this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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There's a pretty good amount of people still using it, it seems.
I feel pretty comfortable saying that was the last good one, perhaps the best one, and it’s been downhill ever since.
It hasn't been steadily downhill. There was a plunge downwards with Windows 8, then 8.1 recovered a little and 10 more, before Windows 11 undid the gains.
Windows 7 recovered from the disaster of Vista. Windows XP recovered from Me. It has been a bumpy ride for a long time.
Windows 7 was just vista with dipping sauce.
By the time 7 came out Vista was fine. Vista was the usual bugs of a new OS, plus the new drivers which most manufactures decided to not do properly so they made Vista look much worse than it actually was. The much higher system requirements really didn't help.
If you bought a new machine with hardware that came out post Vista's launch you probably had a good experience with Vista. I personally had 0 issues with my machine in 2008.
Vista paved the way for Win7 by highlighting the abysmal driver and support issues. Which got significant work done on it so by the time Win 7 acme out things were in a good state.
Vista was, much like ME, was a decent OS hampered by its time and hardware, but have been meme'd into festering shitpiles.
I'm on board with your Vista-->7 thoughts, but I do take issue with ME. It never was a decent OS and it very much was a steaming shitpile. It was far too much new code stupidly rushed for the holiday season. I remembering installing it being a roll of the dice even with the same hardware. It would work, then it wouldn't, then it might work with some odd issues, then it deffo would not at all. Hours wasted trying.
I really did try, but never had a good experience with WinME and I know of no one else who did. Even first Vista was better (though saying that makes me shudder).
Well, it was more than that.
I actually did an interview at MS about a year after Win7 was released (was fresh out of college), and I asked a pretty pointed question about why the release quality seemed so… variable. The manager’s answer was that they had done entirely in-house QA for XP (we didn’t go into WinMe), outsourced the vast majority for Vista, and brought it entirely back in house for 7. He further mentioned they were taking a hybridized approach for 8. I remember questioning the decision, given the somewhat clear correlation between release quality and QA ownership, and got some business buzzword gobbledygook (which I took as “the real answer is so far above my pay grade that I can do absolutely fucking nothing about it”).
TL;DR: it was largely just profit-driven quality cuts done too aggressively, so they had to backstep and reinvest a couple times to normalize it for the user base.
Vista's major problem was that it released during a time that the PC industry was racing to the bottom in terms of pricing. All those initial Vista machines were woefully inadequate for the OS they ran. 1-2GB RAM, which was perfectly fine for XP, was pathetic for Vista, yet they sold them anyway. If you bought a high-end machine, you likely had a pretty decent experience with Vista. If you bought a random PC at Walmart? Not so much.
Vista shows how important the initial reputation is. Everybody had made up their mind to hate it, even if the hate wasn’t fully justified. There wasn’t much Microsoft could do about it, other than releasing Windows 7.
Windows 8 on the other hand was genuinely bad.
I agree with reputation, but just made up their minds to hate it? That's a tough take. Design wise it looked cool and introduced the search bar. But there weren't enough benefits to switch. While on the cons side, it was a very heavy OS. In an age of 128 and 256mb of ram, vista needed 512 to function normally. That was a huge performance hit out of the gate. It didn't feel like an upgrade.
Even when computers did improve and became able to handle Vista people weren’t willing to change their minds about it. Windows 7 had a 1GB memory requirement. Why didn’t more people use Vista right before the Windows 7 launch?
That's where your comment about initial reputation kicks in. I'm in agreement with that. I'm just not in agreement the bad impression was unwarranted.
The talks about 7 at the time still pressed why an XP user would switch, since XP was a great OS and worked well without any glaring missing features. This is a reverse proof. The reputation of XP was so strong that it was still hard to get people to switch 2 OS versions later.
Just to add, Vista’s biggest change broke compatibility with so many applications with the implementation of User Access Control (UAC).
While it was a long-overdue feature for security, lots of older applications would either fail to install or not work properly because it expected to have full system access with no roadblocks. While there was compatibility mode, the results were still very much hit or miss.
Then there was the massive headache around the original implementation of UAC which would constantly go off, usually multiple times during a software installation and again when starting some applications. Most people would’ve turned off UAC because of how annoying it was.
Same with windows 8.1. It had to be replaced with 10.
And it was the OS that introduced UAC. Vista took a bullet for 7.
