alt Hacker NewsSo part of me agrees, but part of me also feels like a victim of the boy who cried wolf.
People have ragged on Windows going back for as long as I can remember. Only in hindsight did people ever express fondness in public for Windows XP (and maybe a bit for Windows 7). It's hard for me to distinguish how much of the vitriol is legitimate this time from developers, or will nostalgia glasses just haunt Windows forever.
I've been using Windows 11 and... it feels fine? If anything, it doesn't feel substantially different enough from Windows 10 to care. My other comparison points are a Macbook and a Steam Deck, and both of them have so many faults of their own that I don't understand the need to rag on Windows in particular.
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Well, that's because 11 and 10 are similar while being substantially worse than XP.
> Only in hindsight did people ever express fondness in public for Windows XP (and maybe a bit for Windows 7).
I don't agree. Those of us using it for embedded development skipped from XP to 7 to 10.
Windows XP started off a bit rough. Once it had some time to mature, nobody in their right mind wanted to go back to Windows 95/98/9x, though.
Windows 7 was definitely lauded as decent contemporaneously. Vista was a disaster by comparison (but a necessary one--Vista took the arrows to allow Windows 7 to appear). And lot of people avoided Windows 8 like the plague it was.
Windows 10 was definitely a step back from 7, but wasn't ... terrible? Especially relative to Windows 8. But Windows 10 definitely wasn't genuinely good on any axis. And everybody was constantly bitching about all the stuff that was clearly the beginning of enshittification that got turned to maximum on 11.
I was there when XP came out and it was clearly better than any of the entries in the two "parents" that it replaced (NT/Win2k, and 9X/ME). I was the local "hey, my PC is broken" guy and the first thing to try was always to replace whatever version of windows they had with XP.
I certainly have some anti-fondness memories as well (I had the service pack burned to a CD because it took longer to download and install the updates than it did to get infected with one of the various worms around at the time), but there was zero doubt in my mind that XP was the best windows yet when it came out.