Nothing is ever perfect but I don't recall having feelings between OS upgrades back then where I was like "why is the OS trying to shove ads down my throat?" or

Nothing is ever perfect but I don't recall having feelings between OS upgrades back then where I was like "why is the OS trying to shove ads down my throat?" or having things change under my feet without warning or "what's up with these dark patterns to get less technical folks to take an action" such as having you jump through hoops to make a local account. It was more like, ok cool, install the new version and then mess around with it for a few hours and after a while you generally feel ok about the decision and it felt like an upgrade. I know XP had a huge backlash in how it looked initially and I remember thinking I'd use Windows 2000 until the end of days but XP was really stable and handled a bunch of games without issues which ultimately trumped everything else for me at the time. Maybe I started with 95c, I don't remember. It was around the end of 1996. You're right in that often times new hardware came with a new OS version but I've had a few OS only upgrades over the years that felt good. The current machine I'm on now ran Windows 7 for years before eventually I was semi-forced into 10.