Skipping v9 broke the old "Even number releases bad, odd number releases good" rule of thumb, but the tick-tock (tick-clunk?) rhythm still seems to apply.
While this sentiment is common, I've honestly never had this experience. Every Windows experience I've had post-Me has been a slow but steady improvement in stability.
I have Windows 10 for work and Windows 11 at home and I honestly forget that they are different OSes most of the time. I just do what I need to do on my machines and the OS stays out of the way.
Sure, I could say the right-click menu out-of-the-box is slightly more annoying now, and I've sure I could come up with a list of things like that for most releases at this point. UAC was a major shift, but I needed one.
But overall, there just aren't very memorable differences between the different OSes. Aside from the fact that BSOD occurrences have steadily decreased up until Windows 10 at which point they almost stopped entirely.
Agreed. I actually found Vista to be a massive improvement in stability. It changed how drivers were run in the kernel, so that a driver crashing often wouldn't result in a bluescreen. I had a ton of graphics card bluescreens on XP, and then virtually none with the same hardware after upgrading to Vista.
Windows 11 really isn't that bad, mostly because it's not really a significant change from Windows 10. The default menu layouts changed a little bit, but not in any way you couldn't recreate in Windows 10, nor did they really remove anything such that you can't make Windows 11 feel like Windows 10.
I suspect the driving reason for the version number increase was to make a clear indicator of the OS's support for scheduling the new wave of hybrid core CPUs, and they simply took the opportunity to clean up some miscellaneous small things that wouldn't have been appropriate to include in a minor version release, but wouldn't have warranted a major version release in of themselves, such as changes to adding things to the file-right-click menu.
> Vista64 on a moderately good system with a proper amount of RAM was fantastic for it's time.
Well yeah, a big part of the problem with Vista was the enourmous increase in resource usage compared to XP, which many PCs sold with it were not ready for. That hardware now has enough brute force to make it work doesn't really mean it is not still needlessly inefficient.