Praise be to our Lord and Saviour, Linus Torvalds!
i think that’s miku, actually
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Off topic but I always thought Vista was pretty good. A lot of the stuff people hated was just change. Things like UAC are normal now, can you image how bad it would be if everything still ran as administrator? Vista basically threw itself on the grenade.
I use Linux by the way, don’t lynch me.
I hated vista, because I had to repair and re-install it multiple times on my less-tech sawwy friends PC, since sometimes it would simply kill itself! Lol. I do not miss that garbage pile.
I am not entirely sure that is a Vista thing. I recall repairing and reinstalling 95, 98 and XP for less tech savvy friends for this same reason.
It is probably a Windows thing, yes. I just had to do it the most often with Vista, which soured my experience with the operating system.
Windows 10 only exists because of how much Windows 8 sucked.
Windows 7 also only exists because of how much Windows Vista sucked lol.
XP and 7 was Microsoft at their best. They’ll never reach those heights ever again.
The only thing that sucked about windows 8 was their decision to force mobile friendly UI on everyone. Seems to be reoccurring issue.
Win11 has been fine for me at home and for the laptops I managed at my last job. Start your machine, skip through the install questions, reboot to USB with a MS ISO, install, done without all the factory bullshit.
Yes, that’s a minor pain, but it’s a tradeoff against post-install configuration with Linux. Either way, it’s hella better than the old days of struggling with pre and post install.
This might surprise you, but I don’t think anyone here is complaining about ease of installation… The “factory bullshit” is built right in to Windows now, and trying to remove it goes way beyond “post-install configuration”.
Also, as someone who’s done server deployments… doing automated linux installs is trivial.
Windows 7 was the peak. everything since has been a decline.
Windows 7 was the first Windows OS that didnt require constant reboots, didnt require regular reformat/reinstalls to fix random over time slowdowns/degredation/crashes/etc.
Windows 7 had a relatively light weight, and very easy to use interface.
Windows 7 was the last Windows OS that you actually owned when you bought it.
Every OS after Windows 7 was centered on taking control and usability away from the owner/user.
iirc microsoft began going heavy on telemetry (and consequently cutting their QA and testing budget) at some point during Windows 7. That’s why it went downhill after that (Windows 8 and after)
Yeah, that was towards the end of windows life, after win10s release… and it was added as a windows update package, and as a result was easily uninstallable.
and every news article i saw informing people about the telemetry update, also told people how to uninstall it
They had QA before?
Tbf, latest update Vista and 7 are barely different aside from their aesthetics. They just decided to repackage the next update into a different operating system because the well was already poisoned with Vista. Which makes me question why they aren’t doing the same business strategy with Windows 11 now that its failing. Oh well, I want everyone to switch to Linux anyway so 🤷♂️
The same could be said about 8/8.1.
It was not ultimately a different OS compared to 10. The major difference was a start button and a baked in telemetry. Other than that, under the hood these used to be the same OSes.
Was just an ugly version of NT/2000 that’s the last windows machine I bought/built.
I did have an XP box for a while that I picked up on a curb on trash day. It still had the wedding photos of the previous owners when I plugged it in.
Even Vista was ok, it was just pre-installed on computers that could barely run it and UAC was overtuned but it was solid with the later service packs.
Pre-installed with the craziest bloatware too. I had multiple come to me thinking there computers were hacked they had so much trash from the factory on them
Yea, vista was the ME problem all over again.
People running it on old hardware and old software wasn’t written to use UAC yet.
Well, sort of, but it was SOLD on hardware that couldn’t run it
Stockholm syndrome?
I can only tell Goku and Miku from that image, no idea about the other girls
it’s gold ship from umamusume, kasane teto from internet and tokō madobe from windows
I believe the other two are Umamusume
Windows 10, the last “sane” Windows. Bruh, this is where the bullshit started.
“last sane windows left”
And the bullshit started a long time before that. I think people were complaining about win95 phoning home to MS.
No XP was where the bullshit started. I quit windows then.
2000 was the last sane (and maybe only) windows.
