C’mon, folks, cut Microsoft some slack. Whipping Windows 8 might be all the rage, but Windows didn’t grow to be, well, Windows—the all-encompassing king of the desktop—out of sheer luck. (No antitrust jokes, please.)

Beyond the vilified modern UI lies a bounty of basic desktop functions that blow the competition out of the water. Seriously. Remember how hard Windows 7 rocked? All that awesome is still there in Windows 8, just buried beneath Live Tiles. Speaking of which, while we were all busy whining about those shifty squares, Microsoft snuck some handy functionality into the modern UI—aspects of which have no peers among Windows’ rivals.

Can Windows 8 get better? Definitely--Windows 10 is already looking like a tremendous step forward. But in a lot of ways, it’s already the best desktop OS around.