[malikNF]

Every time I see something about windows7 coming up, I feel a little sad. 7 imo was the last good windows ms came up with. I remember upgrading to it was something worth bragging to your friends in school. There was so much excitement around it. After 7, something felt, broken, new features felt unnecessary, things got more user hostile, the magic, it was just gone!

[benbristow]

Did you have a Windows 7 Launch Party?

https://gizmodo.com/this-incredible-windows-7-launch-party-v...

[BrenBarn]

Yeah. I feel like the main thing was it was the last version that still had essentially user-controlled updates. By default it would auto-update, but you could have it not do that, or have it download the updates but not install them until you decided to, and you could deselect individual updates and just skip them.

I suspect this is linked to its era: it came out on the cusp of the trend of having everything autoupdate on its own initiative. (I just looked it up and Firefox 15 came out around the same time and was the first version to have "silent updates".) This in turn came as some kind of tipping point was reached where it became simpler to assume everyone was always connected to the internet (and have some kind of "emergency mode" for when they weren't) than to assume they weren't (and have some kind of "online mode" for when they were). And that also led to the proliferation of telemetry and other such things that involve using that always-on-ness to talk back to the software company.

I see this as part of a trend away from what I call "bounded transactions" and toward subscription-type models, and I think it's been one of the most corrosive developments in our society. The thing about Win7 was that once you had a computer up and running with it, it was up and running and would continue to be, and you could just kind of leave it like that. You had security issues to worry about, but you still had the option of being the one to worry about them. In the following years, everything began to shift towards the "you own nothing" model where so much of the functionality of "your" hardware and software was actually just a short-term lease with some company on the other end that could decide to rugpull you at their convenience.

[red369]

On my personal laptop, I run Windows 11 in a virtual machine. Sometimes I intentionally choose "Shut down" instead of "Update and shut down" because I just want to turn it off ASAP and pack up, and it cracks me up when it proceeds to install updates anyway. I just close the virtual machine, powering it off instantly, and later I can restore from a snapshot from before my brutality and let the update happen properly.

I don't find it funny when it's bare metal! On my work laptop I put Windows to sleep 100% of the time, and restart for updates when I'm forced to with 3 hours notice before a mandatory reboot.

This battle with Windows doesn't even need to be happening! I am very good with updates and go looking for them in the settings without needing them to be pushed, at least on less hostile OSs! I run beta iOS on my old phone, and get a little disappointed when I see no changes required when running an update through apt or nix-env or whatever.

I highly recommend running virtualised Windows somewhere for the sanity preserving feeling of vengeful control :)

[pjmlp]

As developer I was a bit less excited as it kind of settled the victory of COM over .NET after the Longhorn/Vista civil war at Redmond.

So while it was indeed a great version of Windows, having COM as the new way of shipping Windows APIs wasn't that welcoming, it is kind of incredible how for such a critical technology on Windows development, Microsoft keeps shipping cluncky frameworks to write and consume COM.

There was even the famous Hilo sample that was praising this as the way forward,

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/announcing-hilo/

https://github.com/microsoftarchive/msdn-code-gallery-micros...

[wredcoll]

Older people feel exactly the same way about windows2000... or sometimes 98... or 3.1...

[BrenBarn]

I used all of those versions but I'd still agree that Win7 was the last good one. I still love the 95/98 aesthetic the most and it's what I try to replicate with my systems now, but the dropoff after Win7 is still much greater.

[wolpoli]

I hadn't read anyone talk about how UI peaked at Windows 3.1 through. Perhaps most people just start their desktop computing journey with 95.

[saurik]

I think the usual adage is that every other version of Windows is pretty good.

[leonnatus]

more about xp than 2000

[bestham]

For me more about 2000 than XP. 2000 still felt like a Workstation OS and it was very responsive. XP themeing was the first thing I removed once I could not continue on 2000.

[therein]

Yeah, most people wouldn't say that about Win2000, but XP, definitely. XP Service Pack 2 was excellent.