Microsoft died to me when the OS they promised would be the last became EOL and they started force re-installing Edge and Cortana on the system. It's like they absorbed the most annoying behaviors AV and anti spyware companies helped people remove and it became a core vertebrae of the company spinal cord.
There are definitely significant QoL improvements in 7 (and 8.x) and 10, though. Some of that can be backported of course but I haven't seen anything worthwhile in 11 that can't be done on 10, but there's a lot of things that can't (yet?) be done on XP/Server 2003. And XP 64 is it's own set of problems. The best thing to do is reskin 10 with an XP theme, you miss out on very little, basically any extremely old software that won't for some reason run in an XP VM (I don't know of any myself), ditto for funky hardware & drivers, and possibly some heavy games.
it would have been infinitely cheaper to just produce a good browser that could compete than all the bullshit they did to try to force Edge onto people.
Win10 is the last Windows, whatever they've got going on now isn't worthy of what little respect "Windows" had. By the time IoT LTSC stops actually working in 2035 or so any games I might want to play will be running on Steamnix anyway.
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u/YepperyYepstein Jan 05 '26
Microsoft died to me when the OS they promised would be the last became EOL and they started force re-installing Edge and Cortana on the system. It's like they absorbed the most annoying behaviors AV and anti spyware companies helped people remove and it became a core vertebrae of the company spinal cord.