Yes, laptops without a windows license are pretty popular in at least some poorer countries. Most buyers install windows anyway and activate it via massgrave and friends, which lets you save 40 to 100 USD, which is a pretty big deal.
GNU/Linux, ChromeOS (Google GNU/Linux), Android (Google Linux), MacOS, iOS (and iPadOS is a different thing, right?) Are almost certainly collectively more popular than Windows. Even as a primary / exclusive computer. I think a lot of people are able to not pay for Windows 11 in $CURRENT_YEAR, probably most.
Each Windows version has regressed from Windows 7 onwards. To the point that Windows 11 can almost be construed as malware. I'll be using Ubuntu henceforth.
Windows "Teletubby Edition"? :-) No, Win2k was "peak Windows", imho.
Frankly MS later ditched the quite ambitious Windows NT 5.0 project, which was the planed Win2k successor, for a Frankenstein monster made out of the super buggy WinME and Win2k. That became Windows XP.
Coming from Win98, Win98SE, WinMe, WinXP was for sure quite good. But compared to the super stable, fast, and well structured Win2k it was quite a disappointment. It didn't have almost any of the advanced features planed for WinNT 5, it was much more unstable and buggy than Win2k, it was quite chaotic with "old Win95" parts, stuff coming from Win2k, and some things on it own placed randomly.
