Windows 8 was ridiculous, and one of the things that gave MS a big wake up call. Its now a different company. Windows 10 is leaps better in about every way than 8 (not without its own issues, of course). Disclosure: I am a MS MVP. MS will listen to me in almost every area I care about.
Interesting. Yes, though I've never used Win 8 (and don't want to), from the little I had read, it seemed like the idea of trying to merge the mobile and desktop paradigms was a bad idea from the start, and doomed to fail.
Windows 8 didn't merge the mobile and desktop paradigms, it put the mobile paradigm over the top of the desktop.
The apps stuff (Windows Runtime) was actually quite well done for a first try, but it was unfamiliar to Win32 users and got in the way. (Only one click away, but people are impatient and resist change.)
Windows 10 does an excellent job of merging apps and traditional programs, though it's not strictly correct to equate apps and mobile. Windows 10 is a mobile operating system that runs apps from an app store, but you can resize apps and run them seamlessly alongside traditional Win32 programs.
You can still run Windows 10 in tablet (Windows 8/8.1) mode if you want to. I don't know anyone who does.
