Indeed - and that is really my point. Win10 can misbehave, but those are problems to be fixed. Not congenital, irreparable issues that you either live with or go back to 7 over. I'm not and wouldn't represent Win10 is flawless, but I haven't experienced or read about any unsolvable global, functional issues... certainly not WU being all nimbly bimbly. Every concern I've had has been addressable. I'm a happy customer.
Wonder if some of the differences are due to Home vs Pro versions?
I have defer feature updates checked, and I keep MS app updates as a separate thing. Forget what other settings I have, but I have never run into a forced restart. AFAIK, it does installs when I'm not using the machine, but not very often since I defer feature updates. (I have this checked so I can choose when I want my system to change other than bug/security updates, just in case there's a new 'feature' that breaks software I use)
Shouldn't be Home vs. Pro - the core is all the same, it's just feature set (domain support, virtualization, encryption) that differentiates them. It's all bolt-on stuff, nothing about the basic operation. I've got about 50/50 Home vs Pro, largely because machines either came with Pro or people had upgraded from 7 Pro. For most people, the practical difference between the two is nil.
Closest I've gotten to a forced restart is a notification saying 'Restart Required', but it doesn't force me to restart, and I think it'll do it automagically when I'm not using the machine... though I forget if I have to be on power, maybe its a laptop vs desktop thing?
You can choose whether to apply updates on battery or not, but the default is no, for sort of obvious reasons.
The unattended restart happens during the non-active hours which, by default is 5pm to 8am. You can change those hours to whatever you want. I think the default setting is dumb for home users, who are probably most active from 5pm to midnight, but it's not like the setting is difficult to change, and it will still only do stuff when it detects inactivity. I could see how that threshold could be small (maybe watching Netflix is "inactive") but to solve that just zero the window in on when it's pretty darned likely you're not using it, like 3am.
Windows Phone works the same way. I haven't even had that do a restart outside of the prescribed hours.
Moving from 7 -> 10, any tips for first-timers?