What y’all talking about?
98SE, 2000, XP (Service Pack 3) and 7 were Windows at their peak.
Windows 8 and 8.1 were screwed by Microsoft’s insistence at creating a more mobile-friendly OS, when the Metro menu was just bad for the desktop user experience. A lot of disgruntled 8/8.1 users did flock to 10 because having the Start menu back was seen as a compromise to having forced telemetry tracking in your OS.
As for Windows 11, it’s getting super shit. Recall AI is being baked into the OS, which will effectively allow Microsoft to snoop and capture data on your computer activity. They claim to not capture sensitive info like bank details or credit card numbers, but I think that’s been proven wrong.
Also, 11 is hardly an upgrade feature-wise, yet requires a significantly beefier PC, and was released at a time when the world was still going through a significant semiconductor shortage.
The only real hurdle for widespread Linux adoption is anti-cheat support. That, and either getting Linux versions of industry standard software (Microsoft 365, Adobe CS, 3DS Max, etc) or decent support through Wine/Proton.
I honestly liked 8.1 quite a bit - once I installed Classic Shell to not have to deal with the new UI. A first year usability student could have foreseen the massive issues trying to weld a touch screen UI and a traditional desktop metaphor would raise, but Microsoft for some reason were completely pig headed about making it work. It didn’t. It can’t. You can not staple two completely different UI paradigms together and have it work smoothly. Other than that, 8.1 was remarkably good experience for me. It felt really snappy under the hood. Good OS brought down by hubris. Well, good for a Windows release, at least. Use Linux.
That, and either getting Linux versions of industry standard software (Microsoft 365, Adobe CS, 3DS Max, etc) or decent support through Wine/Proton.
You won’t. Industry doesn’t want to waste money to port such enormous legacy codebases to Linux, when most people still run Windows.
Windows has to become a minority OS first.
And anti-cheat - I don’t like it, but it seems there will be working kernel-level anticheats for Linux.
You forgot hardware support, nice that it seems not an issue for some people today, but Linux hardware support is still not there. Drivers for Windows are made by manufacturers, drivers for Linux are often made by Linux developers.
@drq @linuxmemes Even nt5.0 was shit, but it’s interface was really good. Later microsoft lost interface consistency. First is enabled/disabled visual styles, and second it dotnet interfaces, looking completely different This is enshitification :)
Yes, but now there is blood in the poop.
And it is a dark red.
Windows 2000 was the last good windows version.
@teft No, not really. It was stable but lacked versatility. It was nice for business but gave some headaches at home.
Also some people went even further and run Server 2000 on home computers :)
@shuro @teft this was last version that not broke interface consistency.
And not’ it was not stable. It was buggy like any OS at this time. But at least they found how consistent desktop interface should look.
I like how internet explorer 5-6 seamlessly turns to explorer windows and back. How everything looks good using system theme
Or menus and system dialogs, easily extendable by custom modules, registered in registry. Or like internet explorer, using gdi is drawing very fast when launched with RDP even with slow internet connection… Imagine something like this in wayland, which only operates pre-rendered bitmaps, it’s just impossible now. And where developers cannot use one toolkit that usin system theme and extending system settings of kde/gnome for 3rdparty app is just impossible.
And all of this runs good on 32mb ram.
Even now both windows and linux modern desktops are long far way from this.
I used to say that, but XP and 7 with proper 64 bit support would like a word.
I just shut down a win7 box a couple months ago. Ran continuously for 10+ years.
Not really
Windows 7 was pretty, it was customisable, it was stable. And microshaft had yet to start fucking about with ads everywhere and invasive “features”. Peak windows right there.
XP was also pretty good for its time. At that point Linux and OSX had caught up and surpassed it in many ways, but it did what it had to without getting in the way.
95 was an innovator if anything, ahead of pretty much anything else on desktop at the time, even if it DID fart and die whenever someone looked at it funny.
It was always a proprietary creation by an anticompetitive tech megacorp, and therefore bad from THAT angle, but it didn’t start being truly shite from a pure user experience angle until like. 8.
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Windows 95 was still just another dos program on top of a shell.
That’s just straight up misinformation. Even 3.1 wasn’t really like that anymore (though, it was closer). Windows 9x uses DOS as a bootloader, and retains the original DOS components for backwards compatibility, but loads into a fully 32-bit kernel with preemptive multitasking and many features DOS couldn’t dream of touching. It is built atop the original 16-bit DOS, and inherits a lot of jank from that, which is why eventually they ditched it to use the developed-from-the-ground-up NT kernel everywhere instead (and broke compatibility with a lot of old hardware and software because of it, much to the chagrin of the users–)
Huh? Coming from an Amiga it really didn’t seem innovative. Or OS2 or BeOS (which ran circles around Win 95) or Macs.
OS/2 and Windows are siblings, with most of OS/2 being written by the same people within Microsoft. Windows NT is what happened when Microsoft decided to backstab IBM (again) to increase their profit margin (as I myself have said, Microsoft has always been bad from the ‘evil megacorp’ angle).
