Modern OSes (and not just Windows) are getting overly bloated and complicated. Talking to all those hosts and IPs is just a symptome of that nobody seems to care about such things anymore.
My main work-laptop, my server and work workstation are running Ubuntu (because of support, yadda yadda), but I've recently tried Arch linux on my personal laptop.
I'm not yet an Arch fanatic, and find the installation procedure particularly baroque (having to manually hunt down which firmware packages to install to get basic hardware like Wifi working, had to explicitly install a network-manager, or else no networking at all)...
But what I did find immensely refreshing, was working on a minimal system which only had the components I had asked for and nothing else. I knew why everything was there, and how it was supposed to work.
I'm really coming to appreciate that more and more, especially after a botched server-upgrade and having to wait for apt to reinstall 1000+ packages I have no idea if I need or not.
So yeah. Windows, Mac, Linux, or whatever. Keep it minimal, please :)