None of Microsoft's operating systems were as good as Windows XP and at least one (8) was a complete disaster, the shock waves from that catastrophe still rumbling around.
By failing to reproduce that success, Microsoft has ceded most of the moral market share to Apple. Though, as a Linux user, every time I see a Mac desktop I can't resist noticing how often would it lock up and display that rotating "busy" mouse cursor in place of what the proud Mac owner actually wanted to do at that moment.
This is not even a radical viewpoint, which is why the downvotes seem irrational. I have seen "normies" pontificating on how Windows XP was perfect for them and how they have seen no benefit going forward.
If I am being maximally charitable, the benefits that come afterwards are drivers, gaming-related (DirectX) or security-related (which is not a user-facing feature). All of them are nice, but not at the cost that the end user perceives; a slow, painful experience, with an OS that crashes randomly and has weird inconsistencies everywhere.
I have mostly stuck to Ubuntu for desktops (since 8.04) and MacOS for laptops (since Snow Leopard).
(Unrelated, I also notice the busy cursor, which is why I went back to Ubuntu once I was able to get a desktop)
My daily driver computing timeline is something like Win3.1, 95, 98, ME, XP, OSX 10.4-10.11, then some combo of Ubuntu/Pop_OS.
I think Windows peaked with XP and macOS with Snow Leopard, with the caveats that Spotlight-like searching in both was primitive/nonexistent at that time and would have been a great improvement, and XP didn't have virtual desktops.
That 2001-2006 era featured systems that had learned a bunch of lessons from 10-20 years of mainstream GUI computing, but hadn't been consumed by feature bloat and a bunch of Internet connectivity and convergence stuff that I'm not interested in.
XP's design was apparently polarizing but I loved it. I was in a modding phase at that point and loved making my own themes.
For me, the big change came with Windows 2000. It had user benefits from 9x in a stable package. That was the first version that I can play games on and also leave it running for months, just like a Linux box.
The funny thing though is that Windows 2000 was never meant for consumers playing games.
They would have to put up with Windows ME, at least in Microsoft's eyes. Which was the first version you could play games on and leave it running for hours between crashes, lol.
I also used Win 2k Pro and it was an amazing leap coming from 98, yes. My laptop came with ME but it sucked so bad I changed it after a week.
I did not use NT at home, but I occasionally used it at school. For me at that time, the ability to play games had been as strong a requirement as the ability to be stable and run word processing, email clients and VC++. So I would use Win95 and curse its (in)stability and reboot several times per day, but not switch to NT. Also, NT cost an arm and a leg for a student.
Win2k was a huge improvement in every respect. My 2c.
I was in a computer science program and the department literally just gave Windows 2000 keys away. They had a booklet with sheets of stickers and just said take whatever you want. It was easy to give to your friends.
When Windows XP came out, Microsoft unfortunately made them report every key given out, and the free ride was over.
> When it debuts in February, Windows 2000 Professional will sell for an estimated retail price of $319, the same as its predecessor, Windows NT 4 Workstation.
Thank you for the info! As I said, I definitely remember Win2k, but not how I got it. My guess is OEM CD to be most likely, then bootleg, then full retail.
Another option was student bookstore. Microsoft sold its wares at universities at steep discounts.
Edit: a sister comment jogged my memory. I bet it was either a giveaway by an EECS dept or a heavily discounted disc from the university bookstore. Which is why I do not remember paying a noticeable sum for it.
They had actually planned one but withdrew this at the last moment, replacing it by ME which was a hastily scrambled version of 98 with a 2000 look on it. And extremely unstable, at least at launch.
I still wonder how they would have thought this was better in any kind of way. A windows 2000 home release could not possibly have had as many problems as ME.
I remember attempting to run Windows NT 4, but it lacked a lot of hardware support. Windows 2000 Professional fixed a lot of that. I consider Windows 2000 to be the first stable AND usable (for a desktop) version of Windows.
Windows NT before 2000 had problems with games and such, 2000 worked well because most games were now working to target XP ( and 2k had better compatibility with 98 anyway).
My thoughts exactly! Except I wouldn't call it bling, I'd call it a hideous Fisher Price aesthetic.
I stuck with 2000 as long as I could before gaming (and maybe.. a certain version of Visual Studio?) eventually forced a switch to XP (with the "classic" theme).
I’ve been using MacOS as my daily desktop for over a decade, switching from Linux. Seeing the busy cursor is so rare I can’t recall the last time. And I have tons of things open all the time.
Maybe it's related to some cloud service? (However, MS Word used to give you a fair amount of exposure to the beach ball. But I'm not familiar with any of the later versions.)
I've been working professionally using a Mac for 4ish years now. Can count on a single hand the amount of times the cursor is stuck spinning / loading.
95 was trash, 98 was gold. XP was great, Vista was trash. 7 was great, 8 was trash. 10 was gold, 11 is trash.
Seems Microsoft has to squeeze in at least one bad version between good ones.
But never has a new Windows version been made available where people didn't initially hate them at first, XP, 7, and 10 included. It's not until the version after gets released when people really start appreciating what once was.
You have missed Windows ME between XP and 98, which was so awful people don't remember it anymore. For a revolutionary product, Windows 95 wasn't that bad.
95 Good, 98 Bad, 98 SE Good, ME Bad, XP Good, Vista Bad, 7 Good, 8 Bad, 10 Good.
Counting 98 SE as a separate release does seem like cherry-picking in order to make the pattern work. Then again, you could also say the cycle started with Windows 98 (putting the whole of that release into the good pile), and you'd still have a remarkably consistent pattern across two decades and seven versions of Windows. Honestly makes you wonder if there's some deeper cause related to Microsoft's organizational structure or something.
