It's basically steamos.

Arch with image based rootfs, with kde desktop, and steam in game mode.

I have it installed on my gpdwin4 'faux deck'.

By default it uses btrfs with zstd compression turned on at compression level 1, zram, and pals. Has handheld daemon controller emulation and emudeck installed by default.

(Quite a bit of space savings can be had, by temporarily remounting the /home subvolume with -force-compress=zstd:15 , running "brtrfs filesystem defrag -czstd /home" with sudo, building then running BEES to block deduplicate the volume, and then running a full rebalance at the end. This is very hard on the SSD though. Lots of IO. But you can get approximately 50% more stuff crammed in. I have close to 3Tb of stuff installed on my 2Tb SSD.)

Being image based, everything has to be flatpak.

BEES can be built and run from the user storage, so it's able to get used that way.

https://github.com/Zygo/bees

I never used Windows ME (I went from 98 to XP), so I'd say that Windows 11 is my most hated, followed by Windows 10.

Windows 10 is what introduced the lack of control over your system. If you change settings, they change back at some random time. The automatic driver updates just caused more problems than they were meant to solve, and the registry hack you need to disable driver updates in the Home edition changes about once a year. You can tell when nothing works because Windows replaced your graphics driver with a buggy or incompatible version. Today, an old Windows 10 install can't decide which media player to switch to as your default without your permission. It keeps changing the default email client to the deprecated Mail program, which then immediately demands that you use "Outlook (new)" with ads disguised as unread emails in your inbox. Why does one of the world's few trillion-dollar corporations need ad revenue?

Windows 11 is even worse with the high system requirements (which you can bypass, but you don't get the twice-yearly feature updates automatically - I know from running it in a VM), attempts to force a Microsoft account and OneDrive, and shitty UI ("game-changer" start menu).

I'm just going to deal with Linux bullshit. I already found some Excel macros (speaker simulations) that give errors in LibreOffice, so hopefully there's a way to get one of my old Office licenses transferred into a VM. The official statement is that they can't be transferred, but even replacing a failed hard drive means that Office won't activate for a few weeks.

I remember when Vista came out. It was a steaming turd, but at least a pretty one. Even on good hardware (with good drivers) for the time, there was nothing Vista could do that XP wouldn't run better. Things got much better by the time SP1 and SP2 came out, but by then it was too late and Windows 7 was out.

Windows 8 I honestly kind of liked. It felt even snappier than 7, and I must have been one of the few who liked the start screen and metro stuff. Basically, had few complaints about it, the biggest being that Aero transparency was removed for the release, despite being in the previews. There was a patch to put it back, by bigmuscle. That was paid for nagware, and not updated, since he decided to disappear into the ether.

Windows 10 and then 11 is when I think Windows really started to go into the toilet. Especially 11 with how arbitrary it's CPU support cutoff is. They only let 11 run officially on a 7820HQ because they were selling the Surface Studio still in 2021. Also the taking away of customization in favor of flat, sterile corporate style that I loathe. This was my complaint from 8, now it's amplified. Bleh.

This still holds up: Every OS Sucks

Autoexec.bat
Config.sys
Win.ini
System.ini

I found Windows 8 in both desktop and server versions to be useless. It wasnt much better as 8.1 either.

Most all of the other OSs have had their bad points but where useable for the most part.

I used ClassicShell even on Windows 7, so Windows 8.x weren't much different UI wise. Though even in recent years I came across few Server 2012 (R2) systems, non-tweaked, those were annoying.