You can always really on the MBAs

Microsoft has long had a tick tock cycle for Windows.

98: great. ME: bad. XP: great. Vista: bad. 7: great. 8: bad. 10: great. 11: bad

Maybe “great” is going a bit far for some of those. “Not bad” vs “bad” seems more realistic.

A fundamental problem with this is that "8" is two different releases (8.0 and 8.1), "10" is about 9 different releases, and "11" is three different releases so far (21H2, 22H2, and 24H2). It doesn't make much sense to lump all of them together because they share the same marketing name; technically there's no difference between going from 8.0 to 8.1 or from 22H2 to 24H2 and going from Vista to 7 or 10 20H1 to 11 21H2

Maybe Windows 12 will be the promised "last Windows" which 10 was supposed to be.

I'd love to know the exec who ordered Windows 11. It stinks of "I need a product on my resume that I launched because being Windows 10 "maintainer" sounds so pathetic on a resume."

10 was bad 11 is a little better but no enough. With win10 they started with more annoying ads and the start menu with apps and the click bait news in the start menu

still leaps better than windows 8

It was, eventually. In the beginning 10 was literally just Windows 8.1 (it even ran the same NT6 kernel) but with the classic UI slapped back on. They called it 10 to get away from the Windows 8 branding that everyone hated.

I recall it being pretty mediocre at release, just a reskinned 8.1. 10 started to come into its own much later after NT10

Aside from the start menu no, not really. Windows 8 is the most performant operating system. No laggy animations (thanks to DirectUI), fast boot time, especially fast on older systems. Windows 10 started the whole lagfest.

"aside from the start menu" is one hell of a caveat. When you screw up one of the main UI elements as badly as they did, it really drags the whole experience down.

Well most people just press the Windows key and type to open a program which works exactly the same on Win8. And personally I loved the start screen. And how often do you really need the start menu?

That's the most brain dead take I've seen in a while. Yes, forget about start menu and lets just search everything or use giant pictorials designed for 'blind' people.

Not what I said.

exactly! I don't understand why people hated it so much. It was snappy, clean OS. I've always thought it was better than Win7. Of course, absent of start menu was terrible choice. And I meant 8.1, not 8.

Windows 8 was ultra stable. I've seen uptime well over multiple years on it. The original UX was beyond awful and 8.1 made it ok but the core of the OS was solid.

Idk, I literally skipped Windows 8.

I mean, apart from killing the start button and all the touch first applications, windows 8 felt really satisfying to me by eliminating transparency effects and having simpler, clearer window decorations. I hate the transparency effects in windows 7, and performance was improved in Win 8.

I can't downvote this comment, because I've observed exactly this practice happen, again and again, over the past three decades.

I still remain naively hopeful and cheer them on, however.