This is one of the primary resaons I ditched Windows for Macos.
The multitasking on Windows is ridiculously bad.
Also, applications that freeze and can't be killed/restarted are simply part of life on Windows.
Add to all that, Window slows down over time - again, the periodic reformat and rebuild is part of life on Windows. After I switched to Mac I didn't need to rebuild the operating system essentially ever.
Also, the registry - I think the worst idea in all computing. Prior to the registry you plopped a windows application in a location and configured it with an INI file. After the registry the entire operating system and all applications turned into one big ball of chewing gum, glue and hair dredged out of the shower drain.
How can Windows have got it so wrong?
Anecdotally, that's not my experience with Windows these days at all. I've never had the whole system freeze up on my Win10 desktop. Never noticed a slowdown or app that can't be killed, and never done a reformat or rebuild. Windows Update is mildly annoying when it decides to reboot your system for you, though usually when you're not using it. The registry seems fine to me too. Okay it's not perfect, but I don't think it's meaningfully worse than the MacOS or Linux system of configs in text files with various types of special formats all over the place, unless of course it's some kind of binary format that can only be modified with a special CLI program.
I agree. Windows is basically fine these days. It's even better than Mac and Linux in a big way from a desktop stability point of view because it has the Ctrl-alt-delete interface which works reliably and lets you kill the offending program.
Linux has various useless options like sysreq shortcuts that you can't remember and kill random processes, and I don't think Mac has anything, though to be honest I don't recall ever bringing a Mac to its knees so much that I couldn't open a terminal and run `top`.
Until the advent of the new screen manager, you could always reliably get to a VT terminal.
Full io access and unlimited kill power, far better than ctrl alt delete...
Any regressions in this area I blame on systemd, which I think runs on cpp, so you know I blame cpp... (kernel is written in c, windows got a bit better when they used c# instead of cpp, Mac never used cpp...everybody kill cpp, quick)