New
#251
I am firmly in the camp of keeping W7 indefinitely, using it with Sandboxie for browsing (which will be going open source in the near future). The programs I need are already installed, the OS has nice eye-candy, and it works fine. It will be a long time before new programs are not backwards compatible with it.
W10 is not an OS, it's a cloud service. I will never go that route myself.
Linux (for me) is fine to have around in the form of a few live drives, but it's not an OS I prefer over Windows. I'm a tweaker and power user and learned DOS in the 80s - am not interested in now switching from 30 years of point-and-click Windows to learning Unix commands to do the simplest thing. Linux is not intuitive and a PITA as a main OS for anyone who delves deeply and wants to configure things themselves.
I will keep my eye on ReactOS if I eventually need to dual boot into another OS to run newer programs. It is a backward-engineered, open-source Windows-clone OS. By the time I need to think about it, it might be the next best thing to having to 'change'. But for now, and into the foreseeable future, no change is necessary.
PS About Sandoxie - for anyone unfamiliar and maybe interested, don't bother with the latest version (5.3x) as the company that currently maintains it is asking for name/add/phone to download the latest version. This is a new requirement based on some gvmt BS. Just look for the last SBIE version 5.2xx and you won't have that issue. Then keep an eye out for it to go open source and update it then.