"Better" is a matter of opinion that I don't want to argue, but I do have a nice collection from GOG too. GOG covers some things that Steam doesn't, and the same is true as well. In cases where the game is available on both, my choice depends on a combination of the price for it on each service and my estimation of whether I'll want to replay it or not. GOG wins a fair amount of the time, but there's a lot that I want to play that isn't available there. C'est la vie; have to go with the suboptimal choice.

Aside from patches that correctly fix legitimate vulnerabilities, Microsoft also has a history of releasing broken updates (and fixing them later when they've already done damage), removing features from their products, releasing "important" updates that are ads for future products, adding annoying new "features" to already-released OSes, and similar behaviors. They aren't the ones that I want as the ultimate gatekeeper of how my computer works.

Aside from that, I'm not going to use any OS that reboots itself without my specific instruction to do so. In terms of security, Windows 10 may be a net gain, taken globally, but at the individual level, it's a step backwards in some ways, and I'm not willing to take that step.

Businesses commonly make deals between each other that aren't available to ordinary customers. For instance, Windows XP was available to businesses long after Vista was the only option that one could buy in-store. They aren't breaking any kind of advertising laws by providing more than they say they are.

And anyhow, even if there were some legal issue with going against its "end of sales" statement, Microsoft could sell licenses for Windows 7 to a company that builds system images. That company would sell licensed images to another company, which would also buy PC hardware and image the drives themselves. It's not like Windows 7 licenses are completely unavailable, even now.

Only if you don't disable them...

The OSes themselves don't have ads, unless you count the various app stores. Although on Android, the Google Apps packages do some phone-home stuff, if that's what you're actually worried about. They aren't an essential part of the OS.

A subset understands, but doesn't care about the same things that you do. I pay rental-level prices for games that may disappear at some point, and which I need to be connected to Steam most of the time to play. They collect data on which games I play, how often, how long, etc. Frankly, I don't care that they know those things. It would suck if a portion of my game library suddenly disappeared because something happened at Valve, but I see that as part of the price, besides the $5-$10 per game that I've been paying for last year's blockbuster-level titles. It seems like a fair trade.

Buying ad-free Solitaire won't fix any other system ads, user data collection, etc, that are the actual reason not to use the OS. Solitaire's basically completely beside the point; there are free versions of the game anyhow, so problems in Microsoft's version are moot. The info in this link ought to give you more of an idea of the security issues that a lot of people are talking about here.

Programs that require direct GPU access and as much of my system's RAM as possible are the top of my list of reasons for keeping a Windows partition around, personally. So, I've basically got one boot option to put my machine into gaming-console mode, and one to put it into everything-else mode. That set up will change when there's either a technical shift in what I can easily do on Linux or my interests change enough that I'm no longer interested in running that kind of program.

Because it's not being reported in places that non-technical users read, and if it was, it wouldn't be worded in a way to make them understand and care about the implications....and if it was, there are a ton of people that don't care too much about their privacy anyhow. We'd hear a resounding "meh", rather than any kind of real PR backlash.

I don't doubt that it's possible, and that it may be a common occurrence on some machines, but it happened rarely enough on my system that I don't have a clear memory of it happening (although even my Win98 install was put on top of DOS).

I remember being able to exit to DOS voluntarily, I just don't remember the entirety of Windows crashing and dropping be back. I've got a computer installed with DOS and Windows 98. It still has the option to exit to DOS. I suppose that it was Windows ME that removed that option, but I've never used ME; its reputation preceded it.

Using Windows 95 and 98, I don't remember it throwing me back out into DOS (or if it did, it was a relative rarity on my machine). What I remember is a BSOD popping up, but giving me the option to press a key to attempt to continue, sometimes 15 times in a row before the computer went back to working again (well, until I retried whatever had just failed and got another flurry of errors).

Well...either that, or you got a message saying that you needed to lower/raise the bit depth of your display, enable/disable some memory manager, or something similar. I kind of missed Windows 3.1 too, until I started playing with it in a VM and kept running into all the antiquated bits that I'd forgotten about...then it would make one of the classic "ding" sounds, and I'd forgive it in a wash of nostalgia.

Right, I get that, and I should've been clearer in how I wrote my comment. It was more of a rhetorical question to acknowledge that the system that I described is a little round-about, and that if the use-case was more limited, there would be better answers for a subset of what you want to do.

I've been playing with OBS "Open Broadcaster Software" streaming video from my PC to a Raspberry Pi. OBS is designed for live-streaming games, but seems to work well for general video as well. In my experience, there's about a half-second of lag, so it's terrible for UI, but the transmission is smooth, so actual video playback is nice.

You should be able to simultaneously run a remote desktop session or VNC on the Pi to control the UI in a relatively lag-free way, hit a key to start streaming, and enjoy the video. Of course, this whole set-up only makes sense if you don't have a smart tv, blu-ray player that supports streaming, etc. Otherwise, why not just use what you already have and set up network shares on the PC?

I played a good bit of Arkham Asylum by streaming it from the PC in my office to my laptop in the family room. There was a definite reduction in video quality, but I never had any serious problems with lag. Some was noticeable, but it wasn't that bad, and I really stopped paying attention after a couple of minutes. Obviously, anything that really relies on millisecond timing will be impacted (fighting games, online FPS, and so on), but I was impressed with the experience overall.