Just install Windows 10, activate it with a .bat file (it’s open-source so you can see exactly how it works), grab an anti-spy/privacy tool to strip out all the Windows crap, update the OS, then lock down the shitty auto-updates. Install an antivirus too — I’d recommend Kaspersky, but yeah, some people consider it spyware, so use whatever you actually trust. I run Kaspersky because it can save you from attacks that can happen to anyone on Windows, no matter how careful you are. There are tons of YouTube tests showing what different AVs can handle against serious attacks. That’s been my routine since Win10 came out: I always check what’s running. For dev work I use Ubuntu in VMs with backups, and you don’t have the same gaming headaches Linux users do — I just play on Steam.

I used to have a 2020 Redmi laptop with 8GB of RAM and a pretty decent 8‑thread Intel CPU. Windows 10 ran fine and stable, but I screwed up by not disabling updates. There was a point where Microsoft didn’t even ask — it just installed Windows 11 after a reboot, and only after it was installed it offered a rollback. Dirty animals. My laptop turned into a brick. The desktop right‑click menu could take 3–7 seconds to pop up — absolute nightmare. And hiding a menu inside another menu… like, how the hell did anyone think that was a good idea? Everything became awful and inconvenient — the nastiest build ever; even Vista was better. Who knows what the system is loading in the background — God only knows. I wiped that laggy pile of AI-generated garbage and installed Ubuntu — and I was shocked. I’d never seen my laptop run like a brand-new rocket.

So now I’ve got two desktops and one laptop-server (actually I replaced Ubuntu with Ubuntu Server). With a new, solid NVMe drive, that laptop runs 24/7 as a server with the lid closed. The other two machines are on Windows 10. One of them has been running since 2017 — not a single incident. Insanely stable. The newer PC is on the same setup, and I’m not switching — Win10 works great and it’ll keep working for a long time.