As I said, each to their own 
I find windows 7 to be fast once all the unnecessary garbage was removed.
I.m still getting updates for defender (surprise)…
I run 6 to 8 users at a time… most direct play,
I have one user who can’t seem to get his ROKU to set to maximum so he transcodes everything.
Linux. At the moment ubuntu 20.04 server.
As a sysadmin, I don’t have to worry about anything after booting. Viruses are theoretical. Since there’s no proprietary kernel processes that I’m legally prohibited from auditing I can inspect literally everything on the system.
I mean, if I didn’t care about performance I would use mac or windows, which I have both of, but why in the world would I burn compute resources running a gui and 150 unnecessary services that are designed to maintain the user experience? It’s a server, not a plex media desktop computer. If I didn’t care about security and didn’t want to have access to the latest features and bug fixes, I wouldn’t run in Linux, I’d use some outdated code or something. There’s a reason that Linux dominates the world of servers. Desktop operating systems just aren’t designed around the server workload, so no point in using a desktop operating system when I want to run a server.
Unraid OS 6.9.1 (Linux 5.10.21-Unraid x86_64) within a docker container.
Hardware
SilverStone Technology RM41-H08 4U Rackmount
Threadripper 2950X 16-Core 32gb DDR4 Gigabyte Designare MB
Storage
20tb (x2 enterprise wd white labels)
14tb parity disk (Shucked WD Elements WDC WD140EMFZ aka HGST white label)
1tb nvme ssd cache disk
