I could see staying with Windows 7. That was the best version Microsoft ever made. Microsoft finally figured out how to make it stable, and it didn't have all the ad and cloud crap nailed in. You can run current Firefox, current Thunderbird, and current LibreOffice, which covers the basics. Most Windows software still works.
Personally Windows 2000 was the only Microsoft operating system I’ve ever liked. And I’m including Microsoft Basic in that scope as well.
XP did mature into something that was decent, but the initial release of XP was just an uglier and more system hungry version of 2000. And thus XP drive me to run Linux as my primary OS.
But back when 2000 was around, most other OSs were terrible. Linux was getting close but still had a lot of rough edges. BeOS was awesome but you could tell it was a dying company. Apple were struggling too: MacOS 9 was less stable than Windows 9x (and that’s saying something!) and OS X took a couple of releases to really take off. Atari were dead. Amiga was basically only ram by enthusiasts. Yet Windows 2000 arrived and it felt genuinely like a next generation OS for its time.
Windows 2000 took NT4 and focused on bettering the stuff that didn’t work rather than breaking the stuff that did. Often little changes like adding short cut keys to Notepad.exe. Whereas every version of Windows since has done far too much GUI overhaul (and always to the detriment of UX in my personal opinion) while doing very little to improve my core complaints with the OS.
I get this is going to be my subjective opinion, just like Windows 7 is yours. But I did wasn’t to share a counterpoint to the praise of Windows 7.
windows 11 removed many of the previous keyboard shortcuts eg ms paint annoys me so much now the keyboard accessibility degraded badly in win 11
Microsofties: Please put them ALL back to match Windows10, acknowledge the heritage of the previous version, and the years of keyboard muscle memory now flushed down the drain
example, let me use the arrow keys again in popup dialogs (arrow left+right keys now do nothing... have to use the tab or shift tab or mouse in dialogs)
Windows 7 also had the best customization/theming, followed by XP. Both 7 and XP had some amazing looking community-made .msstyle themes but 7's theme engine allowed for things like full transparency while XP was limited to 1-bit transparency. This was nice in that it offered UI looks that were more modern than the classic theme yet more understated than the gaudy Luna/Aero.
Then Windows 8 came along and decided flat squares were the only option anybody could use, removing theme transparency support altogether.
And Win7 Aero looked so good stock I never felt the need to go hunting for themes.
Then the abomination that is Windows 8 came along and took an enormous and terribly corrosive dump on the the party. Windows has been a conundrum to me ever since. It just doesn't feel right anymore like it used to with 2k, XP, and Win7.
I'm a bit sad about the decline, having spent many thousands of hours completely plugged in to Windows.. Every wish, only a click or keystroke away.
R.I.P. FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8
(for the youngn's: this is the everlasting devils0wn pirate cd key for Windows XP serial number. How awesome would it be if it also worked for a future version of Windows?)
This truly has me nostalgic for the days of breaking my computer trying to replace the theme, system icons, explorer shell, etc with untested crap to make it look cooler.
But then they notice they cant build a dark mode and end up reinventing it all poorly. I've come to the conclusion that 99% of the time "technical debt" particularly in old stable code that hasn't been touched in years is translation for "Its complex and I don't understand it". Particularly when asked to add what seems like a trivial feature.
SOS as always, the new guy knows better than the old one, but by time time all the edge cases get reimplmented it consumes 100x the ram and runs 1/10 as fast and is just as unmaintainable, if not worse because now its written with 20 layers of OO or functional abstractions in some interpreted language that is a giant mess. Which is why when the next new guy joins its all "garbage code".
Sometimes KISS is best, and it should generally be a requirement that before your allowed to throw the code away you have to refactor it a couple of times.
It's not like they can just throw this stuff away anyway. The theming support is everywhere throughout the API, and since Microsoft is a backwards compatibility company, they can't just change APIs incompatibly because that inevitably breaks existing software.
No. 7 was a rollback on Vista. The best one which was not a step back but rather a step forward was Windows 2000. (Some even swear by NT4, which I feel also has some merit.)
Yes, 2000 was by far my favorite Windows. Very solid, very clean style.
I have a burning hatred for the visual design of Windows 7 (and Vista to a lesser degree) - it may have been technically great, but the design felt appropriate for a toothpaste, not for an operating system. I could only stand XP with the 2000 style as well. What the hell were they thinking?
