I do feel like Windows 7 was the last bearable release of Windows. There wasn’t anything completely infuriating about it, and it was good as far as Windows goes. Then came 10 which just felt like a mess with no benefits over 7 and a lot of half-finished parts. Windows 11 is by far the worst thing I’ve ever used, not just Windows. From 10 onward I really started cursing the need to use Windows in my day job, and I am so thankful that I can now use Linux and FOSS for both work and play. At least with Windows 7 I could sort of forget I was using Windows from 9-5.
You know, I was so preoccupied with giving faint praise to Windows 7 and cursing Windows 10 and 11 that I forgot to comment on this article in particular: notice how much of what makes legacy Windows usable is FOSS. Firefox, LibreOffice, etc. Think about your less technical friends and family who are fretting about replacing perfectly good computers because they can’t upgrade to the latest version of Windows. Help them migrate to the more sustainable FOSS options like [insert your distro of choice; mine’s Fedora]. Honestly, hardware support is great and all the software they need is right there.
I haven’t used it much but I’m under the impression they added these kind of things but new features were mostly not horrible and (almost?) everything could be disabled.
However, adoption was abysmal (maybe even worse than Vista) and after that they started not allowing to disable features, UIs and made away with actual versions so that people had to update. There are good reasons to do that but it also looks like they’ve been burnt and have been doing that for bad marketing reasons too.
i used Windows 8/8.1 daily for their entire commercial lifetime and honestly i really just remember it to be more ‘annoying’ than outright ‘bad’. at least for 8.1. the metro UI stuff was half baked garbage, but with 8.1 you could at least forget about its existence for the most part.
Also i think 8.1 had the best search feature in a Windows ever, up there with MacOS’s spotlight search, in terms of snappiness and being able to give me as the first result the specific thing that I want. Never really got it to work quite right in the little i’ve used Win10/11, even disabling web results it just usually gives me some completely unrelated file. Add to that some of the improvements 8/8.1 had over 7 (which i can’t really name off the top of my head, it’s been a while) and it was pretty good as long as you were willing to overlook some of the annoyances and what ultimately kept me from just downgrading back to 7.
Ha, so right! Admittedly, I was Windows-free at home before 7 even came out so my Windows experience has been in office environments. I never encountered 8 on any machines I used at work, and I only had a couple brief interactions with it on other folks’ home machines. Just enough to learn how to turn off the new Start screen.
I think that pretty much everyone avoided windows 8. I remember seeing browser stats and it was a very very minor OS that disappeared from the charts maybe even before XP.
It is the last version of Windows I will run, and indeed every computer I have acquired since 2016 is running a FOSS OS. I never really thought I’d see things this way, but I’m pretty done with proprietary software as (among other things) it enables extremely asymmetric power between vendor and “user”, and, well, that coincides pretty well with power asymmetry in other parts of life (like, say, government-mandated backdoors that you can’t escape because you can’t run any OS other than what the vendor provides – with mandatory “upgrades” of course).
My issue with windows is the lack of polish on obvious stuff and the annoying advertising that I get on my pro sku (talking at you latest gamepass notification)
I have four computers, a windows workstation I use for development against a Linux workstation that hosts my application. A MacBook Air that I use for travel.
MacOS on base trim (8gb) M2 air: hit command space, start typing. Results take a while to show up but it gets there. Not ideal.
Windows 11 on 14700 (high end) cpu with 32GB RAM: hit windows key, start typing. it chugs and drops the first 5 keystrokes. Absolutely infuriating
I’m so fucking over it. It’s a million things like that. I’ve got my dev env working stable on a $900 laptop that feels better than my $2000 PC
I said I had four computers: the fourth? M4 MacBook Pro.
I think at least part of that comes from special features of Windows’ NTFS (the USN journal change log). I’m aware that MacOS file systems are a bit stale, to be polite, but surprised that the plethora of Linux fs development doesn’t include something suitable.
Ah, interesting. It seems to provide a kernel module to get immediate access to file system updates. That makes it independent from file systems, but of course is quite a bit more work.
I need to test that if it works closer to Everything that e.g. FSearch (which is good, don’t get me wrong, but not as immediate)
Windows 11, with all of its ads, suggestions, popups, etc., has become so embarrassingly unprofessional that it’s hard for me to understand how Microsoft leadership seems to be okay with it.
I’m not here to defend windows in any way but win key -> type 3 letters -> hit enter -> app starts is pretty much instant for me on mu 2019 ryzen box. There’s something wrong with your installation. That Windows used to end up in this place (and apparently sometimes still does) is the problem.
I don’t think I ever reinstalled Win10 on that 5yr, 3 mo old machine that I use for games and daily browsing. I don’t love it and plan to try to switch to Linux with the next hardware buy, but it’s not terrible in general.
