[legitster]

So part of me agrees, but part of me also feels like a victim of the boy who cried wolf.

People have ragged on Windows going back for as long as I can remember. Only in hindsight did people ever express fondness in public for Windows XP (and maybe a bit for Windows 7). It's hard for me to distinguish how much of the vitriol is legitimate this time from developers, or will nostalgia glasses just haunt Windows forever.

I've been using Windows 11 and... it feels fine? If anything, it doesn't feel substantially different enough from Windows 10 to care. My other comparison points are a Macbook and a Steam Deck, and both of them have so many faults of their own that I don't understand the need to rag on Windows in particular.

[aidenn0]

I was there when XP came out and it was clearly better than any of the entries in the two "parents" that it replaced (NT/Win2k, and 9X/ME). I was the local "hey, my PC is broken" guy and the first thing to try was always to replace whatever version of windows they had with XP.

I certainly have some anti-fondness memories as well (I had the service pack burned to a CD because it took longer to download and install the updates than it did to get infected with one of the various worms around at the time), but there was zero doubt in my mind that XP was the best windows yet when it came out.

[ray_v]

I bought into the windows 95 hype big time when it was launched, and I think it by and large lived up to that hype. I was in highschool still, and I gladly bought a copy using money that I had been putting away specifically for this. It really was a high watermark for Microsoft and the Windows product for sure.

[2Gkashmiri]

H7C97-C67JB-G6RQR-P6H2Y-TMQ6W

Xp sp2.

I still weidly remember this somehow after decades.

[treebeard901]

Interesting story behind FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8 ... Probably the most well known key.

[BoredPositron]

Before SP1 it was unusable.

[hulitu]

> Before SP1 it was unusable.

This was the "Release name" for every NT version. RCs were alpha quality, SP1 was the first beta, with SP2 things started to be ok. This was true until 7, then the Gates of hell opened and Windows is now an eternal "release" ( the thing between RC and SP1).

[wltr]

Never had any nostalgia for Windows, and I’ve met plenty of full of themselves developers being ‘nah, Windows is good, you just incompetent’ with their vibes. I could write books about their technical decisions, but I’d just mention none of them knew even slightest bits of Linux. It’s just absurd to me, like man, you do that for work, and the things you were over engineering could be done within one day, if you care to learn something new, instead of applying things you learned 40 years ago. I see no point in even attempting to explain anything to those people. Yeah, nothing wrong with Windows. XP was good, 7 was good, 11 is also no problem. I feel the same, I just mostly never used them myself, with occasional horror of things I’ve seen with others. Like those in abuser relationships who keep telling it’s how things should be and nothing wrong.

[phito]

I can't agree more with you. I know multiple people that keep complaining about windows and Chrome and yet they seem to have no interest in even trying Firefox or Linux.

It totally has abusive relationship vibes. It's like they are being captured by convenience, learning something new being too much of an asshle to them.

They also like to take jabs at me for using Linux, but then their jaws drop when I transfer a file to a server in one second using `scp` while it takes them about 20 clicks with their windows GUI...

[wltr]

The man I worked with couldn’t deploy a VPN. He didn’t know how, literally! And he couldn’t just plainly say ‘hey, really, I don’t know how to do that.’ They have a static IP in the office, so you don’t even need any tunnel for it to work. It’s like one day job for me, but I’m not helping as it’s not _my_ job at the moment. Not that they need that VPN in there, it would just be convenient. The man does daily backups manually, with some fancy Windows GUI tool, which he probably pirated. It’s like, come on, an rsync command and a bash script. Really, I can go on and on and on, but those of us who worked with these people just know these stories, and the die-hard Windows weirdos probably won’t even understand what an rsync is.

[bsder]

> Only in hindsight did people ever express fondness in public for Windows XP (and maybe a bit for Windows 7).

I don't agree. Those of us using it for embedded development skipped from XP to 7 to 10.

Windows XP started off a bit rough. Once it had some time to mature, nobody in their right mind wanted to go back to Windows 95/98/9x, though.

Windows 7 was definitely lauded as decent contemporaneously. Vista was a disaster by comparison (but a necessary one--Vista took the arrows to allow Windows 7 to appear). And lot of people avoided Windows 8 like the plague it was.

Windows 10 was definitely a step back from 7, but wasn't ... terrible? Especially relative to Windows 8. But Windows 10 definitely wasn't genuinely good on any axis. And everybody was constantly bitching about all the stuff that was clearly the beginning of enshittification that got turned to maximum on 11.

