The Steam Deck is absolutely building that future, and I, too, am excited.
The replacement started off as a toy turned experiment: a 12 core Gen 1 Threadripper with 64GB ECC and a Radeon Pro W5700. I wound up installed Void Linux Musl with XFCE mostly to see how useful a system-d/glibc free Linux machine can be. Turns out very useful if you install bloated Windows-style "applications" like Steam, Discord, Chrome, LibreOffice, etc using Flatpak. You can also setup a glibc chroot if need be but I have not ran into this need yet.
I can watch Hulu and other streaming services just fine in Chrome (haven't tried FF). I can play older AAA games you would never imagine running on Linux such as GTA5 and Skyrim with ZERO configuration other than checking "run this game using proton". However I have yet to get Crysis running :-( Anything I can't get running with Wine I can toss into a VM. And I can run lots of VM's :-)
And if you really miss Windows or want some familiarity back - XFCE + Chicago95 ;-)
I also have a Nuc hooked to my bedroom TV running Debian and use a similar setup but no Steam (Its mostly a Chrome toaster).
- Vista: shit
- 7: decent
- 8: shit
- 10: decent
Beyond that it was a solid operating system and one of the better Windows releases.
Most people just had shit computers, combined with "group think" regarding it's quality.
Vista64 on a moderately good system with a proper amount of RAM was fantastic for it's time.
Well yeah, a big part of the problem with Vista was the enourmous increase in resource usage compared to XP, which many PCs sold with it were not ready for. That hardware now has enough brute force to make it work doesn't really mean it is not still needlessly inefficient.
I have Windows 10 for work and Windows 11 at home and I honestly forget that they are different OSes most of the time. I just do what I need to do on my machines and the OS stays out of the way.
Sure, I could say the right-click menu out-of-the-box is slightly more annoying now, and I've sure I could come up with a list of things like that for most releases at this point. UAC was a major shift, but I needed one.
But overall, there just aren't very memorable differences between the different OSes. Aside from the fact that BSOD occurrences have steadily decreased up until Windows 10 at which point they almost stopped entirely.
I suspect the driving reason for the version number increase was to make a clear indicator of the OS's support for scheduling the new wave of hybrid core CPUs, and they simply took the opportunity to clean up some miscellaneous small things that wouldn't have been appropriate to include in a minor version release, but wouldn't have warranted a major version release in of themselves, such as changes to adding things to the file-right-click menu.
95 ok
98se great
ME... Can't even describe how awful it was
XP great
Then your selection :-)