Windows has been running an "every other one is good" process for a while. I think it may actually be causal; Microsoft has a "good windows", which lasts for 3-5 years, it gets overconfident internally as everyone just becomes accustomed to dominance and starts thinking it has a platform it can do something other than "be a good operating system" from, so it designs a piece of crap and gets humbled for a couple of years. So they take the time to make a good OS. Then repeat.

Windows 10 was a good windows. Not perfect, but it's been pretty good. I thought maybe we escaped from this cycle when they announced Windows 10 would be the last windows, but I've expected 11 to very likely be a pile of crap since I first heard it announced.

Windows 12 will be the one to look out for.

(They do have a platform they can do something other than "be a good operating system" from... it's just it rests on the foundation of having a good operating system. They seem to neglect their foundation every other major release.)

Is it actually a case of every other version being good, or is it a case of the market settling upon every other version? Nearly every version of Windows had its critics, yet the "bad" versions typically had such a short life those issues couldn't be address or users couldn't be accustomed to the changes, so the bad is what people tended to remember.

It’s only Me/Vista/8 that people didn’t like.

Me was just a buggy piece of trash, maybe it would have gotten fixed, but XP was around the corner. Speaking purely from personal experience—had a desktop running Me, it’s the only time I ever saw Explorer crash.

Vista’s actually a decent Windows. The changes to security that broke a bunch of apps and made pop-ups everywhere stuck around, they just got polished a bit in later Windows, it would have been fine if Vista had a longer life.

Windows 8 had the Metro UI and introduced a ton of misguided changes around the assumption that people will be using touch—changes which were often half-implemented at best, so even if you had a touchscreen (I developed for these), you had to constantly switch between the Metro and desktop interfaces. A lot of those changes got unwound in 8.1 and 10.

IMO the bad ones are Me and 8. Anything that fixed 8’s problems would have gotten a new version number.

In my memory also 98 was horribly unstable until 98 SE.

Early XP was also a horrible experience. If you installed an early version Windows XP and connected to the internet to update, you might get malware from remote vulnerabilities before the updates finished downloading.

likewise w/ 95 osr2. To me 8.1 is the better version - no telemetry junk compared to 10.

Probably a bit of both. The market settles on a version that's "good enough" and it gets patched until it's "good". But Windows 8 was around for quite a while, and never got to be particularly good.

10 became good over time. 8 was crap, and stayed crap with 8.1. 7 became good over time. Vista was crap. XP became good over time.

I disagree. I think that makes sense as a hindsight view, but at the time, the good version of Windows generally started good, and the bad versions were generally bad out of the gate too.

By "good" I don't mean perfect. But Windows 95 was good, 98 was good, XP was amazing compared to what there was at the time, 7 was good, and 10 was good. Vista was immediately a bomb from the moment I first saw its desktop that looked like a not even particularly good Linux desktop theme [1]. ME was a buggy mess from start to finish. 8 wasn't as much of a disaster but the whole attempt to merge tablet UI and desktop UI was just fundamentally flawed.

Windows being Windows I'm sure tons of people can pop up with stories about how their first install of XP ate their entire hard drive and also killed their dog, but generally I think it's pretty obvious pretty quickly which way a version of Windows is going to go.

One of the major markers of a bad version of Windows is that it's made for Microsoft's needs and not the users. If another comment in this discussion is accurate and Windows 11 is primarily so they can dump a lot of hardware, dump old booting code for non-UEFI boots, etc., then that suggests to me they don't have a strong through-line on what the value for the user is, which is going to lead to sadness. Even though those goals are good and ultimately even necessary in the long haul, that's not going to be a set of requirements that leads to a good Windows.

[1]: This one floors me to this day. Like, I don't really have a lot of visual taste and I've run some pretty awful Linux desktop themes back in my younger years for a period of time. My current desktop is a tiling WM and so utilitarian it burns to look at for most people. And that Vista desktop... yeowzers! It was like they pulled a random theme off of a desktop theming site and they got babbies first uploaded theme.

I found Vista to be a huge improvement over the Windows XP Playskool look. I couldn't stand seeing those awful colors and huge bubbly look for all those years... Thankfully you could change the theme to classic, but nobody else did. So it was still everywhere.

Also custom Visual Styles were popular only in XP era. Maybe people satisfied with Win7 default.

The Silver theme was a good balance between moderness and the industrial design.

Let's not forget that for a while it was almost impossible to install Windows XP while connected to the internet. You'd get infected with Code Red. The security was an existential threat to Windows back then.

Windows 2000 came before XP and was as good imo.

In my recollection, 98SE was good. 98 was very unstable, I think because of (usb?) driver issues?