Why did did it start at XP? I’m too young to remember.
Probably they hate XP because it introduced Windows Activation Services for the first time.
That said, XP did suck. Windows 7 and Windows 2000 were the best editions of Windows IMHO.
Vista was OK, once it had its bugs worked out with UAC. XP had tons of security problems. Windows 8 actively hated people who had keyboards and mice for some reason. Windows 10 was shoved full of telemetry, which Windows 11 has taken to the max, plus added AI slop.
XP ruled idk what they’re on about. Windows 8 really began the death knell of Windows IMO. A new UI people didnt want or like forced down your throat. They started their new hideous and confusing design language, which led to the truly abhorrent Windows 10 half-baked replacement for the control panel. Then the ads. Spyware baked in. Vibe coded start menu that takes 300ms to open. Sigh.
XP ruled idk what they’re on about. Windows 8 really began the death knell of Windows IMO.
Yeah XP was great. I would even say Windows 7 was the pinnacle. The best modern Windows before it started to enshittify.
I like how everyone glosses over Windows ME existing
Windows ME was the cancer of all windows variants. It was slower and less stable then w98, and it was slower and less stable then XP. I don’t know what they were thinking when throwing this abortion-type of os at us.
MELLENIUUUUUUUUUM FEEEEEVVVVEEEERRRR
Most of the thread just makes me feel old…
WindowsME was what made me switch to Linux… Sure there has been a windows box around here and there for gaming mostly… Now with anything I want to play working on Linux, no need for 11
Windows 8 with its over simplified UI style was to accommodate the fact that corporate users wanted to do RDP over slow connections from laptops made between 2007 and 2012, remember how fucked those things were?
GoToMyPC!
A few things that people seem to have forgotten over the years:
The “Fisher-Price” visual style fiasco. (People claiming XP’s UI design choices were too unprofessional)
Extremely unstable on base release, with things only getting better after Service Pack 1.
Activation servers required to install the OS.
The start of Window’s Customer Experience Improvement Program telemetry.
Integration of Windows Update into the OS, which re-enabled Microsoft defaults like Internet Explorer, after patches were complete.
The start of confusing SKUs: Home Edition, Professional Edition, Media Center Edition, and Professional x64 Edition which was confusingly a re-badged Server 2003.
I’m sure I am forgetting a lot more. It wasn’t all sunshine and daisies like people seem to remember… but it was a lot better than now.
You got these right, and I wrote basically similar things.
But I had to reply because if you remember all of this, you might also remember seeing how long an XP machine could last on the internet before being patched enough.
It was crazy that you HAD to upgrade it offline, because it would be owned before you could even get it patched. At the time we saw 10 to 15 minutes tops before it was infected.
In any case, yes, XP was the start of all the things we hate today. Its interesting how much more push back there was back then: anti consumer advocates, government intervention, class action lawsuits, even the EU got their own version because they got involved.
Now everything is even worse, and only the consumers seem to be the ones complaining.
Wow, yeah I completely forgot that we used to connect directly to the internet. No gateway to shield us.
I used to get OS alert popup windows from random people connecting to the local Messenger Service with all sorts of scams.
I write about this one a lot, because people have forgotten how bad it was, thinking only today is bad. So let me grab my notes and copy and paste some detials:
They started product activation tied to hardware ID. They created tiers of what you purchased. WGA phoned home to Windows servers, and they ran programs in the background to check on your computer. All of the “validate before you download” started with Windows, IE, Media Player, Defender, and Office here at XP, and expanded every year to today.
They started forcing bundled applications and lied to consumers that they could not be separated (explorer and media player for example). They even offered software that would “remove” these types of packages, but it didn’t, and this was after they said only third party tools could do it.
They began the cut-off dates to force hardware upgrades and windows upgrades.
They bundled messenger into XP and tried to get people to use MS Passport accounts. If you didn’t use passport, you could not download music from the windows store. This was the beginnings of required windows accounts. They used the passport ID’s to tie together users and specific hardware.
