24H2 is a steaming pile of monkey crap

I am the type that always gets excited for a new OS version release, whether it be Windows, MacOS, or Linux (more on that in a min). Imagine my disappointment when I upgraded from 23H2 to 24H2 - don't do that. I had only problems after that "upgrade". UAC would timeout and leave the desktop and all apps unusable. The only thing that saved me from hard poweroffs was being able to cmd reboot via RMM, and even that took several minutes. So many app crashes, including explorer. So much lag in apps and overall OS responsiveness. So yesterday I bit the bullet, wiped my ssd and installed 24H2 from scratch - that'll make everything better, right? Not so much. the UAC problem appears to have gone away, but still random crashes. Just now, explorer crashed for seemingly no reason. (hardware diagnostics all check out fine). I'm seeing similar, albiet less severe, problems on my home computer as well, after upgrading from 23H2 to 24H2. And speaking of the clean install, the Windows install process has changed as well. The initial copy files to disk is faster, but then the actual installing after reboot takes much longer. And on top of that, it leaves a Windows.old folder - on a clean install. (never mind that the folder is empty, it's just stupid that it's there at all). I used ccleaner (i know, i know) to do cleanup after installing apps, etc. Ccleaner (i know already!) found and removed the Windows update cached files, and then ran bleachbit, but cleanmgr still shows the 8GB is there. Again, it's just stupid. This is the worst Windows release in recent memory. None of the other Win11 or Win10 updates had problems like this. I think Win7 did one time, but this is much more reminiscent of Vista. :/ It seems like they've fully embraced "the customer is the beta tester" philosophy that ppl here always joke about.

**Edit: Oh, and one more thing - disable 'widgets' and it removes it from main display, but it's still present on the extended display(s). 😠

Overall, the clean install is performing better than the in-place upgrade, but it's still not as stable as 23H2. I'd recommend everyone waiting for a few 'performance and stability enhancement' updates before wide deployment of 24H2.

And speaking of OS updates, upgrading to 24.04 on two diff linux computers has also been.... less than good. I'm not even going to get into MacOS updates because that's always a PITA.

Perhaps 2024 is just not the year for OS updates? uggh.