Your mentioning of Vista from 2007 shows the amount of confusion: the relevant years for comparison in the thread were: Linux, for which no distribution existed

Your mentioning of Vista from 2007 shows the amount of confusion: the relevant years for comparison in the thread were: Linux, for which no distribution existed before around 1995 at minimum, and no serious software with the features of those written for Windows, and Windows systems for which a stable Windows NT existed since 1993. Since the same year users chose non-NT Windows systems because they needed cheaper hardware. That’s it. And even the non-NT systems were more stable than the confused comments claim. The instabilities were typically bad hardware or bad user software.