> Yet, the people who use it (mostly gamers), seem to think it's all fine and the operating system is great.
I hate Windows these days, but the specific AMD video card in my gaming desktop has buggy drivers in Linux and reliably crashes the whole machine about once every four hours (or, much faster if I actually play a game on it—that's if I'm just web browsing and hanging out in terminals and such) versus my having had zero OS-level crashes on the same hardware over almost three years under Windows 10. So... Windows it is.
IDK, the driver may be fixed now, but the bug had been outstanding for 18+ months when I encountered it, so, I wouldn't bet on it. It seemed to have very little traction. And at this point it's really not worth my time to try, since the machine's working OK as-is, aside from Windows being crap.
Since all I do on Windows is game, having to avoid some ads isn't that big a deal. I spend nearly all my time on it in fullscreen programs anyway, hardly interacting with Windows at all.
So it's "great" in that it actually works correctly on my hardware, and ~all my games work just as they should. It's shit in every other way, but if it's effectively just a game launcher, oh well. I do anything important on other operating systems.