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 Having used Linux and Windows alongside each other as a sysadmin and support tech for more than 20 years, I have seen both slowly improving in both usage and stability.
Until Windows XP.
Since then Linux has continued to improve.
@wyliecoyoteuk @david_chisnall I've been using windows since 3.1
Windows peaked at XP UI wise.
Feature wise, windows peaked at 7
I'm slowly transitioning to Linux. With the massive improvements to Wine and Proton over the past 5 years, I'm pretty certain I can eventually go full time Linux in the next few years. Only thing that's really holding me back is VR support and work needs me to use a remote program the devs dropped Linux support for a long time ago.
@vandorb12 @david_chisnall I dropped Windows altogether in 2023, when I finally retired and returned the company Laptop.
I still do charity work, Web and DTP mainly..

@wyliecoyoteuk @vandorb12 Technically, I still have a Windows machine: an Xbox. Its value is mostly that it doesn’t have a keyboard or email client so I can’t accidentally do work on it when I want to relax.

Handing back my work laptop and going back to the Xbox being the only Window machine in the house when I resigned from Microsoft was a happy experience.