I have had the case of dropped first few keystrokes, but usually only for the first start menu invocation after a login. And I think it’s better since a patch or two because I don’t consciously remember it happening recently. Further uses seem fine.
Also disabling in-start Bing search is required for that to feel OK. If you don’t disable bing it’ll get higher match priority over local results and upset people like me.
I’m fairly happy with the overall experience of using Windows. I cannot remember how I configured it, but I don’t get the ads people talk about, or have random recommendations pop up. Like, overall I think the newer versions have better designed user experience. That being said, you highlight a problem. That user experience is hampered by absolutely terrible implementations of its components, and it’s small things like the delay in accepting input and such. Hell, I even have another example of it. When your Win11 computer is locked, waking it by pressing a key will have that lock screen slide up, but while it’s doing that it won’t accept keyboard input for the password field. My install on one of my computers has even taken to resetting the animation so I have to do it twice. The reason I say the user experience design is fine is that, well, given these things functioned correctly it would be stellar, but they don’t so they end up becoming infuriating to work with.
It’s the delays in time to interaction, the inconsistent GUIs, the random changes to functionality, tone deaf promotion of their services… Stuff like that is what hampers it from being a great OS. It might not be the right one for you, but assuming they would deal with these issues, you could at least argue against it on what you need rather than how poorly made it is…
I agree, and I’m also confused by this, I have a stock UK install, zero “ads” or anything, no debloater (they remove things I actually use, so I never bother) and I’m not into heavily customising so I just keep things default aside from using NuShell to match my Mac environment.
One of the reasons I do prefer windows for a lot of multi-tasking work is the window management is so snappy and fast, compared to the silly animations of mac which you can “disable” which just replaces them with equally slow fade animations. Frustrating when in flow!
Honestly if you run Win10 LTSC, delete the start menu and use Everything and Autohotkey macros to launch stuff that gets rid of 99% of the day-to-day bad stuff, and the remaining 1% is worth suffering through since Windows has by far the best developer tooling these days.
gdb/lldb are a joke and more broadly there are no alternatives for remedybg, RAD Debugger, Live++, Superluminal (Tracy is very good but not as a sampling profiler), PIX (XCode’s Metal tooling is good when you aren’t on versions that crash 100% of the time), probably others I’m forgetting…
I will say that macOS is still completely fine for dev work and is much better for anything that’s not dev work or gaming though.
This mostly seems to boil down to “Windows 7 still works and I prefer its UI”.
I find the author’s use of highly critical language without justification quite annoying. What is “low-IQ” about Windows 11 and “website wrappers pretending to be apps” (what does the author even mean by this? Electron apps?). Why are mobile-style toggles “for apes”? It’s not even that I would disagree about these things if they were properly explained, but they have no context and it just reads like a blank ‘I don’t like this’.
Hopefully some day ReactOS will mature enough to serve the values that OP is looking for… With the way things are going, that almost seems like the most likely option.
Too bad that a lot of the people that really know Win11 internals might be disqualified from contributing to ReactOS.
I suspect the amount of money actually going to Windows OS support is a rounding error in the total amount - or rather, it’s not itemized, it’s part of the Office365/Copilot subscription these companies are paying.
Windows support is always a negotiation. If you’re a BigCo and have software that requires older versions of Windows, it’s cheaper to try to get MSFT to foot the bill to keep that version in support than to rewrite the software. MSFT can say no, but if there’s enough customers it might be a problem regarding future continued use of Windows.
My point is that for the individual BigCo it’s probably cheaper in the long run to coast along paying the Windows fee than to do a lot of hard work trying to port to ReactOS and rely on that OS being developed and supported in the future. Software will be rewritten eventually anyway.
Imagine a work/desktop setup with Windows 7, Office 2007, Firefox [appropriate version], and whatever tools you need to do your work.
Assume someone has backported all security patches.
Windows Server 2025 with bare desktop experience and some start menu replacer should do just that. https://imgur.com/a/odYvEPp
I do feel like Windows 7 was the last bearable release of Windows. There wasn’t anything completely infuriating about it, and it was good as far as Windows goes. Then came 10 which just felt like a mess with no benefits over 7 and a lot of half-finished parts. Windows 11 is by far the worst thing I’ve ever used, not just Windows. From 10 onward I really started cursing the need to use Windows in my day job, and I am so thankful that I can now use Linux and FOSS for both work and play. At least with Windows 7 I could sort of forget I was using Windows from 9-5.
