Thing is, ME as an idea made sense. Win2K wasn’t targeted to consumers, XP was in the pipeline for that, but they needed an interim version until it was ready. It looked like Win2K, but ostensibly compatible with the Win9x line. They just fucked up the execution on the internals, so it was terribly unstable.
Windows 8 had the opposite problem: it improved on Win7 internals, so it was solid, but had a terrible UI that no one asked for.
One could argue that the reason ME failed was very possibly because it was rushed. Win8, on the other hand, looks very much like designed by comitee with either very misguided designers or marketing people at the helm. Because of that, Win8 feels like a much worse failure to me.
This. It’s not as simple to get it working as it is on non-free OS’s, but with rclone I can get on Linux pretty much the same functionality I get from (eg.) Google Drive on Windows, including have most of the drive with on-demand access (meaning files are not stored locally, but downloaded / uploaded as needed) with a few specific folders synced for offline use. Since it supports a lot of storage services, I suppose it shouldn’t be that different to set it up the same way with Proton Drive.