I know people like to make fun of niche operating systems, but for the five years I was at Microsoft I used Windows (10 then 11) as my daily driver. It’s much less stable than a professional OS, but it does kind-of work. I wouldn’t say it’s ready for the desktop. The UI is inconsistent and changes randomly between releases, a load of common software is basically useable only in a VM, it lags and freezes periodically (unlike an OS designed for interactive use, random drivers run a load of things directly in interrupt handlers, so you get latency spikes that you wouldn’t see in a more mainstream desktop OS) and the update process can hose the system, so it’s mostly of interest to people who like tinkering with their machines than people who actually want to get work done. Oh and a load of random bits of the OS have ads, but that’s what you get from a free ad-supported system instead of one developed by an active open-source community.

I don’t think I’d recommend anyone use it as their daily driver or in a work setting, but it’s not totally unusable. It’s not at the level of maturity than you’d expect from, say, Linux or FreeBSD, especially not for client workloads. If you do have to use it, I recommend that you install FreeBSD in a Hyper-V VM for real work. That’s what I did and it works quite well.

@david_chisnall i know this is a joke post but after 4 years of Uni i legitimately had to learn Windows again at my first "real" job

@silhouette The last version of Windows I used before going to Microsoft was 2000. I gave up when XP came out and was worse than 2000 or NT4 and switched to a mix of OS X and FreeBSD. A few years later, when everyone was saying how much worse the new versions of Windows were than XP, I knew I’d made the right choice.

I decided to give it a fair go at MS, but they haven’t really fixed any of the things that made me leave in the first place and they’ve made a load of things worse,

@silhouette @david_chisnall My last version was XP. Than and now - Debian...