Oh, but they did. There was a series of problems with Vista that pissed people off, then there was the quite-ok Windows 7, and then Microsoft screwed everything up with Windows 8. The irony is, they've managed to fix a lot of Windows 8 UX problems in Windows 10, but then the telemetry stories and in-your-face pushing of the upgrade from 8 to 10 left some people I know stranded at 8 and afraid to try out 10. I guess this'll change in the next hardware upgrade cycle...

I've been windows power user for many years before I switched to Linux. I can say that WinXP was one of the best windows and Win7 was okay and usable. Win8 and Win10 complete shit. Everyone I know had issues with it and had hard times using it. Asking if it was possible to use at least Win7 again. Windows completely screwed up there UI thinking it would be easier for people to use and in process completely killing windows. Not to mantion Win8/10 security/privacy horror storries. The last usable windows was Win7. This is why I see many people switching to Mac OS X or Linux.

> WinXP was one of the best windows

On a somewhat more objective note, there was a lot of criticism back when it came out. (Specifically, about "the bloat". Everything is relative, I guess; one can say that things continued to get worse and worse from Windows 2000 on, although some would swear that it was NT4 that was the best Windows ever - e.g. it ran in 16MB of RAM vs. Windows 2000 that raised the requirement to 32MB; for comparison, Windows 95 only needed 8MB.)

Vista and 8 had their problems, but 10 has been fine for me. I disagree with the statement "The last usable windows was Win7." But then, I've seen the same argument before, in different flavors. People complained about Windows 7, wondering why anyone would switch from XP. They complained about XP, wondering why anyone would switch from 98SE.

Microsoft has been in a bit of a tick-tock cycle with their operating system releases. NT 4 was good, 2000 was good, XP was good eventually, Vista, not so good, 7, good, 8, not so good, 10 irons out most of the issues with 8. Pick any other product, and it's likely the same story. Mac OSX was all downhill from Tiger for quite awhile, at the latest High Sierra has had its share of serious flaws.

I feel like "quite-ok Windows 7" is underselling it. Response was largely positive and it wasn't even that different from Vista. It simply didn't suffer from the same problems, since hardware manufacturers caught up.

Yeah, Vista had two big issues that had both been mostly resolved by the time 7 was released: 1) Driver support was poor, and 2) A bunch of low end computers with "Vista Capable" stickers that really meant "It should boot but it's going to be awful."

IIRC Microsoft was pressured by OEMs into making a lower tier of Vista qualified hardware even though they knew it really required more than that to work acceptably well.

I never personally owned or used a Vista machine, but my office has a couple of them plugged in for a showroom area where they cycle powerpoint slides, and oh my god is it painful if you ever have to touch them. IIRC they've got 512 MB of RAM, and some of that is being shared with the iGPU. It's not pretty.

I used two sets of Vista machine, the 32-bit machines were almost all terribly slow, the 64-bit machines were surprisingly capable. So much so, that I could use a Vista 64-bit machine as an alternative to Windows 7 if it were still supported. The machines sold as Vista-capable weren't all that great with XP, but better, so were even under-powered for the previous generation. Vista leaned a lot more heavily on disk I/O that its predecessors, so turning off Windows Search, and a few other things I forget made it tolerable to use. It must have been about that time that all of Microsoft's developers got SSDs on their desk (I'm only half joking).

I remember installing Windows 95, from floppy disks back in 1996 or so. The system requirements on the box said 4MB of RAM. And it was true, Windows would run with 4MB. In the fine print, the box also said if you wanted to do anything besides play solitaire, like word processing, 8 was recommended.

So it's been going on a long time, the lowball estimate of systems requirements to get you to buy the product, then the real cost after you've already installed it. 4MB is a rounding error these days, back then it was at least a couple hundred dollars.

Vista being painfully slow was not limited to low-end machines. I had a fairly powerful (8GB+ RAM, new i5, etc.) gaming rig when it came out, and everything was slow on it: I'd click something in the interface and have to wait 5+ seconds for it to respond, Windows Explorer would crash randomly, etc. Even booting up seemed to take forever. Upgrading to Windows 7 fixed all such issues, and I still have the machine to this day, which I've kept with Windows 7 (although I upgraded the GPU).

Damn.

512MB wasn't even enough for my WinXP box because the softeware apart from the OS became more demanding with time.

They fixed some UX problems but left others. Two control panels, massive grey buttons that feel odd when used with a mouse, dysfunctional and random start menu, full screen modal notifications (windows server 2016), etc

The two control panels thing is maddening. It's just embarrassing they've let this mess escape beta. It should be one or the other, not an unevenly applied mixture. The lack of cohesiveness makes the whole system look amateurish.

The control panels have been in a constant state of flux since Vista... frankly it wasn't the biggest annoyance until after windows 7 (which at least had semi-clean breaks)... Win8/10 are horrible. I don't have a windows machine currently, running a hackintosh for my home desktop. I may give ReactOS a try in a VM to see how much I can get working.

Does the DOS stuff work? (NTVDM)

I am an heavy keyboard user, and prefer it to the mouse.

I find that Windows 2000 has the best support for keyboard users among GUIs. Better that MacOS, better than all the incarnations of Gnome/KDE, better that the following releases of Windows, that "forgot" about the keyboard and focused on other input systems.

You can see that in many small things, like sane keybindings and reasonable sequence for selection through tabs (for example, going from the path bar on the top to the folder content requires two tabs in Windows 2000 but four in Windows 7, unless one does some find tuninng of the UI).

KDE3 > Windows 2000. It was truly amazing. Ripping CD's by copying folder. FULL network integration on the file manager. KIOslaves. Artsd sucked, ok.

Things that you mentioned are still fully functional btw.

I'm one of them and have as much extensive experience with Windows 7+ as someone who write *nix and embedded software for a living can have. Windows 2000 is the last Windows version I used exclusively.

The "mostly successful efforts" you speak of seem to have been focused on delivering ads, TOS-backed spyware and those weird Metro apps. The result is certainly simpler from a strictly visual standpoint, but more usable is something that I wouldn't be too willing to concede without some data (and I don't mean install data/user base, given how Microsoft's customers don't have much of a choice in this department). Frankly, I don't see how the weird start menu or having both the Control Panel and some weird Settings thing help with usability, but UX is a surprising field, I guess.

That's a compromise. Settings is deep-searchable and unified between platforms. Control Panel is still there for backwards compatability (including with MS's own stuff)

That's bloody terrible, whenever I need something I have no idea where I'll find it.

I usually click the start button on my keyboard and type what I'm looking for... most of the time, it's the first option that comes up. It mostly works for apps too, excluding some annoying MS app placement issues. I've moved on... Windows 10 was the last straw. Not the telemetry, but the stupid integrated ads, especially the ones over the chrome icon in the launch bar.

Windows 8 was absolutely dire. Windows 10 is very good, but not in any way brilliant.