You didn't miss anything with Windows 8. It was horrible. Glad they finally listened and ditched the tiles idea and went back to a more normally Windows with 10, which actually felt more like an evolution of 7.

11 I'm not yet so sure about. Will have to give it a bit more time. It still has a few issues.

As for wiping OSs, that's fun. But I tend to mess around with Linux builds in VMs more then anything these days