Pro install on Windows or Server?

Question

Does anyone have opinions or experience, even anecdotal, related to the performance and stability of contemporary 2025 ArcGIS Pro versions on Server 2025 vs Windows 11 24H2?

This will be for bare metal local workstation use only; my split personalities do not yet deserve multiple remote desktop sessions.....

With a Server based desktop having less 'fluff' and although using similar architecture, Server versions are more performant with regards to some networking and disk based workloads.

I may have alluded to it in other posts but my current opinion of Pro is pretty low, specifically related to user interface performance and stability (anti-crash, not anti-change). 
My day to day typical datasets are small, hence more interaction with UI bits & pieces, compared to people that work on large datasets that have to wait minutes for things to load/process/save/refresh.

There is some new hardware ogling me and picking the OS is the next step prior to moving it into my office.

RTPL_AU · Answer

After a few months on Server 2025 I can hand on heart say, in my opinion, Pro 3.5.x is one of the most frustrating Esri releases ever.

There are quite a few advantages to run a server os as a daily driver.  Some os-level interactions seem better (file browsing in non Esri dialogs, network access & browsing, a lot less Microsoft annoyances, and I have not had any crashes in any other app or during an interaction with the OS.

For running Pro as a concept in isolation? I don't think there is much benefit and subjectively I feel no difference compared to my Win 11 machine. 
The non-Pro gains make it worthwhile but is it enough to offset the per-core license cost? I think so.

I have not had the chance to install an older version of Pro to test - some of the 3.5 specific issues (copy bug and slow-down-over-time mostly) has made it hard to gauge real gains in productivity.  We'll see what 3.6 brings.

If you build/source/pay for your own high end computers, I would say give Server a go. 
For large deployments the licensing cost and minimal gains are probably not worth it; and if you have an IT team that can package Win11 properly you won't have the issues buyers of Windows' retail versions have.

If you have weird hardware that need complex drivers, you are unlikely to find them for Server. In some cases Win11 drivers work but that is a rabbit hole for another forum.

I'll give an update once 3.6 has rolled out but suspect this machine will go back to being a Linux-based workshorse for AI & container-based testing.

RTPL_AU · Answer

I'm getting more frequent random hard crashes on this machine than I did on the Win11 PC.

I've been editing in an enviro compliance project all day and have had a few hard crashes where Pro will just disappear and you get the small notification box saying the application has crashed.

Most recent I was editing the fields in a SHP file to remove 3 unneeded fields. Clicked Save & Boom. Gone.
Data was OK after re-opening.

The other crashes earlier today were all random things - one was changing a colour in symbology and the other while looking for a GP tool.

I've been updating old maps in ArcMap on another machine and it is stable and responsive. Yes - it doesn't have as many pretty trinkets but these are compliance and disturbance maps, not trying to win a Nat Geo prize, so I want to get the job done and not wait for a pretty .... menu to appear.
I'll say it again - some areas of ArcMap also take a second to open, but it feels the same every time you click the button - that means you can get into a rhythm and get work done. Pro just wants to mess around, play with the dog, update Insta, Tik some Toks or who knows what else, instead of just getting doing what the user wants!

RTPL_AU · Answer

I think the improvement was mainly due to being on Server and the newer generation hardware (other apps etc fly!) .

Pro, after working in a project for a few hours, starts grinding and you start seeing the spinny-wheel-thingy a lot more.  Add to this the Copy bug and you have a recipe for wanting to take up rock farming.

It is still better than on the other machine (throw electricity at a problem is so 2025 eh?), but for it to devolve so quickly with no updates / other changes to the pc, just means the app itself is written badly, in my opinion. 
After a decade, I suspect there is serious technical debt at play, and we are unlikely to see real improvement until they do a new build of ArcGIS Next on a new dev platform (please prove me wrong).

I can follow the Esri recommendation and create a new user profile, fully uninstall & re-install Pro using the Esri AU blog, but doing that every week seems a bit counter-productive.

While typing this I noticed Pro is sitting in the background doing something - you can see it grey out parts of the UI every few seconds. I suspect the cursor will be a spinny wheel periodically if I move it over the app. 
The Diag Monitor shows there is activity and the memory usage is steadily climbing, but I have no geo-processes running, no web services in the map, Indexing should be off, so what is it doing while it is supposed to be doing nothing?