1) Has Microsoft finally gotten the message from the PC gaming community?

2) Are we going to see a PC gaming revival like never before?

3) Best Windows Ever

1. There is no "message". Are you suggesting we've got companies like Ubisoft, EA, Activision/Blizzard, Steam and the other big players running a super-secret whisper campain nobody knows about? Or perhaps a bunch of gamers rather than the industry have some single thing they are universally claiming something?

2. A PC gaming revival? Others have already covered this. Look over Steam's history if you think PC games need a revival. I've got a backlog of amazing PC games that I don't have time to play.

3) Being the "best Windows ever" is a complete marketing claim.

Windows does lots of things.

As an OS it manages hardware resources, and it has done a good job of that for many years. The abstractions for I/O systems and other resources are rock solid. The biggest issue they had on that front was third-party code, and WHQL certs have mostly addressed that.

They do a good job of providing other OS services, such as task scheduling, task management, resource cleanup after task death, interprocess and multiuser security, those work great. Virtual memory is invisible to most programmers, and has been for decades. No worries about corruption from other tasks.

Also "best" depends on your features. Microsoft has differentiated between their server and client operating systems for several years, such as a completely different network stack since a regular desktop machine tends to have very different networking needs than a server.

Most end users think of "windows" as the boot screen, the start menu, and the desktop management. While these are customizable and replaceable, very few PC users will do that, using the default shell, default file manager, and other built-in components. As their most visible components these are what most people associate as the OS, even though it is one of the least critical services it provides.

As far as the core OS goes, Microsoft has always done a great job of keeping up with hardware.

As far as the eye-candy shell and UI goes, they have had some missteps (especially with Windows 8) but that is different, easily replaceable software. Classic Shell and LiteStep are probably the biggest of these. But the shell is not the OS, even though that's what most people think of.

The graphics shell is the part OS that 99% of people use to interact with the OS itself. If the graphics shell sucks because of drunk designers and drunk manager, the OS experience will suck, doesn't matter how cool and well written are under the cover parts.

If to change a network profile from private to public I need to use regedit or the powersehll, the common user (which is not only the average Bob/Joe/whatever) will get reasonably angry and frustrated.

The average user problem doesn't have to change networks from private to public; you are not the 'average user'.

(Hell, I can count on the fingers on my third hand how many times I've had to change a network from private to public...)

When you connect the first time to a network the OS ask you which network type is (private vs public). If the average user chose the wrong type (doesn't matter why!) he cannot easily change the network type, especially if he wanted a public profile instead of a private profile (think about how much problem related to the privacy and the security come from this example too!).

The average user do a lot of things wrong, especially the first times, so the OS MUST provide a way to easily change its settings.

EDIT: moreover, the GUI designer broke the holy mantra of "If it works, and it works well, don't fucking change it". Windows 7 Network management work well, Windows 8 removed some little things like network map and security before connection. Windows 10 removed quite everything.

Greatest OS of all times? I believe it when I see it, can use it myself and have used it for 6 months or more.

Better than Win 8? I would really hope so. After their horrible missstep with Windows 8, they really need to put out another windows 7 like hit

(Win8 wasn't as horrible as the public made it look like I reckon, just pretty damn stupid on the desktop (a mobile homescreen and 24" Touchscreens.... really, MS? That was the best you could come up with?)

I am cautiosly optmistic about DX12... it sounds great, but again I need to see the gains for myself before I become a believer.

I don't think MS really listened to the PC gamers. They listened to market pressure:

1) People disliked Windows 8's mobile centric approach -> thus a more desktop centric approach for Win 10

2) Other companies forced their hands with Mantle and the XBOX One being considerably weaker than the PS4 -> DX12 suddenly became a huge topic while DX11 seemed to be a forgotten step child when it came out, at least from what I have seen.

3) All others do all kind of streaming services. And as with other things involving either a community or allowing you to build up a library, the early bird catches the worm. Once people are on a service, and have built up a library of music tracks, videos, apps, whatever, it takes quite some momentum to make them move to a different service as they might lose 100s or even 1000s of dollars worth of digital goods while moving. Thus the XBOX streaming and music services on PC, thus MS trying to get into the fledgling game streaming market.

In the end that all could still be a very good thing for PC gamers. If the free upgrade is true, and only half of the hype, its gonna be a quite exciting second half of 2015.

