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Comment by estebank | Hacker News Reader

> The last good OS MS released was Windows XP.

I'm reminded of how much people hated it when it came out. Post Vista it was widely liked. A lot of people are also nostalgic of 7 now. I wonder if we'll have a batch of people nostalgic for 10 or 11 in a decade in the same vein. I doubt it, but who knows. The old rule was "every other release is loved/hated", which held until at least 10 (8 was hated, 10 was somewhat accepted). I also remember that 10 was supposed to be "the last version of Windows".

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Windows XP was a downer for many when it came out because it wasn't Windows 98SE++ (and Windows ME was a flop) - it was Windows 2000 with a "fisher price" skin.

For those in the know, that was great. Windows XP + classic theme + drivers (even if you had to find the W2k drivers) was incredibly stable and performant.

But it took a few years for games to catch up and get the updates, and so for the "tech oriented" crowd (which were often gamers), it took a bit to catch on.

But its longevity is a tribute to how "good it was" and how hard it was to improve from it. Vista introduced more stability at the expense of requiring new drivers, so they re-released Vista a few years later as 7 (there's really no major differences between Vista and 7 except a few years of upgrades to drivers and hardware).

The five years between XP and Vista certainly didn't help matters, either. If you wait that long, you better be willing to support it for decades. Windows XP's last update was 18 years after it was shipped.

Windows XP was the beginning of the downhill slide for me because it was the first "phone home" version of Windows.

I'm not gonna gainsay anyone who says it was good, I'm sure they have lots of legitimate fond memories of Space Cadet Pinball, Half-Life 2, etc. But the Windows XP era was the first one where "what's happening with Windows" just passed me by. I was through with Microsoft's shenanigans starting around then.

Hehe even today I still remember FCKGW and using it on completely legitimate copies just to avoid having to find whatever the actual one was.

Yeah I missed out on using what I call the "FuCKinG Windows" code. I was able to commit to Linux full time, even find work in it.

Vista suffered from being stuck in PM hell. MS was working on so many new features for longhorn that were never fully finished and later scrapped. The only real significant (and important) change was the HAL.

I would've loved Vista if it looked like the early Longhorn builds.

WDDM was a huge improvement. UAC was also an improvement against shatter attacks but too aggressive in Vista.

That was another thing Windows 7 "won" on by just being later; by the time it came out many of the major programs that had huge UAC issues were updated and resolved.

Oh yeah that filesystem whatever it was called sounded really revolutionary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS - it's sad, there really hasn't been much done in filesystems, but there's a lot that could be done.

It introduced volume mixer (which stays kinda beloved and sought out even now) (and also WASAPI), search in start (hit start and type, which is now everywhere), snipping tool (which is made even better in windows 11), etc., there's actually a bunch of features there that either get overlooked or misattributed to windows 7, which is kinda interesting. Check out this article about them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista

I remember the start menu search and related search things (both for windows and Mac OS, remember Sherlock?) being so absolutely dog slow and even worse after upgrade/fresh install.

That all went away as SSDs came on the market, but it was a noticeable "downgrade" from teh snappy.

I'm one of the few people who liked 8. I didn't mind the start screen and I was disappointed when 10 took away my Charms bar and related gestures, and remain livid over the Windows Update/telemetry situation. I understood what they were doing: with the phone and tablet OSes, the goal was a unified ecosystem like Apple's. Effortless movement between form factors. They didn't do themselves any favors by only sort of delivering on that promise, but the main problem was that no one explained the fundamental dynamic: Apple is a cult, Microsoft is a jail. So while the users of the former's OSes will happily rationalize or ignore even negative changes, Microsoft's users are always somewhat resentful, no matter what. This was the curse of their effective monopoly. Something finally snapped with 8's failure, giving us MS' apparent abandonment of any pretense and an evolution toward a Google-like "users are the product" attitude.

The Ghost of Bushes Past continue to haunt us, I suppose.

While I liked Win 7 more, I didn't mind Win 8.1. But convergence won't happen. Everyone is quick to forget that the devices are actually in different physical forms when interacting with them.

I think Gnome 3 is the most successful, because their utilities and first party apps have the right kind of compromise while not trying to enforce their view on other software workflow. iPad OS would have been great too, if they went for a free floating windows management and some widget redesign instead of the awkward stage manager.

The tiles thing that Microsoft tried for one of the iterations of Windows Phone was actually quite nice, I forget the OS that kind of went with that, but - they never doubled down on it and abandoned that phone OS soon afterwards.

The funny thing about XP is that it indirectly made running 2000 as a daily driver a better proposition, because all of a sudden consumer hardware and software was being made to work on an NT kernel.

XP also had the benefit of riding Moore's law for so long that the "high hardware requirements" became lower than the cheapest hardware you could buy halfway through its useful lifetime, which helps with its perception.

I remember editing XP drive INF files so that I could install them on W2K, which I did for a year or so before finally moving to XP with a new system.

Don't think I've ever encounter someone that didn't become nostalgic for 10 after having to switch to 11. So many pointless UI changes, and just like with 8 none of them are necessary to force the user to use beyond some incessant need to dictate how users do things on the part of Microsoft.

I still use 7 on my offline pcs. Its still such a fantastic operating system and I don't see us getting another like it from ms. I'm one of those nostalgia folks who can't move on. People are certainly feeling the same way 10 to 11.

That rule can always be gamed too, heh. I felt it went 8 bad, 8.1 good, 10 bad. Then 11 broke the pattern.

Consider trying out Linux+KDE, if the reason to use 7 isn't specific software on older hardware. It feels like a continuation of Windows 7 as a desktop for the most part.

It really depends how you configure it. It has an amazing wealth of configuration settings and that's before diving into the whole addon rabbit hole. This is really what I love about KDE. Everyone else is now going for the apple opinionated design "Just use it like we meant it to be used" philosophy. Even other Linux desktops like gnome (in fact gnome is one of the worst offenders)

With KDE you can simply align it with your own opinions.

I really have not seen anything material since windows 7 that would meet the bar of major improvement. Windows 7 with bug & security fixes, adding support for new hardware standards and SW developments, and feature evolution would be superior to what we have today IMO. Prior to win7 all the revolutionary "coming next" things either became impractical or were dropped.

I have a desktop that still runs all tripe-A games and is my main development machine running win10 that MS says is a boat anchor come the fall; this will be my last windows machine.

Microsoft has been pretty good to me as a developer (despite some of the technologies intentionally designed to do nothing but distract and consume attention) but the consumer side is a pathological shit-show and appears to really hate people (or at least love money more). MS looks a lot like the White House these days.

I knew someone who hated it and would instead install windows 2000 on everything. And he would do so claiming defiance of Microsoft for ruining the most perfect operating system only for money. Then when 7 came out he proclaimed he would never use a new windows again and remain on 2000 forever. I never really got why he was so upset. For me I didn’t like the interface that was in vista or in windows 8. But it wasn’t ever the end of the world. And this was all in the context of playing games! He didn’t develop software or anything. He also hated steam.

Windows XP was the last good OS, but Windows 2k was the last one that really added a lot of user centered features and usability.

Yeah a lot of people stayed on 98 SE2 until the XP service packs were out and XP was solid.

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