On rare occasions that I have to boot Windows to run some government-compatible software on a 32-core, 64GB RAM and I-don't-even-care-to-check-how-fast SSD, I have to listen to it firing on all cilinders while Defender fights Malicious Software something and Windows Updates while I'm typing some text in a barely responsive page. Truly getting my shit done.

Edit: Forgot all the random software doing auto updates and notifying me about it as I go.

That's the price of living in a world where you're connected to the internet by default - a huge amount of performance goes towards security (sandboxing/scanning/rules). Windows 9x didn't even have a firewall FFS.

Windows has to chose defaults for a huge audience, if you daily drove it it would probably just work. Way better than 95 would.

Eh, no. Linux and bsd had process isolation and ran packet-filtering with little effort on contemporary hardware.

You should also be aware that early android/ios phones did all this in "modern times" on limited hardware by today's standards.

> if you daily drove it it would probably just work

More like, "if you daily drove it you'd get used to all the awfulness".

No, you can add defender exceptions/disable it and updates are staggered.