I already upvoted for the comment, I’m out of upvotes!

I’m not trying to judge, but you installed and ran a modern operating system on a spinning platter drive?

I had to switch to SSDs in 2016 because macOS was dragging hard on a Pro notebook.

XP did have a 64-bit version, but at the time 64-bit wasn’t widely used.

I dont want to do the whole “640K ought to be enough for anybody”, but I cant imagine most home users, average and production, hitting the ram limit of windows 7 which is like 200gb or there abouts.

I would think anyone running loads that would require that much are probably running linux, like servers and such.

but even so, I’m sure it could have been expanded if there was an actual need.

That and ME is a huge dip in that curve.

Yes

8 was horrible, 8.1 was fine. 10 wasn’t great but got better. 11 was and is bad.

We shouldn’t accept an OS with comparably sized lists of wins and blunders. Subsequent OSs should be a steady upward trend, perhaps with slight dips here and there.

Well, I used to be quite positive about Windows 11. The WSL thing is cool, being able to use bash and Linux tools. The hypervisor thing is cool, enabling fast virtual machines. And the styling is all round better than any previous Windows at least since Windows 7. But then I’ve had systems broken by updates more than once recently, everything feels slow, applications hang all the time, the Start menu still doesn’t work, even opening File Explorer leaves me wondering whether it noticed my mouse click, I have to fight it to create a local user account instead of a Microsoft account, fight it to avoid unwanted tracking, fight it to stop the ads popping up in all kinds of corners by running a network-wide DNS filter which reports huge amounts of requests to Microsoft telemetry domains, fight it to make sure file don’t end up in OneDrive, and it still can’t handle USB sticks reliably, it still steals focus constantly from wherever I’m typing, there are far too many services eating up resources, and so on.

It’s just constant low-level frustration that I just don’t have with other operating systems, because Microsoft has cut out QA and spent years prioritizing marketing strategies, gimmicks and cosmetics instead of improving the things that matter to users.

That hasnt been true for a while.

8 was bad, 10 was bad, 11 is bad.

I think they are trying to ensure that no future Windows is ever good again. I mean, it was Win10 that made me frustrated enough to permanently kick the habit of using Windows.

If you’re a technical person, or you run Windows Pro instead of Home, you probably won’t see as much crap. But there’s a ton of new telemetry/tracking in Win10 that’s even worse in 11.

As someone who’s been part of OS and software deployment since before WinNT, Win11 is hot garbage unless we do all sorts of preconfig to not make it so.

This isn’t really new, just that much worse in 11. With the previous versions of Windows, we didn’t have to configure as many Group Policies to restrict as much nonsense. And the home versions of 10/11 are so much worse, especially since they don’t support GP, you have to Registry Stamp any changes you want to make to disable all the telemetry garbage - stamps which an update can easily revert. At least GP is reapplied at boot/login.

I don’t let my family buy Home versions of Windows. Pro costs more, because it’s worth it from a support perspective.

Strangely, that generally is how my Linux boxes have been - way less IT guy than when we had WinXP or Win7. You have to use a stable distro however - which TBH is the problem with Win10 and 11 for a lot of people - finding the “stable” version isn’t available to home users or is complicated - so you have new OS deployments every 6 months. Windows Updates are now forced and still often have problems or bugs.

That all said, I think we’ve just got to get used to unstable / rolling release OSs cause “everyone” is doing it. Even Alma is not as stable as previous enterprise linux rebuilds due to Red Hat not releasing point release security updates anymore.

Windows Pro does “just work”. Configure GP when you setup, and all this garbage isn’t an issue. Even without the more extreme changes I make (beyond GP), most people would be fine.

MS pushes this crap in Windows Home users, because they know those people have no idea what to do with it.

Historically, every other edition of Windows is good. The logic is that they release a version, then fix it and make it good. In your examples, vista became 7 and ME became XP.

Windows 7 was just vista with dipping sauce.

By the time 7 came out Vista was fine. Vista was the usual bugs of a new OS, plus the new drivers which most manufactures decided to not do properly so they made Vista look much worse than it actually was. The much higher system requirements really didn’t help.

If you bought a new machine with hardware that came out post Vista’s launch you probably had a good experience with Vista. I personally had 0 issues with my machine in 2008.

Except ME was part of the DOS line, while XP extended Win2k which is NT.

But I take your point, just that Win2k was (largely) the end of MS producing DOS-based operating systems (with XP being the final nail in that coffin).

In business, once Win2k was out, we stopped deploying Win9x entirely. Before that, NT was problematic on some hardware and for some software/users. Win2k solved most of that.