Nostalgia

Yep. It feels weird to be nostalgic for windows 7, but it was honestly not bad. I think the reason why the loss of aero glass feels cold and sterile is because it honestly is. The whole metro/material design thing is just garbage. I don't want buttons that look like abstract squares, I want buttons that look like buttons. What brain-dead designer honestly likes minimal design over skeumorphism?

The aero interface was a really good addition, in the early days of it, it sucked because it required alpha blending which wasn't very optimized in graphics cards of the era. So even if it was supported, it ran like shit and ate performance.

I liked Vista. I can still point to examples of stuff in Windows 7 which were broken that worked perfectly fine in Vista. AFAIK, that stuff was never fixed because it was a niche item that most people didn't bother with.

I've been up, down, inside and out of all of these OSes throughout my time in IT, and I can see all the problems. The sidebar/widgets in Vista were a mistake, poorly implemented fluff that consumed too many resources for what they could realistically do. If they were a lot lighter in terms of performance demands, then they would have been fine. Beyond that 7 was basically a reskinned Windows Vista, with some "updates". You could get the same updates for Vista by the time 7 came out, and it made Vista quite reasonable.

IMO, the biggest problem Vista faced wasn't that it was bloated or slow or buggy (though it was very buggy at the beginning - again, mostly fixed with patches by the time 7 landed), it was that Vista was built for the best computers at the time, with the idea that everything would improve to the point where the best computers "today" would become the minimum standard tomorrow. They were right of course, but most people were buying the cheapest HP, Dell, Acer, etc computers they could find with Intel Celeron processors and basically no graphics hardware worth a damn.... They came shipped with Vista and it sucked because you bought a shit PC. The industry was going through a bargain basement type of phase where there were a lot of "discount" CPUs coming out. Before Celeron, you bought an Intel Pentium something or other, and they were all the same. You couldn't get a premium Pentium processor, or a discount Pentium processor.... Celeron was the first foray into what would become Intel atom, or at most the core i3. Intel was looking to expand into the budget households at a time when Microsoft put out their most demanding version of Windows. So people snapped up these Celeron shit boxes pre-installed with Vista and to nobody's surprise, it sucked.

So Microsoft cobbled together a new, somewhat less demanding UI, threw away the widgets, and released the same thing as Windows 7. By the time it hit shelves, most people had figured out (specifically OEMs) that the Celeron wasn't just a cheaper Intel CPU, it was handicapped. So the focus was turned to the core series of CPUs, and away from the hobbled Celeron line.

Look, Celeron had a place, just like Intel Atom. In consumer desktops, is not that place. Something like a point of sale, yeah, that's fine. A glorified web browser or kiosk, sure. All good. A multitasking desktop? Not so much. But OEMs put that shit in everything, and they stopped doing that pretty quickly.

I very successfully ran a core 2 duo system on Vista for a long time in my younger years. 4G of RAM, Nvidia GPU... It worked really well, and I used it for many years. It was even a laptop. I still have it, it still works, but I have more powerful systems, so it's sitting in a protective case and has been untouched for many years at this point. That system was my daily driver for pretty much the entirety of college. I also had a core 2 duo at home, but I spent most of my days on campus with my laptop.

It was excellent.

Yet, everyone praises Windows 7, despite it having features that were non-functional for its entire lifespan, which people either didn't notice, or didn't care that those things didn't work. I don't hate 7. I still think that it's UI and everything was superior over 8/8.1, and that it was a really good OS for average use. As an administrator and a power user, I'm happy on 10. I also used 8/8.1 for a while and though it was functional, it was pretty painful overall. Especially compared to 10.

Don't get me started on W11.

