I genuinely think windows peaked at Win2K including the GUI.

It was stable, it was fast, the debugger couldn’t take out the entire OS, it had the classic windows 98/NT look but was polished and above all was self-consistent.

Everything since then has been a step back in consistency and polish (with the possible exception of XP/SP2).

It was the last time windows got out the way and actually let me compute.

Now Windows 11 (by default) has inconsistent UX/UI, it nags constantly, updates are still painful and slow and they seem utterly determined to shoehorn things in I do not want, OneDrive and AI been the two primary but not only suspects.

I’ve only used windows for gaming since 2003 and my primary get stuff done OS since ~2000 has been Linux, one has dramatically improved and the other has regressed.

Even when I had to do some .Net stuff at work a few years ago I shoved Windows into a VM and did it inside that so I didn’t have to deal with native windows.

The current backlash is the end result of all that accumulating over time, it’s not one thing, it’s dozens of little things and different users hit a different subset.

Also if you do use windows and haven’t seen it, win11debloat is a time saver.

Installing Linux is adding things I do want after install, Installing Windows 11 is removing things I don’t want, I know which one is respecting the user.

Crashes too frequently for me. Needs a reboot to fix only to be crashed again few hours later. I never found a solution; likely related to docker/podman being memory hungry.

Port handling requires constant Powershell maintenance too.

I completely agree, even if it’s an unpopular opinion.