Actually a free Windows OS would actually be great. Here in India, Pirated Windows OS are like as common as mosquitoes. No one but Microsoft was losing in all this. The price of Windows is generally prohibitively high and was by no way affordable to home and even small business users. The only option was to pirate them or use Ubuntu. People walk in to buy a laptop, check the difference in price for Laptops with Windo…
> If only Microsoft can make Windows affordable, they can kill all competitors instantly. Yeah maybe for the consumers market, but that's already the case with Piracy anyway. But price is not the only issue, Windows is just horrible in so many ways that there's a number of people who will not come back to it even if it's 100% free. I keep Windows (7) as dual-boot on my desktop PC, where I run OpenSuse most of the tim…
(Just to make things clear before what follows, I'm not a Windows fanboy and I use like 70% of the time Windows and the rest Ubuntu or Fedora. And I'd choose Linux over windows anytime. But the current state of Gnome and KDE is deplorable! ...both from a UX/I perspective and from a performance perspective. Actually the only DE that doesn't make me wanna push my fist through the display after ~30min is Xfce and it's what I daily use.)
"Default config" Windows 7 and 8 feel as responsive as KDE, Gnome or Unity to me. If you want more speed, there are lots of things to tweak and trim down, but I never felt the need, not even on very cheap netbooks! The only real performance improvements I got by tweaking were from tweaking individual app's obscure perf settings (like Matlab or Photoshop).
About "just opening a window": admitedly, windows explorer does very weird things from time to time, but just because you're on Windows it doesn't mean you have to stick with the default file manager - find one that suits you (and btw, some third party alternatives are actually faster than explorer).
Also it's a well know fact that some apps have better performance on some OSs than other: Firefox has always been visibly faster on Linux, Opera (the old Presto engine version) has always been visibly faster on Windows etc. Also, since about ~5 versions ago the Firefox devs really got their shit together and got rid of some of what seemed to me like "Windows only memory leaks" and probably did some ui thread optimizations to make things feel more responsive, so the perceived performance feels as if it increased by about ~60% on Windows, even if the actual webpage rendering speed is probably close to the same.
Again, it may seem that I'm a Windows/Microsoft fanboy, but even if feature-wise the Linux DEs are way better, if you compare each feature with its equivalent, you'll see that there are zillions of little details that Linux "failed to learn from Windows." And the current DEs seem to play some stupid iOS/MacOS-copycat-ing game instead of stealing more of the true UI/X innovation that came with Windows 8 for example (and yes, I'm actually one of the people that love the Win 8 hybrid tablet/desktop gui and apps concept - I just think that Microsoft blew it by over-geeking it, as any kind of "hybrid" UI will appeal mostly to "geeks" and much less to "average joes" that prefers a "one-piece uniform experience", even if it's really suboptimal).