I know it is, but Microsoft isn't, and that's what it is counting for me atm.

Windows 7 was fine*, then MS comes with W8, under the hood it was just as fine, but some design decisions where just "WHY?", then comes Windows 10 just as fine as the previous ones but again, some design decisions are so unbelievably backwards that just don't work for me anymore.

*fine as in, as fine for the casual user Windows can be, there's some fucked up things occurring on the system in long term that I can't believe we're still using that thing.

It's been said the options enjoy turning themselves back on every so often. Sometimes after updates, but maybe it is just after say a 3 week period or something. So just 'turning it off' might not be enough.

Win 10 is fine. Sure it's not as good for the snobs as Linux is but it is a smooth easy to run OS. I have yet to have a problem with it.

Oh, Vista was absolutely a disaster. Same for Windows ME. You won't catch me defending those. =)

At the same time it somewhat blows my mind that some people are still using something as ancient as XP. To me this isn't about fixing what isn't (arguably) broken, but about staying current. Aforementioned abominations aside, each newer version of Windows has been better than the previous one. At this point we have Windows 10, which (at least in my opinion) the sort of OS that all of us were hoping for since Windows 3.11 was released.

Now, this is not to say that all must switch. Hey, if XP fits your needs and all is well, sure, why would you spend an extra hundred bucks. Assuming we are all gamers here, however, I'd imagine you would at some point want to get things like DX11/12, SSD support, and so on.

There are enough games on Linux already, so I recommend you to give it a try.

There are a lot more games for Linux than there ever were before including a few of recent high profile releases. This is awesome! Hopefully, one day one will no longer have to consider gaming as an obstacle when selecting one's OS. All that said, I wouldn't say there are "enough" games on Linux. The situation is indeed improving, but most interesting new releases are not ported.

Judging from all the sub-forums here (other forums as well) older games seem to be tricky to get working, perhaps slightly easier than Windows 8.1 but less than Windows 7. If you have some must-have classics you like to play regularly you could look it up in case they are hard to run with Windows 10.

But you already did. You said it primarily is a hardware issue.

I don't disagree hardware issues can tank a system, but generally that should be obvious and right away, not getting worse as time goes on. A number of problems are more and more increasing as updates are pushed, so Windows 10 is breaking more compatibility. The same streamer after updates suddenly can't play any of his older games. By older I mean as far as Morrowind, Fallout 3 / New Vegas, Skyrim, Saints Row games, etc. Yet work perfectly fine before. So something is broken. Maybe it's related to the video drivers, or maybe it has to do with DirectX updates, but something was working and then doesn't anymore, but works again when you roll back.

Depends. Software 30 years old can still be relevant today, so just 'being current' isn't a trend I care about. I shove all my settings to performance and drop visual eye candy, so my system looks very much like Windows 98. I'm more than happy to do commandline-only work which is far from current (yet in my opinion more advanced), and even use kernels and software 10+ years old if it does the job I want. In this case being 'current' is a stupid argument. A word processor is still a word processor. Unless sufficiently new features are required or needed, updating is pointless. XP as such offers a lot of good GUI and OS features without being so bloated, and runs amazingly well with few resources on a VM.

You should try doing programming and using REALLY old utilities, like Sed and Awk, those were written in the 80's (and have been kept updated but otherwise haven't changed too much). They can provide tons of useful stuff and code.

I have never experienced that myself. Why that is, we will never know, although I suspect that always building my computers with top of the line hardware has something to do with it. As to Vista and ME, the reason I've not seen any problems with them is because they were never used in the enterprise setting. Likewise I never used them myself, though I heard horror stories.

I disagree and I would even explain why, but I don't want to subject you to any more stupid arguments.

I should try programming. My position title is Senior Software Developer so maybe one day I might. In the mean time, yea, I know that some people still use VIM and swear by it. To those people I say: this is fine.

What is it that makes you Senior?