Agreed. Windows Server 2000 through Windows 7 were peak Microsoft operating system.
By Windows 2000 Server, they finally had the architecture right, and had flushed out most of the 16 bit legacy.
The big win with Windows 7 was that they finally figured out how to make it stop crashing. There were two big fixes. First, the Static Driver Verifier. This verified that kernel drivers couldn't crash the rest of the kernel. First large scale application of proof of correctness technology. Drivers could still fail, but not overwrite other parts of the kernel. This put a huge dent into driver-induced crashes.
Second was a dump classifier. Early machine learning. When the system crashed, a dump was sent to Microsoft. The classifier tried to bring similar dumps together, so one developer got a big collection of similar crashes. When you have hundreds of dumps of the same bug, locating the bug gets much easier.
Between both of those, the Blue Screen of Death mostly disappeared.
I agree with one big exception, the refocus on COM as the main Windows API delivery mechanism.
It is great as idea, pity that Microsoft keeps failing to deliver in developer tooling that actually makes COM fun to use, instead of something we have to endure.
From OLE 1.0 pages long infrastructure in Windows 16 bit, via ActiveX, OCX, MFC, ATL, WTL, .NET (RCW/CCW), WinRT with. NET Native and C++/CX, C++/WinRT, WIL, nano-COM, .NET 5+ COM,....
Not only do they keep rebooting how to approach COM development, in terms of Visual Studio tooling, one is worse than the other, not at the same feature parity, only to be dropped after the team's KPI change focus.
When they made the Hilo demo for Windows Vista and later Windows 7 developers with such great focus on being back on COM, after how Longhorn went down, a better tooling would be expected.
Drivers can crash the rest of the kernel in Windows 7. People playing games during the Windows 7 days should remember plenty of blue screens citing either graphics drivers (mainly for ATI/AMD graphics) or their kernel anticheat software. Second, a “proof of correctness” has never been made for any kernel. Even the seL4 guys do not call their proof a proof of correctness.
The original ribbon sucked but with the improvements it's hard to say it's generally a bad choice.
The ribbon is a great fit for Office style apps with their large number of buttons and options.
Especially after they added the ability to minimize, expand on hover, or keep expanded (originally this was the only option), the ribbon has been a great addition.
But then they also had to go ahead and dump it in places where it had no reason to be, such as Windows Explorer.
I don't know quite when it started to happen, but changing and/or eliminating the default Office keyboard shortcuts in the last few iterations has really irked me.
People hated it because it was all over the place. Change this or that setting? UAC. Install anything? UAC. Then you'd get a virus in a software installer, confirm the UAC as usual, and it wouldn't stop a thing.
Well, the Crowdstrike driver isn't (wasn't?) static. It loaded a file that Crowdstrike changed with an update.
Most drivers pass through rigorous verification on every change. But Crowdstrike is (was?) allowed to change their driver whenever they want by designing it to load a file.
> The big win with Windows 7 was that they finally figured out how to make it stop crashing.
Changing the default system setting so the system automatically rebooted itself (instead of displaying the BSOD until manually rebooted) was the reason users no longer saw the BSOD.
A modern reimagining of Windows 2000's UI - professional, simple, uncluttered, focused, no cheapening of the whole experience with adverts in a thinly-veiled attempt to funnel you into Bing - with modern underpinnings and features such as WSL2 would have me running back towards Microsoft with open arms and cheque book in hand.
I’ve been watching ReactOS development for years and and progress is slow but steady. I’m excited for the point where it will be fully usable as a drop in replacement for old Windows software.
There are Linux distros that meet your description (no need for WSL2 either!). I am guessing you're not running towards them with open arms and cheque book in hand ... or maybe you already ran to Linux and are just nostalgic about going back to Microsoft ... ?
Linux UIs can’t even align fonts correctly within the elements.
It is miles away from the original and you can immediately see its Linux because things don’t quite line up. Huge difference in quality, attention to detail, and the entire interface becomes unpleasant to look at.
Also, Linux power management and lack of hibernation means its useless on laptops
Plenty of distros/skins get it 99% of the way there for a similar looking screenshot but only 25% of the way there for the actual user interface experience. ReactOS is probably the closest (in terms of going down a holistic user interface approach) but saying it's 25% the way there to being a finished solution would be generous.
While DEs often emulate the look of macOS or Windows, they always get the feel wrong. You can put a global menu bar, Dock, etc into KDE, but ultimately it still acts like KDE and nothing like macOS.
Windows Whistler (XP Beta) had an interesting theme that was like a bit modernized Windows 2000. Small non-rounded title bars, non-obnoxious taskbar, etc. Too bad they never finished it and offered a stable version for Windows XP users.
Adding to this
If you're willing to go third party
Everything can give you instant search, and with a PowerToys plugin you can integrate it into PowerToys Run, which gives you an Alfred Style search bar
WizTree works for visual inspection of Storage
Screenshots apps, Markdown Viewers, are common enough, won't comment further on those
On the printer disconnections:
I've had some weird experiences, recently, a technician showed to me that, using the default windows update driver, my work printer regularly disconnected, but using the manufacturers driver, the setup has so far worked without a problem
My main gripe for work laptop is that Windows 11 is dog slow. I think they have rewritten Explorer but not for the better. Word is also driving me nuts. The formatting does a ton of weird stuff that's totally unpredictable. Outlook has this weird flat UI where it's hard to tell what is a button and what isn't. Search has been broken for a long time.
Both Windows 11 and modern macOS are slow as shit now. The other day I clicked the Notifications settings in the outhouse they call a Settings app on my Mac and it took a solid 3 seconds to render the UI.
And behind me, was a G4 Cube that could open the System Preferences app off of a spinning hard drive in less time.
Seriously though I think Microsoft has mostly given up on the B2C market. They have good capture of B2B with hardware and software. Why make great products when you can make mediocre products that people have no choice but to use?
> Runs Windows update and reboots without my permission
This might be an unpopular opinion but I'm actually glad they do this by default now (you can turn it off). My understanding is that MS was continually getting blamed for users getting viruses because they would never update their system, so in the best interest of the users they decided to force it.
I know a lot of people will still disagree with me, but I think if you were in their situation and you were getting tired of not only end-users but also world governments blaming you for things your users did (or did not do)... you'd probably want to control that a little more too, for both your sakes.
In the end it will hurt MS's reputation for being a broken mess even if it's 100% the users' fault for not updating, so I absolutely get it. And yes I know there's plenty of other things you can blame them for, I'm not saying this is their only issue.
I agree with these. Here are some third party tools that can help with some of the gripes though:
> - No instant search (macOS has had it for how many years now?)
Everything search somehow does instant search across the entire file system. It is the first thing I install when I get a new computer, cannot stress enough how much time this has saved me:
https://www.voidtools.com/
> - No tool to graphically show where my diskspace went; allowing me to find and delete large files
I use WizTree to see what's taking space. On NTFS volumes it uses the same method as Everything does to quickly read all the file info straight from the filesystem.
It doesn't let you type text on the image. That's so important! The main thing I want to do when I take a screenshot is to circle something, or draw an arrow, then type some text about the item I am pointing to.
As someone who built an IT career on Microsoft’s entire suite, only to recently (past six years or so) migrate wholesale to macOS (endpoint) and Linux (server), I can definitely say MS’ best days are behind it. 2000 was rock solid, Server 2003 had some growing pains (mainly the transition to x64 and multi-core processors), and 2008 fully embraced the long march into irrelevance even as it tried to shake up the hypervisor space. Now the company is so obsessed with arbitrary and unnecessary feature creep and telemetry-as-surveillance that I’m loathe to recommend it when I don’t have to.
Honest to god, if an IdP like Okta made an Active Directory replacement that ran via container instead of a full-fat VM or appliance template, I’d gladly toss ADDS out the window with all its stupid CALs. Basic directory functionality in 2025 shouldn’t require a bloated ADDS/LDAPS virtual machine to run, especially with the move to cloud providers for identity. If you make it easier to do identity without ADDS, you remove Microsof’s major trojan horse into the enterprise - and M365’s as well.
You’re not wrong, but depending ln the org size those charges are still cheaper than Windows Server + CALs.
Ideally though, it’d be like Okta in that its core directory is in the cloud, but also like ADDS/LDAP in that local servers/objects can join to a domain via local containers posing as domain controllers.
Yes, I know modern device management and cloud-based IdP means the need for a directory is decreasing by the day, but Enterprises still want it for ease of user and computer management via a centralized database of sorts. Having someone, anyone offer me a leaner way of achieving this without a crusty LDAP deployment or expensive Windows Server + CALs, would be hugely appreciated.
In my opinion, the year of the Linux desktop happened more than 2 decades ago, when the last kinds of applications that were previously available only on Windows became also available on Linux, e.g. movie players and device drivers for some less common hardware, e.g. TV tuners.
That is when I have converted all my computers, desktops and laptops, from dual-booting Windows and Linux, to Linux-only. For some servers I have continued to use FreeBSD and I have continued to use Microsoft Office Professional, but on Linux with CrossOver, where it worked much better than on Windows XP (!).
I agree that installing and configuring in the right way Linux remains a job for someone with decent computer management skills.