I consider Windows 2000 the top that Microsoft reached with regard to style (both look and feel).
But you can choose "Windows Classic" as a style in Windows 7 and it will not to be too different, although some thing may be annoying.
For example, Windows 2000 was more keyboard-friendly. In Explorer, you edit the path on the top input, then you tab and you move between files. Since Windows XP that has been increasing, and its 5 tabs in Windows 7. Pratically unusable
The control panel is not yet fucked up like in Windows 8+ but still you can guess the year in which the entry was written.
On the other side, the start menu is better because you have a search field that works well (no web stupid web searches there).
My chief complaint about Win7 is how much slower it seemed to perform than Win2k on late 90s/early 2000s hardware / on a virtual machine. (Also, IIRC, the licensing terms for Win2k were better regarding running on virtual machines.)
You can switch Win7 to classic theme and pretend it's an improved Win95. That's what I do in my VMs since I don't need to be burning cycles and RAM on eyecandy.
The theme in Windows 2000 and its classic counterpart in XP 64-bit used a darker shade of blue for the background, which I always tried to hand-select on the systems that I had (and weren't running these versions).
There was also some tiny difference between the active window colors as well, IIRC.
Vista was a necessary evil on Microsoft's end. While yes some things weren't great (Aero), the main issue was always drivers.
Microsoft had to switch the ways drivers work for some very necessary security reasons. This led to many hardware manufacturers just not making new drivers or slapping together the shitiest thing and hoping it worked. Took a few years but eventually everyone had new hardware (with decent compatible drivers), at which point 7 came out which is basically Vista with a new skin.
Hell, at the end its life an up to date Vista was actually pretty decent.
Their other issue was giving in to Intel on lowering the requirements of a "Windows Vista Capable" sticker, so a lot people were buying hardware for Vista that really shouldn't have been recommended, especially at the start of Vista's era.
Also the start of COM everywhere, after WinDev managed to win over DevDiv regarding Longhorn.
So instead of having everyone working together to make an OS where managed stacks take the main role, as Google has managed to push no matter what, regarding Android and ChromeOS, we got Longhorn's demise and its ideas being redone in COM and C++, WinDev darlings.
Win2K was the only version of Windows I ever ran as a daily driver. I had access to Macs from an early age (since System 7 and through all the processor architecture transitions, except I haven’t gotten an M-series yet), but sold my Mac and couldn’t afford a replacement for some time around the XP transition.
My completely unqualified ranking…
- 2k: excellent, top Windows
- XP: fine, if you turn off all the UI changes, but not appealing over 2k in any way I can recall
- Vista: didn’t use it, but I think it got a bad rep for efforts that should’ve been lauded
- 7: good enough, mostly didn’t suck for web compatibility testing
- 8: I’m one of the weirdos who found it very compelling… but not enough to actually use it. I’m sure it was as bad in practice as everyone who used it thinks, but I really appreciated the bold attempt at a UI for any device. And I’d been very taken by earlier Metro.
- 10: seemed like a perfectly reasonable reversion to evolving 7, but also seemed like it got weirder and worse as they dug into no new versions.
- 11: new version doesn’t seem to have improved things on that front.
- 3.x-98: I didn’t like them, but objectively they were probably just as good as their contemporary Mac offerings just catering to different markets
Extra lulz. I understood ME to be a stopgap in the NT transition, where 2k was supposed to be the consumer/corporate merge but that was delayed til XP for reasons… I think drivers? But of course there was IE strategy.
Maybe I’m just softening because I haven’t had to deal with IE for so long, but I really do think it’s an incredible achievement that MS transitioned Windows with as little disruption as they did, with all sorts of good and bad incentives. It’s a wonder Windows even still works, much less keeping such a large majority of install base. Obviously it’s not my favorite software in the world, but I’m thoroughly impressed with what the devs have pulled off through a cartoonish timeline of priority shifts with unbelievable backcompat expectations.
- 95/98 are a OS on their own although still having quite some old DOS code in there.
All others versions are following the NT tree.
NT 4.0 for non-x86 hardware deserves a honorable mention despite the fact i'm absolutely not a Microsoft fan.
It was quite impressive during it's time, but hardly to be seen anywhere.
I lumped 95 in too! Though I should have used my handy en-dash and consistent formatting of the 3.x–9x (i.e. not NT, not ME, more than a word processor).
