Of course Microsoft has a stranglehold on the regular enterprise, but they already completely lost the server and mobile market to linux. Linux might not be generally known, but it's spreading slowly on the desktop.

customize your Windows 10 installer with NTlite.... my Win10 works and feels like Win7 with faster i/o

If you game then you pretty much forced to use Windows considering most Steam games still haven't been ported to Linux/Steam OS. I'd go with Steam OS if I could but not able to play over 80% of my games is a no deal. They keep porting games to Linux but it seems to be a snail pace and perhaps they are just treating Steam OS like a pet project which they don't really give a fuck about anymore. So yea... I'm stuck with Windows since I mainly use my PC to game.  Mac OS is a piece of shit if you want to game considering most games hardly ever make it to Mac.

All these posts and comments and everyone is forgetting one of the best OS's that has ever been, Windows 2000 (64-bit)! It was the first consumer OS based off the NT file system and it was the first Consumer OS to support the x64 architecture. It made Windows 95,98,98SE, XP, and XP SP1 look like garbage in comparison. XP SP2 changed all that though.

A lot of people forget how terrible XP was before SP2 came out. Most people say that SP1 was XP's saving grace but even though it made huge improvements to XP, SP1 still had massive hardware incompatibilities and still struggled with USB hot-swap.

My favorite Pre-XP SP2 OS was Windows 2000 (64-bit). It was such an amazon OS for it's time.

I installed SP2 back in the day and had to remove it, as my modem and printer stopped working with the update. Then again, was it SP3 I had on my work computer, and that was crap compared to SP1.

It's my second favourite Windows after Win 7. But even Win 2000 was a mess before SP3! And they never fixed a small bug of file preview that sometimes flagged files as in use and prevented users from modifying or deleting them, although there were two workarounds, either disabling file preview at least in folders with many files, or using Sysinternal tools to close handles improperly left open. Of the three NT-based Windows I used, XP was the worst for me. I had to replace Win 2000 with it as my new HW wasn't fully supported, but XP was heavier and had problems with some old games and their DRMs.

Windows 7 has been succeeded twice now. And allot of it's features are outdated. (I.E. No Direct X 12.)
So by it's very definition it's not modern.

Succeeded by garbage and spyware, it doesn't matter what additional features they have, they ain't the modern XP.

Windows 7 is the modern XP, with adequate functionality and similar lifecycle.

Can't agree with such a hypothesis.

I chose Windows 10. I have some problems with it. (Sometimes the touchpad, or speakers stop working and only restart helps). But still, it is very pleasant to use.