Comment by dag11
4 days ago
I'm surprised nobody caught this, but both the screenshot for Windows 8.1 is not Windows 8.1, it's Windows Threshold, the development phase of Windows 10.
The specific screenshot they show is the very first start menu they cobbled together for Threshold, which would later be redesigned again before shipping as Windows 10. The screenshot is also showing off early adaptations of Windows 8 apps running in movable windows -- before that, they could only run full- or split-screen!
I am not surprised, from memory I only know like 3 people who ever willingly used 8.x. The active user base must be tiny compared to Windows 7 and 10 users (if we just stick to that range).
I have personally not used it for more than an hour total (on anyone's PC combined) and I have (co-)owned and used at least one Windows PC continuously since 1995.
In some ways 8.1 was better than 10. You could still control the updates and uninstall the or block telemetry updates. Unfortunately, a lot of hardware makers abandoned making driver updates for it before it even went out of support (unlike Windows 7 where they often kept making minor updates even after it was out of support)
I never used it really myself. The original UI wasn't what I'd ever want out of a PC but the impending stench of the Windows Store was what drove me off of Windows at that point.
I have an 8.1 VM in my unraid server that only exists to run an older radeon driver that allows the GPU to turn off to near 0 watts idle when the hardware isn't in use. Windows 10 broke the subsystem that these drivers used and AMD never got this feature working on 10.
Windows 8 was fine if you used StartIsBack which just added the Windows 7 start menu back and you could happily ignore the big stupid fullscreen start menu that yanked you away from your desktop. But at that point, yeah no point in upgrading.
Interestingly whoever made StartIsBack is still developing a start menu replacement for Windows 11 (called StartAllBack for some reason), and it's made my usage far more tolerable. You can also get a normal file explorer again, with the normal native right click menu that doesn't hide a bunch of stuff behind a "more options" option
8.1 was slightly better, but most people I know that used it, used one of the start menu replacements that looked/felt more like Win7.
They actually backported this start menu to Windows RT which makes it even less sense considering Windows RT was mainly used on tablets and the start screen is better for these devices.