A few things that people seem to have forgotten over the years:

The "Fisher-Price" visual style fiasco. (People claiming XP's UI design choices were too unprofessional)

Extremely unstable on base release, with things only getting better after Service Pack 1.

Activation servers required to install the OS.

The start of Window's Customer Experience Improvement Program telemetry.

Integration of Windows Update into the OS, which re-enabled Microsoft defaults like Internet Explorer, after patches were complete.

The start of confusing SKUs: Home Edition, Professional Edition, Media Center Edition, and Professional x64 Edition which was confusingly a re-badged Server 2003.

I'm sure I am forgetting a lot more. It wasn't all sunshine and daisies like people seem to remember... but it was a lot better than now.

I mean Windows ME was shit, but XP and 7 were great. Everything after 7 tho has been shit.

Windows 7 was the peak. everything since has been a decline.

Windows 7 was the first Windows OS that didnt require constant reboots, didnt require regular reformat/reinstalls to fix random over time slowdowns/degredation/crashes/etc.

Windows 7 had a relatively light weight, and very easy to use interface.

Windows 7 was the last Windows OS that you actually owned when you bought it.

Every OS after Windows 7 was centered on taking control and usability away from the owner/user.

Windows ME was the cancer of all windows variants. It was slower and less stable then w98, and it was slower and less stable then XP. I don't know what they were thinking when throwing this abortion-type of os at us.

XP was complete garbage for many reasons. Security being the number one. Multi-user being number two (or lack thereof). And boy did it look nasty. I think you have nostalgia.

But my main point is microsoft began everything that people hate about it today in XP. People seem to have forgotten all push back there was at the time.

The only thing I miss about XP was that if it was at a hotel or internet cafe, no matter what they did, you could be admin in about 10 minutes or less. Which was always handy to have.

People still run windows 7.so nothing changes

You got these right, and I wrote basically similar things.

But I had to reply because if you remember all of this, you might also remember seeing how long an XP machine could last on the internet before being patched enough.

It was crazy that you HAD to upgrade it offline, because it would be owned before you could even get it patched. At the time we saw 10 to 15 minutes tops before it was infected.

In any case, yes, XP was the start of all the things we hate today. Its interesting how much more push back there was back then: anti consumer advocates, government intervention, class action lawsuits, even the EU got their own version because they got involved.

Now everything is even worse, and only the consumers seem to be the ones complaining.

Wow, yeah I completely forgot that we used to connect directly to the internet. No gateway to shield us.

I used to get OS alert popup windows from random people connecting to the local Messenger Service with all sorts of scams.

Drive letters? (Yes, they are stupid and don't work with MTP but I won't explin /dev/ to him)

You know, I dont think so. I dont remember enabling it

Even Vista was ok, it was just pre-installed on computers that could barely run it and UAC was overtuned but it was solid with the later service packs.

Yeah see I'm pretty sure Bazzite should be able to read the drives. I'll mess with it when I feel like it

I already use unattend scripts for the rest of my family's Windows shit... I add irm https://christitus.com/win | iex at the end too so I can then install cool stuff

And no, I'm not upgrading any Windows 10 stuff rn

Yea, vista was the ME problem all over again.

People running it on old hardware and old software wasn't written to use UAC yet.

i mean they're just folders at the end of the day

The only thing that sucked about windows 8 was their decision to force mobile friendly UI on everyone. Seems to be reoccurring issue.

Eh, this was initially true about XP. By the time SP3 came out, XP was honestly probably the most stable Windows version MS has ever produced.

iirc microsoft began going heavy on telemetry (and consequently cutting their QA and testing budget) at some point during Windows 7. That's why it went downhill after that (Windows 8 and after)

XP was honestly probably the most stable Windows version MS has ever produced.

That would likely be 10. The mandate in 2017 to break up services and require that no one thing could bring down windows made a big difference. Doing this required using more memory, which is one of the reasons it hadnt been done before.

I think you are still being nostalgic about XP! Even after SP3, we called a USB device plug and pray. There were drivers that could take down the whole system. Huge security flaws that never were resolved. A simple palm pilot plugged in would cause a BSOD fairly often. I seem to remember microsoft themselves saying that it could never be stable, the architecture would never be able to be successfully patched.

Win11 has been fine for me at home and for the laptops I managed at my last job. Start your machine, skip through the install questions, reboot to USB with a MS ISO, install, done without all the factory bullshit.

Yes, that's a minor pain, but it's a tradeoff against post-install configuration with Linux. Either way, it's hella better than the old days of struggling with pre and post install.

Better DOS program support?

GoToMyPC!

Yeah, that was towards the end of windows life, after win10s release.. and it was added as a windows update package, and as a result was easily uninstallable.

and every news article i saw informing people about the telemetry update, also told people how to uninstall it

That's fair. You're probably right. So, what makes Windows 10 the magnum opus?

now I have 6TB of SSDs that I can't figure out how to get rhe data off them without buying new hardware

Are these drives completely full? If not you can likely split the partition 50% NTFS where your data resides and 50% EXT4 so that Linux distro’s can access them properly.