I agree 95 was a huge step relatively, but agree it was ~on par with my preferred Mac contemporary. Granted it does deserve mention for licensing music by Brian Eno… and a button licensed by another famous musician.
Yes 2003 64-bit was the first official 64-bit x86 windows and is probably the largest advance over 2000, and there really hasn't been anything since that is as large a technical capability addition.
I'm on the fence, but frequently say that 2000 was probably the best. Then I have to qualify that maybe the preview 64-bit XP or full win2003 might be first or in the running because 64-bit is such a major/critical feature to modern computer that if you wanted to sell a modern "Windows for business" release you would have to pick one of the 64-bit versions rather than rolling back to 2k.
I too ran 2k3 (64-bit of course on my athlon64) for a while as a desktop and technically it was fantastic, but eventually ended up switching back to XP with a few hacks to just avoid the general issue that a number of pieces of desktop software refused to run on a "server OS" without buying the server license for $$$$.
As to "the best OS Microsoft has ever made," it was OS/2 (which they abandoned in favor of the "hugely successful" Windows 3.0 which was clearly inferior on all technical accounts).
I'm still running it on a PC I use all the time and it's great. I do use 0patch and some other tricks to mitigate the obvious downside. If Win10 had a permanent off switch for all telemetry and better control over upbreak timing I'd switch... starting to run into software I care about dropping support (the Chrome deadline coming up is heartbreaking).
Groan, the luddite mentality about Windows is and has always been out of control, with so many people insisting on living on decade-old software for silly pedantic reasons like "cloud crap" that can be turned off in 5 seconds. Don't move my cheese, nothing else can possibly be better, Windows peaked 10 years ago.
No, my Windows 11 system doesn't use a Microsoft Account. No, I don't get ads on Windows (web search and suggestions are off, e.g., turn Windows Search settings to "classic"). All of the annoying stuff takes very little time to disable. And let's not pretend that Windows 7 didn't have people looking to turn off things about it they found annoying. [1]
Don't forget that the system requirements for Windows actually decreased after 7 when Microsoft optimized it for lower spec devices. Windows 7 isn't actually all that well optimized compared to 8/8.1/10/11. Windows 10 and 11 are much better able to take advantage of hardware enhancements on modern chips that are vastly different than the hardware available over 10 years ago. How many x86 processors had big.LITTLE architecture in 2009? Because that's what Intel is shipping now.
Don't forget about all the things that are massively antiquated about Windows 7 like the legacy control panel with no search function, lack of multiple desktops, lack of basic built-ins like a PDF reader, garbage command prompt and powershell, troubleshooting wizard that did nothing, Windows Update still being relatively disruptive and unreliable.
Don't forget about all the things that are actually REALLY good about Windows 11 like the game bar, task manager, Linux tooling and aliases (can you run ls ~/ | grep example in a Windows 7 shell without additional software?)/PowerShell 7/SSH being preinstalled, expanded and improved window management, very clean and minimal visual design, Windows Hello biometrics (I can SSH to my Linux server with a key stored in 1Password, automatically authenticated with my fingerprint when I run the SSH command (I don't have to open 1Password manually), using the built-in Windows SSH client, can Windows 7 do that??)
Windows 7 looked good because Vista was so unfinished and inappropriately matched to the contemporary hardware of the time, but in reality it wasn't anything particularly special and had plenty of missing and frustrating aspects.
I agree. But the peak is Windows 10 (BTW it already has the game bar). Windows 11 seems like a small step back in those things: I haven’t found a way how to show seconds when you click on bottom right datetime. I’ve used it countless times. Another annoying thing is the right click and hiding all things in something like Show more options. And the last one is drag&drop between windows. E.g. I was used to drag the file over the icon in taskbar, which activated/opened that that program. Now it doesn’t seem to work anymore. I personally haven’t noticed any significant improvement between 10 & 11. Maybe just more options for window snapping.
> so many people insisting on living on decade-old software for silly pedantic reasons
But what could possibly be the point of changing something that works?? Buy a new machine, spend weeks or months reinstalling software, try to find alternatives for things that no longer work, and for what benefit?
Yes one can run `ls ~/ | grep example` in a Windows 7 shell, and ok, it requires additional software, but once that additional software has been installed, it is done. What's the point of installing a new OS so that functionalities that you already have, become "native"? Who cares?
Same for PDF (Sumatra) or SSH (putty), etc. etc. I have a stable system that I know intimately, on old hardware that I also know well. I don't see the need to be running after new things like a dog after a ball.
