Seems Microsoft has to squeeze in at least one bad version between good ones.

But never has a new Windows version been made available where people didn't initially hate them at first, XP, 7, and 10 included. It's not until the version after gets released when people really start appreciating what once was.

11 has all the same problems 10 has, but brings many significant improvements both in the backend and frontend. Hardly trash.

>never has a new Windows version been made available where people didn't initially hate them at first

Windows 95 and 98 were both received to applause and fanfare, 95's stellar reception in particular is probably still unmatched to this day.

The only shift in user experience that I can equate it to is maybe the jump from candy bar and flip phones to the iPhone and Android. In addition to the UI, it brought real multitasking to a consumer OS.

What made XP great was how reliable it was compared to previous Windows versions.

95 Good, 98 Bad, 98 SE Good, ME Bad, XP Good, Vista Bad, 7 Good, 8 Bad, 10 Good.

Counting 98 SE as a separate release does seem to me like cherry-picking in order to make the pattern work. Then again, you could also say the cycle started with Windows 98 (putting the whole of that release into the good pile), and you'd still have a remarkably consistent pattern across seven releases. Honestly makes you wonder if there's some deeper cause related to Microsoft's corporate structure or something.

I use 10 at work and 11 at home and after changing the taskbar settings to put the start button back on the left I don't even notice switching.

Same here by the way, I don't use it for anything but gaming and work for the tracking reason.

That's because it isn't, Windows 10 and 11 both identify internally as NT10.0.

For some context: Windows Vista, 7, 8, and 8.1 identified as NT6.0, 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3 respectively; Windows 2000 and XP identified as NT5.0 and 5.1 respectively.

Windows 2000 was no-nonsense, but all good stuff. The good bones that Windows XP got came straight from Win2k.

The only real problem it had was a narrower hardware compatibility profile, but it still wasn’t that bad.

Some people claim this was mostly due to bad 3rd party drivers and not the OS itself. But even if that's true, from the user perspective it's very hard to tell the difference.

If you think 10 is "gold" and 11 is "trash" I assume you're suffering from some sort of stockholm syndrome from using 10 too long and haven't actually tried 11 yet because it's just a reskinned 10 (and visually, it looks a lot better).

I've been on 11 since it was released and I find it to be objectively a worse experience. On Win 10, I could game on one screen and stream a video in a browser on the other. On Win 11, I get stuttering on the streamed video.

It's also failed to update twice now. I invested hours into debugging the issue the first time. This time it's been days and I'm about to just do a fresh Win 10 install over this nightmare.

My current 11 install has never failed to update, but I have experienced various update failures before on 10. This sort of issue is present in both versions, it's just random whether you'll experience it or not, and I wouldn't be surprised if the stuttering issue is just some random driver incompatibility too.

No, it's not random, which I know because I stumbled upon the solution. The problem was that it was using an old 100MB partition as the EFI boot partition. Nowhere in any of the system logs did it mention this. No error message said anything about it. Ridiculous.

and I wouldn't be surprised if the stuttering issue is just some random driver incompatibility too.

Why? My system is the same hardware after the update. In fact, the only thing that's changed (and this happened awhile after the Win 11 'upgrade') was a video card that's 3 - 5x faster than the old one.

Periodic reminder that “Stockholm Syndrome” was a complete fabrication based on no clinical evidence invented on the spot to discredit an ex-hostage who was making legitimate criticism of an unnecessarily violent police intervention by one of the architects of that intervention, because they had no rational defense.

Its invocations in debates are also typically as an attempt at a thought-terminating trope to evoke an emotional response that covers the lack of actual argument, which fits the history of the term well.

And as others have observed, 2000 was an immediate hit with everyone who tried it.

Win2k was a huge improvement in every respect. My 2c.

(1) Win2k Home was much cheaper than Win2k Pro. Possibly an upgrade version was cheaper still.

(2) I had a bootleg version

(3) I started working for real money in 1999 so didn't care that much

(4) An OEM CD came with the computer hardware kit.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/microsoft-outlines-w...

> When it debuts in February, Windows 2000 Professional will sell for an estimated retail price of $319, the same as its predecessor, Windows NT 4 Workstation.

Note that there was no "home" edition of Windows 2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2000

So it's one of 2, 3, or 4.

Another option was student bookstore. Microsoft sold its wares at universities at steep discounts.

Edit: a sister comment jogged my memory. I bet it was either a giveaway by an EECS dept or a heavily discounted disc from the university bookstore. Which is why I do not remember paying a noticeable sum for it.

I still wonder how they would have thought this was better in any kind of way. A windows 2000 home release could not possibly have had as many problems as ME.

When Windows XP came out, Microsoft unfortunately made them report every key given out, and the free ride was over.

Yes, you read that right: DirectX 3.0a.

Windows 2000 by contrast supported DirectX all the way through DirectX 9.0c, same as Windows XP, 98, and ME.

This is why Windows 2000 could run games properly.

They would have to put up with Windows ME, at least in Microsoft's eyes. Which was the first version you could play games on and leave it running for hours between crashes, lol.

I also used Win 2k Pro and it was an amazing leap coming from 98, yes. My laptop came with ME but it sucked so bad I changed it after a week.

It depended on the definition of "hours" but sometimes the "hours" were very short.

Huh? XP added nothing to 2000 except useless bling.

I remember being gifted Shattered Horizon (a DX10 launch title) and thinking "it really doesn't look that great"

Halo 2 for Vista also required DX10 even though the original Xbox was hardware DX 8.1 only

I stuck with 2000 as long as I could before gaming (and maybe.. a certain version of Visual Studio?) eventually forced a switch to XP (with the "classic" theme).

I have had my fair share of crashes though.

If I am being maximally charitable, the benefits that come afterwards are drivers, gaming-related (DirectX) or security-related (which is not a user-facing feature). All of them are nice, but not at the cost that the end user perceives; a slow, painful experience, with an OS that crashes randomly and has weird inconsistencies everywhere.

I have mostly stuck to Ubuntu for desktops (since 8.04) and MacOS for laptops (since Snow Leopard).

(Unrelated, I also notice the busy cursor, which is why I went back to Ubuntu once I was able to get a desktop)

I think Windows peaked with XP and macOS with Snow Leopard, with the caveats that Spotlight-like searching in both was primitive/nonexistent at that time and would have been a great improvement, and XP didn't have virtual desktops.

That 2001-2006 era featured systems that had learned a bunch of lessons from 10-20 years of mainstream GUI computing, but hadn't been consumed by feature bloat and a bunch of Internet connectivity and convergence stuff that I'm not interested in.

XP's design was apparently polarizing but I loved it. I was in a modding phase at that point and loved making my own themes.