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.
8 was pretty solid under the hood, but they really pushed that Metro interface, and even if you managed to disable it with something like Start8, it was still crippled by the tablet-first design on an OS that had like 2 tablets. And even with the tablets it sucked because lots of settings were still in the old control panel that required a mouse and keyboard.
If we’d had a Service Pack that just gave us the Win7 UI and the Win8 backend it could have been great.
I vaguely remember they might’ve done that later on? Maybe that was for the business version only. It was at least interesting that Microsoft was trying to directly compete with Apple for a while in having a whole ecosystem. I was waiting for more hardware because I liked metro on the phone, but then that all collapsed.
Really the worst part of 8 onward was the fragmenting of the settings, Vista you could at least fallback to the old stuff but they started removing old functionality. I get that they wanted to “update” from the control panel. But that it’s taken them 20 years, and they’re not done, and now neither the new system or the old system is feature complete, is fucking bonkers.
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.
I made the mistake of starting on 95, now I can’t stand anything fancier than XFCE.
8 was pretty solid under the hood, but they really pushed that Metro interface, and even if you managed to disable it with something like Start8, it was still crippled by the tablet-first design on an OS that had like 2 tablets. And even with the tablets it sucked because lots of settings were still in the old control panel that required a mouse and keyboard.
If we’d had a Service Pack that just gave us the Win7 UI and the Win8 backend it could have been great.
I vaguely remember they might’ve done that later on? Maybe that was for the business version only. It was at least interesting that Microsoft was trying to directly compete with Apple for a while in having a whole ecosystem. I was waiting for more hardware because I liked metro on the phone, but then that all collapsed.
Really the worst part of 8 onward was the fragmenting of the settings, Vista you could at least fallback to the old stuff but they started removing old functionality. I get that they wanted to “update” from the control panel. But that it’s taken them 20 years, and they’re not done, and now neither the new system or the old system is feature complete, is fucking bonkers.
Pointing out that Windows Vista is turning 20 this year is a gut punch.
Oh no… I thought I was exaggerating. 😅
Don’t forget to schedule your colonoscopy.
Someday digital archaeologists will search for Windows 9, the legendary Lost OS, said to give its users unlimited power.