Windows 10 started off pretty funky. I was using it before RTM. The updates afterwards made it the solid OS that it is now.

7 was much better than XP, but 10 is much worse than 7, so I'm not sure if I'm ready for a 12 that is much worse than 10.

I'm not updating until they bring back taskbar ungrouping. Not interested in adding more clicks/reducing button size for something as important as switching between windows...

Oh no, they finally did it. I feel like Windows has some kind of fascination with taskbar grouping, every new version you have to specifically shut it off. They've finally gone and removed the choice. There is nothing in windows that annoys me more than taskbar grouping, I don't even have a rational basis for it, it just immediately annoys me when I see it.

It's not irrational IMO, it's a hassle in several ways compared to the "classic" behavior.

I honestly can't fathom for the life of me why taskbar grouping is even the default, or what problem it was supposed to solve. It is a terrible UI pattern.

I suspect every person that is aware of the option to revert has reverted, but a lot of people are used to deal with defaults and just don't want to waste energy fighting their OS and research stuff like that...

Exactly. The central menu is a good idea for ultrawide monitors, but forcing grouping seems to go a step backwards, especially if you cannot move the taskbar and you're on said ultrawide monitor.

I think the UI decisions make perfect sense if you consider using your PC like it's a giant phone.

Why would I EVER even want that? Windows on phones is dead and tablets/hybrids are perfectly able to display the regular UI in a usable way.

Nobody sane would, but this taskbar rewrite was started for Windows 10x and that was the modus operandi for it. Then during yet another fundamental internal change in direction it got foisted on the desktop OS, and then they got told to ship it six months before it was finished, so we've ended up with this mess.

Except for not being able to move the taskbar location I find the UI to generally be an improvement. As for explorer I find the UI to be a great improvement from Windows 10.

Completely disagree on both counts. The desktop peek feature is gone which I used regularly to look at stats on my desktop widgets. Right clicking the taskbar has removed all the previous options and now only shows settings. I used that to open task manager with 2 clicks and it had a much larger surface area than just the start button. The non-optional grouping is just completely terrible. Not having an option to keep the taskbar on the edges is awful. The start menu has removed all grouping options and is now far less useful than it was. The new quick access bar doesn't show you the volume unless you hover over it

Explorer has completely made the right click useless that had a lot of utilities I used and now it takes 2 clicks to access them. The icons are fine but they removed all customisation like adding images to the icons which I used for improved readability

All this and it's not even consistent. The windows defender screen is still the old one. The eject disk menu is as old as windows 7. The improvements are inconsistent and as a result, extremely ugly to me. Also you can't even see seconds on the time. Basic crap like this is missing. Why...

Desktop peek is now a three finger swipe down and up on your trackpad.

I don't use Windows on a laptop

I know it's a little petty, however not being able to move the taskbar has zeroed out any interest I had in using Windows 11. I'm a huge fan of moving the taskbar/dock to the left vertical side of the screen, especially so on a 16:9 screen.

It isn't petty, it is indicative of an incompetent development team. We have been able to move the taskbar since Windows 95, but apparently whoever Microsoft hires to work on Windows UI these days can't figure it out. Lord knows what else those yahoos have fucked up.

Probably some "yagni" Scrum master/PO aggressivly cutting corners in the planning phase to save story points, but on the end adding work for removing the feuture from the old code.

I would bet more on a standard a 49" 5120x1440 monitor and they didn't even realize the need of that basic productive feature.

Yeah I do the same. Can't believe it's not possible in 11.

Someone will probably make a quick fix that returns tat functionality heh

I've recently embraced my petty little self dinking around with Manjaro Sway.

Changing a line in a config file to put the waybar anywhere I please, and storing that config file in a dotfiles repo so that the next time I need to set up a machine. Bliss.

If you are ok with manual changing a non-GUI config to change your GUI then technically the taskbar in Windows 11 is relocatable. It requires a Windows registry change.

If you do a lot via right click they nuked it, but you can add it back in. The fact that I can't right click the taskbar to open Task Manager without getting that horrible full screen "LOG OUT/SHUTDOWN/OPEN TASK MANAGER" thing is my biggest frustration. I'm opening the taskbar because I'm getting poor performance, don't make me take multiple steps to do it.

Not to mention I had no idea what the right click icons meant when I first starting using it, is that copy? Is that paste?

Does Ctrl+Shift+Esc still open task manager directly?

Yes.

You can right click on the start menu and get (most of?) the old menu

Same. Don’t get the hate for the new UI. It’s quite nice now that I’ve gotten used to it and given I often use 10 and 11 side by side I now quite prefer 11.