Hacker News Reader

Comment by debian3 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know why they always alternate a good with a bad release. Technically Windows 12 should be good.

It feels like Windows 12 will be riddled with AI stuff nobody wants and ads, and forced to be online and connected to Microsoft in some way.

People always say that, but it’s not really been completely true.

< 3.1 Bad

3.1 Good

3.11 WfW Good

NT 3.5 Okay

95 Good

NT 4.0 Good

98 Good

Me Bad

2000 Good

XP Good

Vista Bad

7 Good

8 Bad

8.1 Okay

10 Good

11 Bad

There just really isn’t a pattern to it.

The only 'bad' thing about Vista was it's change (and thus deprecation of many drivers) of driver model. Once tweaked and with good native drivers it was the first good 64bit windows - far more reliable than XP64. At least until 7 came out.

Windows 3.0 was good. 3.1 was a minor improvement.

3.0 was ok but a bit rough around the edges and it crashed a lot.

3.1 was a substantial improvement in that regard. It also brought major features like TTF fonts, the registry, a usable file manager, audio and video support, and networking in the Workgroups version.

NT 3.51 Best

These are also mixing two separate streams: Win3.x/9x/ME and NT+

>95 Good

That's arguable, I thought it was poor at the time.

Windows users have low expectations. I still have PTSD from all the problems 9x caused me.

On well supported hardware 95 was a major upgrade. The Start menu, long file names, preemptive multitasking, plug and play hardware, and Direct X gaming support. In many ways it even surpassed MacOS at the time.

When Win10 started, it was clearly Bad. No good reason for updates, invasive privacy-breaking telemetry, updates at random moments of the day, and everything was a little different but nothing was better. People flat out refused to upgrade when it was given for free. Microsoft had to force it trough windows update, and did multiple rounds of breaking software people explicitly installed to block the upgrade.

When did it become good? WSL and DirectX 12 were real changes, but all in all, my impression is that the user has been frog boiled over the years, with 2K,XP and 7 becoming distant memories.

I remember that too. Microsoft was more aggressive and hostile towards the user than ever before.

XP was the last that I really REALLY used. I've had Windows 7 (on my work machine that I didn't use) and I have a Windows 10 machine that I boot from time to time when I want to mess with recording gear. But I kinda fell into "they're all bad, I was just used to them".

I'll give my prime example. I used to know Device Manager/Control Panel SO well. I could just get things done. Now I have to hunt around forever to do any sort of hardware related task. In their attempt to make it "so easy, even your grandma could use it" they've alienated power users. My grandma still has to call me to help her attach a printer... but now I have to say, "I dunno... let me watch a YouTube video and pray that it matches the sub-version that you're using".

I don't know how good Windows 95 was in practice, but in our country where 99.9% of internet cafes didn't have licenses, or service pack updates (if they even had any for the 95 variant), it was a pretty easy Windows to DoS via the netbios vulnerability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinNuke

There is a pattern when you remove the versions few people used.

Win 11 and Vista have been unfairly maligned, with some minor tweaks (and start11) both are solid performant windows releases.

Windows Vista was essentially unusable on release unless you had very high-end hardware.

A couple of weeks after release the first step after getting a new computer was changed from "downloading firefox" to "downgrade to windows xp". Unironically, many people did that.

And that unusuability was mostly due to the driver model change, once native Vista drivers appeared it performed better than XP/XP64 unless you were running old video hardware that couldn't handle aero - in which case you were still better off running Vista with the classic UI, although that did entail forgoing the Luna styling.

Even with native WDDM drivers it performed poorly in desktop graphics, because Vista also removed all GDI hardware acceleration support. This caused many 2D graphics operations to execute in software, or worse, an even slower mix of hardware and software rendering. Windows 7 improved on this by re-adding hardware acceleration for some GDI primitives and adding aperture windows to reduce DWM memory footprint.

Windows 11 is the only version of Windows I’ve used where the taskbar routinely crashes on login and refuses to load.

I think the vista hate is well earned. Remember when Microsoft had to trick users into trying it by calling it 'Mojave' instead?

Also the unending and relentless UAC prompts.

It felt like malicious compliance. Oh, you want security? OK, here you go, hope you choke on it.

Vista was indeed fine. I used it for many years and had nary a problem with it. The problem with 11 isn't the core (everyone seems to agree that is fine), it's that Microsoft insists on putting ads and other user-hostile BS in.

I basically skipped windows XP entirely, only seeing it on other people’s computers.

I staying on a thinkpad R31 with win2k until I got a R61 (4gb ram) with vista on it several months after vista’s release. At that point it seemed like driver and other early teething had been worked out, so my experience was pretty positive.

When I eventually moved to win7 I didn’t notice any real difference.

they should’ve just skipped 11 like they skipped 9

The story I heard[1] was that Microsoft skipped 9 because people used to check for "Windows 9" prefix string to identify 95 and 98:

    if(version.StartsWith("Windows 9"))
    { /* 95 and 98 */
    } else {

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2hwlrk/comment/...

It's a story all right, but that's all it is. Windows has a GetVersion function that returns a struct of major/minor/build, and they're all ints. That's how you've always checked for versions, with older versions checking against a single int that contained both major/minor.

Microsoft had no reason to support blatantly stupid development practices that no one ever actually did. They were trying to avoid brand confusion with the consumer, because even people who know about versions will still do a mental double take at seeing "Windows 9", expecting another digit. The confusion might not last long, but it still detracts from the brand.

> no one ever actually did.

There is an example further down that thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2hwlrk/comment/...

https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/secure/attachment/18777/Platfo...

    /** Performs computation and returns the result, or throws some exception. */
    public HashSet<String> call() throws Exception {
        final String arch = System.getProperty("os.arch");
        String name = System.getProperty("os.name").toLowerCase();
        String version = System.getProperty("os.version");
        if (name.equals("solaris") || name.equals("SunOS")) {
            name = "solaris";
        } else if (name.startsWith("windows")) {
            name = "windows";
            if (name.startsWith("windows 9")) {
                if (version.startsWith("4.0")) {
                    version = "95";
                } else if (version.startsWith("4.9")) {
                    version = "me";
                } else {
                    assert version.startsWith("4.1");
                    version = "98";
                }
            } else {
    ...

I suppose Java didn't offer too many alternatives to checking the OS version the standard way, but I really have a hard time imagining MS bending over backwards to support that approach on that platform. There wasn't even a need to check for the "windows 9", the code was already checking for a Windows platform and would have worked the same without it. Avoiding confusion in the minds of the end users is still the most plausible explanation to me.

Microsoft has a history of trying to avoid breaking older software with new Windows releases. To do that, they definitely do need account for how people are actually coding things in their software rather than just what they've documented as the way to do things.

The string check makes a lot of sense when you consider software written in languages like Java or Python rather than something that's coded directly against the OS APIs. In those cases you would get strings back with the OS name which of course is going to lead to many people just doing taking the simplest route of string matching.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com