5 ms·

i think the consensus is that windows 95, XP, 7 were the least troublesome versions. I still think 7 > 10

shp0ngle 6y ago
10 has tons of under-the-hood improvements that are great, honestly. However, it also has a ton of advertisments everywhere, and those annoying auto-installing apps.
- bayindirh 6y ago
  I don't use Windows day to day anymore but, my family has Windows 10 and I manage it. When I sit in the front of the computer, I feel like I'm inside the big space ship in the Wall-e. All the advertisements, forced consumerism and everything.
  - beagle3 6y ago
    I had run tr0nscript on the computer I support for family a few years ago, and that made the experience almost reasonable. I know tr0nscript has fallen out of favor since, don’t know the exact reasons. I did need to fix the hosts file to allow windows to get security updates - but otherwise, that machine still feels as usable as win7 except for the degraded shell (which could be replaced with classic shell, I guess, but I didn’t bother).
    - bayindirh 6y ago
      > I know tr0nscript has fallen out of favor since, don’t know the exact reasons. Looked to what it's doing in every step [0]. It's a bit overzealous while doing what it's doing. Also, its default are not the most sensible ones so, if you're not running it after installation it may change the behavior of the system quite a bit. Removal of metro apps, resetting IE, purging %APP_DATA% storage, removal of some VCS snapshots... It's a thermonuclear option to take. To be able to run in a milder, sensible manner needs a lot of tuning. So it's not practical. [0]: https://github.com/bmrf/tron/blob/master/README.md#full-tron-description https://github.com/bmrf/tron/blob/master/README.md#full-tron...
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  I really don't know what people are talking about ads? My win 10 has zero ads on it. I turned off all telemetry (i think) with a couple of programs dedicated to doing that. Maybe my pi-hole is blocking the ads?
Flockster 6y ago
And all forget that 8 even existed.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  Although I find 8.1 still better than 10. Some of its preinstalled apps and UI were just weird, but at least it wasn't anti-user by design. Both are a clear downgrade to Windows 7 though.
- FractalParadigm 6y ago
  Personal experience would indicate that a lot of people hated Windows 8, not just because it took something they were familiar with and threw the biggest curveball at it possible, but because they actively made the UI/UX significantly more difficult to use. For me the icing on the cake was segregating different apps between "tablet mode" and "desktop mode," where the former would take up the entire screen with no reasonable way to multitask between programs. Not only that but how many apps had (and even still have) both a UWP and standard implementation, from my experience that just confused users as to which they were supposed to use. Heck even today we still have the Settings app and the Control Panel (which is increasingly difficult to access I might add), both with various controls and settings only found in one but not the other. IMO Windows 10 (sans tracking and forced pre/auto-installing apps) is what Windows 8 should have been from the beginning. Many beneficial changes under the hood, and minor UI changes that don't entirely change the workflow of the OS, but instead augment it for a better experience for both regular and power users. Somehow we've eclipsed the 5-year mark since its release, yet Windows 10 still feels incomplete. Not even just that, but they manage to make it feel even less finished with every new update.
  - square_usual 6y ago
    I think the biggest change that killed 8 was the lack of the start menu. Having to go to the start screen - pulling you away from your entire desktop just to launch an app - was awful. I know Win 8.1 got it back, but for the time between 8 and 8.1 Classic Shell was almost necessary to use Windows 8. All that for no discernible benefit over using 7.
- 6y ago
ObscureScience 6y ago
To me it's always been win2k, win 7, win 10, win 98. In tthat order. I've been using win2k rather than windows xp when I need legacy application support, though you might need to jump through some hoops for XP compatibility and drivers. Though I've been inpressed by how snappy windows 8 feels, especially the boot time which is the fastest of all versions.
- Joeri 6y ago
  8 was the first version that hibernates the kernel on shutdown so it can reload it from snapshot on boot. That’s why all windows versions since 8 boot so fast.
  - ObscureScience 6y ago
    Still Windows 8 boots faster for me. A clean installation is 2 seconds from bios to login (not hibernated, but "fast startup"), and perhaps 5-6 seconds for windows 10 (also with fast startup enabled, which it is on both on a default install).
buran77 6y ago
The humorous but not wrong "consensus" was that you always had to skip a version. In this case 95 > not 98 > 98SE > not Me > XP (this was a bit of a departure because it was a successor to both the 9x and the NT lines) > not Vista > Win 7. And both XP and Win 7 were criticized at the beginning because they had to compete with very solid predecessors, and because they came with plenty of teething problems even if they had potential. That potential was fully realized some SPs later.
- taneq 6y ago
  This is because since at least ‘95, MS has alternated focus between base technology and polish/reliability/UX. The ones we think of as good (98SE, 2000/XP, 7) are the ones with the focus on polish. The ones we remember as flaky (ME, Vista, 8) are the ones with substantial new tech in them that hadn’t had the additional years of refinement.
  - noisem4ker 6y ago
    I think Windows Me was just an attempt at making 98 more modern and multimedia-friendly. It was just bad, with no relevant upgrades at any layer of the stack.
    - taneq 6y ago
      Yeah, actually let’s not talk about Windows ME. :P
    - asddubs 6y ago
      i think it was the only still dos-based windows to automaticall install usb drivers for mice and usb sticks and things. we had a sony laptop running ME for a long time because it was too slow to run XP, but had a USB port already
  - unilynx 6y ago
    What was the new tech in ME ?
- memsom 6y ago
mschuster91 6y ago
> I still think 7 > 10 Me too, for a simple reason: Windows 7 can be made to look and behave almost identically as Windows 95 did in terms of UI - which is, to this day, widely praised: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21878006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21878006 Windows 8 and 10? Not at all. It's a wild, wild mixture of the good old UI and... an abomination of stuff clearly "designed" for touch screens. Not to mention all the privacy and advertising issues.

