I never needed to go beyond WinXP myself tho my work insisted that I use a PC with Win7 on it a long time ago. I would say now tho that I think windows holds me back whenever I am on it. I find the ease of use on Linux to be better than windows but its not quite as fluffy UI as windows. But on linux when you ask it to do something it does it. So right now I am typing this on a windows machine but I use a load of different OS's - too many to count - at least 10. Of that I have 3 windows machines. A win 2K, Win XP and a Win 7 one. No Win 10 for me. Of those I think XP was the best 7 is fine, Win2K was also fine but is showing its age now with lack of hardware support. But even my Win7 machine lacks support for some things and is a pain to get some stuff working on. On linux there are also some other things I have some issues with too but generally I find it is the most up to date of them all. It is definitely faster than windows but its down side is that the free apps like say Gimp and Krita are just a bit less stable, buggy and not quite as polished as the windows apps. However the linux OS including the kernel is far better than windows. The networking support on linux knocks windows out of the park and thats an important factor for me. Not least to log into this guild server which is linux and do remote admin it would be a nightmare on windows.

The small boards you can buy now which run linux are ridiculously cheap. I just had two more arrive in the post the other day. Quad core and $13 US each. For $20 you can get 1Gb ram, accelerated video graphics, gigabit ethernet, wifi the whole nine yards. Prob not enough memory for doing big images but for about $150 or £120 I could put together something which could - but only under linux.

Cost is not the issue any more. You can buy a working full but limited speed PC for £4 + an SD card (£5). So < $15 US easy. Just fear of the dark is all that is holding you back.

I am seriously considering re-releasing my ViewingDale where it comes preconfigured *with the PC to run it on* so that there is no compatibility issues with it any more. Thats how cheap they are. You use it as a boxed appliance instead of an software application.

You do have a choice.