I ran win98 until 2006 to run my machinery. I put up with the daily BSODs and reinstalls 2-3 times a year because I viewed it as a tool. They wanted money for XP. Windows was more dangerous then. One of my kids downloaded a virus that transferred itself automatically over irc. By chance, a few months later, I downloaded a virus checker for CIH, because it was only a meg, and on another whim I ran it and found 175 copies of CIH virus between 2 computers 3 days before it was due to overwrite the BIOS. I never let windoze online again.
More Recently I've used Vista to actually do the odd thing in VMs, purely because it was there. But wine does a better job of being windows than windows does now. The one windows program I use regularly is just fine under wine. It caters for guys with 'hand-me-down' pcs so the 2016 version was compiled i386, and the 2019 version is compiled i586. But the same data updates work on both.
I have win11 on this box since last year purely because windows was there from new and my son may want to use it. I boot it every few months for the updates and then put it away quickly. And I never give it my name, or Internet moniker. To windows, I am TightAss.
I invite you all to use it - that will confuse the tracking/data logging wonderfully