Move the data from the NTFS partition over to your new partition gradually, expand the EXT4 partition and shrink the NTFS one as you go.

NTFS partitions do work on Linux however you’ll experience permission issues and such which is why it’s generally not recommended for day-to-day use, Bazzite is such a beginner-targeted distro that they don’t want the blame put on them if you do something wrong and lose data.

Well, sort of, but it was SOLD on hardware that couldn't run it

This might surprise you, but I don't think anyone here is complaining about ease of installation.... The "factory bullshit" is built right in to Windows now, and trying to remove it goes way beyond "post-install configuration".

Also, as someone who's done server deployments... doing automated linux installs is trivial.

Naw. I grew up with all the Windows, 7 was the last sane one.

Have to agree. Windows 10 LTSC was tolerable, but it still was pretty batshit with how they designed the settings menus. So many things were now tucked away and hidden, with the real settings you often needed being in Windows 7 settings windows that carried over, but virtually always hidden as normal hypertext links below a much larger windows 10 button that didn't actually do the thing you needed. The only real advantage of 10 was the inclusion of many drivers out of the box, updating a bit faster, and being able to swap the SSD between completely different computers without it freaking out and bluescreening.

Windows 7 was just an advanced Windows XP/2000, and for the most part was still very intuitive to use, with logically laid out settings menus.

Nowadays Linux has far surpassed Windows in ease of use and UX for normal settings with the mainstream desktop enviornments.

And what was up with 3 different styles of settings pages? There was the old MSC style, the more UI friendly pages and then the full-page, here's your phone on Windows, you need to reboot to get back to the desktop version where you have 2 buttons for all your network settings. Fucking infuriating.

It's just heinous now. I don't know how people handle it, I get fucking mad within 5 minutes of having to do anything technical on Windows now.

Tbf, latest update Vista and 7 are barely different aside from their aesthetics. They just decided to repackage the next update into a different operating system because the well was already poisoned with Vista. Which makes me question why they aren't doing the same business strategy with Windows 11 now that its failing. Oh well, I want everyone to switch to Linux anyway so 🤷‍♂️

Was just an ugly version of NT/2000 that’s the last windows machine I bought/built.

I did have an XP box for a while that I picked up on a curb on trash day. It still had the wedding photos of the previous owners when I plugged it in.

Nah they screwed up the performance eith telemetry and took a dump on the NT kernel and Win32 with PWA.

My disk usage went from 20% idle in 7 to 100% usage in 8, which made running on HDDs painful to use.

Pre-installed with the craziest bloatware too. I had multiple come to me thinking there computers were hacked they had so much trash from the factory on them

I use arch, btw.

Anything banned in China has some credibility with me, but it stopped receiving CPU compatibility updates in 2016 and after multiple extensions the last supported versions hit EOL in 2023.

The end of security patches are a much bigger concern than most people realize. Simply browsing the internet could end up with ransomware on your computer without an up-to-date virus database and using a third party solution often doesn't cut it these days.

On top of that, new instruction sets for CPUs don't get updated so newer programs won't run on it and you might not be able to install nor run it with newer hardware.

MELLENIUUUUUUUUUM FEEEEEVVVVEEEERRRR

1. I agree 100%

2. I ran the LTSC version until it recently failed a regular update multiple times, every shutdown and restart would take over an hour, and I would never wish that curse upon anybody ever. It frequently BSOD'ed, usually involving nVidia audio or Windows Store applications (I didn't have any windows Store Apps installed but they're sometimes dependencies), and the only way I could tell you that was the source of the problem is I learned to read the clusterfuck that is the Event Viewer logs, but I haven't had a single similar issue on Linux since I made the switch.

Eh, that's fine. I get that people are worried about EOL systems but, honestly, most of the time the concern seems overblown to me: it's not like you are going to run these Windowses on baremetal and plugged directly into the root DNS gigabit ethernet line. When it comes to Windows, you run them in a VM and under a battery of safety measures such as firewalls and snapshots to begin with. And, once you're bored with it, you return to Linux and the AUR.

I'm always impressed by the level of differences. Printer drivers were a real hassle with 8 and 8.1, and you never knew in advance which driver was for which.

I've used everything from XP to 11. Win 7 was definitely, and by far, the most comfortable for me to use. 8 was hot garbage, 10 was tolerable, and 11 made me switch to Linux a week in.

Same, btw

Windows 10 already had a ton of forced telemetry and more UI clutter than ever. It was a huge downgrade from Windows 7.

I'd rather use a Mac these days and I hate apple products.

Yes, I meant NTFS

Most of the thread just makes me feel old..

WindowsME was what made me switch to Linux.. Sure there has been a windows box around here and there for gaming mostly.. Now with anything I want to play working on Linux, no need for 11

I never liked windows, windows 7 was the most tolerated one

I grew up with 95/98, and still think 7 was the best one and it went downhill after real quick.