Spectre & Meltdown largely affect cloud computing and have very little bearing on home computing. There's now another vulnerability dealing with hyper threading. Researchers warn of new Hyper-Threading-based Intel CPU vulnerability - TechSpot
And here's the latest reminder of that vaunted Win10 stability: "Windows 10 users finding their legit installs are being deactivated"
Windows 10 post-1703 is a buggy, horrible mess and MS are only digging it down for themselves.
As for Meltdown/Spectre they greatly would impact the performance of my old AMD, and one of the exploits won't even affect my processor IIRC, so I wouldn't update. Didn't realise it only really affected cloud computing.
Wouldn't surprise me if Intel are putting exploits in on purpose for the NSA either, or wanting to force push W10 later versions...
I personally have a laptop, a tablet and 2 desktops running Win 10 that are all upgraded to build 1809 (also have Win 10 on a VM for test purposes running Windows Insider build 18277). In addition, I also have a work laptop running Win 10 build 1803. I haven't run Win 7 on any of my machines for several years. I've found Win 10 to be extremely stable (much more so than Win 7 ever was).
I've NEVER had any of my machines disabled by a buggy update causing me to spend hours getting things working again. I had that happen with Win 7 on multiple occasions but never with Win 10.
There is a much trumpeted bug in build 1809 where some users reported that the OS was deleting some of their files, I didn't lose a single file on any of my machines.
There's a new bug being reported regarding legitimate installs being deactivated. I actually encountered that one on one of my machines yesterday. I tried to Activate and it failed. I then clicked on Troubleshoot and got a message that Windows was now Activated. Sum total of time spent "troubleshooting" that bug was about 1 minute. The only symptom I had was a message in the lower right corner of my screen telling me to go to Settings and Activate Windows.
As far as Win 10 sending data to MS servers, it's a non-issue for me since I'm not a paranoid person. MS is collecting millions of records daily from millions of machines running Win 10. Any data collected is pretty much lost within that large dataset to where the data is really only useful to track trends and such for MS. Not sure what else people think MS would/could do with the data.
Just wondering: Why shouldn't I switch to Windows 10 now? Why is 7 the preferred OS? I'm a newbie to operating systems, and genuinely prefer Windows 7's overall style and feel over Windows 10, but I know Windows 10 is supposed to be faster and overall more smooth than Windows 7. I'm a casual gamer and programmer, so I'd like to hear why others do not upgrade to Windows 10.
I'm all very new to this as well. I have been running Linux since 2001, and the last Windows rig I used was Windows-98SE. I have a specific app I need and it won't run under WINE, and I don't have a Mac and have no intention of ever getting one. So that leaves Windows. As for why:
*) Seven runs like a champ on the old Dell Optiplex (originally had XP installed) 32 bit rig I was just given for free. Looks like it's a model from the early Oughts.
*) The Dell has CD read/write capabilities, but doesn't read DVDs, so that meant preparing a USB drive for the install. This is easy to do from Slackware and the install DVD *.iso file. Stop the boot, and select the USB drive and you're good to go: flawless install.
*) Looked into the various iterations of Windows, and Seven got the best reviews. Not sure Ten can even run on my rig, and even if it did, I wouldn't: way too intrusive, tries to do way too much for you so I'd be spending more time arguing with it than getting anything done.
*) It cost way less: less than 25% what Ten would cost.
*) Still has a lot of life left in it, and so why not keep it until the specialized app I need no longer runs on it? If it was the main rig I did everything with, that might be a different story.
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