Aero was peak. If I could get Windows 7 with dark mode then I'd bust

Nope, sorry if unpopular, I don't want my buttons round and volumetric. (Classic windows theme user here) Windows 7 worked great tho

W7 was the last version where I felt like a normal user could have full control. I could do updates once a week without having to worry about setting safe hours. Settings weren't duplicated and scattered across multiple locations and UI styles. As far as I remember there were very few un-uninstallable features, it was the OS and what ever the user wanted. No McAffee demo, Candy Crush, OneDrive, XBox, Spotify, etc.

DOS->95->98->98SE->XP->7->REGRETREGRETREGRET

My relationship with windows in a nutshell.

I did love Aero. And Aero Snap was legit useful and remains so. macOS for whatever reason has had trouble implementing what I would now consider an essential feature: at least a basic ability to drag to the side of your screen for some basic tiling (yes... I know later versions have a "tiling" feature, but it is as if they looked at Aero Snap and said "wow, so complicated" and purposefully made it dumb).

Also, just use Linux.

I had good times with windows 7. It felt good.

But my heart was with the tonka-toy hot mess of XP and themed winamp skins.

One of the main reasons I bailed to Linux is that I got so bored of staring at 10s functional but personality-less interface (which struggled even within it's own constraints to provide a useable darkmode and a non-eye-searing bright mode).

And now I have simple, but human. It's like wearing a tailored suit rather than one off the rack, and in this drawn out analogy, I think XP was like having fun in the dress up box at the back of a charity store.

what if i told you you can have this on linux?

https://store.kde.org/p/1012735/

Strong agree

It was definitely more fun to play with. And easier to modify to your needs.

Windows 7 was my favorite, but people forget Windows 7 wasn't good on launch either. Aero was just too intensive for the hardware it released on and 7 was a band aid for Vista.

Windows 7 is awesome on modern hardware, but it's too late now.

Windows 7 from a usability standpoint was such cancer. But I do 100% miss the aesthetic of the time :(

Also rip the old internet / search engines

Yep, 7 was the last good version of Windows and the GUI is a big part of that.

I love 7. It's the last good version of Windows. I didn't use Linux as much during the Win 7 years. Search still sucked though.

Man, Windows 7 was great. All the excellent parts of Vista (and contrary to popular belief, the were many excellent things about that OS), and none of the nasty. Although that can be somewhat attributed to computing power having caught up by the time 7 was released.

I remember switching from Vista to 7 fulltime as soon as the beta came out. Even then, it was faster and more stable than Vista on the same hardware.

Coincidentally, Windows 7 was around for a whole lot of good times in my life..

Windows 2000 was the last version I thought was on the correct path, simply for it being the last version that did not require online activation.

Microsoft seems to be consistent with every other version being good. Granted they can't count... 3.1, 98, xp, 7, 10, 12...

I just got this set up in virtualbox and am planning on using jt for things. What things I will find out later.

I'm one of these people who turn off transparency effects at the earliest convenience. Everything else, fine, but don't go changing even a single pixel of a window because of what's behind it in an unrelated window. It's distracting

It was my last Windows too. I used it until shortly before the end of Extended Support, stubbornly refusing to upgrade.

I had been running Dualboot with Ubuntu for a while, but something bricked my bootloader (I didn't bother investigating just what nor trying to fix it) and I decided the time was as good as any to take the leap and go fully Linux.

I'd love to say I never looked back, but every now and then I'm tinkering to get something to run and think of the days when the question "will it work?" was reserved for complex mod setups in Skyrim. The compatibility tools have gotten a lot better and I've gotten more experienced and confident with them and the system itself, but there are days where I miss the comfort.

Still, the newer Windows versions never appealed enough to consider going getting, and they're growing less and less appealing with each new update. I'm using Win10 at work and it has only cemented my conviction to not get it for myself.

For me it's the reverse. Windows 2000, for me, was the best looking windows to date. Windows vista, XP, and indeed aero felt child like, non-serious, unprofessional.

Funny considering I still remember people specifically hating on XP and 7 for looking too "toy like".

The more things change the more they stay the same.

I like my win10 🤷