I still won't upgrade, can't give a rat's arse whether I'm getting new updates or not. If Windows 12 ends up being good, then I'll upgrade to that. Otherwise, I'll run 10 until it doesn't run my games anymore.
I had moved on to another OS after my first experience with windows.
It was Windows XP on a Pentium 4 computer. Anytime I tried to change the look of the system (via 3th party tools) I noticed that every few days I had a complete system crash. I think windows XP just wasn't stable on the hardware because we had a second PC with the same hardware that I hadn't changed anything on and it also crashed very frequently.
Despite having already said goodbye to windows for good after windows XP, I do have an idea of its successors since people around me use it.
Windows Vista: this was far too heavy for the hardware that was popular at the time. Like windows XP, it was also not completely stable on much of the hardware at the time.
Windows 7: I found this to be the only windows that felt professional. It was reasonably light for the hardware at the time. It was also reasonably stable and had few flaws. And I still use it now in VirtualBox, it (fully) boots in 7 seconds (login included) on FreeBSD via VirtualBox. It kind of feels then that Window 7 starts up as fast on FreeBSD as e.g. opening Photoshop on windows, which is impressive.
Windows 8: The worst UI, worse than all the UIs I have used on Linux. Many loyal windows fans dumped it as soon as possible for windows 7 or windows 10.
Windows 10: Feels a bit like they mixed the start menu of Windows 8 with the classic start menu of Windows 7/XP. I personally found this an ugly windows and didn't think it worked very well either. The UI of Windows 7 worked smoother.
Windows 11: A windows that uses a lot of RAM. I find the UI pretty OK for windows but a bit ugly and I also notice that Linux UIs perform many daily operations with fewer intermediate stops. Windows11's UI is less efficient than LXQt, KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, etc.
I used Linux for a very long time. Ubuntu 10.10 I really liked and was one of the first Linux systems I used.
The emerald themes that were available then are still not (visually) matched by other UIs I have used since then.
At one point, I had switched to FreeBSD, which I found to be similar or better than Linux in many areas. Something that bothered me was the default security. Eg Intel microcode from the CPU was not used automatically, I had to install and activate it manually.
Now I use OpenBSD which places more importance on the out-of-the-box security aspect.
What is often said about Zen 5 is that it is more stable than Intel gen 13&14. But it must be said that in experienced hands, FreeBSD and OpenBSD are more stable than Debian stable and 'any' windows. By which I mean that the Intel 12700KF on OpenBSD is more stable and reliable than Zen 5 + windows 10/11.
The ranking on stability of operating systems based on my extensive experiences.
1. FreeBSD (bspwm and Polybar)
2. OpenBSD -current (bspwm and Polybar)
3. Debian stable, GNU Guix
4. Windows and macOS (many open-source apps are very buggy on macOS)
I'm a big fan of bspwm (window manager) which feels a bit like a genius determined what the all-important features are that I will need. I think I only use the default configuration file with a few minor tweaks.
But as I use it, it makes multiple screen setups fairly redundant (or no great value).
The keybinding to switch workspaces works smoothly and very fast. It is a manual tiler so I can easily scale the ratio of windows to the size I want. I can also easily switch to floating or fullscreen modes.
What I also find very useful is that I can determine in advance whether a window will be scaled horizontally or vertically via Ctrl+Mod+h/j/k/l
I also find Ctrl+G incredibly powerful and I don't know if there is an equivalent in Windows and macOS. It swaps your current 'small tiled window' to the largest window that is open in
another workspace.
There are also shortcuts to swap tiled windows directly and many other useful keybindings.
Furthermore, I have tweaked Polybar so that I can close/minimize/maximize any window with one mouse click. I have a configuration that I can no longer improve in terms of productivity and that I could reuse forever on any Unix-like system that supports bspwm. (=almost all Unix-like systems)
