[pelasaco]

Sorry, but are we talking about Desktop operating system? Because if that's the topic, Linux and BSD have much to learn from Microsoft. Including stability. I can tell you, because it's my job: if you don't want to use outdated software, you should go with rolling distributions, that became stable around 2016. Before that every update was a schrödingers update. Windows are able to rollback updates since Windows 2003.

> Between updates and malware spreading behind a NAT, I'm not at all convinced updates are the lesser of two evils.

You can get your answer looking back to events like Nimda and Code Red.

[alpaca128]

I would have agreed with you before Windows 10 came out. Afterwards I had to regularly reinstall Windows on most of my machines as well as laptops of close family members because whether it was a boot loop, BSOD every 10 minutes, random switching of keyboard layouts or just performance issues to a point the mouse lagged, there was a whole wave of new bugs suddenly appearing after some forced update.

Now I run a rolling distro since 2018. Development got a whole lot simpler, everything is more enjoyable and to date there's been exactly one noteworthy issue which was resolved after a quick search and 10 minutes.

And since then I've never seen a "new update available" popup dialog, no ads, no Cortana, no "smart" features, and most definitely no need to install third-party software to actually have a usable file search. I even update much more frequently than Windows 10 every forced me to, because for some reason I just never have any issues and I can just do it in the background.