However, I have also installed Windows professionally, and on less common hardware, like embedded computers, I have encountered far more problems and far more difficult to solve than when installing Linux on the same hardware. Moreover, the solution for most Windows installation problems was not using some menu in a graphic tool, but using some obscure Windows command in a CLI window, with some very cryptic and undocumented command-line options, which I typically found by searching Internet forums where Windows users complained about the same problem.
Therefore the only real reason why Windows is more user-friendly is because it comes pre-installed on most computers, after professionals have solved any compatibility problems.
For whomever has a friend or relative that is knowledgeable about Linux, Linux can be more "user-friendly" than Windows.
My parents, older than 80 years, have been using Linux (Gentoo!) on their desktops for many years, without any problems, for reading/writing documents, Internet browsing, movie watching, music listening, TV watching, e-mail using, and so on, despite the fact that they do not even know what is "Linux".
Imagine coming into the mac world with a 10.5 cd and upgrading to the current 10.6 and then watching it deteriorate through years into 10.10. Yeah that's me. Peeking at a glimpse of perfection only for it to flash and fade.
They really did offer a lot of features that really helped productivity. Snapping windows, jump lists, having libraries act as a virtual folder for many folders, etc.
It was the best for its time. But one of the reason why XP was "better" is that it had built-in support for WiFi. That ended up being a dealbreaker for 2k.
That's the issue.. every new OS has brought some features or stability improvements that are huge upgrades over the older OS.
WSL 2 is a must-have for me now, so Windows 10/11 is much better than anything that came before in that way. I may be alone in this, but I actually think Windows 11 has the best design of any Windows so far. The problem as usual, is that they haven't made the entire OS consistent. I wouldn't mind the new control panel if you could actually change every setting in windows in that one control panel.. and not have to dig through to find control panels that still date back to Win2k. And the new/old context menu in explorer is an absolute disaster. Then new design is fine.. but how the hell did they manage to not make it support all the options of the old context menu?
Also let’s not forget that windows 11 puts random news stories in the start menu. Here in Australia, a lot of them are clickbaity scams. I really can’t believe Microsoft is endorsing whatever horrible choice of news provider they’ve teamed up with. It really spoils their brand image.
There’s a way to remove it, of course, by running some obtuse console command. But normal people have no idea how to do stuff like that.
yeah while 2K was their best ever single breakthrough improvement, it was a v1 and XP/2003 in classic mode was a more refined 2K eg more drivers and better plug and play, more graphics compatibility. And 2003 Active Directory had a number of quality of life improvements.
Perfectly stated. It was more stable and had better UX than NT4, but didn't have all the unwanted anti-features that came in later versions of Windows. It was the last version of Windows that didn't get in my way.
Agree. My company ran a bunch of web servers on Windows 2K and Apache web server, because management was afraid of Linux (general FUD and Microsoft's lawsuit threats) and the engineering staff was afraid of Microsoft's IIS web server (security dumpster fire at the time). It was actually a pretty good system, super easy to maintain.
You can't say WDDM wasn't a step forward... Being able to crash your video drivers and reboot them without crashing and rebooting your whole machines made Windows a lot more stable.
Nostalgically, yes, Windows 2000 was amazing. At the time of launch, on period hardware, it was the fastest and most lightweight OS released by Microsoft. And looking back, I always appreciate that I can look in Task Manager and immediately recognize all of the processes by name.
Windows 7 (except for the last few updates that introduced telemetry and ads) comes in as a close second. But everything after is just bloated crapware.
The only bad things I remember about Windows 2000 are that some software written for Windows 3.x and 9x had compatibility issues and it took an eternity to boot up. It was go take a coffee break as soon as you turn your computer on for the day bad.
IIRC, Win2K would wait for most / all service startups to complete before showing the login prompt. XP and later would allow login to occur while many services were still starting up.
It's a tradeoff. A Win2K system was pretty responsive when you log in after a reboot/startup, but you've got to wait for that experience. In the days of spinning disks and single core CPUs, you had to fight those still-starting services for resources, making the first several minutes of XP usage painful.
I used the NT 5 betas for a while, and loved alerts not stealing focus. But that came back in the released W2K, and I remember being slightly annoyed by it.
It was anything but lightweight on a Pentium 90 or Pro, or whatever was common at the time. Really needed to upgrade to 16MB of RAM (lol) which was expensive at the time. Why only business and not normal folks used it.
It's a shame ReactOS never got mature enough to be a serious competitor. If it had modern app and hidpi support but was suck in a 2000-era UI and didn't have feature bloat, it could be a great daily driver.
Can it run Firefox yet? The last time I tried reactOS, it BSODed just trying to launch Firefox... and don't even try using Windows drivers on it, it'll either hardlock, BSOD immediately, or during startup, regardless of whether you're in safe mode or not...
For folks that pick Windows 2000 Server, why not Server 2003? Is it just because by then NT had XP out as the "Windows for Home Users" and people didn't use Server 2003 as much or were there changes about it folks hated for some reason? To me it always seemed to bring so many more features/capabilities without trashing the classic UI.
Remember that it also introduced Active Directory. I helped build out a global enterprise network that was consistent and supported the same way, with like a quarter million users and tbh, it pretty much worked flawlessly.
Of course that innocence was lost with Welchia and other issues, but Windows 2000 made the year 1999 feel like ancient history in 2001.
Sure, Windows 2000 was definitely great in a lot of ways, but Server 2003/R2 either extended on all of those (e.g. greatly improving AD and its management) or added on it's own big firsts such as x64 support - all without really introducing any of the types of downfall people hate the more modern versions for.
In the 90s, Windows was simple enough that I was able to read tech articles and understand a lot of what is going on inside, up to the point of Windows 2000, and to a certain extend, Windows XP. That completely changed with Vista/7 where I can no longer recognize the name of many processes that are running or understand what actions/situations make my computer lag.
Nowasdays, even through I don't worry anymore as Windows 11 is happy as long as you give it a quadcore cpu, ram, and an SSD, sometimes I still wonder why it writes 40GB to the SSD everyday.
As someone who still runs Win2003 R2 (32bit) on my desktop I can confirm. It was peak MS. System is very stable, UI (classic) is great. It is quick, snappy and good looking. For basic POSIX I have cygwin. For other stuff I use VMs. I have all tools needed to handle some mainmentance (compilers, DDK, docs, ...).
But there is problem.. HW.. The pool of old HW is shrinking, and one day I will not be able to run it anymore.. I guess I will move to Linux. There are few nice and lightweight distros...
I'm just surprised that it feels like very little deep innovation in the OS world has happened since windows 2k. 3.11 brought networking in. 95 brought true multitasking to the masses and 2k brought multi-processing/multi-user (yes, NT3.1 had it, but 2k is where most normal users jumped in). And, yes, I know these things existed in other OSes out there but I think of these as the mass market kick offs for them. In general I just don't see anything but evolutionary improvements (and back-sliding) in the OS world beyond this time. I had really hoped that true cloud OSes would have become the norm by now (I really want my whole house connected as a seamless collection of stuff) or other major advances like killing filesystems (I think of these as backdoor undocumented APIs). Have we really figured out what an OS is supposed to be or are we just stuck in a rut?
[edit] 3.1 should have been windows for worgkroups 3.11
"Normal users" did not jump into Windows 2000 Workstation. That was still an 'enterprise only' OS. Normal users either suffered with WinMe shipping on their desktop computer or jumped from 98SE to XP, given their computer could handle it (aka they bought a new computer).
Sorta. It was real pain-in-the-ass to run 2000 as a regular (non-administrator) user. Assuming your software worked at all that way, as even Office 2000 had some issues. UAC was necessary.
It required attention to detail, from a sysadmin / desktop admin perspective, but it was definitely possible and paid dividends in users being unable to completely destroy machines like they could on the DOS-based Windows versions. I put out a ton of Windows NT Workstation 4.0 and Windows 2000 Pro w/ least-privilege users. It was so convenient to be able to blow away a user's profile and start w/ a clean slate, for the user, w/o having to reload the machine.
Looks like there is some negative feelings towards this comment. So if we aren't in a rut, what are the big revolutionary OS advancements that have happened since this time?
Desktops have been in a rut for a decade. Windows has sucked post Win7 in ways that are either conspiracy or the most stinging indictment of managerial incompetence possible. Osx is good except it's key bindings are alien and the hardware is closed and apple hasn't improved it really at all in ten years and it has loads of inconsistencies with Linux cli. Linux has been in a huge rewrite of the desktop and graphics lift for no real end user benefit and flubbing the opportunity to make ground on windows while it tried to commit market share suicide.
3d compositing, ssds, mega displays, massive multi core, all completely wasted.
You know what I should be able to do? Hot execute windows and Linux and Osx on the same desktop without containerization that leaves 3d as an afterthought or worse a never thought.
Isn't Sharepoint like an enterprise management tool? I've never interacted with it once.
As for appdata... There's many faults to find in modern Windows changes, but I'm not willing to pin this on MS. Microsoft stuff tends to use %appdata% fairly sensibly, in most cases. On the other hand, the behavior of third-party developers has been really frustrating. What was initially intended as a universal storage location for some program data has become some kind of program container. Now, whenever you download some giant 300-500mb Electron app or whatever, you can be sure that it will force its entirety into appdata with no way to change the location. Every one of these developers has decided that their program is so valuable and Important that it's inconceivable that the user might want to install it on anything but the system drive. No, our program is unique and deserves nothing but the best!
