Oh Windows 10!

I have been using Windows 10 on a Thinkpad X1 Carbon for work and my experience with it has been less than joyful. Before listing my day-to-day grievances I would like to make a few points:

• Bad defaults are still a bad thing. So even if I can turn off most of the ads, I have every right to complain.
• I use Linux exclusively on my personal computers so I use that experience as my baseline.

The list of grievances which I hope to keep updating:

• When getting a blue screen of death, it chooses to waste my next 5 minutes processing some error info instead of just letting me restart the computer.
• Random cortana prompts asking me to let it listen to microphone.
• It is a shame the start menu has gone downhill with Windows 10. The tiles are hard on eyes and finding information takes longer than it did in Windows 98. I appreciate the search integrated into the start menu, but why can’t I turn off/sleep my computer through the search interface?
• Ads in start menu!
• Sound management is pretty unintuitive. I usually have to go through multiple clicks before I can see the interface to switch my default input/output device. Afaik, there is no simple ability to switch input/output device individually at an application level. On the linux side, pulseaudio is no rockstar when it comes to simplicity, but the GUI frontends are simple and powerful enough for most daily use cases.