Any long-time windows users frustrated with how things are going really should try installing Linux Mint and just see how it goes. No need to nuke windows, just dual boot for now.

There are plenty of things that can end up keeping somebody on Windows, and admittedly I have not switched over all my machines at home yet. But for general usage, it’s such a night and day difference between the OS designed to be nice to use and the OS designed according to a complex matrix of corporate goals. And that’s using a distro that’s the opposite of stripped down and light weight.

I’m able to dual boot at work, and at this point I only fire up windows occasionally to make sure it doesn’t get out of date and isolated from the network or something. Even using outlook and doing video calls on Teams works great with the web versions in Firefox.

Windows 7 was the last good one, maybe windows 10 still not that bad in my opinion.

Windows 2000

It's never been great

redacted

When was Windows 1 released?

It's weird to not see any posts about Azure. I remember watching a keynote from Microsoft's CEO several years ago where he explicitly said the company's focus was on Azure and cloud applications, and that the role of Windows was simply to get you there. That's it. This is also inline with comments about Win7 being the last good OS because that's about when the transition started.

Windows Me, Windows Vista, Windows 8, and Windows 11. These are all bad iterations of Windows.

It used to be "skip the evens". But since they themselves skipped 9, now it's "skip the odds".

when they made it free

Windows 8 marked the point in my opinion. It's when they tried to start locking down the operating system and focusing heavily on the cloud. The adware began in this era as well.

Windows 1.0; November 20, 1985.

I agree on the ads and bundled services, but the "windows is slow" stuff is horseshit. A tight build of Linux boots more quickly no doubt, but a fresh Win10 or 11 install, even with bloat, is up in under 30 seconds, and runs swiftly out of the box. This isn't "slow" by any definition.

Again, let's hate the other shit, let's hate on that together.

Vista I think

According to South Park the movie, Windows 98