Nowadays Windows is filled with adware and is fairly slow, but it wasn’t always like this. Was there a particular time where a change occurred?
Windows Vista was the start in my eyes. XP (pro) was amazing. And then Vista came out and it broke a lot of things. Security was garbage, applications would constantly lose root files
Vista only lasted 2 years before they went back and turned it into Windows 7 with a few small tweaks, but more or less the exact same thing
98, XP, 7, 10: Good.
ME, Vista, 8, 11: Bad.
It’s Star Trek Movies all over again. We just need to hang on for Windows 12.
98 still had plenty of jank, but it was worlds better than 95. I would add 3/3.11 to the “good” list if only because that was basically the only other option for a lot of people and it did what it needed to. I don’t recall personally seeing windows 1 or 2.
edit: I guess I could throw NT mostly into the good section, but I mostly just did tech support for it rather than using it.
12 is in a weird cybersecurity limbo. It’s supposed to have a top-notch built in anti-virus and firewall, but Microsoft has said the same thing for Vista, 7, 8, 10, and 11. Yet systems are still getting compromised. If Microsoft included a VPN with insurance guarantee of function, I’d be 1000% on board
Windows Defender is actually really good for the common person. If you’re doing highly risky things then perhaps getting better software would be warranted. But if your doing low risk activates, Windows defender is pretty great.
Also, that’s not what VPNs do; you can still download ransomware through a VPN tunnel.
If you just want opinions then I would say Windows 7.
It was excellent.
By Windows 10, though, they had moved to tiles and there were influences from tablets and mobile on the main OS, which was still terrible on those devices.
And it’s been downhill since then.
Probably when the MBAs appeared at their offices.
Depending on who you ask, Vista or 8.
+1 for 8
That’s where they started to suck
NT 3.5 was the last version I’d consider “good” without reservation.
Vista, no question
To be honest I’d go as far back as XP and say that was fine, 7 was also but I’ve never liked the start menu etc since and the forced updates really just wind me up.
From the very beginning, it always had particular features which were designed to make things worse for the users for some business reason for Microsoft. After XP, though, the work in the core OS was basically done - it wasn’t slow or lacking important features or unstable (relatively speaking, at least), and so the only changes being made to it from then on were adding crappiness to it for some reason related to business priorities or just simple stupidity. And so, it entered its slide.
After XP, though, the work in the core OS was basically done
There were a lot of big things happening in computer hardware: migration to 64-bit instruction sets and memory addressing, multicore processors, the rise of the GPU. The security paradigm also shifted to less trust between programs, with a lot of implementation details on encryption and permissions.
So I’d argue that Windows has some pretty different things going on under the hood from what it was 20 years ago.
When was Windows 1 released?
every other version is good
Bill Gates? Is that you?
Nope. That’s an old meme, that still checks out. There is still hope for Windows 12.
Microsoft has always made windows good… … … For them.
It’s weird to not see any posts about Azure. I remember watching a keynote from Microsoft’s CEO several years ago where he explicitly said the company’s focus was on Azure and cloud applications, and that the role of Windows was simply to get you there. That’s it. This is also inline with comments about Win7 being the last good OS because that’s about when the transition started.
Windows 2000 was the peak - rock solid with no visual fluff. XP was 2000 with a childish skin on it and it’s all downhill from there.
I’ve always believed that 2k was the best software they ever produced.
Nah, that would surely be a game or something. Maybe Age of Empires II?
Naw, the best software they’ve ever produced is 6502 BASIC.
Though Flight Simulator does get an honorable mention.
I remember all the nicknames from when XP came out. I don’t remember which was more common; disco windows, or teletubby windows.
In my neck of the woods it was called fisher price windows lol
Oh man that was one of the few windows distros I never felt too compelled to reinstall. Perf just never degraded that much with a reasonably defragged drive (jesus I am dating myself with that statement)
windows 8 is a strong candidate, because that was their huge push into trying to remodel the OS in the image of mobile OSes. you had to perform quite the exorcism to get it functional. i skipped Vista so I’m not the best source on this but my understanding is that the issue with Vista is less that it was loaded with dark patterns and trying to be a walled garden and more just an unfortunate time to be an OS with the technology and security landscapes changing.
of course, while the base OS wasn’t necessarily always the problem, Microsoft has anti-competitive practices going back even further and you could argue Windows stopped being good when MS started bundling Internet Explorer with it, so it all depends where you draw the line. might be safest to say their last truly good OS was MSX-DOS just because they abandoned it before they could do anything scummy
Best home screen ever
According to South Park the movie, Windows 98
Any long-time windows users frustrated with how things are going really should try installing Linux Mint and just see how it goes. No need to nuke windows, just dual boot for now.
There are plenty of things that can end up keeping somebody on Windows, and admittedly I have not switched over all my machines at home yet. But for general usage, it’s such a night and day difference between the OS designed to be nice to use and the OS designed according to a complex matrix of corporate goals. And that’s using a distro that’s the opposite of stripped down and light weight.
I’m able to dual boot at work, and at this point I only fire up windows occasionally to make sure it doesn’t get out of date and isolated from the network or something. Even using outlook and doing video calls on Teams works great with the web versions in Firefox.
Not really slower, just more shit going on under the hood than ever before. Considering all of the novel ways to attack the operating system, the ubiquity and level of integration of computing in everything, the OS is a much higher value target than it used to be back in the days of Xp-7. However, MS has introduced numerous security features and significantly improved the built in AV. 10/11 is a hell of a lot more secure, but there is a performance cost to that. That and the software we run on top of it has only gotten more resource hungry and complex as well. There are also things that you might hate but are worlds better than they used to be. Updates are a lot faster, support automatic rollback and are practically flawless compared to the broken mess they used to be. We now have things that were never possible before, like first party tools to convert a MBR/BIOS-boot system to UEFI boot.
I’ll concede the point about service advertisements, however depending on the edition that is suppressable. MS is not alone in its sinful capitalism however, MacOS is full of stuff like that too, they’re just sneakier/more subtle about it. MS will have you griping about their promoted services or apps; Apple will have you licking their boots and not realizing it because you’ve deluded yourself. The only operating systems that are really free are the ones no company fully owns. I work with multiple different operating systems in an IT job, and the notion that it is acceptable to run old versions of Windows in this day and age or that they were objectively better is just nostalgic horseshit. It was always a corporate product, you’re just chafing against that now.
Massive overhead for no reason is what “slower” means.
Linux has better security and even heavy distros don’t come anywhere close to being the massive resource hog Windows is. For “features” that downgrade the experience.
You know what’s also good “built in AV”? Good design with code that’s open to review. There’s not nearly as much performance cost to good security if you start from a good foundation. Saying windows is slower because it’s doing more security and more anti-virus is like saying I only run slow because I trip over my own feet. Like, no shit, but that’s no excuse.
And singing the praises of updates and rollback systems that are like a decade behind everything else and still a consistent pain point for users is a little bit of weird fanboyism too.
