No opinion based on experience here. But, I was yakking with my BIL, and he just got a Win 8.1 laptop. He was so annoyed with software incompatibilities that he sent it back for one running W7. He didn’t complain about the OS itself; just that he didn’t think he should be required to upgrade Office 2007 because it was incompatible with Win 8.1. I was actually surprised to hear that MS hadn’t maintained compatibility.
Windows did that same crap back when the switch from Win 3.1 to Win 95 as some hardware would not be recognized by Win 95. Same sort of thing happened between 95 and 98. Then 98 to XP. Then XP to Vista. And now 7 to 8...