Definitely stuck. We found a pretty strong optimum that no one has been willing to venture outside, strong enough to keep selling and that seems to be all that matters these days.
It was during an era where there was actual competition over Operating Systems. OS/2 definitely pushed Microsoft hard. BeOS woke everyone up even if it wasn't on popular hardware. Bell labs was still experimenting with plan9. There were several commercial Unix vendors.
Monopolies. They ruin markets. Destroy products. Reduce wages. Induce nostalgia.
I am 50/50 on this particular argument for why OSes are in a rut. I think there is actual competition in the form of the various distros out there and they have passionate advocates with real skill trying new things but they don't really take in a more mainstream way and they rarely feel revolutionary. I think this is more of a track gauge problem. It is hard to provide a truly novel OS without building all the infra around it so that people can actually use it. That takes resources at a scale that few can muster. What if I wanted to build something that kills off the idea of a file system? All the apps out there are written at their very core with this concept in them so even if it is a better idea, it is incredibly hard to bring it out to market and only huge companies can do it. At the same time though the huge companies are pushing their versions of things which makes it hard to compete and have even small innovation in the space. I don't have a solution here. I had hoped things like web assembly would have led to OS breakaway by now but it hasn't really happened. Maybe it still will.
The desktop UX was good, but nearly every network service on Windows 2000 had a critical vulnerability at some point. The Code Red worm (MS01-033) comes to mind as particularly impactful. This was the golden age of stack smashing.
I’ve been running Windows 2000 Pro as my main machine from I think the second beta until it was completely dropped from support.
It ran all of my games, stable as hell, quite light with none of the bullshit added later, none of the graphical bullshit added by XP but still classic Chicago.
The only thing that could make it better were the UI rendering engine introduced with Vista and its enhanced driver and security model.
I see a vast majority of comments here agreeing that UIs were significantly better and faster twenty years ago or more. Assuming HN is representative for the software community, how is it that slow, inferior and dumbed-down interfaces have prevailed in the end? And this hasn't been happening just to popular consumer products.
I don't know whether Windows is for corporate desktops, enterprise servers, PC manufacturers, Azure, home users or advertisers. It certainly doesn't feel like it is the right product for me anymore.
If MS stripped *ALL* ads and bloatware (telemetry for calc??) out of Win 11 and restored the traditional UI of start menu + desktop, it would be fairly good overall. Certainly within their top 5. They really are close to peak yet again but cannot realize they are striving to make it worse.
"A computer on every desktop and Windows on every computer" was the company's goal. Ever since they claimed success on that one (glossing over the ubiquity of Linux everywhere else) they've been sorta directionless.
I started my Windows Server career around 2003R2, so can't comment on the peakness of 2K.
2008R2 snowballed it's own "revolution" when it introduced PowerShell 2.0, which was pivotal for many future things to come.
Out of the more modern ones, 2012R2 was "peak".
I would guess we will still see 2012R2 installations well into the future. Still running bits and pieces of critical infra, even if it has been EOLed long ago, but that's the way of the Server I guess. Can't wait for the 5000+ uptime day screenshots of ancient 2012R2's.
My guess is the next "long LTS" will be Win2025. Just because it's introducing the NTLMv2 deprecation path and working solutions to replace it.
TBF XP and 7 are both decent. Everything went down after those, including the Ads, the update, etc.
I didn't upgrade to 10 until I purchased a used Dell laptop (which includes 10 prof) a few years ago, and I never used 11 and hopefully never needs to use it.
I love 2000 and XP but 7 has a special spot for me because it’s a “modern” Windows (supporting proper alpha blending in its theme drawing and such) without the various problems that 8 and newer bring. I have an old laptop with it installed and booting it up is honestly refreshing. Its visual style is a little dated feeling but not that much.
I like it for the same reasons. I just wish it supported high DPI. It, and Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion era OSX, at high res would be peak desktop usability.
I believe XP was when Windows Activation started, so that's a pretty big negative for me. Other than that, XP, 7 and 10 were pretty good, although 10 introduced advertisements if I'm not mistaken.
XP also inexplicably required at least twice the ram as 2000. when XP came out that was a significant cost, and I personally was able to salvage many laptops at the time by downgrading them from XP. Eventually XP became the default for me because ram got a lot cheaper and the service packs and driver support made it more viable.
But then, tangentially, I started using ubuntu at work, in a sort of misguided belief it would make me a better sysadmin, and it was only a matter of time before I couldn’t stand windows at home as well.
I thought win7 was pretty solid, though I didn’t upgrade until well after win8 was shipping. But lucky for me, proton finally got really good, and that allowed me to basically skip win10+. Now it’s only for the rare tool that I even boot into my windows partitions anymore. When I do, being bombarded by random attention grabbers is completely jarring and I want flee as fast as I can.
I'm already moving into Linux for one of my laptops. If the drivers and desktop experiences are good enough (or bad enough in Windows) I might move 100% to Linux in a few years.
If you intend to stick with Windows for the long haul, you will have to upgrade eventually. I hung on to 7 for a while, but several apps stopped getting updates: iTunes, the Spotify desktop client, Google Chrome, and even Firefox dropped support. I was using iTunes to download podcasts, which after a while became impossible with some feeds because I would get an SSL error each time on that old version. For 10, the ESU period ends one year after 10/14/25 for consumers and three years for organizations. It's possible that apps will continue to receive updates during that time.
Come try out Fedora, or whatever flavor of Linux you want.
It's surprisingly fantastic for almost all modern computing tasks. Yes, it's true, some software won't work, such as Adobe Photoshop, but most people aren't using software like that anyway. For gaming, I'd say we're close to 99% of games supporting Linux out of the box on Steam. The few left that still don't choose not to via kernel-level anti-cheat or forgetting to toggle a checkbox for Linux support (EasyAntiCheat and friends).
The point is, it "Just Works" for darn near everything these days and is a very pleasant experience. Try it out!
The best Linux I have ever seen is Linux Mint. I tried it out because I needed to do something with firewire, but all of the other Linux kernels had dropped firewire, and it was the only one left that still supported it. I found it to be intuitive and friendly and everything just worked.
Eh, this is going to sound like a I'm a stick in the mud, but I've tried Linux about a dozen times now, and every time has eventually led to 'a Linux evening' that disenchants me from the fantasy and back to reality. It's fantastic as a server OS, however.
Windows 10 LTSC IOT has all the bloat and spyware stripped out and will get security updates for years. It's super lean.
Will third party apps keep installing updates ? Hard to say. The adobe suite already refuses to install the latest version on any LTSC (for no reason other than they don't want to support it - it works great) so who knows.
Suspect my next OS will be Windows 12 LTSC if I can hold out long enough - every other Windows version alway seems to be experimental crap going all the way back to ME (millennium edition)
I tell customers that they should use LTSC for things like virtual desktops. You need stability, such as it not randomly deciding to install a 4 GB game like Minecraft for every user as a “critical update”.
Microsoft joined a meeting and told the customer that they don’t agree with my recommendations because they want to make sure all users get the “latest experiences”.
There’s your problem right there: pushing your own KPIs instead of what’s best for the customers.
Windows 7 was my all-time favorite. I remember you could not use it straight out of the box, there was a whole bunch of UI tweaks that I would make right away. After that, it was perfect.
For me it's windows 7, if nothing else for being the first and last major Windows where Universal Search worked well.
The Windows 8.x line gets some credit for having the strongest pen interface integration, which regressed significantly in the 10 line, but the overall shell in Windows 8 was rough, and a lot of features were broken in the rushed out and mostly failed attempt to Appify windows and redesign much of the UI at the same time.
The way I see it (and similarly with browsers now) is that the OS is a venue providing a stage for others to perform on, they provide the facilities so every act doesn't need to build their own venue. Most of the time people don't visit/use a venue for the sake of it.
The glasses are rose-tinted. There were a number of little bits missing from Windows 2000 that were helpful to have in XP, and you could change the theme to make it look just like Windows 2000.
And I really don't know how Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 doesn't win this battle.
Context. We upgraded from Windows 98 to Windows 2000. That was a major upgrade. First stable NT platform that we could use for everything, including games.
Didn't expect to see this-but after Windows 95/98, I went to Windows 2000 for a long time, didn't switch to Windows until 10/11. After Win2k, I went to Linux because I wasn't a fan of XP/7. (I know this is an unpopular take.
For all I know, windows server 2025 is amazing, but have you priced it out? There's no way to justify it.
I actually like Windows despite their aversion to committing to a UI redesign but do I really need to pay $1100 (per core!?) for the hope (but not the promise) of no ads?
There are software and scripts to decrapify Windows 11. After uninstalling and stopping everything that's not needed and making start menu and the bar behave like in Windows 7, it's quite decent.
This adds maybe 20 more minutes to install time but it's worth.
Unfortunately all that crap eventually comes back. Microsoft likes to reset settings… I’m pretty sure I must’ve spent the majority of my youth setting the same explorer settings over and over and over again … And it never ends with any custom setup you do; given enough time it reverts.
I don't think anyone doubts that you can do this. It's more that I refuse to pay for an OS which needs to be de-crapped in the first place. If Microsoft can't make something which prioritizes my needs above their corporate metrics, then they don't get my money.
