The best version of Windows was 7. It had previous few gimmicks and acted as a stable platform for everything else.

8, 10 and 11 are all just extra layers on top of this and it shows. Windows bundled apps don’t all share the same aesthetic. There are still two settings apps. They seem to think people want doom-ridden news and ads on their desktop.

Microsoft need to rebuild Windows from the ground up. They are a big company that doesn’t build crap products so it’s within their grasp to do it. It needs to be a lighter load on hardware, have full ARM compatibility and act more as a stable platform for everything else.

If Apple can rebuild MacOS to go from PowerPC-to-X86-to-X64-to-ARM and still work with older apps as if nothing had changed, so can Microsoft.

If it were me I would add in a ‘kiosk’ mode where I could run an instance of an app and just the background code it required to function. This would allow me to allocate all system resources to the one task I want to achieve without the operating system doing things in the background I never ordered it to. A computer should be 100% subservient to the user and be doing nothing they cannot shut off or change.