The question I'm more interested in is, why is everything else drastically slow? Contentious opinions on Windows as an operating system are common, but as a use

The question I'm more interested in is, why is everything else drastically slow? Contentious opinions on Windows as an operating system are common, but as a user I've been able to feel the impact of the kernel itself becoming a crufty horror show. When upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 8 on release, I didn't notice too much of a difference. There was outrage at the time (no more start button!) but my only real issues with it were philosophical, the edging towards the 'walled garden'. Then some time later Windows 8.1 came out and the experience, for me, was __dreadful__. Everything was so much slower. The icons on my desktop suddenly couldn't even load in time at login, temporarily being replaced by placeholder white squares. Every click, every keystroke had noticeable latency. Was it just me? Initially I thought it was just a bad installation from the upgrade process. I did a few fresh installs across the years and it still was still so slow it hurt. Windows 8.1 became praised as the saviour of Windows 8, but that wasn't my experience. These days I maintain a Windows 7 installation at home. Making heavy use of Cygwin, I find the experience to be fine. At work we're on Windows 10 and it's __horrifying__. Cygwin's speed will never be a fair representation of how a program should run because of all the hoops it has to jump through, but to see the difference between running it on Windows 7 is __staggering__. The Windows 7 experience is akin to a native terminal on Linux, the Windows 10 experience is like a remote desktop. I feel the same experience in other programs, especially Visual Studio, which is a large portion of my day. Nobody else I talk to shares my frustrations. Am I just super picky? Maybe everyone else is now acclimated to everything being innately slow? That seems like a stretch. But using Windows 10 isn't something I would do out of anything other than necessity because dealing with its speed is like pulling teeth.