I believe in order to suit absolutely everyone, the key is customisation - something that was certainly lacking in 8.
I have used XP the most, since the early 00s, and for years. In my experience 7 and 8 are far more stable than XP or Vista, and I have not seen a BSOD with 7 or any further release at all. That does not mean no issues, but certainly no major hiccups. The shortcomings I feel in every release after XP has certainly been in the desktop environment. Since then, they have not made many improvements, and even 8 is just 7 with a couple of extra features, tweaks and an added app screen. There were a few features missing or changed in 8, but there were features missing in 7 that were available in previous implementations of windows as well, eg
http://www.brighthub.com/computing/wind ... 83951.aspx.
After a few tweaks however I have to say I now prefer 8.1 to 7. The earliest builds of 8 on my acer aspire did have freezing issues, but this came down to issues with compatibility (avast) and my hardware's intel graphics drivers, which have now all been updated and the problem now fixed. Just because certain extra features are included in any operating system shouldn't put you off, unless they are constantly running in the background or you are forced to use them. I feel the touchscreen feature may be implemented into every mainstream OS in the end, but that does not mean it will become the only way of control. In 8.1 I find the mouse scrollwheel much easier to browse the app screen and start screen than any touchscreen, as an example.
I do not use the app screen for much aside from the news, email and local weather, but from example videos, in my opinion windows 10 looks bloated with the idea of having these apps also featured on the desktop and startmenu. I prefer one seperate screen. I hope they learn and give as much ability to customise that menu as much as possible. Everyone knows that 8.0 auto booting to that start screen instead of the desktop confused many initially, arguably a bad move by microsoft leading to much bad press. After microsoft adding that start button once again, the reports of users removing it once more, proved that customisation is needed, but it would seem microsoft executives and likewise tend to want push the company to only do things a set way. I removed the start button re-implemented into 8.1 since it did not also feature a menu, and with all my much needed programs as shortcuts on the desktop and taskbar, I was happy. I am sure for professionals, reimplementing that startmenu fully may be a must for those that use a great number of programs. Of course they can do that already with third party software, but perhaps the media and general users will applaud 10 regardless, as I have noticed many seem to believe in a 'xp good, vista bad, 7 good, 8 bad, 8.1..?.. ideal which seems to be all over the internet.
I agree, I prefer duckduckgo to just about every search engine, although for search for particular files such as images of a set size, I need to go back to google now and then.