My desktop was WinXP until I had to move and couldn't take it with me, because Vista and onwards were gimped, heavily, due to DRM (I didn't knew it was DRM-related until a month ago).

Vista removed 3D Sound Card support (because it could be used to circunvent HDMI audio DRM), and made many CRT features unusable to incentive people to use HDMI cable and DRM-supporting monitors (CRTs, because they are inherently analog, doesn't work with DRM at all).

Vista also doesn't supported parallel port properly (thus anyone using parallel port to contorl stepper motors, be it parallel-port scanners, CNC machines or hobby hardware had to stick with XP).

When I had to buy a laptop after moving, Linux-based machines were usually 120 USD more expensive, even when they had 100% identical hardware, I bought a Win8 laptop, wanting to replace WIn8 with Linux, but my laptop has buggy UEFI and even disabling Secure Boot it keeps preventing boot of anything that is not the OEM windows.

Win8 is terrible, and did something that REALLY annoyed me, upgraded to Win8.1 forcefully when I was busy, it just showed a dialog box written it was going to update now and reboot, and a "reboot" button, but no way to re-schedule, cancel, anything, not even a "X" (it showed a metro-style modal box, over my desktop environment).

When Win10 was announced, I liked what was described, and wanted it badly... but then I learned of the extremely hard to turn off telemetry and update policy, and other shady policies, and became suspicious of it, then MS started to nag people to install it, this made me not want it.

Then I had to install Win10 on some of my parents business computers... and then I learned how nightmare Win10 is.

1. On Win10, the only software some of the users use for e-mail, that is Windows Live Mail, doesn't work properly, MS even made an update in december that deliberately sabotaged it. (update, as you remember, install mostly mandatorily, specially if you don't have windows 10 enterprise, or a windows 10 server to control windows 10 pro with policy).

2. Win10 updates frequently break random shit, usually banking or tax related (my country is heavily moving toward online-only bureaucracy, and is also the world leader in bureaucracy amount...)

3. Printers randomly stop working on Win10, when they work fine on Win7.

4. Tested some games on my Win8.1 machine and Win10 machines, and older DirectX is very broken there, depending on your hardware the broken DX + Hardware combo make some games completely unplayable.

5. MS promised 3 or 4 years ago to fix the broken DX emulation, and has an employee in the official forums gathering all bug reports in a thread, but released not even a preliminary fix.

I had to build a new PC (the laptop was failing, and I couldn't use a WinXP era machine anymore...), since most new games doesn't work on WinXP anymore, then I finally installed Win7 for the first time...

Almost best Windows ever, so far (I installed Win7 a month ago, thus I don't used it much yet).

I am hoping Linux people will stop some desktop-user hostile behaviour and that Linux will be actually useable on desktop before Win10 become "mandatory" for hardware reasons, so I don't have to ever install it on my personal computer.

Of course, MS can attempt to get goodwill again by reversing all their crappy policies, but they did that (crap policy, reversing it, unreversing it) now so many times (example, launch Games for Windows + Xbox 360, that was terrible, kill it off, only to "relaunch" it in the form of Xbone + UWP + DX12 Win10 only) that I doubt I personally will trust them again.