10 has tons of under-the-hood improvements that are great, honestly. However, it also has a ton of advertisments everywhere, and those annoying auto-installing apps.

bayindirh 6y ago
I don't use Windows day to day anymore but, my family has Windows 10 and I manage it. When I sit in the front of the computer, I feel like I'm inside the big space ship in the Wall-e. All the advertisements, forced consumerism and everything.
- beagle3 6y ago
  I had run tr0nscript on the computer I support for family a few years ago, and that made the experience almost reasonable. I know tr0nscript has fallen out of favor since, don’t know the exact reasons. I did need to fix the hosts file to allow windows to get security updates - but otherwise, that machine still feels as usable as win7 except for the degraded shell (which could be replaced with classic shell, I guess, but I didn’t bother).
  - bayindirh 6y ago
    > I know tr0nscript has fallen out of favor since, don’t know the exact reasons. Looked to what it's doing in every step [0]. It's a bit overzealous while doing what it's doing. Also, its default are not the most sensible ones so, if you're not running it after installation it may change the behavior of the system quite a bit. Removal of metro apps, resetting IE, purging %APP_DATA% storage, removal of some VCS snapshots... It's a thermonuclear option to take. To be able to run in a milder, sensible manner needs a lot of tuning. So it's not practical. [0]: https://github.com/bmrf/tron/blob/master/README.md#full-tron-description https://github.com/bmrf/tron/blob/master/README.md#full-tron...
stjohnswarts 6y ago
I really don't know what people are talking about ads? My win 10 has zero ads on it. I turned off all telemetry (i think) with a couple of programs dedicated to doing that. Maybe my pi-hole is blocking the ads?

Flockster 6y ago

And all forget that 8 even existed.

alpaca128 6y ago
Although I find 8.1 still better than 10. Some of its preinstalled apps and UI were just weird, but at least it wasn't anti-user by design. Both are a clear downgrade to Windows 7 though.
FractalParadigm 6y ago
Personal experience would indicate that a lot of people hated Windows 8, not just because it took something they were familiar with and threw the biggest curveball at it possible, but because they actively made the UI/UX significantly more difficult to use. For me the icing on the cake was segregating different apps between "tablet mode" and "desktop mode," where the former would take up the entire screen with no reasonable way to multitask between programs. Not only that but how many apps had (and even still have) both a UWP and standard implementation, from my experience that just confused users as to which they were supposed to use. Heck even today we still have the Settings app and the Control Panel (which is increasingly difficult to access I might add), both with various controls and settings only found in one but not the other. IMO Windows 10 (sans tracking and forced pre/auto-installing apps) is what Windows 8 should have been from the beginning. Many beneficial changes under the hood, and minor UI changes that don't entirely change the workflow of the OS, but instead augment it for a better experience for both regular and power users. Somehow we've eclipsed the 5-year mark since its release, yet Windows 10 still feels incomplete. Not even just that, but they manage to make it feel even less finished with every new update.
- square_usual 6y ago
  I think the biggest change that killed 8 was the lack of the start menu. Having to go to the start screen - pulling you away from your entire desktop just to launch an app - was awful. I know Win 8.1 got it back, but for the time between 8 and 8.1 Classic Shell was almost necessary to use Windows 8. All that for no discernible benefit over using 7.
6y ago

ObscureScience 6y ago

To me it's always been win2k, win 7, win 10, win 98. In tthat order. I've been using win2k rather than windows xp when I need legacy application support, though you might need to jump through some hoops for XP compatibility and drivers. Though I've been inpressed by how snappy windows 8 feels, especially the boot time which is the fastest of all versions.

Joeri 6y ago
8 was the first version that hibernates the kernel on shutdown so it can reload it from snapshot on boot. That’s why all windows versions since 8 boot so fast.
- ObscureScience 6y ago
  Still Windows 8 boots faster for me. A clean installation is 2 seconds from bios to login (not hibernated, but "fast startup"), and perhaps 5-6 seconds for windows 10 (also with fast startup enabled, which it is on both on a default install).

buran77 6y ago

The humorous but not wrong "consensus" was that you always had to skip a version. In this case 95 > not 98 > 98SE > not Me > XP (this was a bit of a departure because it was a successor to both the 9x and the NT lines) > not Vista > Win 7. And both XP and Win 7 were criticized at the beginning because they had to compete with very solid predecessors, and because they came with plenty of teething problems even if they had potential. That potential was fully realized some SPs later.

taneq 6y ago
This is because since at least ‘95, MS has alternated focus between base technology and polish/reliability/UX. The ones we think of as good (98SE, 2000/XP, 7) are the ones with the focus on polish. The ones we remember as flaky (ME, Vista, 8) are the ones with substantial new tech in them that hadn’t had the additional years of refinement.
- noisem4ker 6y ago
  I think Windows Me was just an attempt at making 98 more modern and multimedia-friendly. It was just bad, with no relevant upgrades at any layer of the stack.
  - taneq 6y ago
    Yeah, actually let’s not talk about Windows ME. :P
  - asddubs 6y ago
    i think it was the only still dos-based windows to automaticall install usb drivers for mice and usb sticks and things. we had a sony laptop running ME for a long time because it was too slow to run XP, but had a USB port already
- unilynx 6y ago
  What was the new tech in ME ?
memsom 6y ago

mschuster91 6y ago

> I still think 7 > 10 Me too, for a simple reason: Windows 7 can be made to look and behave almost identically as Windows 95 did in terms of UI - which is, to this day, widely praised: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21878006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21878006 Windows 8 and 10? Not at all. It's a wild, wild mixture of the good old UI and... an abomination of stuff clearly "designed" for touch screens. Not to mention all the privacy and advertising issues.