Comment by deltoidmaximus

In some ways 8.1 was better than 10. You could still control the updates and uninstall the or block telemetry updates. Unfortunately, a lot of hardware makers abandoned making driver updates for it before it even went out of support (unlike Windows 7 where they often kept making minor updates even after it was out of support)

I never used it really myself. The original UI wasn't what I'd ever want out of a PC but the impending stench of the Windows Store was what drove me off of Windows at that point.

I have an 8.1 VM in my unraid server that only exists to run an older radeon driver that allows the GPU to turn off to near 0 watts idle when the hardware isn't in use. Windows 10 broke the subsystem that these drivers used and AMD never got this feature working on 10.