Funnily enough, I see the same thing playing out with computers, operating systems, the internet, and video games. People identify the peak as some time when they were younger and it was all new and exciting. Everything was downhill since then.
Talk to younger people and they’ll already tell you that Windows 10 was actually the GOAT and they won’t comprehend any fascination with Windows XP. That was the junky old OS they had to deal with on old computers once.
People hated Vista, and loved 7. Yet 7 was really just vista with a bit of polish. What changed is when 7 came out the average computer capabilities had gone up significantly.
People hated 8, but loved 10. The only real difference between the two is MS dropping the weird tablet mode that nobody wanted/asked for.
People currently hate 11, I suspect 12 will be loved mostly because MS will back off a bit on some of the new innovative UI changes and advertising everywhere.
Personally I think 98, 2000, XP, 7, and to a lesser 10, were all stellar releases from Microsoft. None of those would be the GOAT, but the closest in my mind was 7, which dropped when I was doing tech journalism and I had the time and space to poke at it in an extended fashion
Nope. They were raised.
Vista's minimum requirements were [1]
A modern processor (at least 800MHz)
512 MB of system RAM memory
A graphics processor that is DirectX 9 capable
a 1 GHz or faster processor
1 GB (32-bit OS) or 2 GB (64-bit OS) of RAM,
16 GB (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit) available disk space
a DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver.
[2] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/window...
Plus Vista's UAC was far too intrusive.
I agree, but I think that technology journalists were too harsh on this aspect of Vista. It was Microsoft's only really serious attempt at shoring up single-user security on Windows, and I think that its poor reception contributed to Microsoft neglecting to make any improvements thereafter. xkcd.com/1200 is still embarrassing relevant over a decade later.
But in the vista days security was not yet so much on the radar for most people. In fact even for companies. I remember working for a company where all the laptops had the same local admin password which was the company name + "123". I'm not exaggerating. There was also no full disk encryption used. These were also the days most websites would use plain http.
With that in mind I just don't think the importance was clear yet to most users. They just saw the negatives, not the benefits. Post Stuxnet and Wannacry/NotPetya things are really different.
Ps: it wasn't like that for all of course. I also worked for another company in the late 90s that had all their laptops equipped with windows NT 4.0 with full disk encryption (aftermarket of course as it wasn't yet built in), managed admin account and the whole shebang.
Time has probably colored my memory some. But pound for pound 7 ran better than Vista on equivalent hardware.
[0]: https://www.blackviper.com/service-configurations/black-vipers-windows-8-1-service-configurations/
[1] http://www.blackviper.com/service-configurations/black-vipers-windows-10-service-configurations/
Typical nonsense people believe because it feels true.
Vista was perfectly fine. The problem was trying to run a 2006 OS on a 2001 machine during a time of both great stagnation in OEMs and great progress overall.
I used Windows Vista beta as my primary OS on my new computer that summer and that thing was amazing.
Microsoft shoved glass panels, widgets and such down the user's throat in Vista. It was a new look and they wanted to make you realise it. Without spinning a fresh 7 machine now, I'm certain it was very toned down.
But, I could be very wrong about this :D Last time I used Windows was XP (I mean, granted last week) because nostalgia is a real thing :D
Edit: I can't reply (not sure why, thread too deep?) but @cogman10, you're right! My memory is bad :(
I think they were roughly the same
Vista: https://img.sysnettechsolutions.com/What-is-Windows-Vista-Ne...
Windows 7: https://blog.thinprint.com/uploads/tp/sites/6/2019/08/319410...
Your memories are not serving you well. Windows 7 was very glass and very aero when it was first released.
You can disable the transparency and fake glossiness, but then it's just a pale blue glossy glass colour instead of transparent.
1) Install any Windows version from the past decade in any machine
2) Go to 'performance' and remove all visuals
3) download and install ClassicShell to have a decent Start button
4) download and use (most are portable) any Privacy settings tool
5) find, download and install WindowsFirewallControl v4.9.x.x and use it on MediumFiltering with "Display Notifications" (you get the 'ZoneAlarm experience')
6) Uninstall all the crapware and disable many services (I use SysInternals Autoruns64)(Winternals for the older ones)
7) Happy Days!!Windows is only free if you don't value your time, huh?
If Fedora setup puts food on your table, go for it!! I 'bet' on Microsoft for my career and it has taken me around the world multiple times, so yeah :)
Tbh I don't change machines 'that' often. My laptop is from 2015. My desktop is 3? 4? years old, and I won't be changing either in the next 5-6 years, they do 'ok' for home use.
But every now and then (couple of years) I do buy some second-hand cheap Surface, or HP Elite, or similar Win tablets, I set them up, and keep them on the side (OS, and Firefox only) just in case someone will need an urgent laptop, or I travel somewhere and I want a 'burner' machine with zero data/sw in it.
Please listen to yourself. It's just a style, they didn't kill your dog. The UI was fine, beautiful even, especially coming from Lego XP — which if you think about it was really tacky, literally an RGB palette.