Okay, mostly use Windows 7 Professional (with 100+ "updates") for general purpose and software development but for such usage and/or a Web server what to get now? Windows 2xxx?
This brings back a lot of nostalgia and I wholeheartedly agree. Back then I ran Windows 2000 server beta 2 on a dual proc system with P2-300s. It was rock solid.
One cool thing Microsoft did with Windows NT was the whole local security model and a filesystem that supported them (NTFS), which was definitely richer than UNIX. I don't really know if other UNIXes at the time had anything more than the 16-bit uid and gid and mode bits on everything the filesystem. I wonder how it would have looked if Microsoft kept Xenix as the base and added ACLs on top of it, for example.
Well, Xenix was extremely popular since it was the cheapest option on x86. That said, I doubt Bill Gates would have hired Dave Cutler had he stuck to Xenix.
You wouldn't want to connect a fresh installation of Windows 2000 to the internet today. "Net Send" and default-on Administrative Shares are some brain-dead design decisions that made sense on a trusted LAN, but not the Internet.
XP was the last that I really REALLY used. I've had Windows 7 (on my work machine that I didn't use) and I have a Windows 10 machine that I boot from time to time when I want to mess with recording gear. But I kinda fell into "they're all bad, I was just used to them".
I'll give my prime example. I used to know Device Manager/Control Panel SO well. I could just get things done. Now I have to hunt around forever to do any sort of hardware related task. In their attempt to make it "so easy, even your grandma could use it" they've alienated power users. My grandma still has to call me to help her attach a printer... but now I have to say, "I dunno... let me watch a YouTube video and pray that it matches the sub-version that you're using".
I don't know how good Windows 95 was in practice, but in our country where 99.9% of internet cafes didn't have licenses, or service pack updates (if they even had any for the 95 variant), it was a pretty easy Windows to DoS via the netbios vulnerability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinNuke
When Win10 started, it was clearly Bad. No good reason for updates, invasive privacy-breaking telemetry, updates at random moments of the day, and everything was a little different but nothing was better. People flat out refused to upgrade when it was given for free. Microsoft had to force it trough windows update, and did multiple rounds of breaking software people explicitly installed to block the upgrade.
When did it become good? WSL and DirectX 12 were real changes, but all in all, my impression is that the user has been frog boiled over the years, with 2K,XP and 7 becoming distant memories.
The only 'bad' thing about Vista was it's change (and thus deprecation of many drivers) of driver model. Once tweaked and with good native drivers it was the first good 64bit windows - far more reliable than XP64. At least until 7 came out.
Vista was indeed fine. I used it for many years and had nary a problem with it. The problem with 11 isn't the core (everyone seems to agree that is fine), it's that Microsoft insists on putting ads and other user-hostile BS in.
Windows Vista was essentially unusable on release unless you had very high-end hardware.
A couple of weeks after release the first step after getting a new computer was changed from "downloading firefox" to "downgrade to windows xp". Unironically, many people did that.
It's the Register and therefore too worthless to get worked up about, but their naming a server version of Windows as peak anything is an indication that they probably just polled a few drunks at a bar.
Agreed. Windows Server 2000 through Windows 7 were peak Microsoft operating system.
By Windows 2000 Server, they finally had the architecture right, and had flushed out most of the 16 bit legacy.
The big win with Windows 7 was that they finally figured out how to make it stop crashing. There were two big fixes. First, the Static Driver Verifier. This verified that kernel drivers couldn't crash the rest of the kernel. First large scale application of proof of correctness technology. Drivers could still fail, but not overwrite other parts of the kernel. This put a huge dent into driver-induced crashes.
Second was a dump classifier. Early machine learning. When the system crashed, a dump was sent to Microsoft. The classifier tried to bring similar dumps together, so one developer got a big collection of similar crashes. When you have hundreds of dumps of the same bug, locating the bug gets much easier.
Between both of those, the Blue Screen of Death mostly disappeared.
I agree with one big exception, the refocus on COM as the main Windows API delivery mechanism.
It is great as idea, pity that Microsoft keeps failing to deliver in developer tooling that actually makes COM fun to use, instead of something we have to endure.
From OLE 1.0 pages long infrastructure in Windows 16 bit, via ActiveX, OCX, MFC, ATL, WTL, .NET (RCW/CCW), WinRT with. NET Native and C++/CX, C++/WinRT, WIL, nano-COM, .NET 5+ COM,....
Not only do they keep rebooting how to approach COM development, in terms of Visual Studio tooling, one is worse than the other, not at the same feature parity, only to be dropped after the team's KPI change focus.
When they made the Hilo demo for Windows Vista and later Windows 7 developers with such great focus on being back on COM, after how Longhorn went down, a better tooling would be expected.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/announcing-hilo/
Drivers can crash the rest of the kernel in Windows 7. People playing games during the Windows 7 days should remember plenty of blue screens citing either graphics drivers (mainly for ATI/AMD graphics) or their kernel anticheat software. Second, a “proof of correctness” has never been made for any kernel. Even the seL4 guys do not call their proof a proof of correctness.
Not the operating system:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver_Verifier
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I lost less time to bluescreens than I have to forced updates and sidestepping value add nonsense like one drive, edge.
They didn't "prove the kernel is correct", they built a tool to prove that a single driver maintains an invariant throughout execution.
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I think it ended at the first "ribbon" UI, which was in the 2003 era, but not all products ate the dirt at once.
Yeah the ribbon drove me to LibreOffice and Google Docs and I haven’t been back.
Windows 2000 Pro was the peak of the Windows UX. They could not leave well enough alone.
The original ribbon sucked but with the improvements it's hard to say it's generally a bad choice.
The ribbon is a great fit for Office style apps with their large number of buttons and options.
Especially after they added the ability to minimize, expand on hover, or keep expanded (originally this was the only option), the ribbon has been a great addition.
But then they also had to go ahead and dump it in places where it had no reason to be, such as Windows Explorer.
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I never understood the issue with the ribbon UI. Epecially for Office it was great, so much easier to find stuff.
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> I think it ended at the first "ribbon" UI, which was in the 2003 era,
Nah. 2007 era.
Office 2007 introduced the ribbon to the main apps: Word, Excel, I think Powerpoint. The next version it was added to Outlook and Access, IIRC.
I still use Word 2003 because it's the last pre-Ribbon version.
I don't know quite when it started to happen, but changing and/or eliminating the default Office keyboard shortcuts in the last few iterations has really irked me.
Another often-underappreciated advancement was the UAC added in Vista. People hated it, but viruses and rootkits were a major problem for XP.
People hated it because it was all over the place. Change this or that setting? UAC. Install anything? UAC. Then you'd get a virus in a software installer, confirm the UAC as usual, and it wouldn't stop a thing.
It is more of a warning than an actual security mechanism though. Similar to Mark of the Web.
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> This verified that kernel drivers couldn't crash the rest of the kernel.
How did crowdstrike end up crashing windows though?
> Static Driver Verifier
Well, the Crowdstrike driver isn't (wasn't?) static. It loaded a file that Crowdstrike changed with an update.
Most drivers pass through rigorous verification on every change. But Crowdstrike is (was?) allowed to change their driver whenever they want by designing it to load a file.
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> The big win with Windows 7 was that they finally figured out how to make it stop crashing.
Changing the default system setting so the system automatically rebooted itself (instead of displaying the BSOD until manually rebooted) was the reason users no longer saw the BSOD.
> First large scale application of proof of correctness technology.
Curious about this. How does it work? Does it use any methods invented by Leslie Lamport?
A modern reimagining of Windows 2000's UI - professional, simple, uncluttered, focused, no cheapening of the whole experience with adverts in a thinly-veiled attempt to funnel you into Bing - with modern underpinnings and features such as WSL2 would have me running back towards Microsoft with open arms and cheque book in hand.
Not an obligation, but ReactOS exists and needs help:
https://reactos.org/donate/
Surprisingly close. I recently tried its package manager and installed a recent Python! So better than the original XP-era Windows in some respects.
I’ve been watching ReactOS development for years and and progress is slow but steady. I’m excited for the point where it will be fully usable as a drop in replacement for old Windows software.
There are Linux distros that meet your description (no need for WSL2 either!). I am guessing you're not running towards them with open arms and cheque book in hand ... or maybe you already ran to Linux and are just nostalgic about going back to Microsoft ... ?
Linux UIs can’t even align fonts correctly within the elements.
It is miles away from the original and you can immediately see its Linux because things don’t quite line up. Huge difference in quality, attention to detail, and the entire interface becomes unpleasant to look at.
Also, Linux power management and lack of hibernation means its useless on laptops
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Plenty of distros/skins get it 99% of the way there for a similar looking screenshot but only 25% of the way there for the actual user interface experience. ReactOS is probably the closest (in terms of going down a holistic user interface approach) but saying it's 25% the way there to being a finished solution would be generous.
While DEs often emulate the look of macOS or Windows, they always get the feel wrong. You can put a global menu bar, Dock, etc into KDE, but ultimately it still acts like KDE and nothing like macOS.
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Sounds like you are describing XFCE.
I made the switch to a *nix OS with XFCE 20 years ago. Couldn’t be happier.
