Uh ok. This is very personal stuff. If you are happy with Win10/Win11 GUI, fine. I hate it with passion, and no, I dont speak about corporate vs home (Admin rights and other stuff). Its pure GUI related. Win7 was last windows I liked because it still had classic mode. Anything upward is just retarted.
Yeah, scaling is improvement (but I would be cautionus here, it can bring artifacts). I preffer just good native resolution.
For running stuff quickly, I have an app that handles that: