I admire your efforts. I'm on again, off again with linux as well, and while like you, i had a ton of recent inthusiasm to try again, i always reach the same conclusion, linux is fine for servers, but not ready to replace windows or OSX. Usually what puts me off is the minor orca bugs, or how there is no microsoft word equivalent no matter how much people push libre office. Not to mention orca only has one developer right now, and what concerns me the most is when she's gone, then what? Linux accessibility is on the edge of a knife, you never know when it will break, and if we are being flat honest here, it breaks a lot.

Figment, what exact issues do you have with Windows 10? I'm curious as I might be able to give you a hint on fixing some of these. I upgraded my laptop to Windows 10 from 7 a few weeks ago, and within a few hours of customizing I hardly ever notice any difference any more.
Even a while before the upgrade, I was also convinced I would never willingly switch to that system myself, even if they paid me for it. :-)

Lukas

I was certainly in the mindset of trying to do anything i could from the command-line, but while i was willing to do the learning, and got pretty far, i realized at a certain point that doing basic day to day tasks just took too many steps for my liking. Having to type out everything can be a fun learning experience, but you can in my view, just get stuff done from a gui much faster. While my inner nerd appreciates learning about jumping directorys with a few commands, or editing config files on the fly, i realized that all of this could be done for me with gui tools, and even gui tools that let me customize things the way i wanted. Lukas and others here have showed me that windows 10 can be customized to one's liking with some work. I have used windows all of my computing life, and don't plan on giving it up any time soon. Not because i can't learn a new Os, or not because i'm not willing to do things differently, it's more that windows does what i need it to do the most efficiently, and it always is proven to me time and time again.

Yeah these are all points in which I share concerns and the unwillingness to have it be my full time OS. I'm using it in the server space where I feel its meant to be and does its best at. Windows could never do what linux does in the server space. Windows is also a chaos driven orgie of insanity, round about methodology, and the new wish to be the convergeance  of the PC, phone and tablet. It is not that as far as I am concerned. But, what it lacks, it makes up for in accessibility features that mostly work, and if they are not working in an app you have found, its most likely because the developers of that app have not exposed the app's controls to MSAA, or UIA or any other accessibility API.

I'm kind of in the same boat as Arqmeister, I started off my computing life with the Apple 2 series, then in 1985 sold off all of my Apple 2 stuff and dove head long into the IBM PC compatible world, and have never looked back or anywhere else.

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The first thing I heard about Windows 10 were all the privacy concerns, but then I found out that they all had options allowing you to opt out of them, so that concern was dealt with.

Then I started hearing about included apps that had to be replaced because the native ones weren't accessible. The first was the email client, that's not a problem since I'm using Thunderbird, and except for a couple of problems with no apparent solution, I'm satisfied with it. The problems don't prevent me from using it, they are just annoying. There were some other apps that had to be replaced for accessibility reasons, but I can't recall what they were now.

Then I heard that Windows Update was removed from the control panel so it's no longer possible to review and approve of updates before they are installed, you are forced to accept all updates offered. This is a serious issue in my eyes, what if you discover an update that screws up your computer? Sure you can use System Restore to back track it out of your system, but you can't prevent it from being installed again.

I have that problem now with Internet Explorer, the last cumulative update for it changes the way it handles .URL files. .URL files are the files Internet Explorer creates when you bookmark a web page. Instead of just opening them as it's supposed to do, after the update is installed, Internet Explorer now issues a security warning and asks if you want to open or download the file! Even stranger, this only happens if opening the .URL file also launches Internet Explorer, such as choosing a favorite from the Start menu. But if you choose a favorite from within Internet Explorer through its favorites menu, they open normally. I've found what some called solutions to the problem on the Internet, but they always turn out to be partial solutions, or only work once. In Windows 7 I was able to back out of the update, then in Windows Update, hide the update to prevent it from being installed in the future. With Windows Update gone from the control panel in Windows 10, this wouldn't be possible, you'd be stuck with the faulty update until Microsoft fixes it, assuming they do fix it.

And I have no doubt there are other unpleasant surprises waiting. No thank you! I'll just keep using Windows 7.

Yeah, I know that someday I won't be able to avoid Windows 10, but, hopefully, some smart cookie will have figured out how to restore Windows Update to its proper place. Or just get Windows 10 Pro, even though I don't need the business features. In Pro versions of Windows, you will be able to pick and choose which updates you want.

I also tried Linux, Vinux in particular, a few times in the past, but like many others, I didn't like it enough to get too far. I even gave up sooner than most of you, probably. :-) I do see its potential and admire it for its philosophy and for what it means to the mainstream, but its day has not come yet in terms of accessibility and ease of use. :-)

True, I haven't realized you can't choose which updates you want and which you don't. However, as I don't use any apps by Microsoft itself at all except for Notepad, Word and Excel, so that means not even IE or Outlook, I'm okay with this new way of update delivery for the moment.

Lukas

That is the one thing that keeps Linux from taking over, despite all that it has to recommend it, it is nowhere near as approachable as Windows is, and until it is, it will always remain under the Windows shadow.

I will over look a lot. But I draw the line when a company thinks it can decide what I want on my computer for me. Sorry Microsoft, until you return control over updating to the user where it belongs, I will never upgrade to Windows 10.

I'm on IMAP too, and have no problems with Thunderbird, my account has about 40 folders and about 1,000 emails in it. But my volume is low, it's taken about 20 years to collect all of that.

Sounds like you need a new email address to leave all the spam behind.

I've had the same email address for almost ten years and very rarely does spam ever get through to my inbox. Even better, my spam filter only has to catch maybe half a dozen spams each month.

Of course there's no telling how many spams get deleted by the service's spam filter before it gets to mine, but I don't care about those because I never see them.

Becky is paid but I still can use tryal version. It warns me that my tryal has expired, but it still works anyway.

Do you mean on another Operating System? Have you tried typing in "EMacSpeak for Windows" on Google? lol I did. found this: https://sourceforge.net/projects/emacspeakwin/
Maybe it's not what you want, but it might be worth looking at.

hey devin i know what you mean. linux accessibility is definitely on the edge of a knife. my best advice is this. if you want to run a linux system with the end user in mind go get an android phone or tablet and use that. android runs on top of the linux kernel. i tried linux for 3 or 4 months about a year or 2 ago. ended up going back to windows just because linux could not quite do everything i wanted my computer to do. can i type commands and stuff? yes. is it as intuitive as windows to install software and things? no.