[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Lucky you. Meanwhile Microsoft has delayed the October update for the third time because of all the crap they keep breaking whenever they release it. Yesterday my boss and I had a conversation about just turning Windows Update off forever for our org because it's caused more trouble than pretty much anything we could think of as a consequence of not updating. This was brought up (again) because of several of our developers having their network cards randomly and inexplicably stop working and requiring a reboot to fix after 1809.

I will say that since Vista there has been a ton of improvement on the driver model, display system, network stack, audio stack (as you mentioned), and a few other relatively low-level pieces, but pretty much everything above that has been a continual shitshow of user-hostile bullshit and overly complex interlocking crapware.

Start Menu used to just be a menuized view of a folder structure, now it's some horrid amalgamation of junk that breaks whenever the Windows Apptore database gets corrupt, which is surprisingly often considering no one here even uses Windows Appstore apps.

Older Windows versions had their bugs, sure, but on the whole they cared a lot more about the user, about not breaking their shit and making sure their updates were actually worth applying. Microsoft has made it very clear since Windows 10 that they hate the user.