Nowadays Windows is filled with adware and is fairly slow, but it wasn’t always like this. Was there a particular time where a change occurred?
The interface is garbage. I moved from windows 7 to linux with KDE desktop years ago, and my attempt to navigate Windows 11 lately was a disaster.
How do you fuck it up so hard?
Windows 2000 was the peak - rock solid with no visual fluff. XP was 2000 with a childish skin on it and it’s all downhill from there.
I remember all the nicknames from when XP came out. I don’t remember which was more common; disco windows, or teletubby windows.
In my neck of the woods it was called fisher price windows lol
Oh man that was one of the few windows distros I never felt too compelled to reinstall. Perf just never degraded that much with a reasonably defragged drive (jesus I am dating myself with that statement)
I’ve always believed that 2k was the best software they ever produced.
Nah, that would surely be a game or something. Maybe Age of Empires II?
Naw, the best software they’ve ever produced is 6502 BASIC.
Though Flight Simulator does get an honorable mention.
Depending on who you ask, Vista or 8.
Vista, no question
+1 for 8
That’s where they started to suck
NT 3.5 was the last version I’d consider “good” without reservation.
From the very beginning, it always had particular features which were designed to make things worse for the users for some business reason for Microsoft. After XP, though, the work in the core OS was basically done - it wasn’t slow or lacking important features or unstable (relatively speaking, at least), and so the only changes being made to it from then on were adding crappiness to it for some reason related to business priorities or just simple stupidity. And so, it entered its slide.
After XP, though, the work in the core OS was basically done
There were a lot of big things happening in computer hardware: migration to 64-bit instruction sets and memory addressing, multicore processors, the rise of the GPU. The security paradigm also shifted to less trust between programs, with a lot of implementation details on encryption and permissions.
So I’d argue that Windows has some pretty different things going on under the hood from what it was 20 years ago.
every other version is good
Bill Gates? Is that you?
Nope. That’s an old meme, that still checks out. There is still hope for Windows 12.
Windows Me, Windows Vista, Windows 8, and Windows 11. These are all bad iterations of Windows.
I used ME a lot and never had trouble. I think I had just the right hardware cuz I know that many people had a hard time.
I think you and I were the only ones.
Windows 1.0; November 20, 1985.
I was going to say, post 3.11, but maybe you’re right ;-)
windows 8 is a strong candidate, because that was their huge push into trying to remodel the OS in the image of mobile OSes. you had to perform quite the exorcism to get it functional. i skipped Vista so I’m not the best source on this but my understanding is that the issue with Vista is less that it was loaded with dark patterns and trying to be a walled garden and more just an unfortunate time to be an OS with the technology and security landscapes changing.
of course, while the base OS wasn’t necessarily always the problem, Microsoft has anti-competitive practices going back even further and you could argue Windows stopped being good when MS started bundling Internet Explorer with it, so it all depends where you draw the line. might be safest to say their last truly good OS was MSX-DOS just because they abandoned it before they could do anything scummy
Best home screen ever
Not really slower, just more shit going on under the hood than ever before. Considering all of the novel ways to attack the operating system, the ubiquity and level of integration of computing in everything, the OS is a much higher value target than it used to be back in the days of Xp-7. However, MS has introduced numerous security features and significantly improved the built in AV. 10/11 is a hell of a lot more secure, but there is a performance cost to that. That and the software we run on top of it has only gotten more resource hungry and complex as well. There are also things that you might hate but are worlds better than they used to be. Updates are a lot faster, support automatic rollback and are practically flawless compared to the broken mess they used to be. We now have things that were never possible before, like first party tools to convert a MBR/BIOS-boot system to UEFI boot.
I’ll concede the point about service advertisements, however depending on the edition that is suppressable. MS is not alone in its sinful capitalism however, MacOS is full of stuff like that too, they’re just sneakier/more subtle about it. MS will have you griping about their promoted services or apps; Apple will have you licking their boots and not realizing it because you’ve deluded yourself. The only operating systems that are really free are the ones no company fully owns. I work with multiple different operating systems in an IT job, and the notion that it is acceptable to run old versions of Windows in this day and age or that they were objectively better is just nostalgic horseshit. It was always a corporate product, you’re just chafing against that now.
Massive overhead for no reason is what “slower” means.
Linux has better security and even heavy distros don’t come anywhere close to being the massive resource hog Windows is. For “features” that downgrade the experience.
You know what’s also good “built in AV”? Good design with code that’s open to review. There’s not nearly as much performance cost to good security if you start from a good foundation. Saying windows is slower because it’s doing more security and more anti-virus is like saying I only run slow because I trip over my own feet. Like, no shit, but that’s no excuse.
