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Comment by NikkiA | Hacker News Reader

Win 11 and Vista have been unfairly maligned, with some minor tweaks (and start11) both are solid performant windows releases.

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Vista was indeed fine. I used it for many years and had nary a problem with it. The problem with 11 isn't the core (everyone seems to agree that is fine), it's that Microsoft insists on putting ads and other user-hostile BS in.

I basically skipped windows XP entirely, only seeing it on other people’s computers.

I staying on a thinkpad R31 with win2k until I got a R61 (4gb ram) with vista on it several months after vista’s release. At that point it seemed like driver and other early teething had been worked out, so my experience was pretty positive.

When I eventually moved to win7 I didn’t notice any real difference.

I think the vista hate is well earned. Remember when Microsoft had to trick users into trying it by calling it 'Mojave' instead?

Also the unending and relentless UAC prompts.

It felt like malicious compliance. Oh, you want security? OK, here you go, hope you choke on it.

Windows 11 is the only version of Windows I’ve used where the taskbar routinely crashes on login and refuses to load.

Windows Vista was essentially unusable on release unless you had very high-end hardware.

A couple of weeks after release the first step after getting a new computer was changed from "downloading firefox" to "downgrade to windows xp". Unironically, many people did that.

And that unusuability was mostly due to the driver model change, once native Vista drivers appeared it performed better than XP/XP64 unless you were running old video hardware that couldn't handle aero - in which case you were still better off running Vista with the classic UI, although that did entail forgoing the Luna styling.

Even with native WDDM drivers it performed poorly in desktop graphics, because Vista also removed all GDI hardware acceleration support. This caused many 2D graphics operations to execute in software, or worse, an even slower mix of hardware and software rendering. Windows 7 improved on this by re-adding hardware acceleration for some GDI primitives and adding aperture windows to reduce DWM memory footprint.

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