BeOS was, at the time, an operating system only for Be’s own PowerPC based workstations (and workstation != desktop, especially in those days) – Though there were talks to bring at least parts of it to desktop as the basis for MacOS Copland, that didn’t go through (instead Apple vored NeXT and used its nutrients to make OSX). – It didn’t get a public, user-facing, desktop release that a mere mortal could buy until 1997 (on PPC Mac. 98 for the x86 PC version), which in mid-90s tech terms is like a geological epoch later. Are we also going to compare Doom 2 to Half Life and shit on Doom 2 for being behind HL?
MacOS at the time was still using Cooperative Multitasking (which is what Win 3.0 used, and is unreliable af because any crashed program takes out the entire OS with it) and wouldn’t get true Preemptive Multitasking until OSX in '99.
The amiga did get Preemptive Multitasking to the desktop first (in '86, even. Commodore seriously didn’t know what they had, or they would have ruled the roost), but preemptive multitasking wasn’t the only feather in 9x’s hat.
DirectX was so good at doing what it did (acting as a layer of abstraction between gamedevs and hardware, allowing them to just ask the library to draw and play stuff, and it would figure itself out with the hardware) that alternatives like SDL took another 3 years to exist and much longer to catch up – And it was necessary, because the PC space, unlike the likes of the Mac or Amiga, was an industry standard rather than being controlled by one company, and users could have any combination of wacky third party video and soundcards, and DirectX just dealt with it.
And Plug-and-Play, while buggy as fuck to the point that it really only worked when it wanted, was something that hadn’t been done before. Adding new hardware and the OS just figures that shit out, no reboot required? Unheard of.
Edit: BeOS in 97, not 98. Still retains the whole ‘this was a geological epoch by 90s tech standards’ comment though.
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Well damn. A person who disagrees with me and is nice and eloquent about it, even teaching me some new information.
Mad respect, stranger.
@VinesNFluff @westyvw but win9x still using dos drivers, so it is dos application. 32 bit dos application running on untouched dos system. Yes, it implements full 32 bit OS
It isn’t. It has its own Driver model. DOS drivers are installable and can be called up for backwards compatibility, but windows drivers are different and incompatible.
95 was an innovator if anything, ahead of pretty much anything else on desktop at the time, even if it DID fart and die whenever someone looked at it funny.
com/com 😂
You’ve perfectly summarized my own feelings toward the best versions of Windows. Thank you. I feel more centered seeing it summarized so well in writing.
I’ll add that I found Vista cool and interesting on a technical level, even while the practical outcome was pretty awful.
Win 7 was ok but remember, it still came with three control panels, a fucking registry and 8bit palette drwatson icon in system32 along with gigabytes of absolutely useless shit.
It was good for a windows, but it was still windows.
A centralized place to store settings (e.g. the registery) isn’t a bad idea in and of itself.
That.
I’ll add that a lot of the issues people have with the registry have less to do with the registry itself (it’s just – A database of settings. Nothing shocking about that) and a lot to do with Windows’ philosophy and the problems that creates.
Like yes, the registry of a computer that has been running windows for a few years is a bloated mess which creates a bunch of problems of its own – But that’s not in and of itself because the registry is a centralised binary database.
Rather it is because – Well. Microsoft. Tech corporations in general. Want computers to behave like magic boxes. Not machines you have to learn to operate. This means that whenever you install something or modify something on windows, you are left in the dark as to a lot of the stuff going on under the hood. Windows error messages are very obscure and nonspecific. When you install something, do you know what it has added to your registry? What dlls it has dropped around your machine? And with so many third party programmes and utilities dropping into the system, that shit builds up, and not even an experienced user will fully know what has built up unless they’ve been making a deliberate effort to keep track.
Compare that to Linux, which is made by nerds FOR nerds… And so everything is thoroughly documented. With the general unspoken understanding that a. You will sooner or later go under the hood and mess about in there; and b. If something fucks up, whether it is directly your fault or not, you’re the one who will have to fix it, so here’s ALL the receipts on how shit works so you CAN do that.
I’d want a registry that was compartmentalized meaning each app gets an area to store its own configuration and the apps can only modify their own settings (without root permissions).
Apps should never be expected to modify system settings directly but only through system calls.
Some Linux packages achieve this kind of behavior by adding an additional user which owns their configuration directories. That always felt hacky to me.
Anyone who saw Mac at the time would know what pretty was for interfaces. Windows has never been pretty.
Nothing wrong with the Registry
It’s a different way of handling things compared to how Linux (and most unixes) does it with 18391823 text files
But it’s a perfectly functional and sensible solution for storing system configurations.
The registery is much easier to break, much harder to debug and much harder to fix, UNIX config is more human-friendly, I’ll never mess with the registery again
In theory having a database of configuration settings isn’t a horrible idea.
But the execution was terrible.
Also add that registry exponantionally growing over time bad documented and not easy way to clean it up and thus as time going windows start booting up longer and longer
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I always get pooped on when I say this, but I didn’t like 7. it brought the confusing libraries, ugly glass theme, and all computers I used it on, explorer (file manager, taskbar) crashed a lot and had to do win+r -> explorer.exe to get it going again.
