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2K 100% was the best Windows. The NT benefits with none of the XP downsides.

Hard agree. The windows 2000 UI was peak UX and each step since has been a downgrade, (with a possible exception of windows 7)

It was the best for its time. But one of the reason why XP was "better" is that it had built-in support for WiFi. That ended up being a dealbreaker for 2k.

That's the issue.. every new OS has brought some features or stability improvements that are huge upgrades over the older OS.

WSL 2 is a must-have for me now, so Windows 10/11 is much better than anything that came before in that way. I may be alone in this, but I actually think Windows 11 has the best design of any Windows so far. The problem as usual, is that they haven't made the entire OS consistent. I wouldn't mind the new control panel if you could actually change every setting in windows in that one control panel.. and not have to dig through to find control panels that still date back to Win2k. And the new/old context menu in explorer is an absolute disaster. Then new design is fine.. but how the hell did they manage to not make it support all the options of the old context menu?

Also let’s not forget that windows 11 puts random news stories in the start menu. Here in Australia, a lot of them are clickbaity scams. I really can’t believe Microsoft is endorsing whatever horrible choice of news provider they’ve teamed up with. It really spoils their brand image.

There’s a way to remove it, of course, by running some obtuse console command. But normal people have no idea how to do stuff like that.

Windows Server 2003 was the best Windows by far. All of the good parts of NT/2000 with any parts of XP available when you needed them.

Except that AFAIK 2003 kernel was different enough that a few apps and specially games refused to run, properly or at all, compared to XP.

No too many, and lots actually run without any issues by using compatible mode.

I agree here. I ran server 2003 on my early 2000's desktop for a while.

Cannot agree more. Used Windows Server 2003 for over a decade, until I moved away from desktop to laptop and started having driver issues.

I preferred XP/2003 in classic UI mode. Lots of little improvements.

If you could get winterm on it and recent Firefox it’d be quite usable. Perhaps ReactOS one day.

and 64-bit (x86_64 not IA64), which no version Windows 2000 was AFAIK

Windows 7 with classic UI is probably the most-recent decent version.

There were pre-release 64 bit alpha versions of win2k, but otherwise you needed XP/2k3 for 64 bit. XP for amd64 was a bit of a shitshow with drivers (especially on consumer-grade computers), though. It wasn’t until vista that it ironically got better on that front, though people held out upgrading because of how terrible it was…

yeah while 2K was their best ever single breakthrough improvement, it was a v1 and XP/2003 in classic mode was a more refined 2K eg more drivers and better plug and play, more graphics compatibility. And 2003 Active Directory had a number of quality of life improvements.

NT3.5 was perhaps the most stable version I ever used. NT4 brought the new UI, making NT5 aka 2k not the first version of the 95+ UI.

Perfectly stated. It was more stable and had better UX than NT4, but didn't have all the unwanted anti-features that came in later versions of Windows. It was the last version of Windows that didn't get in my way.

I loved Windows 2000 so much. I was a beta tester back then and they sent me a copy in the end. Was very cool for me as a broke high school student.

I bought it from my college computer store for like $5 for the CD and an endlessly reusable license key. Truly the good old days.

Definitely. If 2K supported ClearType I would have stuck with it on my personal machines for another half a decade.

2K was so much better than XP. The UI rendering thread was decoupled in a way that XP's wasn't.

Agree. My company ran a bunch of web servers on Windows 2K and Apache web server, because management was afraid of Linux (general FUD and Microsoft's lawsuit threats) and the engineering staff was afraid of Microsoft's IIS web server (security dumpster fire at the time). It was actually a pretty good system, super easy to maintain.

WinXP was also NT family. It wasn't from that married-in Win9x gene pool.

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