Ah. I guess my experience was different because I installed apps that I preferred over the built-in ones and found a start menu replacement.
There are pre-installed apps on OS X, Linux, and Windows. If you don't care for the pre-installed ones, you can install ones that you prefer. Same with the kind-of default 'controls' like the Start Menu, or the Dock, or what various Linux distros call their equivalents.
Windows 8/8.1 is Windows 7 with a few improvements and some "Metro" stuff that you can almost entirely avoid.
I found the shipped state of Windows 8 unusable as a power user so I needed to replace it as well. I consider that a complete failure.
Needing to replace the start menu, which is an integral part of the desktop
manager hardly qualifies as a standard practice for a consumer-grade operating system.
I found the shipped state of Windows 8 unusable as a power
user so I needed to replace it as well.
Though, I still don't understand what the comment I was replying to meant by, "Step 1: replace everything with something else."
If you have to replace things like the "start menu", the built in pdf reader, the built in settings app, etc. etc. all because of the same UI design flaw it starts to feel like you are fighting with the OS to get to the level of productivity with which you were previously accustomed. If you feel the need to have to do that, then something is wrong with the design of the OS. Obviously this is a subjective opinion that can differ for each individual, but considering the horrible adoption rate of Windows 8 it seems likely that this is an opinion shared by many.
Objectively, forcing apps to run in fullscreen mode can be a huge waste of real estate for large computer monitors. The gestures required to summon the "charms" bar and the app switcher are completely unintuitive and awkward for a desktop UI. Things like that make far more sense for mobile devices, but it appears like Windows 8 tried to combine mobile and desktop UIs in a confusing, frustrating, an inefficient way. It's quite telling that these were major design errors as Windows 10 backtracks from that philosophy almost completely.
Plenty of people hate the built-in components of OS X like the single Menu bar, the Dock, the Finder and lots of other things. That's why there have always been apps to (attempt to) replace them (unfortunately, Apple typically doesn't give you the same degree of control that Microsoft does).
Apple has also back-tracked on many things in OS X, like finally (finally!) giving people the ability to resize a window by any edge or corner (after years and years of telling everybody that having only "one true way" of doing it was somehow better. Just like "one mouse button" was better for everybody until it wasn't. Just like so many things with Apple. They seem to be fond of buttons with no text and just an icon these days. And I've seen a ton of people complain about it. Unfortunately, that would too difficult to replace with a third party app.)
Ultimately, I'm primarily a linux user who does cross platform dev so I end up dealing with everyone's crap (linux included, I'm looking at you X11).
That is where I know that Linux wins over everything else. A huge number of applications, where there is always at least 1 good alternative. Microsoft and Apple can't compete on choice.