Windows Whistler (XP Beta) had an interesting theme that was like a bit modernized Windows 2000. Small non-rounded title bars, non-obnoxious taskbar, etc. Too bad they never finished it and offered a stable version for Windows XP users.
Here are my gripes with the modern Windows experience:
- Runs Windows update and reboots without my permission
- Keeps trying to make me switch to Bing
- Keeps trying to make me use Microsoft Account vs. local account
- Does a crappy job of reopening windows on reboot. Miserable copy of macOS.
- Fan spinning on my laptop with no easy way to figure out what process is consuming CPU
- Flat UI
- No built-in way to view markdown files
- No tool to graphically show where my diskspace went; allowing me to find and delete large files
- Printers keep getting disconnected; it is easier to print from iPhone thanks to bonjour
- No dictionary app (macOS has it)
- Can't airdrop to iPhone (3rd party apps can do it)
- No screenshot tool that allows you to type text (in addition to circling and highlighting and arrows)
- No command-line zip / unzip
- No instant search (macOS has had it for how many years now?)
Command line zip/unzip is available in PowerShell:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...
Markdown rendering is also available:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...
I agree with a bunch of your criticism, but modern PowerShell is pretty decent and has a lot of tools.
Adding to this If you're willing to go third party
Everything can give you instant search, and with a PowerToys plugin you can integrate it into PowerToys Run, which gives you an Alfred Style search bar
WizTree works for visual inspection of Storage
Screenshots apps, Markdown Viewers, are common enough, won't comment further on those
On the printer disconnections: I've had some weird experiences, recently, a technician showed to me that, using the default windows update driver, my work printer regularly disconnected, but using the manufacturers driver, the setup has so far worked without a problem
Markdown should have a UI viewer
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My main gripe for work laptop is that Windows 11 is dog slow. I think they have rewritten Explorer but not for the better. Word is also driving me nuts. The formatting does a ton of weird stuff that's totally unpredictable. Outlook has this weird flat UI where it's hard to tell what is a button and what isn't. Search has been broken for a long time.
Both Windows 11 and modern macOS are slow as shit now. The other day I clicked the Notifications settings in the outhouse they call a Settings app on my Mac and it took a solid 3 seconds to render the UI.
And behind me, was a G4 Cube that could open the System Preferences app off of a spinning hard drive in less time.
What happened to us?
But besides those things, it's great!
Seriously though I think Microsoft has mostly given up on the B2C market. They have good capture of B2B with hardware and software. Why make great products when you can make mediocre products that people have no choice but to use?
> Runs Windows update and reboots without my permission
This might be an unpopular opinion but I'm actually glad they do this by default now (you can turn it off). My understanding is that MS was continually getting blamed for users getting viruses because they would never update their system, so in the best interest of the users they decided to force it.
I know a lot of people will still disagree with me, but I think if you were in their situation and you were getting tired of not only end-users but also world governments blaming you for things your users did (or did not do)... you'd probably want to control that a little more too, for both your sakes.
In the end it will hurt MS's reputation for being a broken mess even if it's 100% the users' fault for not updating, so I absolutely get it. And yes I know there's plenty of other things you can blame them for, I'm not saying this is their only issue.
You can still give users a 24-hour warning at a minimum, and only force a reboot for really critical issues.
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I agree with these. Here are some third party tools that can help with some of the gripes though:
> - No instant search (macOS has had it for how many years now?) Everything search somehow does instant search across the entire file system. It is the first thing I install when I get a new computer, cannot stress enough how much time this has saved me: https://www.voidtools.com/
> - No tool to graphically show where my diskspace went; allowing me to find and delete large files
This one takes a while to scan but produces an excellent visualization: http://www.steffengerlach.de/freeware/ (Scanner)
I use WizTree to see what's taking space. On NTFS volumes it uses the same method as Everything does to quickly read all the file info straight from the filesystem.
> No command-line zip / unzip
Yes it does. It's just called Compress-Archive/Expand-Archive.
So much easier to use tar -z
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> - No screenshot tool that allows you to type text (in addition to circling and highlighting and arrows)
Snipping tool works for all of this
It doesn't let you type text on the image. That's so important! The main thing I want to do when I take a screenshot is to circle something, or draw an arrow, then type some text about the item I am pointing to.
I don't really agree with half the list as those are just apps you can get but...
> Does a crappy job of reopening windows on reboot. Miserable copy of macOS.
Please! Can windows figure this out and can Macs figure out how to restore window to monitor configuration as well as Windows.
And that's just the user experience! For developers:
- multiple heap allocators
- have to install runtimes, even for C
- all useful permissions are off by default
- entire GUI is permeated by "Not Invented Here" mistakes
- msi is opaque and crusty
> - Fan spinning on my laptop with no easy way to figure out what process is consuming CPU
Huh? Ctrl+Shift+Escape will bring up task manager. Is that not enough?
That's not enough. Sometimes it is system tasks that don't show up in the task manager.
As someone who built an IT career on Microsoft’s entire suite, only to recently (past six years or so) migrate wholesale to macOS (endpoint) and Linux (server), I can definitely say MS’ best days are behind it. 2000 was rock solid, Server 2003 had some growing pains (mainly the transition to x64 and multi-core processors), and 2008 fully embraced the long march into irrelevance even as it tried to shake up the hypervisor space. Now the company is so obsessed with arbitrary and unnecessary feature creep and telemetry-as-surveillance that I’m loathe to recommend it when I don’t have to.
Honest to god, if an IdP like Okta made an Active Directory replacement that ran via container instead of a full-fat VM or appliance template, I’d gladly toss ADDS out the window with all its stupid CALs. Basic directory functionality in 2025 shouldn’t require a bloated ADDS/LDAPS virtual machine to run, especially with the move to cloud providers for identity. If you make it easier to do identity without ADDS, you remove Microsof’s major trojan horse into the enterprise - and M365’s as well.
> Honest to god, if an IdP like Okta made an Active Directory replacement that ran via container
https://goauthentik.io/ can run in docker. It can be paired in with openldap containers, too.
If Okta made an AD replacement, they’d charge for each extra attribute beyond fullName, firstName, surName, and drink.
Identity Admins don’t let Identity Admins buy into Okta.
You’re not wrong, but depending ln the org size those charges are still cheaper than Windows Server + CALs.
Ideally though, it’d be like Okta in that its core directory is in the cloud, but also like ADDS/LDAP in that local servers/objects can join to a domain via local containers posing as domain controllers.
Yes, I know modern device management and cloud-based IdP means the need for a directory is decreasing by the day, but Enterprises still want it for ease of user and computer management via a centralized database of sorts. Having someone, anyone offer me a leaner way of achieving this without a crusty LDAP deployment or expensive Windows Server + CALs, would be hugely appreciated.
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The fact Windows 2000 was peak Microsoft and OS X 10.5 was peak Apple is proof that the golden age of software is way behind us, unfortunately.
That's not true, next year has been and always will be the year of desktop Linux, I'm sure of it!
In my opinion, the year of the Linux desktop happened more than 2 decades ago, when the last kinds of applications that were previously available only on Windows became also available on Linux, e.g. movie players and device drivers for some less common hardware, e.g. TV tuners.
That is when I have converted all my computers, desktops and laptops, from dual-booting Windows and Linux, to Linux-only. For some servers I have continued to use FreeBSD and I have continued to use Microsoft Office Professional, but on Linux with CrossOver, where it worked much better than on Windows XP (!).
I agree that installing and configuring in the right way Linux remains a job for someone with decent computer management skills.
However, I have also installed Windows professionally, and on less common hardware, like embedded computers, I have encountered far more problems and far more difficult to solve than when installing Linux on the same hardware. Moreover, the solution for most Windows installation problems was not using some menu in a graphic tool, but using some obscure Windows command in a CLI window, with some very cryptic and undocumented command-line options, which I typically found by searching Internet forums where Windows users complained about the same problem.
Therefore the only real reason why Windows is more user-friendly is because it comes pre-installed on most computers, after professionals have solved any compatibility problems.
For whomever has a friend or relative that is knowledgeable about Linux, Linux can be more "user-friendly" than Windows.
My parents, older than 80 years, have been using Linux (Gentoo!) on their desktops for many years, without any problems, for reading/writing documents, Internet browsing, movie watching, music listening, TV watching, e-mail using, and so on, despite the fact that they do not even know what is "Linux".
You jest, but with Android desktop mode support it might actually turn out to be true!
I thought 10.6 Snow Leopard is peak OS X?
10.6.8
Still kicking myself for not getting an Axiotron Modbook running Snow Leopard.
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Imagine coming into the mac world with a 10.5 cd and upgrading to the current 10.6 and then watching it deteriorate through years into 10.10. Yeah that's me. Peeking at a glimpse of perfection only for it to flash and fade.
They really did offer a lot of features that really helped productivity. Snapping windows, jump lists, having libraries act as a virtual folder for many folders, etc.
Libraries confuse me to this day. Just give me a path!
Fedora Kinoite with KDE Plasma 6 is pretty good. And will not get worse in the future either. Just need to look outside of the commercial offerings...
The world of software is far larger than those two operating systems.
it was built before, we can build it again and even better than the first time
2K 100% was the best Windows. The NT benefits with none of the XP downsides.
