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I also reinstall fresh Linux every year or two. Forces you to confront all of the cruft that can accumulate.
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Seriously. My current Windows installs are >15 years old upgraded all the way back from Vista …
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Mine was from websites 7 days I think. Randomly stopped booting a month ago (bsod after updates).

Switched to cachyos - I've spoken with at least 5 people who have had the same bsod after updates situation in the last 6 months. If windows at least embraced proper update techniques like with immutable Linux - and enough polish to make the random bsod loop after updates impossible to accur without hardware damage id likely go back for my gaming rig at least - but right now, it feels like garbage ngl

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How is that even still working?

I've used Windows as my primary desktop for ~35 years and I do my absolute best to housekeep, but I still need to reinstall about once a year or so. I'm militant about installing almost nothing on my primary PC and putting all the janky apps on another PC via RDP too.

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Didn't someone film or document a in-place upgrade process from dos all the way up to a modern version of Windows?

edit: oh, here it is!

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/can-upgrade-ms-dos-6-22-window...

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Didn't most people stop doing that when they moved to XP?
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Honestly I should. Registry and stuff gets cluttered. Programs don't uninstall cleanly, or they change settings I can't find. On one machine I somehow set it up as a wifi print server or something and for the life of me couldn't find a way to turn it off. But it's such a hassle to setup a computer.
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What are the practical issues with "cluttered" registry? But also, you can use special apps to track installations and do advanced uninstallations for ~clean uninstalls. Likewise, you could even spend time tracking settings. So yes, still a hassle, but nothing comparable to setting/reinstalling everything from scratch, that's just pure waste
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Maybe I shouldn't have said cluttered. More like programs mess with things and don't always put them back. There are a lot of Microsoft support forum posts that had to reinstall Windows to fix weird issues that only started after the install
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Cluttered registry does not impact performance.

Unclean uninstalled programs also don't impact performance. Unless it really isn't uninstalled and still runs in the background, but that can easily be fixed by a person competent enough to reinstall Windows once a year.

Settings you don't find, will still be not found after reinstalling Windows.

But to each their own...

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In my case it's not about performance, it's about usability and disk space. And again, that time I somehow started a WiFi access point and couldn't find anything online to turn it off. That laptop also at some point had the new folder option get removed from the right click menu. I had to copy/paste one. There are a lot of weird things that can happen over the years.
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