this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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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.
Great point. I forgot about that. And compatibility mode was practically worthless. I think I've seen it help maybe once or twice.
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.
Strangely, that generally is how my Linux boxes have been - way less IT guy than when we had WinXP or Win7. You have to use a stable distro however - which TBH is the problem with Win10 and 11 for a lot of people - finding the "stable" version isn't available to home users or is complicated - so you have new OS deployments every 6 months. Windows Updates are now forced and still often have problems or bugs.
That all said, I think we've just got to get used to unstable / rolling release OSs cause "everyone" is doing it. Even Alma is not as stable as previous enterprise linux rebuilds due to Red Hat not releasing point release security updates anymore.
“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.
As far as the performance issues go, I've experienced a lot of those when I first upgraded from 10 to 11. After reinstalling though, the performance has been amazing.
I hate all of the constant advertising of MS products and services, especially in the case of Edge, because so many of those products are genuinely amazing, and people won't give them a chance because it's shoved down their throats.
I agree that it gets bogged down and needs a reinstall sometimes. But after I recently installed it on a new machine that also has Linux, Windows 11 still feels comparatively slow. I get the impression that even out of the box it has too much baggage and unoptimized code. Edge is fast though, and a perfectly good browser. Edge even runs on Linux too, which is surprising.
Edge is just chrome...
you use Linux now, right?
I use Windows a lot of the time, because I need to use several pieces of professional Windows software. But yes, I use Linux some of the time too, and I find it more relaxing.
what distro?
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed most of the time on the desktop, and some Debian and Ubuntu servers.
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We shouldn't accept an OS with comparably sized lists of wins and blunders. Subsequent OSs should be a steady upward trend, perhaps with slight dips here and there.
I mean, that's a decision for the managers or execs at Microsoft, not for me. They released the product with a ton of issues, not us.
Plus, plenty of users are sticking to Windows 10 because it's the better OS for them, whereas Windows 11 has fixed so many long-term issues and introduced enough useful QoL features that make it far better than 10 for me. I think the market share difference compared to previous Windows versions speaks volumes on how badly Microsoft screwed up.
You know the saying: every second version of Windows is ~~good~~ usable.
That hasnt been true for a while.
8 was bad, 10 was bad, 11 is bad.
I think they are trying to ensure that no future Windows is ever good again. I mean, it was Win10 that made me frustrated enough to permanently kick the habit of using Windows.
Same! The two straws that broke the camel's metaphorical back were the stupid functionality of the search bar in the start menu; and the beginning of the removal of local accounts.
Windows 10 legit doesn't work with hard drives. It keeps scanning and scanning endlessly, slowing everything down. If you go down the "disable useless services" rabbit hole you might go too hard and end up with a useless Windows install without being able to remember how you disabled the firewall, for example. It wouldn't let me run the update without the firewall service running.
I just threw NixOS on it and only booted windows once since
I really don’t see the issue with W11. It works fine. As did 10, and 8.1. I’ve not encountered any ads or many of the other shitty things that are constantly reported on.
If you're a technical person, or you run Windows Pro instead of Home, you probably won't see as much crap. But there's a ton of new telemetry/tracking in Win10 that's even worse in 11.
As someone who's been part of OS and software deployment since before WinNT, Win11 is hot garbage unless we do all sorts of preconfig to not make it so.
This isn't really new, just that much worse in 11. With the previous versions of Windows, we didn't have to configure as many Group Policies to restrict as much nonsense. And the home versions of 10/11 are so much worse, especially since they don't support GP, you have to Registry Stamp any changes you want to make to disable all the telemetry garbage - stamps which an update can easily revert. At least GP is reapplied at boot/login.
I don't let my family buy Home versions of Windows. Pro costs more, because it's worth it from a support perspective.
I appreciate the insight. Just curious, do you have a link to things I should be disabling in group policy?
Typically I’m not a fan of modifying that much especially registry wise, as I feel this is a cause for many people’s problems, but I’m not uncomfortable making GP changes if they make sense.
I’m currently using W11 Pro activated with massgravel scripts and I’ve got DNS level blocking set up on my network, although I’m not sure how well that does at blocking telemetry. It’s my second line ad block primarily.