[20240519]

Windows 2000 was great IMO, and peak Windows!

XP was peak if hardware compatibility is important.

Then it went downhill slowly. UI decisions and telemetry and now needing an internet connection and a MS account to install and now Win11 refuses to install on perfectly good but older hardware.

Microsoft cloudifying Office ironically makes going to Linux as a normie fairly easy as Office is the only thing I would miss. And mainly due to it’s dominance rather than it being great.

Windows dark side is a shame as MS as a developer’s company is really good. VS, VSCode, Typescript and C# and F# are awesome. And also some changed to Windows are good.

[Affric]

Occasionally I have to help my father with his windows computer and each time it actually gets worse. Edge. Suggestions.

Like I am sure the actual fundamentals of the OS are fairly high quality but holy shit it sucks to use.

[h4kor]

I had a similar, frustrating experience last weekend trying to copy data from a phone to a windows machine.

Windows is trying to hide all "technical" stuff so hard that it becomes impossible to do anything.

[GuB-42]

I put the peak at Windows 7.

Windows 7 UI is like Windows XP but prettier thanks to GPU acceleration. Compared to the XP generation, it had better security, 64 bit support out of the box, it was an "internet age" version of Windows, but it could still run offline and wasn't too obnoxious with ads, telemetry, etc...

It definitely got downhill after that.

[Zecc]

I mostly agree. But Windows 10 added virtual desktops[0]. Took them long enough!

Its dialog when copying files in nicer as well IMO.

[0] Windows 7 supported up to 4 virtual desktops, but not out-of-the-box: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/des...

[timeon]

> Windows 7 UI is like Windows XP but prettier

Isn't 7 UI basically Vista?

[Aeolun]

Sorta, but Vista was slow and stuttery, so they don’t feel the same.

[p_l]

Windows 7 effectively cleaned up some details, and by the time of windows 7 the vendors shipping broken drivers already had to correct for NT6 changes or deal with their hardware not working.

[pxc]

Is Windows 7 fast on Vista-era hardware?

[routerl]

> Windows 2000 was great IMO, and peak Windows!

> XP was peak if hardware compatibility is important.

It all started with Windows NT 4. It had its own kernel and was enterprise (and network) focused, compared to Windows 98 (which was Windows 95 (which was Windows 3.11 minus the DOS host dependency)) with bolted on network capabilities.

Windows 2000 is literally "Windows NT 5.0", and Windows XP is "Windows NT 5.1". The win95 lineage was decisively killed by Windows Me, after which the NT kernel took over the entire product line.