There actually are updates to it as for the last three years Microsoft has continued to patch it under the commercial "Extended Security Update" program - that only ended in January 2023.
You just couldn't get them as a home user without doing a lot of tweaking on your own.
You know how when you press the Windows key and are able to type into the searchbar? Prior to 10, this bar did an instant local-only search of your desktop applications and (if you enabled it) select cached documents. Imagine building up the muscle memory of using this to launch applications for a decade or two to the point where you don't even look at the screen anymore when launching apps. Now imagine that Windows 10 comes along and introduces a mandatory internet search that has to complete before it lets you see the local results that you were actually looking for.
Now imagine not being able to forget how snappy it used to be every single time you launch an application. Imagine the annoyance of being punished for a typo by having Edge open up a Bing search instead of the application you were trying to launch. Imagine not noticing the error and waiting 5 seconds for Bing to boot up, only to be confusedly greeted by a search you didn't ask for in a browser you wish you could uninstall. Imagine installing third-party applications to try and restore the old search experience only for it to get regularly broken by OS updates you cannot opt out of and are only sometimes notified of in advance (another "feature" that Windows 10 brought).
IMO Windows 7 was the last "pure" Windows before the power balance at Microsoft tipped in favor of the cloud & sales people.
Woah man, why wouldn't you want your computers key search features to just go straight to bing result? Are you using some kind of crazy computer that has things on physical memory? Fuck that put it all on the cloud man. It's the future.
You can disable searching as a fall-through, but you cannot disable web results appearing inside of the menu itself, which is what slows it down. At least, that was the case for the first 4 years or so before I stopped using Windows 10 and switched to Linux.
you can fully disable all online/web search features in search using a group policy on Pro versions of windows. afaik there are even one click tools that can do that for you (pretty sure even good ol' OOSU10 can do it)
you can, it's just harder to do. I suggest find a debloater tool, and use it. Also remove cortana thing to make it even faster. There are some tools that let's you remove all WinRT apps
Slovakia. I mean, it's not all of them. Most of it can even run Windows 7. Recently they put Windows 10 on some of them, but good luck even just trying to launch a browser.
In June they already got rid of the last 32-bit machines.
Schools often have very old computers but don’t let that discourage anyone. We had old Apple IIe’s in 1998 in my high school “computer literacy” class. I became a programmer in part because I was bored and learned BASIC on the Apple II’s and my TI-85 calculator also supported BASIC.
Sometimes, a crappy computer teaches you more than a modern one. (Only if you want to be a programmer, though. Don’t learn Office 2000 because politicians in your country won’t budget for some cheap, modern laptops.)
The TI83 Plus was my gateway drug. Learning BASIC and the fundamentals behind connecting it to my computer. Emulating software to test code on different models. It was fascinating and engaging.
The fun and learning involved with doing anything and everything you can with the technology that's available to you is something that I think is lost for a depressing majority of youth now.
I had to upgrade 4 years ago when I bought new hardware and went to 10 and now 11. I still miss 7, it was insanely more performant and feature complete. From a UI point of view, anyway.