> There have been no objective improvements since Windows 7 that I can think of
I think this is pretty rude to the many people who have contributed to Windows in the years gone by. I won't argue that there hasn't been some crappy things added or on the advantages/disadvantages of later Windows versions but there have been plenty of things added since Windows 7. Some I can think off just off the top of my head
* Credential Guard - protection of secrets in the lsass process even from kernel access
* gMSA support - Windows 7 could only use standalone MSA accounts which weren't as useful
* Windows LAPS - now supports encryption and is builtin to the OS
* Schannel improvements - newer cipher suites and TLS protocols (cipher suites in Win 7 are right at the edge of what people might support these days)
* Windows Terminal - including ConPTY support in the underlying APIs
There's plenty more out there but these are pretty important features for me to have on Windows. Granted some only make sense in a more corporate/domain environment but not all of them.
Wanting Windows 7 back does not mean there should be no further development. By all means update the cipher suites.
I just want the window borders easy to grab on a high resolution and a sensitive mouse, and no latency when I activate a program in the task bar. I want no ads in the start menu and no telemetry. I want an operating system doing work in the background, and not an anonymous entity called "we":
Re-reading your list of improvements it doesn't impress me either for a decade of work. And I don't think people in this thread are particularly 'rude', i.e. they're not expressing what they really think about Windows 10+ ...
Yeah I literally care about zero of those. Plus there's no reason those features couldn't have been shipped as part of Windows 7, without bringing "telemetry" and Start Menu advertisements and coercive updates that wipe people's drives, etc.
I think this is pretty rude to the many people who have contributed to Windows in the years gone by. I won't argue that there hasn't been some crappy things added or on the advantages/disadvantages of later Windows versions but there have been plenty of things added since Windows 7. Some I can think off just off the top of my head
* Credential Guard - protection of secrets in the lsass process even from kernel access
* gMSA support - Windows 7 could only use standalone MSA accounts which weren't as useful
* Windows LAPS - now supports encryption and is builtin to the OS
* Schannel improvements - newer cipher suites and TLS protocols (cipher suites in Win 7 are right at the edge of what people might support these days)
* SMB 3 - encryption, compression, better integrity/mitm/downgrade protection over SMB 2
* WSL
* Windows Sandbox
* Windows Terminal - including ConPTY support in the underlying APIs
There's plenty more out there but these are pretty important features for me to have on Windows. Granted some only make sense in a more corporate/domain environment but not all of them.