I don't remember last time I had to reinstall Windows unless upgrading in place is considered reinstalling. I keep hearing people reinstalling and I don't understand why. Windows has bugs some very annoying but so does every other OS I used. With Linux it's very likely you'll find an obscure forum post that explains how to work around it (unless it's nvidia related on a laptop) but with Windows you are stuck until Microsoft decides to fix it. Same applies to MacOS though.

> I keep hearing people reinstalling and I don't understand why.

I believe it comes down to popularity. The more popular something is, the more corner cases your OS has to deal with as people write software that apparently does weird unforeseen combinations to the underlying OS. I've had to reinstall linux several times because of bad AMD/nvidia driver installs. On windows, a windows update recently disabled my AMD video driver.

AMD and NVidia drivers have notoriously terrible histories when it comes to the linux kernel. But with Windows/Mac there's 10,000 times more crap like this. Particularly on windows.

Mac has locked a few more things down, so it should be more stable, but I still hear stories of people that do reinstalls on it occasionally.

> I don't remember last time I had to reinstall Windows unless upgrading in place is considered reinstalling. I keep hearing people reinstalling and I don't understand why.

Same. Had a work Windows 10 install that happily chugged along for years, on a very old machine with a spinning disk and no performance deterioration.

> I’ve learned to reinstall the OS from scratch every year or so on Windows and that resolves my issues

that's amazing, I haven't reinstalled my laptop OS since 2016, when I had to replace the SSD. it updated to the latest nixos without fail every time since.