Was in a similar boat as you, until a new build more or less forced me to use 10 (motherboard only had USB 3. yes, you can slipstream drivers into a 7 installer - but when I tried this, the machine kept bluescreening to high heck). After a few months, I'm perfectly fine with it.
Don't get me wrong, there are problems - but there have always been problems. The two competing but not quite feature matching control panels for example. I also turned notifications completely off, as they were all for trivial BS (in my case).
But overall, I am now just as happy as I was on 7.
> Also, there seems to be a number of people here commenting very strongly in favour of Microsoft
Count me (shockingly) in the pro Microsoft group here. After years and years of supporting family PCs, I understand and appreciate what they're trying to do.
If you make updating something the user has to do, they'll never do it.
If you prompt them to update, they'll never do it. Even if they've had the why of it explained to them many, many times.
In anticipation of the inevitable "well this update famously broke X": yes, the risk of an update doing something funky outweighs the risk of running software with known and possibly currently exploited vulnerabilities.
There are definitely some of us whose balance leans toward "leave me the heck alone." I work at home in a rather remote location. I often don't see anyone besides my wife for weeks at a time. (and I love it).
Was in a similar boat as you, until a new build more or less forced me to use 10 (motherboard only had USB 3. yes, you can slipstream drivers into a 7 installer - but when I tried this, the machine kept bluescreening to high heck). After a few months, I'm perfectly fine with it.
Don't get me wrong, there are problems - but there have always been problems. The two competing but not quite feature matching control panels for example. I also turned notifications completely off, as they were all for trivial BS (in my case).
But overall, I am now just as happy as I was on 7.