Comment by bsder

> Only in hindsight did people ever express fondness in public for Windows XP (and maybe a bit for Windows 7).

I don't agree. Those of us using it for embedded development skipped from XP to 7 to 10.

Windows XP started off a bit rough. Once it had some time to mature, nobody in their right mind wanted to go back to Windows 95/98/9x, though.

Windows 7 was definitely lauded as decent contemporaneously. Vista was a disaster by comparison (but a necessary one--Vista took the arrows to allow Windows 7 to appear). And lot of people avoided Windows 8 like the plague it was.

Windows 10 was definitely a step back from 7, but wasn't ... terrible? Especially relative to Windows 8. But Windows 10 definitely wasn't genuinely good on any axis. And everybody was constantly bitching about all the stuff that was clearly the beginning of enshittification that got turned to maximum on 11.