[0xy]

My favorite version of Windows was Vista, and it receives unearned hatred thanks largely to OEMs bundling it with underpowered PCs.

It was miles ahead of XP from an architecture standpoint, Aero looks positively futuristic today, security was improved, file transfers improved.

It was rock solid and good to look at. I used Vista right up until EOL.

[StopDisinfo910]

What was shocking to me is discovering that Windows 11 on a managed company laptop and Windows 11 on a store bought personal laptop feel so different, they might as well not share a name.

It's insane the amount of bullshit Microsoft is pushing on private users.

[nalathna]

My daily small annoyance is that when my work laptop goes to sleep, it doesn't shut off primary and secondary displays at the same time and moves all my windows onto one monitor. Which monitor seems totally random, so I'm perpetually moving windows back to one screen or the other. And it doesn't respect my sleep settings if I put up the lock screen, instead almost immediately turns the monitors off.

[concinds]

Surely there are ways to measure its quality objectively, and separate dumb nostalgia from real concerns. Are support tickets down? Is the OS a less frequent root cause for tickets? IT people with big enough fleets could settle this debate.

I’m a Mac person but Windows 11 seemed as fine as Windows 10 when I used it.

[hulitu]

> Are support tickets down?

There is no support for Windows. At least for the mere mortals. Bugs are not acknoledged for months and then they might be, silently, fixed.

[sylens]

I was definitely somebody who rolled their eyes when people were up in arms about XP, Vista, and 7. Was OS X becoming better at the time? Sure, I’ll concede that. There were also initial driver issues with Vista and too many UAC prompts, but they worked to smoothe those out for 7 because they still prioritized the user experience.

What is happening now is even the longtime Windows power users and defenders are throwing up their hands and giving up. This is very different than the people running Gentoo in the 2000’s badmouthing Micro$oft on Slashdot

[ricardobayes]

To be fair, compared to Linux (and to an extent, Mac), Windows has been sluggish, bloated and unreliable for a long time. XP was the last one that felt "solid", aka: fast, reliable and "just works".

[legitster]

> reliable and "just works".

Getting advanced drivers on XP was often an absolute nightmare.

[hulitu]

> XP was the last one that felt "solid",

You mean XP SP2 ?

[pathartl]

It's an unpopular opinion, but I genuinely believe that 11 is the best version of Windows yet. I've been using computers for 30 years and you're right, everyone has _always_ complained about Windows. The only reason people have a fondness for XP is because it was pretty much the world's first Windows. It's the OS that was used to connect the world, and IE being (for the time) the competent browser played a huge role in that.

[Austizzle]

I feel the same way. I recently installed Windows XP in a VM for nostalgia and it was shocking how much I realized windows has improved since then.

I'm not obsessed with windows 11, but I am the happiest using it than I've been with any other version (aside from the TPM 2.0 requirement, that's my #1 complaint)

[hulitu]

> it was shocking how much I realized windows has improved since then

YMMV

> not obsessed with windows 11, but I am the happiest using it

Good luck then. And, I really hope, you will remain happy in the future.

[digitalPhonix]

What do you think it does better than 10?

There are plenty of things that Windows 11 does well, but for me they’re all things that 10 also did well.

Most of the things that annoy me in 11 however were not also in 10.

[pathartl]

I know many items in this list can apply to both, but I've been maining 11 since release and going back to pre-11 builds of 10 genuinely feels like a downgrade: - Windows Terminal is great - Settings now covers almost everything, I haven't had to actually go into Control Panel in years - Explorer has tabs! - The new context menu loads in items asynchronously. Some people hate it, but I remember how apps would abuse the context menu and bring my PC to a crawl. - The CPU scheduler is genuinely insanely better with big/little CPUs - Scaling with windows and monitor management is better - Auto HDR - Updated notepad is actually kinda good - Updated paint is actually kinda good - Built in WinGet is chefs kiss - I actually love Fluent design

Again, some of these are on 10, but on 11 it feels like more of a tighter package.

[Zardoz84]

What are M$ paying you ? Or what kind of mushrooms eat you ?

[AlienRobot]

Well, that's because 11 and 10 are similar while being substantially worse than XP.

[idiotsecant]

Windows 10 is worse than xp? How do you figure??

[conception]

I’ll try!

Consistent interfaces. UI speed. Lack of telemetry/ads.

[nitwit005]

There are plenty of things that got better, but it's also easy to find things that got worse. Examine the minimum system requirements.

[dartharva]

just added bloat.