I'm lucky to have three powerful WIndows Workstations and one server at my disposal. I'm happy to be able to continue to run Windows 7 on one, Windows 8.1 on one, and Windows 10 on two of them, because I believe that gives me perspective. And finally I'm additionally fortunate to be able to make a number of virtual machines, because there's where risky testing can be done, with near zero consequences.
In the past week I brought two of my hardware workstations up to Windows 10 v1909 build 18363.900 (June updates) and things are going pretty well I guess. It's still more a pleasure to use the desktop on my Win 8.1 system, frozen at a December 2017 update level (and measurably more efficient than the Win 10 systems at doing the same things).
I also brought a VM up to Win 10 v2004 and that actually was a pretty smooth process, and it runs OK I guess, though it is more bloated than ever before and has more tendency to contact online servers (as detected by my non-standard firewall setup) via some new services.
I sure wish I had some confidence that the engineering of Windows was going in the right direction. But from the most superficial (desktop appearance) to the murky, geeky depths (online comm observations, Explorer quirks, and a number of other things) it honestly just doesn't look like it's going anywhere except in a spiral around a whirlpool.
Sigh.
-Noel