Under that logic I'd still be using my Macintosh Classic.
I see this the other way around: Microsoft released enhancements and security patches for $0, and my computer can run the software.
What could possibly be the point of not changing my software where a new version that does more things is available for free?
Imagine a car manufacturer offering to give you a new car and take you old one with no significant catch and saying no. Why would I do that?
Resistance of change for resistance of change's sake alone is something that is a major pet peeve for me. It represents a negative personality trait in my mind. In my opinion, the day I refuse to use something solely because it's new, different, or scary is the day I've turned into an old grump.
Change isn't friction free, and therefore it isn't "free" except if you count your time for nothing. It takes weeks or months to reinstall things that work fine as they are.
I love new things that are actually new and that bring a clear benefit; Windows 10 isn't "new", it's the same thing with the UI arranged in a slightly different way for no reason.
A computer is like a hammer. When you're used to one, and you suddenly decide to use another one, it takes time to feel its proper balance and use it with the same efficiency as the previous one. You can have two hammers that you use regularly; but changing hammers every year just because there's a new one with a handle in a different color is absurd IMHO.
That comment just shows me you haven't used Windows 10, nor have you used Windows 11. I mean, you're still talking about Windows 10 like it's a new thing. That OS came out 7 years ago!
The feature/enhancement list of Windows 10 and its constant iterative updates and now Windows 11 is probably hundreds of items. How am I supposed to communicate to you that it's more than just a new UI when an operating system is made up of so many different pieces?
It's hard to "win" against arguments like this because your side of the argument amounts to "I haven't seen it but I assume it has to be basically the same" or "from the screenshots I can see it's a new UI and it's basically just Windows."
To win this argument I'd have to come up with some big feature list and hope there are a few that resonate with you, but you can easily dismiss it as "I don't need that."
No, it didn't take me weeks or months to upgrade from Windows 10 to 11. I clicked a button and I walked away. The computer updates itself. Automatically, at night, when I'm asleep.
I upgraded to Windows 11 relatively early and nothing broke. No workflow was disrupted. Windows' backwards compatibility is legendary.
You're looking at this like upgrading isn't worth the lift, but that's backwards. Upgrading is so easy and just gives you more stuff with basically no downside (and Microsoft fixes big complaints about new releases quickly these days because they take feedback and release continuously – they have a whole app just for providing feedback).
I don't want to "win". I'm happy if you are. While I have never used Win11, I have two laptops running Win10 and seldom use them because they're the same, only different (and they apparently won't run Office 2003, which is the last version before that stupid "ribbon" interface that's annoying to no end).
But it's funny the one bug feature you mention is "low level optimization for Intel new chips". So indeed, it's not just a software thing: in order to fully appreciate the greatness of that new OS I would have to buy a new CPU (not free) and all that comes with it.
I don't see the need to do that, but if you want to do it please do! But why does it upset you if others don't want to upgrade, and why would you label them luddites and grumpy old farts, is my question.
I'm regularly amazed at how many people there are on HN that tell on themselves by complaining about ads in Windows. It's like complaining that IKEA furniture is difficult to assemble.
Ironically, I haven't made the jump to 11 yet just because my decade old Dell has an i7 that's been remarkably resilient for the kind of work I do on it.
My favorite thing about Windows is the backwards compatibility. I had a 2005 era Dell laptop that had come with XP. I think I paid $35 for an upgrade to Win7 after running the beta. Had the Win8 beta on there, which upgraded to a full version for free, and eventually upgraded to Win10 freely somehow as well. By that time, it struggled to run more than a web browser, and the internal wifi card no longer functioned, but it was remarkable that the upgrades all just worked.
And I've got some pretty nice Firewire audio hardware that runs flawlessly on Windows 10 despite the last driver for it having been released in 2006.
> I'm regularly amazed at how many people there are on HN that tell on themselves by complaining about ads in Windows.
Maybe it's just me, but it gives me the feeling that the OS is actively working against me. I'm still having some configuration to do on Linux (hybrid graphics are fun and so is audio for my setup), but it's something caused by having so many options and limited time of contributors. On Windows, this is because the OS is trying to extract as much money as possible from me and that kind of adversarial relationship is not what I want to have with software that manages all of my data.
