Oh yeah and I already have A fully fledged Windows 8 pro lying around and part of the reason from going from Windows 7 home to 8 Pro was so that i could get 10 Pro if that makes sense?
I've been using 8.1 since "8" was released and I haven't looked back. I also play with *nix on the side. Windows 7 is a bore.
There's quite a lot of applications that have ported over to 8, by now--I would be surprised if you have compatibility issues. If you want to make the transition to 10 easier, I'd suggest installing 8.1 now and getting used to the new placement and organization of tabs, objects etc.Structure of your local disk (Windows partition) is identical. Anyone who still hates on 8 either can't adapt to change or doesn't want to be arsed to use the metro menu or even get a third party app to remove it, to at least reap benefits from the rest of the OS. I
If you're a keyboard warrior, the Metro menu quite literally doesn't require you to take your hands off of the keyboard, to find the application you want. Before I get told how wrong I am about the reasons why people don't use it, you have it, try it for yourself and see how you like it. It wasn't meant for the desktop market, but it work and it works well. Adapt.
If you really want to upgrade, then yes, but only if you absolutely can't wait. I would wait for Windows 10, however, if you just have to upgrade, then go with 8.1, it fixes a myriad of the issues in 8.
I had used win7 since day one and about 1 year ago I switched to win8, and never looked back....multi-monitor support, gaming, stability, memory mgmt, hell even transferring files from drive to drive seems ALOT faster.
I don't care what something looks like or how the interface is, if its faster, I use it. Period Win 8 had some bugs, but with the most recent updates to 8.1, hadn't seen an issue yet.
I really wanted to like windows 8 but I fucking hate the asshole. I was dual booting between 7 and 8 for a while, one good day after installing some windows 8 updates I couldn't boot back into 7. Windows 8 fucked up my 7 installation. Mind you, each OS was on a different physical HDD and I was selecting which drive to boot from from the bios, so 8 had no business touching my 7 drive.
Anyway, I think it's a joke that you have to install a third party software so that you can have such a basic thing as a start menu. Windows 8.1 menu is ugly and lacks features. There's a new option called "Show my desktop background on Start" which is fucking stupid and pointless since it just does that, meaning it shows the desktop but hides every window you might have opened. My desktop is not a wall where I hang pictures and paintings... It's a wall where I "hang" applications I'm working on and I need to see, If you hide them you break my chain of thought.
I have two monitors and for some reason the mouse pointer keeps getting stuck to the edge that's between the two monitors, like in Unity, except that in Unity you can easily disable it, in windows 8 you have to go regediting and even then the issue comes back.
8.1 is good, I was glad I upgraded from 7 Ultimate even though at first I hated it. Now I've gotten used to all the extra features and I don't think I could go back. I got 8.1 Pro though.