> A mature Windows 7 wasn't terrible.

Yes. Microsoft peaked with Windows 7. Microsoft had finally fixed their long-standing stability problems. Internally, they had two main tools. One was the Static Driver Verifier, which verified that kernel drivers wouldn't take down the whole OS. The other was a classifier that took in crash dump reports and clustered them into groups given to one developer per bug area. That was enough to stop almost all Blue Screen of Death problems.

Windows 7 didn't have ads, license renewals, integration with Microsoft paid services. It just did the job of an operating system.

It's the last Windows I had. I've been all Linux for years now.