alt Hacker NewsA mature Windows 7 wasn't terrible. You could easily configure it so that it stayed out of your way, and only the updates were a headache. Windows 8 and those beyond were all downright atrocious. While I had dabbled in Linux for years before then, announcing Win7 EOL finally pushed me 100% into the Linux camp.
> A mature Windows 7 wasn't terrible.
Yes. Microsoft peaked with Windows 7. Microsoft had finally fixed their long-standing stability problems. Internally, they had two main tools. One was the Static Driver Verifier, which verified that kernel drivers wouldn't take down the whole OS. The other was a classifier that took in crash dump reports and clustered them into groups given to one developer per bug area. That was enough to stop almost all Blue Screen of Death problems.
Windows 7 didn't have ads, license renewals, integration with Microsoft paid services. It just did the job of an operating system.
It's the last Windows I had. I've been all Linux for years now.