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

First time I’ve read someone recommend hyper-v in ages! Made me assume you were kidding about this whole piece

@johno The Hyper-V architecture is quite nice (and I say this as the author of the Xen book). It’s one of the nicest operating systems on the market. It’s a shame Microsoft bundles it with Windows (the parts that run in the Hyper-V equivalent of dom0 are not great).

@david_chisnall I haven’t used it much TBH but every time I’ve tried it over the years, I’ve regretted it.

Most recently last month: the day 1 experience on win11 was just rubbish: couldn’t get Ubuntu or Fedora VMs to reliably boot. Stuff like missing config files I had to manually create after lots of googling & just felt untested by MS

Went back to VMware and once I’d finally found the download link, had my VMs running in minutes