[firesteelrain]

Speaking of XP. Windows XP SP2 is really when people liked XP. By the time SP2 and SP3 were common, hardware had caught up, drivers were mature, and the ecosystem had adapted. That retroactively smooths over how rough the early years actually were.

[joe_mamba]

Same thing with Vista. By the time WIndows 7 came out, Vista was finally mature and usable, but had accumulated so much bad publicity from the early days, that what was probably supposed to be Vista SP3 got rebranded to Windows 7.

[kwanbix]

Vista was allways trash.

As the tech person for the family, I upgraded no less than 6 PCs to Windows 7. Instant win.

EDIT: Downvote as much as you want, but it is the truth. Vista, ME, and 8.x are horrible Windows versions.

[buran77]

> but it is the truth

It's a very superficial "truth", in the "I don't really understand the problem" kind of way. This is visible when you compare to something like ME. Vista introduced a lot of things under the hood that have radically changed Windows and were essential for follow-up versions but perhaps too ambitious in one go. That came with a cost, teething issues, and user accommodation issues. ME introduced squat in the grand scheme of things. It was a coat of paint on a crappy dead-end framework, with nothing real to redeem it. If these are the same thing to you then your opinion is just a very wide brush.

Vista's real issue was that while foundational for what came after, people don't just need a strong foundation or a good engine, most barely understand any of the innards of a computer. They need a whole package and they understand "slow" or "needs faster computer" or "your old devices don't work anymore". But that's far from trash. The name Vista just didn't get to carry on like almost every other "trash" launch edition of Windows.

And something I need to point out to everyone who insists on walking on the nostalgia lane, Windows XP was considered trash at launch, from UI, to performance, to stability, to compatibility. And Windows 7 was Vista SP2 or 3. Windows 10 (or maybe Windows 8 SP2 or 3?) was also trash at launch and now people hang on to it for dear life.

[kwanbix]

It delivered a terrible user experience. The interface was ugly, with a messy mix of old and new UI elements, ugly icons, and constant UAC interruptions. On top of that, the minimum RAM requirements were wrong, so it was often sold on underpowered PCs, which made everything painfully slow.

[buran77]

Everything you said was perfectly applicable (and then some!) to Windows XP, Windows 7, or Windows 10 at launch or across their lifecycle. Let me shake all those hearsay based revelations you think you had.

Windows XP's GUI was considered a circus and childish [1] and the OS had a huge number of compatibility and security issues before SP3. The messy mix of elements is still being cleaned up 15 years later in Windows 11 and you can still find bits from every other version scattered around [2]. UAC was just the same in Windows 7.

Hardware requirements for XP were astronomical compared to previous versions. Realistic RAM requirements [3] for XP were 6-8 times higher than Win 98/SE (16-24MB) and 4 times those of Windows 2000 (32MB). For CPU, Windows 98 ran on 66MHz 486 while XP crawled on Pentium 233MHz as a bare minimum. Windows 98 used ~200MB of disk space while XP needed 1.5GB.

Windows 7 again more than quadrupled all those requirements to 1/2GB or RAM, 1GHz CPU, and 16-20GB disk space.

But yeah, you keep hanging on to those stories you heard about Vista (and don't get me wrong, it wasn't good, but you have no idea why or how every other edition stacked up).

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/12itfx...

[2] https://github.com/Lentern/windows-11-inconsistencies

[3] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...

[kwanbix]

I’ve been using Windows since version 3.0, so I know what I’m talking about.

Vista peaked at around 25% market share and then declined. The lowest peak of any major Windows release. Compare that with Windows XP at 88%, Windows 7 at 61%, or Windows 10 at 82%. Why do you think that is? Because Vista was great and people just didn’t understand it?

Windows XP was already perfectly usable by SP1, not SP3. The UI was childish looking, but you could easily make it look and behave like Windows 2000 very easily.

Vista, on the other hand, was bad at launch and never really recovered. I very clearly remember going to friends’ and family members’ homes to upgrade them from Vista to Windows 7, and the difference was night and day.