alt Hacker NewsDon't get me wrong, If hating Microslop was an Olympic sport I'd be on the podium every 4 years, but Win 95, XP, and 7 were functional, usable and stable OS's. 8 got a lot of flak for it's horrible UI changes, but under the hood it was actually a big improvement to 7.
It's been steadily downhill since 7 though. Integration of spyware got it's foothold in 8 and now that we are at 11, you've got a completely spyware ridden OS, and then on top of that, basic things like context menus, audio drivers, screenshot tools, and connecting monitors to laptops is broken.
Many of these issues were ironically the same issues that stopped me from running Ubuntu Dapper Drake when I first installed it. It's just an unacceptably bad product from Microsoft, and if businesses weren't vendor locked (specifically the business I work for) I'd never even look at it, much like I don't look at Lotus or Corel products.
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8 and 8.1 were two full different releases as well. 8.1 was much better than 8.
The Kernel Version Numbers are a better hint at what is going on than the marketing releases.
Windows 2000 NT5, XP NT 5.1
Vista NT6, 7 NT6.1, 8 NT6.2, 8.1 NT6.3
> If hating Microslop was an Olympic sport I'd be on the podium every 4 years,
To be fair, I agree they are overdue for a truly awful release.
I mean, there was Windows Me and then 7 years later Windows Vista.
Those were truly Gold medal awful podium releases.
Even with Windows 11 I don't think we've hit that level in the cycle just yet.
Windows 7 was effectively just vista but enough time had passed that the required hardware to run it was easy to get a hold of.
The biggest problem with Vista is you had a lot of Windows XP computers running happily on 256 and 512MB of ram. That made updating to Vista REALLY painful to a lot of people.
I think people forget about how little resources 95, 98, and XP needed to run.
XP was also criticized for being a hog when it first came out. People viewed Windows 2000 as being the good windows right up until memory became more abundant. You couldn't run XP on a machine with 64MB of ram, but you could run windows ME and 98 on that same machine.