I thought 10 was a decent OS once debloated, used it for a while.
Back to Linux now though.
this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2025
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Other than it rebloating itself
I miss windows millennium, which would be a hammer made of a turd.
At least you can despyware 10...
Why should you need to? That's my beef with it. It means they don't respect you enough to give you something good in the first place and hope 99% won't bother.
The plain old basic hammer probably should have been Windows 2000, and then a big playskool plastic stuff slapped on for XP, but ultimately pretty much exactly the same.
I use arch BTW. But I liked XP and 7.
Windows peaked at 7, I only moved to Windows 10 when Windows 7 lost support
Windows peaked at DOS. It was small, inoffensive, and easily killed.
That's mostly due to your age. Older people say it peaked at XP, younger people are saying it peaked at 10. Truth is, they're all kinda the same shit.
Is it though? From a privacy perspective I think Windows 10 quite clearly started introducing some shady surveillance practices which were absent in earlier versions. Of course, 11 took that waaay further, but 10 was a turning point imo.
I think it's a hard case to make that 7 wasn't objectively better than XP.
Windows 10 did roll back some of the more egregious stuff from Windows 8, but still was sort of committed, sort of not. You had a platform with multiple personalities, multiple right click context menus, multiple 'control panel' with a new one being emphasized, but not actually completed, so it's an awkward mix of the platform they had suceeded with and a platform they wished it could be (combined with telemetry). Forced microsoft accounts and using the desktop as a platform to promote products and services....
Yeah I think a fair argument can be made that WIndows 7 was the ultimate execution of the general vision that started with Windows NT, and what came after was something else that also happened to have bits of that original product hanging on.
I'm not too terribly excited by any Windows in particular, but I can recognize something categorically different they wanted to do starting with 8 that remains partially executed to this day, starts to emphasize Microsoft's interests at the expense of the users, and a direction that no one really asked for.
Exactly this. 7 was absolutely the peak of Windows. Everything after was enshittification, and everything prior was still less user-friendly and rough around the edges.
And anyone arguing XP was peak should try installing XP and try connecting to wifi. Talk about a mess. XP was only a marginal upgrade over 98/2000, but with some glossy paint. 7 was the first time Windows felt modern.
95, 98, xp, and 7 were all great; each improved on the last. But 7 was the true peak. 10 was pretty good and unfortunately was the turning point into enshitification.
95/98 was another operating system, though. Windows ~~98~~ ME (forgot about that one) was the last OS in the original Windows series– that Windows that was basically just a graphic shell for DOS.
IIRC, XP was the 5^th^ version of Microsoft's fork of OS/2. OS/2 was rebranded as Microsoft NT in its 3^rd version due to the success of the brand Windows and the failure of OS/2 despite OS/2 having been the superior OS.
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Oh how I wish we could just go back to W7 :(
I agree. This is why I think literally all software should be FLOSS. People should be able to use a platform as long as they like on their own hardware.
As a programmer, my world changed when Windows 95 came out, what with being 32-bit and having an extremely powerful (if difficult-to-use at first) low-level audio API, since I mainly wrote software synthesis and music composition apps. I have not given two fucks for anything that has happened since 95. Quite amazingly, that audio API has remained in existence, unchanged, all the way until today. 30 years of not having to change what I'm doing at all has been absolutely amazing. That shit even worked, without modification, for Windows CE (Compact Edition) and Windows Mobile, so I was able to make versions of my software synthesizer that ran on shitty smartphones from 2005. It worked on Windows Phone as well, albeit it quite uselessly.
That is super interesting! I could read your comments on the windows audio API all day! Do you have a development blog? I’d also love to read more about this audio API.
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It's really incredible how Microsoft is trying to drive people away, by:
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Polluting what works.
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Never actually finishing revamps in progress.
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Pushing so much crap even normal users are conditioned to click Microsoft 'features' away as spam.
