98SE, 2000, XP (Service Pack 3) and 7 were Windows at their peak.

Windows 8 and 8.1 were screwed by Microsoft’s insistence at creating a more mobile-friendly OS, when the Metro menu was just bad for the desktop user experience. A lot of disgruntled 8/8.1 users did flock to 10 because having the Start menu back was seen as a compromise to having forced telemetry tracking in your OS.

As for Windows 11, it’s getting super shit. Recall AI is being baked into the OS, which will effectively allow Microsoft to snoop and capture data on your computer activity. They claim to not capture sensitive info like bank details or credit card numbers, but I think that’s been proven wrong.

Also, 11 is hardly an upgrade feature-wise, yet requires a significantly beefier PC, and was released at a time when the world was still going through a significant semiconductor shortage.

The only real hurdle for widespread Linux adoption is anti-cheat support. That, and either getting Linux versions of industry standard software (Microsoft 365, Adobe CS, 3DS Max, etc) or decent support through Wine/Proton.

Not really

Windows 7 was pretty, it was customisable, it was stable. And microshaft had yet to start fucking about with ads everywhere and invasive “features”. Peak windows right there.

XP was also pretty good for its time. At that point Linux and OSX had caught up and surpassed it in many ways, but it did what it had to without getting in the way.

95 was an innovator if anything, ahead of pretty much anything else on desktop at the time, even if it DID fart and die whenever someone looked at it funny.

It was always a proprietary creation by an anticompetitive tech megacorp, and therefore bad from THAT angle, but it didn’t start being truly shite from a pure user experience angle until like. 8.