I had purchased the Win8 upgrade for $49 for my systems that had XP. For the price I was willing to take a chance on it. Win8 was a disaster from the GUI perspective and I really hated it. I took the Win10 upgrade as soon as I could. The Win 10 WiFi driver didn’t work well on my laptop and I had to make some serious tweaks to the driver to get it to work without overheating the card and consuming CPU resources. I got through it, and the system runs nice and cool, without BSOD from the heat. It is much faster than 8 which was faster than 7.
Win7 is fine, and my office PC has it. I am OK with Win7 and find 7 or 10 equally effective.
I got a Win8 upgrade for $29 with a (months-to-get) rebate card, and saw the playground metro, and thought like, "there must be some freeware to correct this," and so Googled to that effect and quickly found Classic Shell , thanks be to God.
As explained in Windows 8 pro review (upgrade XP to Windows 8 with Classic Shell), you can make W/8 look and work much like XP/W/7 and improve both, for free.
See here on how to do things like get the Quick Launch bar back.
Classic Shell also improves the bloated Start menu in W/10.
But note that I largely bypass Windows defaults, except for system and most program files and a few profiles (in User folder).
My Quick Launch is actually a folder on another (data) partition, replete with organized folders for shortcut to programs, including portable ones that stay in that partition.
Also Right Click Extender allows you to add a lot of things to the right click menu, and AutoHotKey enables custom scripts for launching apps and programs, which scripts i save. likewise my User, Desktop and Send to folders are backed up before upgrading or a clean install (although Windows does save a previous installed OS in a folder for a little while).
And i try to keep the same user name in the case of a clean install. Thus in a short time after a new install you can have your functionality back.
Thank God we can customize and for those who help us do it.