Being old enough to remember Windows not being common, it's always been a mixed bag. It was interesting to see the transition from windows being a thing you sometimes invoked from the commandline to being the thing into which the computer booted. Gamers and others of course had opinions on all those system resources getting used when they weren't even needed.

'98 was stable after some big patches for the most part. XP was really the move to make after that. I used to work tech support and had to learn and support all of the various flavors before XP. I've used XP onward moving as support gets dropped for the previous one, though one of my PCs runs only linux. If davinci would kindly be stable on linux, I would probably switch, maybe keeping windows around for any games I might really want to play.