alt Hacker NewsWindows has historically oscillated between pretty awful and pretty decent.
XP was good, Vista was bad, Win7 was good, Win8 was a disaster, Win10 was decent again. Now we're in a low part of the cycle with Win11.
Maybe there's another 'good Windows' on the way. But I'm sceptical this time, being in the era of enshittification and the AI slop bubble, where everything is user-hostile by design, where if something seems like a good deal, you know it's a bait+switch.
> XP was good, Vista was bad, Win7 was good, Win8 was a disaster, Win10 was decent again. Now we're in a low part of the cycle with Win11.
The cycle is more complicated:
* 2000: exceptional
* XP: bad (the original XP was indeed bad)
* XP SP2 (from a technological perspective basically a new OS): decent
* Vista: bad
* 7: good
* 8: awful (it was so bad that soon 8.1 was introduced)
* 8.1: bad
* 10: controversial (some say it's "decent"; some say it's "bad" because of the magnitude of telemetry (spying) that Windows 10 introduced)
* 11: awful
So, in my opinion it's rather a general downward trend with some overlaid cycle.