After having been forced into using 11 at work, I may have been too harsh on Windows 8 when it came out. At least when you clicked Explorer it opened and Notepad didn’t take 10 seconds to launch

Windows 8 was definitely a stumble, but it at least could be made good with a couple apps to fix default behaviours (ie. boot to Desktop Mode, restore Win7-style Start Menu).

Windows 11 is just rotten to the core.

8 was excellent on my Surface Pro 3.

That article was interesting but such a pain to read. Every other paragraph was repeating itself. I miss editors.

If memory serves me correctly, Windows 8.1 introduced the right-click-on-start menu, arguably the best Windows start menu there ever was.

My memory of that time is getting foggy, but true - 8.1 definitely brought in a number of fixes to Microsoft’s initial, abominable Metro UI design.

The start menu was the beginning of the atrocious thing we have today, but right click on it, and you got a quick access menu to everything from a terminal shell to settings to actual shutdown options. It still exists in some form today.

I'm stuck with windows for my work laptop.

I'll say it outright - metro was good but was delivered poorly. I liked full screen start as an option on my tablet, and it also worked great once you configured it well on the desktop. The problem, as I said, was delivery - it was only nice out of the box for touchscreens.

I kept full screen start on my desktop at 8.1 because it was such a great workflow (once I reworked the hell out of it to logical groups for all the esoteric manufacturers specific software I needed).

11 is just a shit show though. And teams. And shoving copilot into absolutely everything.

MS always does what you expect though - continues to make things worse to use. They've been doing it for decades now, they are great at it!

I feel similar about Vista. Like it wasn't great, but it was fine, a reasonable attempt at a proto 7. The issues with UAC never really went away, people just got used to it. Honestly it was a fine OS.

They should habe stopped at 7, maybe 10. 11 is no fun to use

Windows store put the fear of Microsoft corporate in Gaben, especially when they started selling games