> its mostly the familiarity that keeps me locked in

I mean ... yes and no

there is also the classic game of "guess where we hid the control panel this time"

I also get the impression m$ really really wants to put advertisement in the start bar & status bar ... and they are ever so slowly boiling that frog.

and blocked an alternate shell

@CaffeineAddiction I think part of it they want to do a 'new' control panel and lack commitment

I'd add most of my linux use is command line so... I'm not going to get bit in the rear by UI changes much :D

@CaffeineAddiction Well yeah, the common thing about them happens to be that I can do 95% of the stuff I want by either hitting the windows key and searching or hitting Win+R and typing in a command

So the control panel is always at "[Win]+[R] control [enter]" for me

@nobody I've been using Mint since Ubuntu launched the Unity interface a decade (?) ago and it's good.

I use windows only for gaming, even my corporate-mandated Windows installation is just the hipervisor, and I run Ubuntu under Hyper-V