I mean, that's a significant difference. It was well justified to hate Windows 8 when they screwed up the main UI for the entire OS as badly as they did.
Oh I'm sure it will be radically different.
I expect they will rename windows to "Copilot" or Windows Copilot" just like they have done with most of their other products like Microsoft 365. I'm not even joking.
They just seem so hell-bent on destroying their existing branding, even more than they normally are. Looks like they have a huge fear of missing that AI boat and becoming irrelevant.
At the same time they are building a catalogue that's so difficult to understand because everything is called Copilot now. I've even seen their own sales people get confused about what's what.
Personally I don't care what they name their services because I've already determined I want nothing more to do with them.
The same with office, there was no point in renaming it to Copilot especially because the standard license doesn't even come with the Copilot features in office.
I think the pattern holds for Windows 7 and Vista. I don't know anyone who remembers Windows 10 fondly, and on a personal level I hated both 8 and 10.
I also don't share your optimism regarding Windows 12. You or I might consider switching to Linux, but 95% of the population has never heard of Linux and even fewer will ever install it. Then there is MacOS, which is gated behind hardware that is prohibitively expensive, as well as having a limited selection of software available; also a non-starter. Microsoft isn't going to back off of user-hostile practices unless they lose a series of anti-trust suits. They were already forced to allow users to uninstall Edge in the EU and they region-locked the functionality so that users outside of the EU were still stuck with Edge. They are in the mass surveillance game for the long haul.
If you threw enough horse power at, vista could be fast, but it would always end up using more resources than windows 7.
Personally I thought the first twenty-five years of SNL were great, and it is good recently.
What was wrong with Windows 7? Windows Vista was poorly designed but it wasn't intentionally user-hostile. I don't remember the bloatware and design gimmicks starting until Windows 8.
I'm reminded of how much people hated it when it came out. Post Vista it was widely liked. A lot of people are also nostalgic of 7 now. I wonder if we'll have a batch of people nostalgic for 10 or 11 in a decade in the same vein. I doubt it, but who knows. The old rule was "every other release is loved/hated", which held until at least 10 (8 was hated, 10 was somewhat accepted). I also remember that 10 was supposed to be "the last version of Windows".
For those in the know, that was great. Windows XP + classic theme + drivers (even if you had to find the W2k drivers) was incredibly stable and performant.
But it took a few years for games to catch up and get the updates, and so for the "tech oriented" crowd (which were often gamers), it took a bit to catch on.
But its longevity is a tribute to how "good it was" and how hard it was to improve from it. Vista introduced more stability at the expense of requiring new drivers, so they re-released Vista a few years later as 7 (there's really no major differences between Vista and 7 except a few years of upgrades to drivers and hardware).
The five years between XP and Vista certainly didn't help matters, either. If you wait that long, you better be willing to support it for decades. Windows XP's last update was 18 years after it was shipped.
XP also had the benefit of riding Moore's law for so long that the "high hardware requirements" became lower than the cheapest hardware you could buy halfway through its useful lifetime, which helps with its perception.
That all went away as SSDs came on the market, but it was a noticeable "downgrade" from teh snappy.
The Ghost of Bushes Past continue to haunt us, I suppose.
I think Gnome 3 is the most successful, because their utilities and first party apps have the right kind of compromise while not trying to enforce their view on other software workflow. iPad OS would have been great too, if they went for a free floating windows management and some widget redesign instead of the awkward stage manager.
I'm not gonna gainsay anyone who says it was good, I'm sure they have lots of legitimate fond memories of Space Cadet Pinball, Half-Life 2, etc. But the Windows XP era was the first one where "what's happening with Windows" just passed me by. I was through with Microsoft's shenanigans starting around then.
That rule can always be gamed too, heh. I felt it went 8 bad, 8.1 good, 10 bad. Then 11 broke the pattern.
With KDE you can simply align it with your own opinions.
I have a desktop that still runs all tripe-A games and is my main development machine running win10 that MS says is a boat anchor come the fall; this will be my last windows machine.
Microsoft has been pretty good to me as a developer (despite some of the technologies intentionally designed to do nothing but distract and consume attention) but the consumer side is a pathological shit-show and appears to really hate people (or at least love money more). MS looks a lot like the White House these days.
This may be netlore at this point, but IIRC, a big reason why XP pushed for product keys was for cancelled experiments with subscription pricing (or at least updates for paying customers only). That plug was pulled before launch due to lack of widespread broadband infrastructure for the downloads. Continuous updates are a nightmare enabled by modern CDNs and cable.
And installing the new version required 20+ 3.5 inch 'floppies'
3.1 was a white box. 95 was sky and clouds. 98 was more cloudy clouds. NT 4.0 was sky turning into space.
You can imagine my disappointment when ME and 2k were just white boxes.
Very tangential, but I had the same kind of intrigue for Maxis games where SIM was stylized as a colour and the game name with its own font.
Kick rocks, by the way.