If you're breaking out 98 into two releases, then you should probably break out XP into pre-service-packs and post. IME it wasn't until SP3 that XP really felt solid, depending on what hardware you were running.
>And then there's 11 which doesn't really feel like a new version at all to me.
That's because it isn't, Windows 10 and 11 both identify internally as NT10.0.
For some context: Windows Vista, 7, 8, and 8.1 identified as NT6.0, 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3 respectively; Windows 2000 and XP identified as NT5.0 and 5.1 respectively.
For all the rightful hate 11 gets for ads and tracking crap, once you turn it off it feels... fine. I even don't mind the UI look and really like the new window management, but I don't use windows for anything serious anymore, only gaming so maybe there are other issues.
Some things about Win95 are lost to nostalgia, as well. Like broken drivers, esp. in concert with up-to-date office, which came with issues of its own, like broken export formats. (It took more than a year for serious support for Postscript printers, etc.) Win95 became only somewhat functional with Windows 95B. (This one, however, started the IE integration.)
I had the one PC in that era that WinME was smooth sailing on. It was a Packard Bell with a 200mhz Pentium 1 (96 mb of ram at the time, i think). For whatever reason, and combination of hardware, ME had no issues running. I had less blue screens on it, and overall found it to be enjoyable and much more stable than 98 and 95c was on that machine.
I would personally argue that Windows 2000 wasn't bad, it was just painful in the beginning. It was the transition point from the 9x kernel/setup to the NT kernel/setup and some manufacturers navigated that change better than others in the beginning.
It was the first stable Windows OS that could run all the latest games and desktop applications without constantly crashing or needing a periodic reinstall. It was their best desktop OS at the time. XP was just 2000 with an ugly default theme and added bloat.
95's stellar reception in particular is probably still unmatched to this day.
The only shift in user experience that I can equate it to is maybe the jump from candy bar and flip phones to the iPhone and Android. In addition to the UI, it brought real multitasking to a consumer OS.
Windows 11 cranked up the [user-unwanted] telemetry, mandated TPM 2.0, and eliminated hardware support for certain CPU's for no other reason than 'because security' (overridable with a registry hack at least for the moment).
Instability aside, Windows 98 marked the point where Internet Explorer leeched itself into the operating system to the point of no return (only to be finally reversed in the past year). The complaints of social media apps being "preinstalled" with Windows 11 seem to echo the channel bar, Active Desktop and everything else that arrived with IE4. I believe that the notion that Windows 98 was good came when IE5 were released and pulled back on some of those integrations, which happened to coincide with the timing of 98 Second Edition. In any case it was by no means great, but it was good enough.
I don't think that's true. Vista was so hated, that 7 was pretty much universally heralded as a big improvement, even if half of that was the ecosystem getting used to the new driver model introduced by Vista.
And as others have observed, 2000 was an immediate hit with everyone who tried it.
If you think 10 is "gold" and 11 is "trash" I assume you're suffering from some sort of stockholm syndrome from using 10 too long and haven't actually tried 11 yet because it's just a reskinned 10 (and visually, it looks a lot better).
> I assume you’re suffering from some sort of Stockholm syndrome
Periodic reminder that “Stockholm Syndrome” was a complete fabrication based on no clinical evidence invented on the spot to discredit an ex-hostage who was making legitimate criticism of an unnecessarily violent police intervention by one of the architects of that intervention, because they had no rational defense.
Its invocations in debates are also typically as an attempt at a thought-terminating trope to evoke an emotional response that covers the lack of actual argument, which fits the history of the term well.
haven't actually tried 11 yet because it's just a reskinned 10 (and visually, it looks a lot better).
I've been on 11 since it was released and I find it to be objectively a worse experience. On Win 10, I could game on one screen and stream a video in a browser on the other. On Win 11, I get stuttering on the streamed video.
It's also failed to update twice now. I invested hours into debugging the issue the first time. This time it's been days and I'm about to just do a fresh Win 10 install over this nightmare.
> It's also failed to update twice now. I invested hours into debugging the issue the first time. This time it's been days and I'm about to just do a fresh Win 10 install over this nightmare.
My current 11 install has never failed to update, but I have experienced various update failures before on 10. This sort of issue is present in both versions, it's just random whether you'll experience it or not, and I wouldn't be surprised if the stuttering issue is just some random driver incompatibility too.
This sort of issue is present in both versions, it's just random whether you'll experience it or not,
No, it's not random, which I know because I stumbled upon the solution. The problem was that it was using an old 100MB partition as the EFI boot partition. Nowhere in any of the system logs did it mention this. No error message said anything about it. Ridiculous.
and I wouldn't be surprised if the stuttering issue is just some random driver incompatibility too.
Why? My system is the same hardware after the update. In fact, the only thing that's changed (and this happened awhile after the Win 11 'upgrade') was a video card that's 3 - 5x faster than the old one.
Some people claim this was mostly due to bad 3rd party drivers and not the OS itself. But even if that's true, from the user perspective it's very hard to tell the difference.
By failing to reproduce that success, Microsoft has ceded most of the moral market share to Apple. Though, as a Linux user, every time I see a Mac desktop I can't resist noticing how often would it lock up and display that rotating "busy" mouse cursor in place of what the proud Mac owner actually wanted to do at that moment.