They used registration screens to trick users into thinking they had to have a passport just to access the internet. An online privacy organization got involved when they realized just how much data Microsoft was collecting.
MSN explorer was pushed into the start menu, and began microsofts efforts of getting people over to MSN to see ads. There was even a time it would do pop up ads for microsoft dial up, msn messenger, and premium subscription services.
Then there is Active X, tied to Internet Explorer. The EU antitrust investigation was on exactly this: was IE + Active X used specifically to keep people hostage in IE.
Telemetry began here as well. Product Keys, Hardware Fingerprint, IP address, Bios info, applications installed, usage patterns and configuration. You could stop this in group policies, but who was looking at those in the consumer space? Several class action lawsuits were filed and Microsoft themselves called their daily harvest of data “personally identifiable information”.
tldr; Microsoft soft began the tactics of telemetry, lock in, restriction of features based on software tied to hardware, and creating a account to use all the features of your computer back in the Win XP days.
I mean Windows ME was shit, but XP and 7 were great. Everything after 7 tho has been shit.
XP was complete garbage for many reasons. Security being the number one. Multi-user being number two (or lack thereof). And boy did it look nasty. I think you have nostalgia.
But my main point is microsoft began everything that people hate about it today in XP. People seem to have forgotten all push back there was at the time.
The only thing I miss about XP was that if it was at a hotel or internet cafe, no matter what they did, you could be admin in about 10 minutes or less. Which was always handy to have.
Eh, this was initially true about XP. By the time SP3 came out, XP was honestly probably the most stable Windows version MS has ever produced.
XP was honestly probably the most stable Windows version MS has ever produced.
That would likely be 10. The mandate in 2017 to break up services and require that no one thing could bring down windows made a big difference. Doing this required using more memory, which is one of the reasons it hadnt been done before.
I think you are still being nostalgic about XP! Even after SP3, we called a USB device plug and pray. There were drivers that could take down the whole system. Huge security flaws that never were resolved. A simple palm pilot plugged in would cause a BSOD fairly often. I seem to remember microsoft themselves saying that it could never be stable, the architecture would never be able to be successfully patched.
Sanity died with XP (sp3)
Actually, what happened to win10? like much no updates, if some security hole get discovered, there wont be fix for that, sure, like it never was any extra secure in the first place… so, what changes now?
People still run windows 7.so nothing changes
Windows 11 isn’t terrible once you put some work into it, but it is still bad on lower-end devices, and a pain to do any development stuff on without wsl.
I never liked windows, windows 7 was the most tolerated one
Sanity died with $(windows_version_i_grew_up_with)
I grew up with 95/98, and still think 7 was the best one and it went downhill after real quick.
Naw. I grew up with all the Windows, 7 was the last sane one.
Have to agree. Windows 10 LTSC was tolerable, but it still was pretty batshit with how they designed the settings menus. So many things were now tucked away and hidden, with the real settings you often needed being in Windows 7 settings windows that carried over, but virtually always hidden as normal hypertext links below a much larger windows 10 button that didn’t actually do you thing you needed. The only real advantage of 10 was the inclusion of many drivers out of the box, updating a bit faster, and being able to swap the SSD between completely different computers without it freaking out and bluescreening.
Windows 7 was just an advanced Windows XP/2000, and for the most part was still very intuitive to use, with logically laid out settings menus.
Nowadays Linux has far surpassed Windows in ease of use and UX for normal settings with the mainstream desktop enviornments.
And what was up with 3 different styles of settings pages? There was the old MSC style, the more UI friendly pages and then the full-page, here’s your phone on Windows, you need to reboot to get back to the desktop version where you have 2 buttons for all your network settings. Fucking infuriating.
It’s just heinous now. I don’t know how people handle it, I get fucking mad within 5 minutes of having to do anything technical on Windows now.
You handle it because your boss says so…
And what was up with 3 different styles of settings pages?