You know, I was so preoccupied with giving faint praise to Windows 7 and cursing Windows 10 and 11 that I forgot to comment on this article in particular: notice how much of what makes legacy Windows usable is FOSS. Firefox, LibreOffice, etc. Think about your less technical friends and family who are fretting about replacing perfectly good computers because they can’t upgrade to the latest version of Windows. Help them migrate to the more sustainable FOSS options like [insert your distro of choice; mine’s Fedora]. Honestly, hardware support is great and all the software they need is right there.
You forgot 8 and apparently not many people noticed. That probably says enough about that version.
8 is when they introduced the new wave of bullshit - metro ui, full-screen start menu shit.
I haven’t used it much but I’m under the impression they added these kind of things but new features were mostly not horrible and (almost?) everything could be disabled.
However, adoption was abysmal (maybe even worse than Vista) and after that they started not allowing to disable features, UIs and made away with actual versions so that people had to update. There are good reasons to do that but it also looks like they’ve been burnt and have been doing that for bad marketing reasons too.
i used Windows 8/8.1 daily for their entire commercial lifetime and honestly i really just remember it to be more ‘annoying’ than outright ‘bad’. at least for 8.1. the metro UI stuff was half baked garbage, but with 8.1 you could at least forget about its existence for the most part.
Also i think 8.1 had the best search feature in a Windows ever, up there with MacOS’s spotlight search, in terms of snappiness and being able to give me as the first result the specific thing that I want. Never really got it to work quite right in the little i’ve used Win10/11, even disabling web results it just usually gives me some completely unrelated file. Add to that some of the improvements 8/8.1 had over 7 (which i can’t really name off the top of my head, it’s been a while) and it was pretty good as long as you were willing to overlook some of the annoyances and what ultimately kept me from just downgrading back to 7.
Ha, so right! Admittedly, I was Windows-free at home before 7 even came out so my Windows experience has been in office environments. I never encountered 8 on any machines I used at work, and I only had a couple brief interactions with it on other folks’ home machines. Just enough to learn how to turn off the new Start screen.
I think that pretty much everyone avoided windows 8. I remember seeing browser stats and it was a very very minor OS that disappeared from the charts maybe even before XP.
It is the last version of Windows I will run, and indeed every computer I have acquired since 2016 is running a FOSS OS. I never really thought I’d see things this way, but I’m pretty done with proprietary software as (among other things) it enables extremely asymmetric power between vendor and “user”, and, well, that coincides pretty well with power asymmetry in other parts of life (like, say, government-mandated backdoors that you can’t escape because you can’t run any OS other than what the vendor provides – with mandatory “upgrades” of course).
My issue with windows is the lack of polish on obvious stuff and the annoying advertising that I get on my pro sku (talking at you latest gamepass notification)
I have four computers, a windows workstation I use for development against a Linux workstation that hosts my application. A MacBook Air that I use for travel.
MacOS on base trim (8gb) M2 air: hit command space, start typing. Results take a while to show up but it gets there. Not ideal.
Windows 11 on 14700 (high end) cpu with 32GB RAM: hit windows key, start typing. it chugs and drops the first 5 keystrokes. Absolutely infuriating
I’m so fucking over it. It’s a million things like that. I’ve got my dev env working stable on a $900 laptop that feels better than my $2000 PC
I said I had four computers: the fourth? M4 MacBook Pro.
On the other hand, I’d probably pay solid money for a proper Mac equivalent to everything. Speed is incredible, compared to Spotlight.
I miss something like this while on Linux too.
I think at least part of that comes from special features of Windows’ NTFS (the USN journal change log). I’m aware that MacOS file systems are a bit stale, to be polite, but surprised that the plethora of Linux fs development doesn’t include something suitable.
I’ve never heard APFS called stale! Maybe you’re still thinking of HFS+? (Which, yes, was quite stale.)
Propmpted by this exchange I have found this https://github.com/linuxdeepin/deepin-anything as a dependency of https://github.com/linuxdeepin/dde-file-manager and https://github.com/linuxdeepin/dde-grand-search
but frankly I couldn’t understand how it works together.
Ah, interesting. It seems to provide a kernel module to get immediate access to file system updates. That makes it independent from file systems, but of course is quite a bit more work.
I need to test that if it works closer to Everything that e.g. FSearch (which is good, don’t get me wrong, but not as immediate)
Windows 11, with all of its ads, suggestions, popups, etc., has become so embarrassingly unprofessional that it’s hard for me to understand how Microsoft leadership seems to be okay with it.
I’m not here to defend windows in any way but
win key -> type 3 letters -> hit enter -> app startsis pretty much instant for me on mu 2019 ryzen box. There’s something wrong with your installation. That Windows used to end up in this place (and apparently sometimes still does) is the problem.I don’t think I ever reinstalled Win10 on that 5yr, 3 mo old machine that I use for games and daily browsing. I don’t love it and plan to try to switch to Linux with the next hardware buy, but it’s not terrible in general.