Hard agree. The windows 2000 UI was peak UX and each step since has been a downgrade, (with a possible exception of windows 7)
It was the best for its time. But one of the reason why XP was "better" is that it had built-in support for WiFi. That ended up being a dealbreaker for 2k.
That's the issue.. every new OS has brought some features or stability improvements that are huge upgrades over the older OS.
WSL 2 is a must-have for me now, so Windows 10/11 is much better than anything that came before in that way. I may be alone in this, but I actually think Windows 11 has the best design of any Windows so far. The problem as usual, is that they haven't made the entire OS consistent. I wouldn't mind the new control panel if you could actually change every setting in windows in that one control panel.. and not have to dig through to find control panels that still date back to Win2k. And the new/old context menu in explorer is an absolute disaster. Then new design is fine.. but how the hell did they manage to not make it support all the options of the old context menu?
Also let’s not forget that windows 11 puts random news stories in the start menu. Here in Australia, a lot of them are clickbaity scams. I really can’t believe Microsoft is endorsing whatever horrible choice of news provider they’ve teamed up with. It really spoils their brand image.
There’s a way to remove it, of course, by running some obtuse console command. But normal people have no idea how to do stuff like that.
Windows Server 2003 was the best Windows by far. All of the good parts of NT/2000 with any parts of XP available when you needed them.
Except that AFAIK 2003 kernel was different enough that a few apps and specially games refused to run, properly or at all, compared to XP.
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Cannot agree more. Used Windows Server 2003 for over a decade, until I moved away from desktop to laptop and started having driver issues.
I agree here. I ran server 2003 on my early 2000's desktop for a while.
I preferred XP/2003 in classic UI mode. Lots of little improvements.
If you could get winterm on it and recent Firefox it’d be quite usable. Perhaps ReactOS one day.
and 64-bit (x86_64 not IA64), which no version Windows 2000 was AFAIK
Windows 7 with classic UI is probably the most-recent decent version.
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yeah while 2K was their best ever single breakthrough improvement, it was a v1 and XP/2003 in classic mode was a more refined 2K eg more drivers and better plug and play, more graphics compatibility. And 2003 Active Directory had a number of quality of life improvements.
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Perfectly stated. It was more stable and had better UX than NT4, but didn't have all the unwanted anti-features that came in later versions of Windows. It was the last version of Windows that didn't get in my way.
I loved Windows 2000 so much. I was a beta tester back then and they sent me a copy in the end. Was very cool for me as a broke high school student.
I bought it from my college computer store for like $5 for the CD and an endlessly reusable license key. Truly the good old days.
Definitely. If 2K supported ClearType I would have stuck with it on my personal machines for another half a decade.
2K was so much better than XP. The UI rendering thread was decoupled in a way that XP's wasn't.
Agree. My company ran a bunch of web servers on Windows 2K and Apache web server, because management was afraid of Linux (general FUD and Microsoft's lawsuit threats) and the engineering staff was afraid of Microsoft's IIS web server (security dumpster fire at the time). It was actually a pretty good system, super easy to maintain.
WinXP was also NT family. It wasn't from that married-in Win9x gene pool.
You can't say WDDM wasn't a step forward... Being able to crash your video drivers and reboot them without crashing and rebooting your whole machines made Windows a lot more stable.
Peak doesn't mean that it's a monotonic decline without any steps forward.
One of the innovations in NT 4.0 was adding the ability for video drivers to crash the kernel. They went full circle.
Nostalgically, yes, Windows 2000 was amazing. At the time of launch, on period hardware, it was the fastest and most lightweight OS released by Microsoft. And looking back, I always appreciate that I can look in Task Manager and immediately recognize all of the processes by name.
Windows 7 (except for the last few updates that introduced telemetry and ads) comes in as a close second. But everything after is just bloated crapware.
The only bad things I remember about Windows 2000 are that some software written for Windows 3.x and 9x had compatibility issues and it took an eternity to boot up. It was go take a coffee break as soon as you turn your computer on for the day bad.
IIRC, Win2K would wait for most / all service startups to complete before showing the login prompt. XP and later would allow login to occur while many services were still starting up.
It's a tradeoff. A Win2K system was pretty responsive when you log in after a reboot/startup, but you've got to wait for that experience. In the days of spinning disks and single core CPUs, you had to fight those still-starting services for resources, making the first several minutes of XP usage painful.
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I used the NT 5 betas for a while, and loved alerts not stealing focus. But that came back in the released W2K, and I remember being slightly annoyed by it.
It was anything but lightweight on a Pentium 90 or Pro, or whatever was common at the time. Really needed to upgrade to 16MB of RAM (lol) which was expensive at the time. Why only business and not normal folks used it.
You are confusing 2k with NT 3.1. Win2k was not happy with anything less than 128 MB RAM.
edit: changed to 128 MB. It was XP that needed 256 MB to be any good.
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It's a shame ReactOS never got mature enough to be a serious competitor. If it had modern app and hidpi support but was suck in a 2000-era UI and didn't have feature bloat, it could be a great daily driver.
ReactOS is not dead though. They just made a release.
And it has the 2000-era UI and the modern app support.
It's just dragging on other things, such as SMP and 64bit. But development focus seems to actually be focused on precisely these two.
Can it run Firefox yet? The last time I tried reactOS, it BSODed just trying to launch Firefox... and don't even try using Windows drivers on it, it'll either hardlock, BSOD immediately, or during startup, regardless of whether you're in safe mode or not...
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For folks that pick Windows 2000 Server, why not Server 2003? Is it just because by then NT had XP out as the "Windows for Home Users" and people didn't use Server 2003 as much or were there changes about it folks hated for some reason? To me it always seemed to bring so many more features/capabilities without trashing the classic UI.
Remember that it also introduced Active Directory. I helped build out a global enterprise network that was consistent and supported the same way, with like a quarter million users and tbh, it pretty much worked flawlessly.
Of course that innocence was lost with Welchia and other issues, but Windows 2000 made the year 1999 feel like ancient history in 2001.
Sure, Windows 2000 was definitely great in a lot of ways, but Server 2003/R2 either extended on all of those (e.g. greatly improving AD and its management) or added on it's own big firsts such as x64 support - all without really introducing any of the types of downfall people hate the more modern versions for.
In the 90s, Windows was simple enough that I was able to read tech articles and understand a lot of what is going on inside, up to the point of Windows 2000, and to a certain extend, Windows XP. That completely changed with Vista/7 where I can no longer recognize the name of many processes that are running or understand what actions/situations make my computer lag.
Nowasdays, even through I don't worry anymore as Windows 11 is happy as long as you give it a quadcore cpu, ram, and an SSD, sometimes I still wonder why it writes 40GB to the SSD everyday.
As someone who still runs Win2003 R2 (32bit) on my desktop I can confirm. It was peak MS. System is very stable, UI (classic) is great. It is quick, snappy and good looking. For basic POSIX I have cygwin. For other stuff I use VMs. I have all tools needed to handle some mainmentance (compilers, DDK, docs, ...).
But there is problem.. HW.. The pool of old HW is shrinking, and one day I will not be able to run it anymore.. I guess I will move to Linux. There are few nice and lightweight distros...
I'm just surprised that it feels like very little deep innovation in the OS world has happened since windows 2k. 3.11 brought networking in. 95 brought true multitasking to the masses and 2k brought multi-processing/multi-user (yes, NT3.1 had it, but 2k is where most normal users jumped in). And, yes, I know these things existed in other OSes out there but I think of these as the mass market kick offs for them. In general I just don't see anything but evolutionary improvements (and back-sliding) in the OS world beyond this time. I had really hoped that true cloud OSes would have become the norm by now (I really want my whole house connected as a seamless collection of stuff) or other major advances like killing filesystems (I think of these as backdoor undocumented APIs). Have we really figured out what an OS is supposed to be or are we just stuck in a rut?
[edit] 3.1 should have been windows for worgkroups 3.11
"Normal users" did not jump into Windows 2000 Workstation. That was still an 'enterprise only' OS. Normal users either suffered with WinMe shipping on their desktop computer or jumped from 98SE to XP, given their computer could handle it (aka they bought a new computer).
I think the major change has been that computers are very stable and secure these days. It's night and day compared to the 2000s.
There's a lot working against fundamental change of PC desktop OSes that corporations use, therefore OSes that Microsoft can make money from.
- Big software vendors (Autodesk, Adobe, etc.) making it difficult for Microsoft to deprecate or evolve APIs and/or design approaches to the OS.
- Cybersecurity/IT security groups strongly discouraging anything new as potentially dangerous (which is not incorrect).
- Non-tech people generally not caring about desktop PCs anymore - phones have that crown now.
- Non-tech people caring much more about interface than the actual underpinnings that make things work.
Outside of the PC there's some innovation happening, at least with the OS itself and not user interfaces. Check out Fuschia sometime.
> 2k brought multi-processing/multi-user
Sorta. It was real pain-in-the-ass to run 2000 as a regular (non-administrator) user. Assuming your software worked at all that way, as even Office 2000 had some issues. UAC was necessary.
It required attention to detail, from a sysadmin / desktop admin perspective, but it was definitely possible and paid dividends in users being unable to completely destroy machines like they could on the DOS-based Windows versions. I put out a ton of Windows NT Workstation 4.0 and Windows 2000 Pro w/ least-privilege users. It was so convenient to be able to blow away a user's profile and start w/ a clean slate, for the user, w/o having to reload the machine.