And from a company that used to scaremonger about Linux being inconsistent and therefore wasting time & money…
Our family PC still has 8.1 (parents really don’t like change and Firefox got security updates until recently). I think I’ll upgrade it to 10 when I have time, the amount of debloat required to keep it sane is manageable as opposed to 11.
get the iot ltsc version, it’s the only sane option rn
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I agree 100%
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I ran the LTSC version until it recently failed a regular update multiple times, every shutdown and restart would take over an hour, and I would never wish that curse upon anybody ever. It frequently BSOD’ed, usually involving nVidia audio or Windows Store applications (I didn’t have any windows Store Apps installed but they’re sometimes dependencies), and the only way I could tell you that was the source of the problem is I learned to read the clusterfuck that is the Event Viewer logs, but I haven’t had a single similar issue on Linux since I made the switch.
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Man 8.1 Metro was the worst UI pick Windows has had
We’ve been using Classic Shell since Day 1 of course. I modded it to quit qBittorrent when Mom opens the Shutdown dialog (yes, she always opens that awful window) because that takes the longest to terminate. I’ll use it plus Explorer Patcher on 10, a semi-transparent taskbar without blur is so handy
A suggestion:
Dual boot!
Call the Linux partition “Mom’s speed machine” and the old Windows 8.1 partition “Dad’s slow shitheap”.
Make the Linux partition as easy and intuitive to use as possible. Let the Windows partition rot.
I’m sure dad will come around pretty soon when he sees mom’s sleek setup and he gets a pang of jealousy.
Good luck!
there are tons of ofms for linux. show him gnome commander or krusader to start with.
Drive letters? (Yes, they are stupid and don’t work with MTP but I won’t explin
/dev/to him)
Mate! If your hardware is good enough, then download windows 11 from massgrave.dev and then use this unattended method, which lets you turn off all the crap including TPM and BitLocked and all ai and o365 teams bollocks.
Source: me using windows for work
I already use unattend scripts for the rest of my family’s Windows shit… I add
irm https://christitus.com/win | iexat the end too so I can then install cool stuffAnd no, I’m not upgrading any Windows 10 stuff rn
For some of us the last sane Windows was XP, so we’re well over it. XP was the end of the era when geeks ran Microsoft.
Working at MSN Tech support during the. Blaster Worm and its subsequent variants which triggered reboots in Windows 98-XP, I was put off from every version of Windows including XP, and it was the last windows I installed.
After working an 8 hour shift of repeating the same proceedure on a customers machine to properly fix the virus every 15 minutes, the same thing I had done every day for three weeks, I came home to find my XP machine bootlooping due to the second variant (Sophos) finding its way into my patched machine as the fix for it had come out while I was at work. Instead of joining the Freelancer LAN party I was due to be at that weekend, I spent the time fixing my machine and learning Linux. That year Windows became a secondary install, and remained that way until Wine had stabalised for most games I played. I think I dropped dual boot around 2011.
I’d say Windows 7 was last that was relatively normal, even though I was all in for Linux even then. It had fairly coherent UI, wasn’t crazy about adverts, it didn’t feel like 10 layers glued on top of an old OS so that it could make impression that it’s contemporary. It also didn’t try to be anything but desktop OS
Hell no, fuck Windows 10 too. It’s what started a lot of the bullshit we’re dealing with today.
Yeah it’s funny reading now that Windows 10 was good. I remember how people didn’t want to migrate from Windows 7/8 to Windows 10 like people today don’t want to migrate to Windows 11. Perhaps back then the issue was even bigger than today.
Praising windows 10 is just wild. (From someone who experienced 95 onward). I mean, it was alright. I think 7 was my favorite.
Mine too, it had a good looking UI and the addition of combined tabs changed everything.
10 was the last one with a technical improvement (its kernel had a scheduler that was better at scheduling on modern processors where some cores share caches while others don’t). Though the anti-features meant it was a tradeoff vs 7 (and just ignore 8 entirely).
It was kinda funny because before I switched to linux and made the question moot, I kept searching for some technical reason, anything, to actually want to switch from 10 to 11. All I’d get were things that other desktops have been able to do for decades (virtual desktops, which I first saw in Litestep (I think?) back around 2003), or anti-features like recall and copilot integration.
