alt Hacker News> Windows is still a solid 'gets out of the way' operating system
A good way to put it.
There are third-party tools that Microsoft really need to adopt to make Windows a bit nicer (WizTree, VoidTools Everything, adopt improvements from Total Commander, make more PowerToys default), but broadly it is still a decent OS. There are issues like slow `CloseHandle()` because of Defender (which needs to be a bit less zealous), and maybe more first-party adoption of WinGet.
On the other hand, every time I use desktop Linux I get some paper cut because some edge case that I just don't ever think about is broken on Linux, whether it be my multi-monitor high pixel density layout, my USB audio interface and peripherals, or my touchpad sensitivity and gestures that Windows was widely derided for in the early 2010s and suddenly after 'Precision Touchpads'[1] no one ever complained about again, or random GPU glitches even on Intel/AMD integrated graphics that I have literally never seen on the Windows desktop, or poor battery life (Windows somehow gets 2-3x the battery life of Linux).
As someone that ran the Insider channel from ~2014-2019, Windows has been in a real weal-and-woe situation. Some parts are so hopelessly bad that they can never be fixed (eg. UI frameworks) while others are extremely promising and justify using Windows for ordinary work (eg. WSL). It's easy to subscribe to either extreme and assume that Windows is doomed or perfect because some specific feature exists.
Five years of Windows Insider made me pretty weary, though. Being downstream of Microsoft's changes is like reading tea leaves, WSL2 had broken networking for four years before any fix ever came up. I can appreciate the work that Microsoft does to ship a stable OS to millions of users, but my impatience got the better of me in the end. I switched to Linux waiting for WSL2 to get fixed, and while it's not a perfect experience it does consistently improve in a transparent and open manner.