> Anyway, I think in 2022, operating system choice is more of a personal preference thing than a technical one. They're all equally bad, just in different ways.
I like most of your post since I agree with a lot of it, but I'd like to try to convince you that it's never been better to be a computer user. OSes are _mostly_ stable, have a clear design goal for users, have multiple well supported shell environments for power users, extremely strong cross-system software (i.e., you can use Firefox et. al., on basically anything), plugging in hardware very likely will "just work" for most hardware, the list goes on.
Most importantly, UI/UX conventions are pretty well established regardless of the OS you pick; for example, while I'm rarely in an actual UI on the linux boxes I work with, more or less it works the way I expect based on Mac/Windows. Hitting the CMD/Meta key brings up a system search utility (this is partially happenstance from MacOS as I believe it's the default hotkey for spotlight...but I use quicksilver on ctrl+space so I might be mistaken) Even the mobile space between major Android releases and iOS are very consistent, Android having a slight blemish in the regional minor releases that lack major Android features.
The point is that I think a lot of established UI/UX defaults for OSes are mature enough that edge cases or test cases are the rough edges. There are elements from each OS I miss, elements they share which are equally frustrating (truly, I wish MS and Apple would document the registry/defaults command respectively in full. Both let you tweak the system to an amazing degree to make a perfectly customizable experience, but you basically have to hope someone else has posted it on stackoverflow/reddit/whatever if you want to discover it).
I grew up starting with Mac OS6 and didn't touch a Windows computer until well into my teens or use one daily until I was 20, and the adaptation period was literally a day or two. My friend was windows/linux for his entire life, saw me using my Mac for browsing tabletop PDFs when we were in university, and was intrigued by the way the UI/UX worked and has been a convert ever since, learning the UI in a few days and only a few questions.
It's really never been better to be a user, and I'm kind of amazed that OS wars continue in 2022. Computers are great. Software/Tech Companies are another story...
> I can't find any (non-anecdotal) evidence that a "bloated" registry impacts performance at all on a modern system. If you have benchmarks or something, I would love to see them! (not being a jerk, I really would).
have to comment on this because I agree, it's a non-issue, but the number of registry cleaners that exist or people's self-invented solutions cause far more problems than they solve. Which is a pretty easy task as typically they solve 0 problems directly.