I just think that this argument is always an exaggeration of the amount of hostility commercial software is directing at users, especially reputable commercial software like Windows (we're not talking about some mobile game trying to sell me gambling tokens).
I totally understand that some people prefer FOSS but it seems to turn into portraying commercial software in a distorted way.
For being 100% free as in beer software with no profitable hardware ecosystem behind it (macOS), Windows 11 bothers you relatively minimally, all with things that are easily dismissed.
Selling things isn't by definition amoral or adversarial. Someone who decides to search with Bing or store their data on OneDrive is getting a solution to their problem.
Even open source non-profit products like Firefox and Wikipedia try to sell products or donations to financially support development.
I don't have a problem with commercial software, in fact I pay for quite a bit of it. I don't mind Windows being proprietary, either. However, the problem really is twofold:
The first aspect is that I, as paying user, am getting monetized even further with ads. The default software might be useful, but it's still not what I'm paying money for. If you can't support software at that price, just raise the price instead of deploying sleazy monetization techniques! But for that aspect only I agree; this is dislikeable behavior, but nothing to call Windows adversarial about.
The second problem however, is that Microsoft has crossed the line multiple times now. I have found Skype and Candy Crush (!) installed on a fresh Windows install; the latter definitely falls under "shady mobile game selling gambling tokens". The Windows 7->10 upgrade nags were also far beyond reasonable behavior for what I'd still call "reputable commercial software". Windows will also siphon my data by default and I have no way to fully disable that without third-party software and even then, a new update might include new ways which I then need to keep up with blocking.
Now, I still use Windows for when I need to, but I really don't trust Microsoft with my data anymore. Even if they most likely behave if I spent an hour configuring the system, trusting my data to such a leaky and adversarial platform that has behaved badly multiple times feels like just keeping up an abusive friendship and hoping that nothing goes wrong. YMMV, though, depending on what you like and your threat scenario using Windows might be perfectly fine for you and if so, more power to you!
That being said, yes, most people (in my friend group) did not explicitly pay for Windows, but they bought devices with an included license that the OEM paid for. So they did not directly send money to Microsoft, but they still payed for the OS indirectly (just like they indirectly supported AMD or Intel, for example).
The nice thing about win11 is that you can run all your decade old software on it.
And that's my baseline for an OS: can it run programs. And thanks to the absolute ubiquitous of Windows for the last 30 years everything was made with Windows in mind.
Too many interdependent services and superfluous wan connections that can't be disabled already on windows 7, 2K was the pinnacle of usability and system configurability and sparse use of system resources, with XP closer to 2K than to 7.
7 Mostly was allright because of huge increase in availabe RAM on laptops.
Windows 7 plus an evolution Android like, where COM's role get downplayed and we get .NET bindings for all major workflow, with the same performance focus of .NET Core progress would have been great.
UWP was great from the point of view that .NET Native is what .NET 1.0 should have been, and C++/CX was the very first time Microsoft had anything similar to C++ Builder.
However it was horrible managed, and asking everyone to keep rewriting their code isn't something that makes Windows dev community jump of joy.
Now WinUI is too late for the party, too buggy, too many features lacking.
I really don’t understand everyone’s issue. I get they try to push you towards a cloud account, but you don’t have to have one, and the ads can be much easier excised than the bloatware they used to install.
Every time I do a "big" windows update I get 4-5 nag screens telling me I should sign up and sign in, some of which have "skip" buttons and some of which don't so you have to click "cancel" instead which to most users would probably be scared to do since they'd worry it would cancel everything instead of just "cancelling" the sign in to cloud.
I agree, but you can move around those screens and keep your account offline.
Do I wish they wouldn’t try to funnel you? Sure, but every tech company does this and no-one bats an eye.
I’m not excusing it, just saying it’s standard behaviour in 2022 and objectively I’d rather click through those rare funnels than not if it gets me modern protections like memory isolation and secure boot.
Also I really like the new UI, but I realise I’m an outlier on this.
A simple Google search refutes this. Ok, if you count running some cmd magic as meaning they don't require you to have a Microsoft account, we're never going to agree. For Joe Bloggs, a Microsoft account is required and there is no way around it.
Fair enough. I mean it’s one line in CMD, but I do see your point.
That said, maybe Joe Bloggs is better off. If he’s not savvy enough to know the difference / be able to Google around it, he might be better of with an online account given he’ll probably not understand why certain things don’t work the same on his machine or care about the implications of taking his account online.
