Seems Microsoft has to squeeze in at least one bad version between good ones.
But never has a new Windows version been made available where people didn't initially hate them at first, XP, 7, and 10 included. It's not until the version after gets released when people really start appreciating what once was.
95 Good, 98 Bad, 98 SE Good, ME Bad, XP Good, Vista Bad, 7 Good, 8 Bad, 10 Good.
Counting 98 SE as a separate release does seem like cherry-picking in order to make the pattern work. Then again, you could also say the cycle started with Windows 98 (putting the whole of that release into the good pile), and you'd still have a remarkably consistent pattern across two decades and seven versions of Windows. Honestly makes you wonder if there's some deeper cause related to Microsoft's organizational structure or something.
I use 10 at work and 11 at home and after changing the taskbar settings to put the start button back on the left I don't even notice switching.
Same here by the way, I don't use it for anything but gaming and work for the tracking reason.
That's because it isn't, Windows 10 and 11 both identify internally as NT10.0.
For some context: Windows Vista, 7, 8, and 8.1 identified as NT6.0, 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3 respectively; Windows 2000 and XP identified as NT5.0 and 5.1 respectively.
Windows 2000 was no-nonsense, but all good stuff. The good bones that Windows XP got came straight from Win2k.
The only real problem it had was a narrower hardware compatibility profile, but it still wasn’t that bad.
What made XP great was how reliable it was compared to previous Windows versions.
11 has all the same problems 10 has, but brings many significant improvements both in the backend and frontend. Hardly trash.
>never has a new Windows version been made available where people didn't initially hate them at first
Windows 95 and 98 were both received to applause and fanfare, 95's stellar reception in particular is probably still unmatched to this day.
The only shift in user experience that I can equate it to is maybe the jump from candy bar and flip phones to the iPhone and Android. In addition to the UI, it brought real multitasking to a consumer OS.
And as others have observed, 2000 was an immediate hit with everyone who tried it.
If you think 10 is "gold" and 11 is "trash" I assume you're suffering from some sort of stockholm syndrome from using 10 too long and haven't actually tried 11 yet because it's just a reskinned 10 (and visually, it looks a lot better).
Periodic reminder that “Stockholm Syndrome” was a complete fabrication based on no clinical evidence invented on the spot to discredit an ex-hostage who was making legitimate criticism of an unnecessarily violent police intervention by one of the architects of that intervention, because they had no rational defense.
Its invocations in debates are also typically as an attempt at a thought-terminating trope to evoke an emotional response that covers the lack of actual argument, which fits the history of the term well.
I've been on 11 since it was released and I find it to be objectively a worse experience. On Win 10, I could game on one screen and stream a video in a browser on the other. On Win 11, I get stuttering on the streamed video.
It's also failed to update twice now. I invested hours into debugging the issue the first time. This time it's been days and I'm about to just do a fresh Win 10 install over this nightmare.
My current 11 install has never failed to update, but I have experienced various update failures before on 10. This sort of issue is present in both versions, it's just random whether you'll experience it or not, and I wouldn't be surprised if the stuttering issue is just some random driver incompatibility too.
No, it's not random, which I know because I stumbled upon the solution. The problem was that it was using an old 100MB partition as the EFI boot partition. Nowhere in any of the system logs did it mention this. No error message said anything about it. Ridiculous.
and I wouldn't be surprised if the stuttering issue is just some random driver incompatibility too.
Why? My system is the same hardware after the update. In fact, the only thing that's changed (and this happened awhile after the Win 11 'upgrade') was a video card that's 3 - 5x faster than the old one.
Some people claim this was mostly due to bad 3rd party drivers and not the OS itself. But even if that's true, from the user perspective it's very hard to tell the difference.