0) I don't think MS really listened to the PC gamers. They listened to market pressure:
1) People disliked Windows 8's mobile centric approach -> thus a more desktop centric approach for Win 10
2) Other companies forced their hands with Mantle and the XBOX One being considerably weaker than the PS4 -> DX12 suddenly became a huge topic while DX11 seemed to be a forgotten step child when it came out, at least from what I have seen.
3) All others do all kind of streaming services. And as with other things involving either a community or allowing you to build up a library, the early bird catches the worm. Once people are on a service, and have built up a library of music tracks, videos, apps, whatever, it takes quite some momentum to make them move to a different service as they might lose 100s or even 1000s of dollars worth of digital goods while moving. Thus the XBOX streaming and music services on PC, thus MS trying to get into the fledgling game streaming market.

0) What SPECIFICALLY where the "PC gamers" requesting for the operating system? Any links to news sources, perhaps links to Kotaku, IGN, GameSpot, or Polygon, where they provide a short list of specifically what the "PC gamers" are demanding for a new Windows OS?

1) The unified mobile/desktop shell was widely derided generally, not anything specific to the games community. When Nadella became CEO of Microsoft, one of the first things he did was publicly apologize for the Windows 8 shell and pledged to get it addressed in service packs, which has happened as much as they reasonably can do in service packs. There are several excellent alternative shells if the default shell doesn't do it for you.

2) DirectX became an OS component a decade ago. DX10 = Vista. DX10.1= Vista Service packs. DX11 = Windows 7. DX11.1 = Windows 8. DX11.2 = Windows 8.1 DX12=Windows 10. There is no "forgotten stepchild". If you are targeting Windows 7 and later, you are targeting DX11. Discussion of game consoles doesn't have much of anything to do with Windows 10 as an OS.

3) Streaming services are not Windows 10 as an operating system.

I'm a PC Gamer and I have no requests for MSFT to change from Windows 8.1. Once I've launched the game I want to play, none of the Windows 7 vs. Windows 8.x differences matter. Every single one of my hundreds of games works properly in Windows 8.1.

The Modern interface sucks, but I interact with it for maybe 5 minutes per month. I don't really care about it enough to light myself on fire in the middle of the internet like the media or forum trolls make it sound like.

Business reports say the PC market is/was stagnating, but this is just because people's PCs hardly ever need replacing anymore. They're pretty much as powerful as you need them to be.

For gamers, PCs only need to be replaced shortly after a new generation of consoles is released because the most performance demanding games are typically cross-platform and are designed to perform within a console's perf budget. PCs are forced to catch up for a small window of time, but then no real upgrades are necessary to your system in order to play any cross-platform AAA games until the next gen of consoles and games built for those consoles are released. There are VERY few high-end PC exclusive games. Big-budget PC-exclusives tend to be MMOs, which are intentionally budgeted at previous-gen hardware to gain the widest audience.

For non-gamers, a computer from 10 years ago is perfectly adequate. So it appears like PCs are "falling behind" phones and tablets, but this is because phones and tablets are being replaced at a much higher rate.

EDIT: moreover, the GUI designer broke the holy mantra of "If it works, and it works well, don't fucking change it".

That's a stupid "mantra". Every successful new invention is preceded by failed attempts. Most advantages of a new technology only become apparent after it has been implemented. The first human to send a smoke signal was probably very proud of his invention. Smoke signals worked well. And now we have the internet.

They didn't invented nothing, they just smashed the GUI network management into pieces, some pieces went around the OS GUI without logic, but more tragically some of them are completely disappear.

If you try Windows 10 a little, maybe with some virtual machines, in a laptop you bring with you around your day-life, you will understand my -and many other "insiders" - frustration.

Yes, "If it works, and it works well, don't fucking change it" is wrong, it should be something like ""If it works, and it works well, and you cannot do nothing better, don't fucking change it or I'll cut your head". People who are responsible of the network management GUI changes disaster should be fired.

I want to remake my approach to technical issues in the prospect that I may be making a big jump in game dev evolution with the new Win 10.

For non-gamers, a computer from 10 years ago is perfectly adequate.

Have you run Firefox? Or Chrome? Or any browser? Pentium 4's struggle with that stuff (on Windows XP of all things!) and MS Office ain't getting easier on the requirements either. I can barely use Chrome on a 3 year old netbook (on linux, don't even try Windows 7 on the thing), much less on a 10 year old PC unless it was high end by its time.

Stuff that people use every day like browsers, Office, PDF readers and music/video players are pretty heavy nowadays, and people do replace computers often. Either because there are new slick notebooks, or touch stuff, or bigger screens, or just because they want something new.