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Looks like there is some negative feelings towards this comment. So if we aren't in a rut, what are the big revolutionary OS advancements that have happened since this time?
This is a forum populated almost entirely by people whose day-to-day existence depends upon building the new stuff that sucks :) (mine too!)
Android (all apps sandboxed). Desktop OSes are still barely catching up to this one.
Desktops have been in a rut for a decade. Windows has sucked post Win7 in ways that are either conspiracy or the most stinging indictment of managerial incompetence possible. Osx is good except it's key bindings are alien and the hardware is closed and apple hasn't improved it really at all in ten years and it has loads of inconsistencies with Linux cli. Linux has been in a huge rewrite of the desktop and graphics lift for no real end user benefit and flubbing the opportunity to make ground on windows while it tried to commit market share suicide.
3d compositing, ssds, mega displays, massive multi core, all completely wasted.
You know what I should be able to do? Hot execute windows and Linux and Osx on the same desktop without containerization that leaves 3d as an afterthought or worse a never thought.
Virtualization. FDE. Hot patching. Io Ring (io_uring), etc.
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Windows moved everything to sharepoint now, so documents are stored "somewhere" and can be edited by many users. What often causes strange bugs.
Also a big degradation is the whole "hidden" %appdata% folder that grows and grows in size with no tools to deal with it.
Isn't Sharepoint like an enterprise management tool? I've never interacted with it once.
As for appdata... There's many faults to find in modern Windows changes, but I'm not willing to pin this on MS. Microsoft stuff tends to use %appdata% fairly sensibly, in most cases. On the other hand, the behavior of third-party developers has been really frustrating. What was initially intended as a universal storage location for some program data has become some kind of program container. Now, whenever you download some giant 300-500mb Electron app or whatever, you can be sure that it will force its entirety into appdata with no way to change the location. Every one of these developers has decided that their program is so valuable and Important that it's inconceivable that the user might want to install it on anything but the system drive. No, our program is unique and deserves nothing but the best!
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Definitely stuck. We found a pretty strong optimum that no one has been willing to venture outside, strong enough to keep selling and that seems to be all that matters these days.
It was during an era where there was actual competition over Operating Systems. OS/2 definitely pushed Microsoft hard. BeOS woke everyone up even if it wasn't on popular hardware. Bell labs was still experimenting with plan9. There were several commercial Unix vendors.
Monopolies. They ruin markets. Destroy products. Reduce wages. Induce nostalgia.
I am 50/50 on this particular argument for why OSes are in a rut. I think there is actual competition in the form of the various distros out there and they have passionate advocates with real skill trying new things but they don't really take in a more mainstream way and they rarely feel revolutionary. I think this is more of a track gauge problem. It is hard to provide a truly novel OS without building all the infra around it so that people can actually use it. That takes resources at a scale that few can muster. What if I wanted to build something that kills off the idea of a file system? All the apps out there are written at their very core with this concept in them so even if it is a better idea, it is incredibly hard to bring it out to market and only huge companies can do it. At the same time though the huge companies are pushing their versions of things which makes it hard to compete and have even small innovation in the space. I don't have a solution here. I had hoped things like web assembly would have led to OS breakaway by now but it hasn't really happened. Maybe it still will.
The desktop UX was good, but nearly every network service on Windows 2000 had a critical vulnerability at some point. The Code Red worm (MS01-033) comes to mind as particularly impactful. This was the golden age of stack smashing.
I think I am not the only one who memorized this: FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8
Raises hand: I always remembered the first series of numbers as f*ck GW (as in Bush).
I always heard it as FuCK GateWay (the PC maker)
That's XP though, not Windows 2000...
I’ve been running Windows 2000 Pro as my main machine from I think the second beta until it was completely dropped from support.
It ran all of my games, stable as hell, quite light with none of the bullshit added later, none of the graphical bullshit added by XP but still classic Chicago.
The only thing that could make it better were the UI rendering engine introduced with Vista and its enhanced driver and security model.
I see a vast majority of comments here agreeing that UIs were significantly better and faster twenty years ago or more. Assuming HN is representative for the software community, how is it that slow, inferior and dumbed-down interfaces have prevailed in the end? And this hasn't been happening just to popular consumer products.
The answer is, HN is not representative.
There will be a much, much higher prevalence of computer enthusiasts on this board, not just people looking for a paycheck
That makes sense.
Webification and phones.
You make more money selling software for phones and it is cheaper to use one stack to build all so you build things for the web first.
I don't know whether Windows is for corporate desktops, enterprise servers, PC manufacturers, Azure, home users or advertisers. It certainly doesn't feel like it is the right product for me anymore.
People just like the Windows they used when they were younger. It's the same with movies, cars, whatever.
Governments, diseases, weather.
If MS stripped *ALL* ads and bloatware (telemetry for calc??) out of Win 11 and restored the traditional UI of start menu + desktop, it would be fairly good overall. Certainly within their top 5. They really are close to peak yet again but cannot realize they are striving to make it worse.
11 is mostly a solution looking for a problem. I don’t do windows day to day anymore, but the folks I work with who do aren’t excited anymore.
"A computer on every desktop and Windows on every computer" was the company's goal. Ever since they claimed success on that one (glossing over the ubiquity of Linux everywhere else) they've been sorta directionless.
I started my Windows Server career around 2003R2, so can't comment on the peakness of 2K.
2008R2 snowballed it's own "revolution" when it introduced PowerShell 2.0, which was pivotal for many future things to come.
Out of the more modern ones, 2012R2 was "peak".
I would guess we will still see 2012R2 installations well into the future. Still running bits and pieces of critical infra, even if it has been EOLed long ago, but that's the way of the Server I guess. Can't wait for the 5000+ uptime day screenshots of ancient 2012R2's.
My guess is the next "long LTS" will be Win2025. Just because it's introducing the NTLMv2 deprecation path and working solutions to replace it.
TBF XP and 7 are both decent. Everything went down after those, including the Ads, the update, etc.
I didn't upgrade to 10 until I purchased a used Dell laptop (which includes 10 prof) a few years ago, and I never used 11 and hopefully never needs to use it.
I love 2000 and XP but 7 has a special spot for me because it’s a “modern” Windows (supporting proper alpha blending in its theme drawing and such) without the various problems that 8 and newer bring. I have an old laptop with it installed and booting it up is honestly refreshing. Its visual style is a little dated feeling but not that much.
I like it for the same reasons. I just wish it supported high DPI. It, and Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion era OSX, at high res would be peak desktop usability.
I believe XP was when Windows Activation started, so that's a pretty big negative for me. Other than that, XP, 7 and 10 were pretty good, although 10 introduced advertisements if I'm not mistaken.
XP also inexplicably required at least twice the ram as 2000. when XP came out that was a significant cost, and I personally was able to salvage many laptops at the time by downgrading them from XP. Eventually XP became the default for me because ram got a lot cheaper and the service packs and driver support made it more viable.
But then, tangentially, I started using ubuntu at work, in a sort of misguided belief it would make me a better sysadmin, and it was only a matter of time before I couldn’t stand windows at home as well.
I thought win7 was pretty solid, though I didn’t upgrade until well after win8 was shipping. But lucky for me, proton finally got really good, and that allowed me to basically skip win10+. Now it’s only for the rare tool that I even boot into my windows partitions anymore. When I do, being bombarded by random attention grabbers is completely jarring and I want flee as fast as I can.
If you think 11 is bad, I bet 12 will be even worse. When 10 is unsupported and 12 is out, you will probably be reaching for 11 by then...
I'm already moving into Linux for one of my laptops. If the drivers and desktop experiences are good enough (or bad enough in Windows) I might move 100% to Linux in a few years.
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If you intend to stick with Windows for the long haul, you will have to upgrade eventually. I hung on to 7 for a while, but several apps stopped getting updates: iTunes, the Spotify desktop client, Google Chrome, and even Firefox dropped support. I was using iTunes to download podcasts, which after a while became impossible with some feeds because I would get an SSL error each time on that old version. For 10, the ESU period ends one year after 10/14/25 for consumers and three years for organizations. It's possible that apps will continue to receive updates during that time.
Thanks, yeah, I figured. Maybe I can move to Linux in 5 years. I'm already using Linux for my dev laptop.
Come try out Fedora, or whatever flavor of Linux you want.
It's surprisingly fantastic for almost all modern computing tasks. Yes, it's true, some software won't work, such as Adobe Photoshop, but most people aren't using software like that anyway. For gaming, I'd say we're close to 99% of games supporting Linux out of the box on Steam. The few left that still don't choose not to via kernel-level anti-cheat or forgetting to toggle a checkbox for Linux support (EasyAntiCheat and friends).
The point is, it "Just Works" for darn near everything these days and is a very pleasant experience. Try it out!
The best Linux I have ever seen is Linux Mint. I tried it out because I needed to do something with firewire, but all of the other Linux kernels had dropped firewire, and it was the only one left that still supported it. I found it to be intuitive and friendly and everything just worked.
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Eh, this is going to sound like a I'm a stick in the mud, but I've tried Linux about a dozen times now, and every time has eventually led to 'a Linux evening' that disenchants me from the fantasy and back to reality. It's fantastic as a server OS, however.
