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Comment by kgwxd | Hacker News Reader

Windows releases always alternates between horrible and good enough. 11 will fester on some machines for a while like 8, Vista and ME did. Enterprise will stick to 10, and anyone who cares enough to fight dark patterns every time Windows update runs. 12 will likely be good enough for everyone to upgrade. 14 (they'll skip #13) will be garbo, 15 will be ok. Sun goes up, sun goes down.

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Windows 10 was a horrible release. With the passage of time, it has become just about usable (although not really in my opinion). When it came out, though, it had an immense amount of bloatware (candy crush), idiotic auto-updating, sample-your-DNA levels of spyware, Cortana rubbish, identical settings in two places, and a whole host of other unpleasantness. All for what, the dark theme? I fucking despised Windows 10. This myth of alternate-releases-good died with Windows 10. Heck, Windows 8.1, with it's full screen start menu, was still a better release in my opinion.

IMO Vista was better than people give it credit for. ME and 8 were the truly bad releases (I used both, ME is super unstable and 8’s UI is a total mess).

Vista was fine except for all the OEMs installing it on $300 Office Depot shitboxes. I still miss being able to have My Computer as a menu across the top of my desktop.

Vista ran positively well on decent hardware.

On a relatively recent (at the time) processor and ideally more than 1GB of RAM and it was absolutely fine.

It's reputation for instability was heavily due to early NVIDIA WDDM drivers being utterly crashtastic - this is something that did eventually get resolved. At the time I had an ATI card and it was perfectly stable.

It was teeth-grindingly bad even on 2GB of RAM.

If you could ignore the UI, 8 was actually a great OS underneath...which is why 8.1 was pretty solid, they fixed the UI

No, it wasn't. At least in my experience, Vista with 2 GB of RAM was dog slow on a mechanical hard drive. So slow, that I eventually replaced it with Linux and got my start into Linux in the first place.

Re: Candy Crush - technically, those icons on the start menu were served up via XML tile specifications, and it wasn't installed until you clicked.

Source: Over the years, an app I had my hand in was on one of the rotations.

Doesn't matter. It'd be one thing if I was talking about some cheap Chinese Android phone, but I'm not. It's Windows. It's supposed to be the pinnacle of Microsoft. If not, atleast something with a modicum of integrity. But seems Microsoft disagrees with that.

I don't care how they technically implement the icons. It's my start menu, and not their billboard. If they want ad space, they better set up a monthly payment to my account.

My experience with 11 is that is just like 10 but with bad UI changes. 11 is stable and runs everything I need.

I think 11 is more about changing hardware requirements, requiring a TPM. The UI garbage seems more like an opportunity to try new things, they'll figure out that people don't like these new things.

Yes, the UI is why I’m not planning on upgrading. I prefer the square windows of 10 to the knock-off MacOS theme that is 11. If I wanted MacOS I would be running it

Knockoff macOS theme? I'm in.

> people don't like these new things

I personally don't like the lack of old things. Namely being able to drag to the taskbar. That's baked into a lot of my workflows, and I can't believe they removed such a useful feature.

IMO it all went down the toilet with 10 and I don't see the next "good" release ever happening again.

8 and 8.1 were the last death throes of decent design, and then they started making a mess of everything in Windows 10. Not only didn't they reverse it with Windows 11, they doubled down on it when they had a perfect chance to rebrand with a "back to the classics" comeback to Windows 7-like UI without backlash.

Their trajectory is locked in. Barring a miracle and re-prioritising on their users, "good" Windows releases are dead forever. Looking forward to the LGR Retrospective on "Windows 7, the last good version of Windows" in about 10 years time.

I'm convinced there's an alternate universe where Windows 9 brought all the improvements of Windows 10 without treating the user like a contemptible moron.

I'm struggling to think of any improvements since Win7. The only thing that might qualify is WSL, but that's still experimental and buggy (yes, I know some people have had success with it, anyway).

IIRC Win7 was the one that started installing most drivers without any user effort, which was really nice. It also bloated minimum disk size to many times that of XP (or a very full-fat Linux install, so the drivers can't be the reason, since that also includes tons of drivers) but if you had the space, it was worth the trade-off.

Amen. I'm pretty sure 7 is the last Windows ill ever feel happy about installing.

I think that it's really sad that I will mostly agree with you.

Yeah, I think actually 11 is just a testing ground for 12.

Exactly. Like Vista was laying the table for 7.

It just occurred to me that I avoided Vista entirely by buying a Mac in 2007 (before moving back to Windows for Win7), and in 2020 I bought another Mac, which will allow me to avoid Windows 11.

Talk about timing...

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