I liked vista, but I only used it on my very first pc and for not much else but web browsing. I also liked 8.1, just needed to tweak it a bit, like replace that horrible start menu. I had instructions for myself for all kinds of registry stuff that needed to be done to a fresh install.
hated 10 from the beginning because it immediately seemed like it fights back too much, forcing microshit down your throat, and all that spying crap.
and finally when I saw 11…well, I’ve used mint for about two years now.
I totally forgot about explorer just s****ing the bed randomly in 7 lmao.
XP was bloated to hell and back, and yeah 10 was okay overall but the “kiddie gloves” hostility towards users sucked, especially hiding away control panel and trying to get rid of it altogether in 11 is what pushed me to Linux.
It still does shit the bed regularly for me (at least, at work), on win 11; address bar in file explorer just randomly stops accepting input, new tabs get stuck showing whatever was on the previous tab, etc
Oh god I’m so sorry. I haven’t willingly touched my Win11 boot in probably close to a year so I didn’t realize things were that bad.
explorer (file manager, taskbar) crashed a lot and had to do win+r -> explorer.exe to get it going again.
This still happens on up-to-date Win10 occasionally. I’ve seen it on multiple machines, hardware tests good. A variant I’ve seen is that the Start button responds to click (changes color) but does not open the menu.
People who don’t like Glass Themes can’t be my friends. Frutiger Aero looks like happiness and a better time when technology was exciting instead of alarming.
You are otherwise entitled to your opinion (fwiw I never used those libraries and still don’t know what they were FOR) and I entirely believe your experience of having instability. Windows just be like that sometimes. No pooping here.
I have an old rig for old games and I still have Win7 SP1 installed on that. It never gets updates as it’s not connected to the internet. I know everything works there and thus it is now a time capsule. Never change a running system lol
95 can suck eggs… The GUI was largely items they had co-developed with IBM for the next release of OS/2 that they instead split last minute due to contractual arguments since Microsoft wanted a larger cut of profits. There’s more depth of course but tldr version.
It’s a large part of why 95 was so crashy until osr2.5… it was largely 32 bit GUI stuck onto rushed 16 bit DOS with some quick protected mode hooks.
That said, XP was the first version I could stand.
7 was actually pretty good.
I liked XP. Never had any issues with it and things mostly made sense
Windows 7 was the last good a Windows
Slow as all get out though. I ran it in a VM just for fun and lacks the performance improvements of newer Windows.
People hated on 7 and said the same thing about XP.
Haven’t cared for any version of Windows, going back before 3.0 .
Kind of, to varying degrees. Posting the ones I’ve actually used enough to have an opinion:
- Win 3 through 3.11 and below: Limited
- Win 9x: unstable
- Win ME: don’t get me started
- Win 2k: Decent, actually. At least after a couple of service packs
- Win XP: Win 2k with teletubbies theme
- Win Vista: “users are too stupid to be allowed to do this just like that”
- Win 7: Decent, actually
- Win 8: worst UI ever
- Win 8.1: sometimes MS actually listens to feedback
I think it’s unfair to complain about its performance
I disagree. If your software runs like a damn snail on inexpensive current-gen hardware, then it’s not worth using.
Windows 8.1 was amazingly good, simple and fast, if you ignored whole Metro thing. You could also install 3rd party start menu alternative, if you needed it.
Win 10: ‘the final version of Windows’ actually kinda decent
Win 11: “when we said f’inal version of Windows’ we meant it’s the final version that your old ass computer would run. Go buy a new one.”
Win10 was extreme crap, you just feel it was good because Win11 is worse.
As for later Windows versions 7 and 8.1 were pretty stable and lightweight. It was only in the later versions of Windows 10 when it became filled with ads and some stupid bloatware.
Earlier Windows 2000 and XP were of course also amazingly well made and even lighter, but weren’t exactly as stable.
I think its just become inconveniently bad now lol
Doesn’t the prefix “en” in enshittification mean “more of”/“increasing”?
Because “Windows is even more shit” makes perfect sense to me.
3.11 was pretty good. After that it’s been a mixed bag. A bag of shit, but mixed.
“Down” was awesome.
The moment they removed hotdog theme was the moment it started to fail
It was better than Linux up until windows 7, and it was objectively more compatible with games until Steam Deck.
No, it was a bit crappy before, then got pretty good, but then went to not shit.
Even the solitaire game in Windows now needs an Xbox account, shows an ad before you can play, nags you for s subscription to make ads go away and keeps sending notifications for challenges.
No. Windows 7 was pretty good. Certainly a better desktop experience than Linux at the time (go on, roast me, I’ve got my flame proof undies on). Windows 10 started out pretty decent, until they ramped up the enshittification. I used Windows for over 30 years and never saw any reason to switch, although I’ve worked with Unix before Windows was even a thing. Only in the last couple of years did it really become unbearable. And I wouldn’t even consider ever using Win11 on any personal machine.
Completely agree! Windows 7 was the best Windows.
@Diplomjodler3 @drq win7 is shit, really shit. It renamed “My computer” to “Computer”…
