alt Hacker News> 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.
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The general downward trend is across the whole of tech, if not the whole of society, rather than just Microsoft products though.
Even earlier than that:
Win98: bad
Win98 SE: good
Completely agree with your timeline and rating, 2000 was the first windows one could use the word 'stable' with, before it was such a bad shitshow that MS-DOS 6.22 seemed like coming from another planet.
Hated 10, was forced to it basically only due to gaming, a common assholish trick MS uses whenever it can. But when looking from 11 perspective, 10 was fine compared to that heap of disorganized badly designed crap.
Yet again time to be ashamed to work for MS, this time its sticking around like tar spit on a white shirt.
Windows 8 was better than 10. The UI might have been wonky, but 10's telemetry was a far bigger problem.
They had a "last release in the series was best pattern" with Win 3.11 / NT, Win 98 SE / 2K and XP SP2 (which merged the consumer and business tracks).
After that, it's been strictly downhill. 7's additions vs XP are purely hostile to the end user, including escrowed disk encryption and DRM. 8 was the beginning of the pivot to mandatory cloud. 10 added mandatory telemetry and ads. 11 added nonsensical AI crapware, and turned the ads to 11.