When were they ever a great OS builder? It was always mediocre at best, and that not very often.
For many years, I had hoped they'd pull an apple and run linux under the hood with a graphic shell that made it look like Windows. But times have moved on, and it will never again be an important enough product for them to fix in that manner now.
I'm not a Windows user anymore, but I think you're selling them short. Windows has been a very good OS for 20+ years. If you think it's bad now, you should have seen it during the Windows 95/98/ME era. Around 2000-ish, they started getting serious about security and they began the conversion of their mainstream OS to the NT kernel. Since then it's been rock solid and the backwards compatibility is second to none.
It's really just the shitty UI more than anything else. The ads and paid placement are an embarrassment, and they still have an inconsistent UI going back to Windows 8. I guess you could throw in telemetry too.
I have just as many gripes about MacOS - probably more. I have really disliked that OS for several years now. I feel like I have to conform to it rather than have it work for me.
These days, I'm a happy Linux user. It's not perfect, but it's the best of the big 3 for me.
The shitty UI, the lack of a tolerable shell (Powershell isn't). It's difficult to get a clear picture of what processes are running if it starts behaving sketchy.
These things make it mediocre. Sure, it's not the dumpsterfire filled with radioactive cobalt that it was back in 1995 or so when I started using it... but if that's the best it can say, it's sort of like Cleveland's "At least we're not Detroit!" tourism campaign.
> I have just as many gripes about MacOS
Me too, as far as that goes. Not a fanboy. But it's tolerable, and I'm mostly too lazy to get a linux install up to a point where it wouldn't make me want to tear my hair out. If someone could do that for me, I'd definitely like it better than Mac. Just too far down the list of priorities for me I guess.
For many years, I had hoped they'd pull an apple and run linux under the hood with a graphic shell that made it look like Windows. But times have moved on, and it will never again be an important enough product for them to fix in that manner now.