Blue screen is almost always a hardware issue, mostl likely ram or gpu related. Another possibility is a bad driver, but windows 10 can gracefully recover from them most of the times.

Except the very article this thread is attached to. Windows update buggered up chkdsk, which breaks the filesystem. All in software.

I haven’t seen it often, but it’s always been extremely impressive to me when my GPU driver crashes and Windows just restarts it without even losing my place in a game.

You might want to run memcheck on the machine. Windows is terrible in many ways, but having regular blue screens is not at all normal.

For me, OS stability, in decreasing order, has always been:

1. Linux

2. MacOS

10. Windows

Hard to say but for me I would say: 1. Windows 2. MacOS 3. Linux

I had more crashes on Linux than any other, all related to the Gpu driver (intel iGpu), and it really depends on the kernel version but newer not necessarily means better. In a VM with i3, it never crashed.

But regarding hardware support except for the Gpu, I had better experience with Linux than Windows on the same machine. On Windows my mouse is stuttering when connected on my TB3 hub, Wifi connectivity is much more unstable and strangely my battery consumption is higher (5-6 h on Windows, 6-7h on Linux)... But the issue on Linux is the lack of proprietary software to manage these device (talking about my Canon printer and scanner).

As for Mac (MBPro 2015 early) I had quite some issues with Bose QC35 II bluetooth connection. I have to reboot sometimes. And one issue with Mac I noticed is compared to Windows, is less support for corporate software. For instance, for my AWS remote certification exam, I could not connect with my Mac.

I never had crashes of Linux on the last 5 years, except 2 or 3 because I was using all the whole RAM and the system freezed. However, I had blue screens with Windows 10 on the same hardware, plus that Windows 10 it's nearly useless on a magnetic HDD.

Linux (and possibly BSDs, did not test) has broken OOM killer, which works the right way only if your swap is disabled. To prevent these situations from happening you need to install EarlyOOM.

Or an M.2 SSD. I can go deep into swap and only notice a slight chugging.

That’s weird, Linux is usually incredibly stable and I sometimes have the system running for months, whereas Windows is hard to get a long “uptime” on.

All of our experiences are compatible if you look at it through the lens of modern kernels being ridiculously stable, with third party drivers causing all of the issues.

Linux on a server is basically bullet proof. There's just no surface area for issues, it's talking to storage and a network card. Desktop Linux with the wrong display drivers can crash daily.

Windows can be rock solid. I do game dev and am forced to have it as my daily driver. I have a 3900X, 2070 Super, do machine learning, VR development, game playing, peg it at 100% CPU overnight and I haven't had a blue screen since I bought it.

Buy the wrong laptop with shitty drivers, though, and BSOD is a way of life. Although Microsoft cracked down hard on this over the last decade, the WHQL initiative. They were well aware Windows stability was suffering at the hands of third parties, and put processes in place to validate their work.

And OS X, since it barely has to work with third party drivers, is more or less rock solid. You buy a MacBook Pro, plug an Apple mouse in and use it like that for years, maybe you never see a fault.

When it does interact with third party devices in my experience it's not better than Windows. Bluetooth handling in particular is quite poor.

This wasn't intended to be some kind of argument. Defending MS on the internet is of zero interest to me. I was intending to say, if you're forced to use Windows professionally and it's not stable, you absolutely do not have to put up with that. I don't.

Brother printers are recommended here often, for their good linux support.

And Linux is the only system I've ever run that had malware show up on it.

What's the last version of Windows you used and the latest version of MacOS?

For me, a system that ran Win7 fine for years, has now bluescreended a far too high amount, and wiped notepad++ sessions etc more than once ... So it can't be the hardware.

Hardware can go bad and connections can loosen over time. I've had drives disappear only from the cable coming loose. Unplugging and plugging back in solved the issues. My current desktop is only report 48GB RAM when there's 64 installed. Undoubtedly at least one of the 8 DIMMs has become unseated or gone bad, but I've been too lazy to troubleshoot because I don't use that much currently.

I have a laptop that was stable for 18 months, then started crashing with increasing frequency. Booted in to memcheck and the memory was faulty. Replaced it and the crashes went away.

Not saying it's definitely the cause, but strongly suggest you check if you haven't yet. It doesn't take long.

My system blew a RAM chip after 6 years. Changed the RAM and it's all good again.

We sometimes fry CPUs, memory controllers or RAM at office. Even a well cooled component has a lifetime and eventually gives up.