The death of the OS is not determined by the support of M$, home users do not care about it (85%+ of them are pirates on the planet). And browser support (because web designers have become dumb and lazy and work with frameworks only of the latest versions, where they can write less code and build more “software” from cubes like children in a nursery) and other key software, including drivers. As long as they exist, no one cares about support except for medium and large businesses. But medium and large businesses are increasingly choosing Unix platforms, because business just got tired of the M$ gag and the disregard for the quality of the code, cynically using ordinary users (who paid for it) as alpha testers...
Wintel has always twisted the arms of ordinary consumers with illegal dirty methods.
Let's remember the transition to W7 from XP - Intel deliberately did not include DVXA support in the drivers for its XP in 2010 for igpu, although nothing prevented it from doing so. M$ deliberately did not add support for GPT HDD(2Tb+) partitioning in XP and SMB2.0+ (stable 1Gbps+ speed for local net/inet, espesially for wlan), although it was elementary to do in SP4. Because then even more XP owners wouldn't upgrade to W7 with it critical features from Vista+.
And now let's remember the most disgusting story with W8+ - after W7 M$ simply disabled the ability to select a classic compact theme for the UI system, even in Pro+ editions! Since W8 it is not possible to select a theme where the 3 buttons in the top right corner of every Windows window - minimize/restore/maximize can be made compact like in W7/XP/W2K. Because of this, densely packed interfaces in professional software simply could not be displayed on monitors of the same resolution! It's wild, but it happened, because of this, some people stubbornly sit on the W7. Latest OS with classic interface theme...
W8.1+ is the latest version of Windows with a relatively fast kernel. But it also has a lot of shortcomings, such as incomplete Bluetooth support compared to the W10. And that for a long time it was possible to close the next service pack. But this was simply not done on purpose.
W7 (and partially W8.1) are the latest versions that, with an SSD, can comfortably run on hardware with 4GB of memory (where it is not expandable).
Let me remind everyone that people opposed the transition to W7 in 2009-2015 for a simple reason - Vista+ versions did not work very well with the HDD as a system disk, because Vista+ already have an unswitchable swap file in fact and the intensity of disk operations just rolls over against the background of ascetic and spartan XP. Only the appearance of SSDs in mass (in terms of money) availability since about 2016 allowed the majority of the world's population to finally switch to W7/W8.
And now history is repeating itself. W10 has not been completed - they are initially bad in design (kernel/UI). W11 introduces new draconian restrictions on the rights and freedoms of people who BUY it. This is madness. But there is no alternative for the mass consumer on the planet. Through the fault of these same consumers - who did not choose normal politicians/legislators, who did not create comfortable conditions for real competition on the planet, allowing M$ in all countries to conduct openly criminal activities through anti-competitive practices. Which has been proven more than once, but it was of little use, because. time was lost and continued to be missed on purpose.
Let me also remind citizens of the whole world that if your authorities buy paid support for W7 and other OS at public expense, and this is exactly what the Pentagon does, for example, then the authorities are simply obliged to provide all the security patches in the open, which they receive PAYING from M$, and M$ is obliged to provide free of charge such patches and updates to all citizens of countries where the state pays for such services through taxes collected from citizens.
Alas, even in the US, most of the population is illiterate and does not understand this important point, that M$ is obliged to share with them all such updates for older OS versions, because ALL citizens have ALREADY paid for them for this extended support old OS.
Surprisingly, no legislature has done anything YET in any country to legally oblige M$ to provide publicly all security patches and key updates if this support from M$ is provided at public expense, I.e. with taxpayers' money. Even Windows XP is still supported by M$ for a number of government customers, not to mention W7.