I have had the case of dropped first few keystrokes, but usually only for the first start menu invocation after a login. And I think it’s better since a patch or two because I don’t consciously remember it happening recently. Further uses seem fine. Also disabling in-start Bing search is required for that to feel OK. If you don’t disable bing it’ll get higher match priority over local results and upset people like me.
I’m fairly happy with the overall experience of using Windows. I cannot remember how I configured it, but I don’t get the ads people talk about, or have random recommendations pop up. Like, overall I think the newer versions have better designed user experience. That being said, you highlight a problem. That user experience is hampered by absolutely terrible implementations of its components, and it’s small things like the delay in accepting input and such. Hell, I even have another example of it. When your Win11 computer is locked, waking it by pressing a key will have that lock screen slide up, but while it’s doing that it won’t accept keyboard input for the password field. My install on one of my computers has even taken to resetting the animation so I have to do it twice. The reason I say the user experience design is fine is that, well, given these things functioned correctly it would be stellar, but they don’t so they end up becoming infuriating to work with.
It’s the delays in time to interaction, the inconsistent GUIs, the random changes to functionality, tone deaf promotion of their services… Stuff like that is what hampers it from being a great OS. It might not be the right one for you, but assuming they would deal with these issues, you could at least argue against it on what you need rather than how poorly made it is…
I agree, and I’m also confused by this, I have a stock UK install, zero “ads” or anything, no debloater (they remove things I actually use, so I never bother) and I’m not into heavily customising so I just keep things default aside from using NuShell to match my Mac environment.
One of the reasons I do prefer windows for a lot of multi-tasking work is the window management is so snappy and fast, compared to the silly animations of mac which you can “disable” which just replaces them with equally slow fade animations. Frustrating when in flow!
Honestly if you run Win10 LTSC, delete the start menu and use Everything and Autohotkey macros to launch stuff that gets rid of 99% of the day-to-day bad stuff, and the remaining 1% is worth suffering through since Windows has by far the best developer tooling these days.
gdb/lldb are a joke and more broadly there are no alternatives for remedybg, RAD Debugger, Live++, Superluminal (Tracy is very good but not as a sampling profiler), PIX (XCode’s Metal tooling is good when you aren’t on versions that crash 100% of the time), probably others I’m forgetting…
I will say that macOS is still completely fine for dev work and is much better for anything that’s not dev work or gaming though.
This mostly seems to boil down to “Windows 7 still works and I prefer its UI”.
I find the author’s use of highly critical language without justification quite annoying. What is “low-IQ” about Windows 11 and “website wrappers pretending to be apps” (what does the author even mean by this? Electron apps?). Why are mobile-style toggles “for apes”? It’s not even that I would disagree about these things if they were properly explained, but they have no context and it just reads like a blank ‘I don’t like this’.
Hopefully some day ReactOS will mature enough to serve the values that OP is looking for… With the way things are going, that almost seems like the most likely option.
Too bad that a lot of the people that really know Win11 internals might be disqualified from contributing to ReactOS.
I wonder how fast ReactOS could mature if 10 big companies would yeet one year of their microsoft support contract money at ReactOS
I suspect the amount of money actually going to Windows OS support is a rounding error in the total amount - or rather, it’s not itemized, it’s part of the Office365/Copilot subscription these companies are paying.
Windows support is always a negotiation. If you’re a BigCo and have software that requires older versions of Windows, it’s cheaper to try to get MSFT to foot the bill to keep that version in support than to rewrite the software. MSFT can say no, but if there’s enough customers it might be a problem regarding future continued use of Windows.
My point is that for the individual BigCo it’s probably cheaper in the long run to coast along paying the Windows fee than to do a lot of hard work trying to port to ReactOS and rely on that OS being developed and supported in the future. Software will be rewritten eventually anyway.
I had a really similar realization when i ranted at work some weeks ago.
Windows is sadly a must-have for a lot of business, so:
Imagine a work/desktop setup with Windows 7, Office 2007, Firefox [appropriate version], and whatever tools you need to do your work.
Assume someone has backported all security patches.
Now we can use a desktop pc with 5, maybe 10 watts. Including the screen. And that system would be incredibly snappy, boot in mere seconds.
I wish one could go back another version for Office, but you’d probably need the format compatibility of the Ribbon-infested 2007.
But where do you get a screen with those low power requirements? A regular office-oriented 24” HD screen should go beyond that easily on its own.
Windows Server 2025 with bare desktop experience and some start menu replacer should do just that. https://imgur.com/a/odYvEPp