They don't have to do anything! They could just freeze Windows 11 and gut development beyond security/api/hardware fixes, and rake in business "stuck on win32" dollars for eternity. But no, they are trying their absolute best to push folks to Android/iOS and open a window for stuff like the steam deck.
I bet we aren't far from OEMs even getting sick of it, as shipping (admittedly, trashy self made) linux distros.
They aren't trying to drive people away, they just have learned there's nothing they can do that will substantially scare people away. So time to pivot to trying to milk that captive userbase for all they are worth. People who are leaving are leaving for mobile class devices and they learned in Windows 8/Windows Phone 7 that they have no idea how to tap into that market segment anyway.
Yes, 'enthusiasts' are going Linux but they are a rounding error, hardly worth trying to capture compared to the revenue capture from the rest of the market. Particularly since the enthusiast market tends to be a bigger pain in terms of being picky users who complain and simultaneously unlikely to just say 'yes I'd like that service you just popped up in the notifications for only $5/month'.
Yes, ‘enthusiasts’ are going Linux but they are a rounding error, hardly worth trying to capture compared to the revenue capture from the rest of the market.
Agreed, it's a rounding error.
But it won't be if OEMs get fed up and start shipping it as an option, like Valve is already doing.
Microsoft has already done some questionably 'OEM hostile' things like pushing the Surface line, shutting out some OEM bloatware in favor of thier own, pollute performance-sensitive devices like handhelds, and such, and it seems MS isn't slowing down.
Yup, most people would just use Mint if it came on their laptop and not really think about it.
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Eh, I’d consider sliding the window a little differently. Command prompt only OS’s like DOS or maybe even BASIC as the “rock.” Windows was more like a Model T car. Make W11 a Pinto or something.
I remember when we were a Unix shop (BSD & Linux) sharing space with guys writing code for some kind of printing software (for professional printing shops that did complex format conversions) that apparently absolutely had to be on Windows (because, unclear reasons, nobody would buy a non Windows printing management box, or something).
Anyway, they were writing for one of the early versions of NT, maybe 2000, not sure, and were pulling their hairs out the whole time we were with them.
A classic I remember was "the system will just decide that our driver (pretty much the only thing running) isn't that important, and dump it's priority to the shitter. Once it's there, it's dead in the water and we can't get it active again without physical intervention. We've been talking to Microsoft for weeks to get around this."
I suppose this has been more or less addressed by Microsoft nowadays, but, of course, this kind of thing hasn't been an issue in unixland, like ever. Because it's a system that fucking makes sense. And about the versions of Windows, I stopped using their stuff in the DOS days, so it's not like I even have an opinion.
(and yes, they did have a couple very high end developers, on top of the regular grunts)
I actually really liked NT around 2000. I think it was NT 4.0? We used it for a typing class I took at the local college. That was just as an end user for one single program, but I remember liking it a lot.
Was CUPS around back then? I assume that was a trillion times easier to manage than whatever Microsoft had concocted.
They know we liked Win7. They'll never go back, they'll just keep making it worse for us and more profitable for them.
That's why I switched to Linux Mint a year ago. I feel sorry for people who can't switch for whatever reason.
I did a switch last week and i feel like my life became just a little bit more bearable because THERE IS NO FUCKING BLOAT. Win11 actively makes you feel bad using a computer.
You forgot windows me.
I know it would throw off the whole 9 square thing but if you (or the person that created this) decide to add it then might I recommend a hammer smashing itself into pieces?
Was there any big difference between 95, 98, SE and ME, though? IIRC they were just the yearly rebrandings of Microsoft, there was no major difference between 95 and ME I can recall.
And windows 95.
Oh shit.
I didn't even notice.
First I forgot about Dre and now I forgot about windows 95. Smh my head.
Isn’t that what the entire thing is balanced precariously on top of? So it’s not absent from the meme, it’s lurking in the background, ever-present.
Windows actually migrated to the NT kernel when XP launched - AFAIK, ME was a dead end.
I'll take both of your words for it since the only I know about windows me is that it fucking crashed catastrophically all the fucking time.
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