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[Il Palazzo]

The privacy thing does bother me, but I thought there might be ways to at least mitigate it.

I remember dialling down everything that was there to dial down at initial setup. More as a matter of principle than because there was anything egregious in there. Was pretty satisfied with it afterwards, and never thought about it since. Let MS have its metadata - I don't care as long as it's nothing personal.

And I haven't had any icons or programs rearranging themselves or uninstalling in however many years it's been since release, on three different devices.
I'm using Firefox for my browsing, so its settings are uncoupled from Windows. I've no idea how Edge (the new MS browser) fares, but I know there's a synchronization option for both the browser and for Windows settings, that can be stored in the cloud. So it actually helps you keep the same settings across different devices, as long as you're not paranoid about putting this info in the cloud.
The one time it altered any settings was my fault, as I turned on synchronization on my two laptops, and it replaced the wallpaper on one to match the other.

Also, I've never had any products recommended. I think there was a link to MS Office store page in the start menu, but that's about all that I can remember that'd qualify.
Maybe I'm just not using the apps that feature the recommending, or maybe there was an option to turn it off that I checked at startup. In any case, I don't know what people are complaining about here.

Another thing - Win 10 boots in seconds. All the previous MS systems took some sweet time (even after taking into account older hardware).

Yeah, it's turning into a glowing review, or at least an apologetic essay. But I've just never had any issues with it, apart from the one time I carelessly restarted my laptop and almost missed a job deadline because of the languorous update process that you can't cancel once it's on.

Oh, one more time the update screwed me up - I took a netbook on a train, and set a hotspot connection from my phone. The system update figured it's not on metered connection, and drained all of my monthly bandwidth in minutes. As far as I know, there was no way to stop it from doing that.

[eerr]

One thing you might look forward to- superfetch.

Windows now pre-loads apps into free memory(after windows starts up)

So if you let the computer run for awhile, you can swap games and browsers super-fast.

This is the sort of killer feature you only found on servers and non-windows computers.

[wierd]

Another that was added to windows 10, was compressed ram.

<smug linux user>
But linux has had that in the form of zram swap and compcache for years.
</smug linux user>

Basically, Microsoft decided to finally join the 21st century, and placed another layer in the paging engine. When memory contents are slated to be paged out, they first go through the memory compression algorithm, which compresses the pages and hangs onto them. Pages that get sufficiently stale are then uncompressed and written to disk like a normal swap operation.

The result is that disk activity is reduced, access speed of paged data goes up, and efficiency of memory allocation goes up.  Surprisingly, many structures in memory are highly compressible, because they are highly repetitive. This means that quite a few pages (statistically) can be held onto in this fashion without a huge increase in memory use by the paging engine, and so memory hungry applications (like games) can make effective use of one of those idle cores in modern processors to keep more data in memory and off the swap file, longer, and more reliably.

But again, I have had this option on Linux for years. I use zram swap on a 15$ embedded linux card reader, for instance.