Except ME was part of the DOS line, while XP extended Win2k which is NT.
But I take your point, just that Win2k was (largely) the end of MS producing DOS-based operating systems (with XP being the final nail in that coffin).
In business, once Win2k was out, we stopped deploying Win9x entirely. Before that, NT was problematic on some hardware and for some software/users. Win2k solved most of that.
Win2k and WinXP were not built on DOS. They were not DOS-based. They were NT-based. ME was the final nail in that coffin.
Historically, every other edition of Windows is good. The logic is that they release a version, then fix it and make it good. In your examples, vista became 7 and ME became XP.
As long as recall is a thing I will never move to 11. I'll move to Linux.
I hate Microsuck for this. I just want to come home from work and have my PC work not have to play IT guy whenever Linux acts up. :(
Windows Pro does "just work". Configure GP when you setup, and all this garbage isn't an issue. Even without the more extreme changes I make (beyond GP), most people would be fine.
MS pushes this crap in Windows Home users, because they know those people have no idea what to do with it.
“Downhill” in the sense of falling into a gorge.
Win 11 has as many wins as blunders
Well, I used to be quite positive about Windows 11. The WSL thing is cool, being able to use bash and Linux tools. The hypervisor thing is cool, enabling fast virtual machines. And the styling is all round better than any previous Windows at least since Windows 7. But then I've had systems broken by updates more than once recently, everything feels slow, applications hang all the time, the Start menu still doesn't work, even opening File Explorer leaves me wondering whether it noticed my mouse click, I have to fight it to create a local user account instead of a Microsoft account, fight it to avoid unwanted tracking, fight it to stop the ads popping up in all kinds of corners by running a network-wide DNS filter which reports huge amounts of requests to Microsoft telemetry domains, fight it to make sure file don't end up in OneDrive, and it still can't handle USB sticks reliably, it still steals focus constantly from wherever I'm typing, there are far too many services eating up resources, and so on.
It's just constant low-level frustration that I just don't have with other operating systems, because Microsoft has cut out QA and spent years prioritizing marketing strategies, gimmicks and cosmetics instead of improving the things that matter to users.
Yep, I've said this before.
Windows 7 was the last great OS by microsoft.
It was light enough to not be a bother on even used hardware.
It was exceedingly stable and didnt need regular reformat and reinstalls like all previous windows OS's.
Didnt need to be constantly rebooted every time you exited a big task like previous Windows.
and you were able to do pretty much anything on it easily and without much fuss.
and, outside of like driver installs, the OS pretty much stayed out of your way.
It was brilliant. It was the best.
It was the peak of the curve. 3.11/95/98/ME/NT/XP all built up to 7, and 8/10/11 are all falling further and further away from 7.
The only reason to get rid of windows 7 is that there was no further way to monetize it since it had pretty good market saturation. If it wasnt for that Win7 would probably be the default OS for another 10+ years.
2000 is a huge omission from that list. Windows 2000 on the NT kernel is really what solidified modern Windows.
How badly did Vista hurt you?
That and ME is a huge dip in that curve.
Yes
And Aero was amazing. Those glassy status bars yassss.
There's the RAM limit that would need addressing. Also UEFI struggles with the Windows 7 splash screen, but that could be replaced with a simpler logo.
I dont want to do the whole "640K ought to be enough for anybody", but I cant imagine most home users, average and production, hitting the ram limit of windows 7 which is like 200gb or there abouts.
I would think anyone running loads that would require that much are probably running linux, like servers and such.
but even so, I'm sure it could have been expanded if there was an actual need.
Oh, I didn't realize Pro and beyond had such higher ram limits compared to home, til.
Best looking for sure.
8.1 was a gem
https://time.com/12854/microsoft-to-take-windows-xp-off-life-support-despite-its-29-market-share/
XP was a whopping 29% at EOL which is impressive to me that 7 is only 3%. But it makes sense that 10 has such a large market share since it was free and ran on (almost) everything that ran 7.
this is full EOL not like normal user EOL, normal user EOL ended in 2020.
I think a large part of it is how most of the machines that could run 7 can run everything after 7 (maybe just need more RAM), but many many MANY machines running XP couldn’t move forward because the CPU or the integrated graphics just couldn’t take it.
My hard drive couldn't take all the background shit in 10, it would literally stutter scanning my files. When I tried to disable the anti-virus and it told me "I'm sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that"