Aside: I bought my first battery backup because the only thing that ruined my uptime on Windows NT 4 was power outages. I would have kept on using NT 4 as my desktop OS, but MS wanted to sell more licenses so newer directX was unsupported on NT4. I moved to Windows 2000, then eventually to XP x64 Edition.

I installed and fixed a lot of 95, 98[se], ME, and XP OSes for other people, though. Thousands. I never bothered with any of those OSes on my own machines, though. The first "consumer" OS i used was win 7 Ultimate Edition (signed by Ballmer, natch). I use 11, now, and i'm fine with it. I think it's because i am "grandfathered" in to win11 without a microsoft login; i just mentioned last night that if i had to reinstall windows on this machine, i probably wouldn't, due to that requirement now.

Anyhow all this is to say, hogwash. Windows has been perfect in the past. Time marches on, fruit flies like a banana, and all that.

I'm not trying to diminish the complexity of a desktop OS of course, but sometimes it's hard not to feel the priorities are all over the place. Don't get me wrong, I'm not nostalgic about Windows XP, I actually remember how many freezes and crashes I used to have back then.

My frustration is more born out of the OS rough edges constantly getting in the way of tasks I actually want to focus on and accomplish, which doesn't play well with my ADHD.