And singing the praises of updates and rollback systems that are like a decade behind everything else and still a consistent pain point for users is a little bit of weird fanboyism too.
I’m going to say Win8 & 8.1.
Say what you will about the UI, they did great work on the underlying kernel, file system and APIs. If they’d continued to refine it, it’d be damn near perfect.
They really started to lose the plot with 10; it kept a lot of what made 8 good (and steals a lot of goodwill from 8) but you can see the adware and telemetry start to creep in.
The next best I’d have to give to Vista, which also did some much needed revitalization, only to see 7 get the glory because Microsoft flubbed the hardware requirements and vendors were sloppy with drivers.
My favourite is NT3.5: full microkernel, no GDI in kernel space, no printer drivers in the kernel, less registry issues. We’d have skipped a lot of pain from the 90s and 2000s had Microsoft not went backwards with 9x and NT4.
vendors were sloppy with drivers
Didn’t they arbitrary remade the way drivers are packed and installed so old hardware would be rendered obsolete? I feel like many producers owe MS money for that one trick. Especially since office peripherals come to chipped tanks and subscription services after that, while old and reliable tech became unusable unless you mess with drivers for a while.
Windows 7 and 8.1 were good, 8 was a disaster.
I don’t mind 10 really, after you disable all the “recommendations”. 11 is terrible.
I kept using 7 until the end and only switched to 10 because I had no alternative. But I’ve been very happy with LTSC.
There’s not much competition, they can’t make more money to increase shareholder value by improving the product because they pretty much have all the marketshare they need.
The only way to make more money is by monetizing your data and selling you more and more ads. Which they will do more and more year after year since they need to increase profits year after year for shareholders.
probably 8 or 10
Vista
7 was good though
7 was the peak of the curve, with everything starting a downward trend with 8.
7 was genuinely the best windows operating system. It was stable, slick, easy to use, and generally unobtrusive to what you were trying to do, and you didnt have to do daily reboots or regular reformats to clean up after it like you had to do with all its predecessors.
When it became more profitable for them to develop it to be shit
Windows 2000 (Windows NT 5.0) was the last great version of windows. It was fucking fantastic.
I’ve also heard great things about Windows server 2008, but I had departed from the entire Microsoft sphere years before that.
*nix4Lyf!
The correct answer is “whenever you discovered there was an alternative”. Windows has always been shit, but before you thought there was no alternative so you were used to it, ever since you started using something different you’ve grown less tolerant of problems. It’s like someone who’s always had a low end PC and played games on minimum at 30fps, it’s “okay” but the moment you play something on maximum at 144fps your normal experience feels sluggish and bad (even though nothing really changed with it).
I think windows is the same thing, which is why most people will tell you the last good version of windows was the one they were using when they migrated over to Linux.
How was windows XP bad? It did all I asked it to do, it was compatible with all the software I needed and, in general, “it just works”. I remember trying openSUSE back in the day, and being underwhelmed by it. Then I ran Kubuntu for a bit but, even though it had cool software for listening to music and such, I couldn’t use it to game. So I went back to windows because Linux just didn’t have anything for me.
Nowadays, I’d completely agree. Win10 does whatever it wants when it wants, even when it seems mostly tamed. It’s not terrible and it “works”, but yeah I’m switching to Arch before Win11 comes, for real.
Linux has come a long way and Windows has gone down the enshittification route; but it wasn’t like this back in the 00s.
XP was the response to Linux. Before that, windows was a crash fest, remember 98, or Millennium?
Linux was rock stable, so microsoft had to do something and started yo use their server core in the home version of windows.
I barely remember using win98, it was the first OS I used when I was very little. But I don’t remember it being so prone to crashing. At least not fatally crashing. Of course, by the time I was just playing around with paint and shareware games, not doing any serious work, so I wouldn’t know if it was bad.
But that still means it isn’t as straightforward as “windows was always bad, linux was always good”.
XP was the response to Linux. Before that, windows was a crash fest, remember 98, or Millennium?
Linux was rock stable, so microsoft had to do something and started yo use their server core in the home version of windows.
They just realized trying to maintain NT and 9x core was foolish. Trying to put the hardware abstraction layer from Windows 2000 (NT 5) into 9x for Millennium Edition was AWFUL. So they scrapped the entire idea of a separate home core, 9x died, and Windows XP (NT 5.1) was born.
But NT was already good. Windows 2000 SP4 was a fantastic OS for its time, as was XP.
Gotta remember that the 9x core versions (95, 98, ME) were (in some ways) practically a separate OS masquerading as Windows.
So you mean “Microsoft developed Windows to be good” like OP said.