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Windows 10 LTSC IOT has all the bloat and spyware stripped out and will get security updates for years. It's super lean.
Will third party apps keep installing updates ? Hard to say. The adobe suite already refuses to install the latest version on any LTSC (for no reason other than they don't want to support it - it works great) so who knows.
Suspect my next OS will be Windows 12 LTSC if I can hold out long enough - every other Windows version alway seems to be experimental crap going all the way back to ME (millennium edition)
I tell customers that they should use LTSC for things like virtual desktops. You need stability, such as it not randomly deciding to install a 4 GB game like Minecraft for every user as a “critical update”.
Microsoft joined a meeting and told the customer that they don’t agree with my recommendations because they want to make sure all users get the “latest experiences”.
There’s your problem right there: pushing your own KPIs instead of what’s best for the customers.
Are we just doing OSes or are we doing the entire conglomerate?
#1 Windows 7
#2 DOS 5.0
#3 Office 2003
#4 Windows 95
Honorable mentions: IntelliMouse Optical and XBOX (2001)
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Windows 7 was my all-time favorite. I remember you could not use it straight out of the box, there was a whole bunch of UI tweaks that I would make right away. After that, it was perfect.
For me it's windows 7, if nothing else for being the first and last major Windows where Universal Search worked well.
The Windows 8.x line gets some credit for having the strongest pen interface integration, which regressed significantly in the 10 line, but the overall shell in Windows 8 was rough, and a lot of features were broken in the rushed out and mostly failed attempt to Appify windows and redesign much of the UI at the same time.
the point of an OS is to be out of the way, w2k was both the best and last windows to do so
The way I see it (and similarly with browsers now) is that the OS is a venue providing a stage for others to perform on, they provide the facilities so every act doesn't need to build their own venue. Most of the time people don't visit/use a venue for the sake of it.
Let's be real, Windows Server hasn't changed much since W2K... they may have slapped the 7/Vista UI onto it, but at its core, nothing has changed.
It still operates just fine for AD, DHCP, DNS, SMB, etc etc... the only thing they could drop without the majority freaking out is IIS.
They 've then slapped Windows 8 UI into it, after that, Windows 10 UI, and lastly they've slapped the Windows 11 UI. The reason should be obvious.
The glasses are rose-tinted. There were a number of little bits missing from Windows 2000 that were helpful to have in XP, and you could change the theme to make it look just like Windows 2000.
And I really don't know how Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 doesn't win this battle.
Context. We upgraded from Windows 98 to Windows 2000. That was a major upgrade. First stable NT platform that we could use for everything, including games.
To be fair, driver support sucked ass for NT3/4, and I don't think 4 even had DirectX support...
Microsoft stopped being the innovator. Now they duplicate or appropriate the innovations of others.
Didn't expect to see this-but after Windows 95/98, I went to Windows 2000 for a long time, didn't switch to Windows until 10/11. After Win2k, I went to Linux because I wasn't a fan of XP/7. (I know this is an unpopular take.
For all I know, windows server 2025 is amazing, but have you priced it out? There's no way to justify it.
I actually like Windows despite their aversion to committing to a UI redesign but do I really need to pay $1100 (per core!?) for the hope (but not the promise) of no ads?
I only used Windows at work and I was very happy with NT, when XP came out I was able to go to Linux (RHEL) for my workstation at work.
I never had Windows 2000, but lots of people said it worked great compared to the other Windows systems.
But really for me, the best M/S setup was DOS with Desqview.
I wish Desqview supported higher text modes than 80x25.
There are software and scripts to decrapify Windows 11. After uninstalling and stopping everything that's not needed and making start menu and the bar behave like in Windows 7, it's quite decent.
This adds maybe 20 more minutes to install time but it's worth.
Unfortunately all that crap eventually comes back. Microsoft likes to reset settings… I’m pretty sure I must’ve spent the majority of my youth setting the same explorer settings over and over and over again … And it never ends with any custom setup you do; given enough time it reverts.
I don't think anyone doubts that you can do this. It's more that I refuse to pay for an OS which needs to be de-crapped in the first place. If Microsoft can't make something which prioritizes my needs above their corporate metrics, then they don't get my money.
LTSC is likely what you want then (needs to be purchased through a VAR but it's not hard to find a smaller one that will sell single copies)
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Okay, mostly use Windows 7 Professional (with 100+ "updates") for general purpose and software development but for such usage and/or a Web server what to get now? Windows 2xxx?
That's kinda mean. Surely Windows ME was peak Microsoft.
This brings back a lot of nostalgia and I wholeheartedly agree. Back then I ran Windows 2000 server beta 2 on a dual proc system with P2-300s. It was rock solid.
Hard agree. 2000 was capable and never felt bloated.
It felt solid.
Microsoft never should have dropped Xenix to invent its own OS.
One cool thing Microsoft did with Windows NT was the whole local security model and a filesystem that supported them (NTFS), which was definitely richer than UNIX. I don't really know if other UNIXes at the time had anything more than the 16-bit uid and gid and mode bits on everything the filesystem. I wonder how it would have looked if Microsoft kept Xenix as the base and added ACLs on top of it, for example.
Microsoft bought Dave Cutler so that he could reinvent his OS (VMS), which became the NT line.
Why would anyone pay for Yet Another UNIX?
Plus Dave Cutler hated UNIX.
Well, Xenix was extremely popular since it was the cheapest option on x86. That said, I doubt Bill Gates would have hired Dave Cutler had he stuck to Xenix.
You wouldn't want to connect a fresh installation of Windows 2000 to the internet today. "Net Send" and default-on Administrative Shares are some brain-dead design decisions that made sense on a trusted LAN, but not the Internet.
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I don’t know why they always alternate a good with a bad release. Technically Windows 12 should be good.
It feels like Windows 12 will be riddled with AI stuff nobody wants and ads, and forced to be online and connected to Microsoft in some way.
People always say that, but it’s not really been completely true.
< 3.1 Bad
3.1 Good
3.11 WfW Good
NT 3.5 Okay
95 Good
NT 4.0 Good
98 Good
Me Bad
2000 Good
XP Good
Vista Bad
7 Good
8 Bad
8.1 Okay
10 Good
11 Bad
There just really isn’t a pattern to it.
XP was the last that I really REALLY used. I've had Windows 7 (on my work machine that I didn't use) and I have a Windows 10 machine that I boot from time to time when I want to mess with recording gear. But I kinda fell into "they're all bad, I was just used to them".
I'll give my prime example. I used to know Device Manager/Control Panel SO well. I could just get things done. Now I have to hunt around forever to do any sort of hardware related task. In their attempt to make it "so easy, even your grandma could use it" they've alienated power users. My grandma still has to call me to help her attach a printer... but now I have to say, "I dunno... let me watch a YouTube video and pray that it matches the sub-version that you're using".
I don't know how good Windows 95 was in practice, but in our country where 99.9% of internet cafes didn't have licenses, or service pack updates (if they even had any for the 95 variant), it was a pretty easy Windows to DoS via the netbios vulnerability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinNuke
>95 Good
That's arguable, I thought it was poor at the time.
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Windows 3.0 was good. 3.1 was a minor improvement.
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When Win10 started, it was clearly Bad. No good reason for updates, invasive privacy-breaking telemetry, updates at random moments of the day, and everything was a little different but nothing was better. People flat out refused to upgrade when it was given for free. Microsoft had to force it trough windows update, and did multiple rounds of breaking software people explicitly installed to block the upgrade.
When did it become good? WSL and DirectX 12 were real changes, but all in all, my impression is that the user has been frog boiled over the years, with 2K,XP and 7 becoming distant memories.
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The only 'bad' thing about Vista was it's change (and thus deprecation of many drivers) of driver model. Once tweaked and with good native drivers it was the first good 64bit windows - far more reliable than XP64. At least until 7 came out.
NT 3.51 Best
These are also mixing two separate streams: Win3.x/9x/ME and NT+
There is a pattern when you remove the versions few people used.
Win 11 and Vista have been unfairly maligned, with some minor tweaks (and start11) both are solid performant windows releases.
Vista was indeed fine. I used it for many years and had nary a problem with it. The problem with 11 isn't the core (everyone seems to agree that is fine), it's that Microsoft insists on putting ads and other user-hostile BS in.
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I think the vista hate is well earned. Remember when Microsoft had to trick users into trying it by calling it 'Mojave' instead?
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Windows 11 is the only version of Windows I’ve used where the taskbar routinely crashes on login and refuses to load.
Windows Vista was essentially unusable on release unless you had very high-end hardware.
A couple of weeks after release the first step after getting a new computer was changed from "downloading firefox" to "downgrade to windows xp". Unironically, many people did that.
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they should’ve just skipped 11 like they skipped 9
The story I heard[1] was that Microsoft skipped 9 because people used to check for "Windows 9" prefix string to identify 95 and 98:
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2hwlrk/comment/...
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Windows ME was peak Microsoft, buggy, glitchy, a haven for viruses. It was pure crap and that defined best what Microsoft was and is: cancer
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it sure does
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It's the Register and therefore too worthless to get worked up about, but their naming a server version of Windows as peak anything is an indication that they probably just polled a few drunks at a bar.