Iirc, tasks requiring elevated permissions wasn't the main complaint, maybe just one of the most vocal ones.

Even with good hardware, it was not optimized for performance in general. This was amplified by the fact they also marketed Vista as having a wide range of older hardware support, which resulted in many users upgrading from XP only to have their performance absolutely tank. I think there was even a lawsuit because of how they marketed some devices as, "Vista ready."

Regardless, Vista was still better than Windows 8.

Can confirm 100%.

During Vista's heyday, I worked in a PC repair shop. All the ones that came in because "Vista sucks" were all Walmart specials with the bare minimum 512 MB RAM and crappy, bottom-of-the-barrel Seagate HDDs.

The thing would start thrashing as soon it booted with the default assortment of bloatware. By the time they brought it in, the HDD was in rough shape which made the thrashing even worse.

Fix was always to upgrade the RAM and, most often, replace the dying Seagate drive with a good one. Removing the bloatware helped as well once the root problems were addressed.

The UAC stuff was also annoying, but those could be tuned.

this! i got my first vista experience on a laptop with a Turion and 2GB of RAM and it was really smooth. bit too chunky for my taste ux-wise but it was solid. first bluescreen i got on that machine was after installing W7.

then the GPU melted its own solder after a few years and that machine was relegated to server duty.

I remember defending it online against a bunch of Linux users and I got told that the UAC prompt is overbearing while having to type your password is fine because it’s just “muscle memory”.

It enraged casual home users, not techies.

I've been using Windows 11 for some time. Besides it's terrible AI features being shoved down our throats, what's different about it from Win10?

I don't see too much of a difference between the two versions. The AI enshittification is relatively recent.

100%. The enshittification is accelerating. Which is leading people to Linux hopefully

It's certainly better than Windows 8 and it's awful mandatory touch interface.

Windows 11 is ok, just like windows 10 was ok. It's not great, but it's not satan's asshole like some people make it out to be. Most use it because they don't really have a choice due to software constraints, or simply because they've been using windows for forever and that's all they know.

Personally I use linux because I like it more, though I still have a windows install for flightsimming. I think that it's a perfectly fine operating system for the 80-90% of people who don't care and just want their computer to be an appliance to get on social media or get work done.

I can't tell you how many times I've had to uninstall OneDrive & Teams from my work computer thanks to a Windows update reinstalling them. My IT director is getting frustrated by it too because he has to keep updating GP and other tools to prevent them from showing up and users inadvertently putting shit into the MS Cloud accidentally because OneDrive likes to insert itself the default documents folder.

I also prefer my start bar to be on the left hand side of my left-most monitor in vertical orientation (I run a tri-montior setup in a tie fighter configuration).

As already stated, the new right-click menu is also ass, and I keep having to fix it to get the actual fucking options I want/need without having to click a button to "show more options" from a menu that loads noticeably slower, or shift-right-click to get the intended menu.

There's a ton of other little annoyances, like removing or relocating configuration flows with inferior tools that don't support everything that used to be configurable. AI search in my start bar (so glad for PowerToys Run).

Windows 11 has done a great job at removing user control over their OS by forcing changes (often inferior to the old version/way) and forcing optional software installs (just wait til Recall is sitting on everybody's machine).

Things that are nice: A better networking stack, blue tooth management, and a powerful built-in windows layout manager (Snap Layouts)

I think it's a boiling frog/straw on the camel's back situation.

I've heard people say both that Microsoft releases a good version of Windows every third time, and that the way Windows works is that Microsoft releases the new one, it's slightly worse/different from the previous and everybody hates it, then they get used to it by the time Microsoft releases the next version, starting the cycle of outrage all over again.

To me, it seems that the average user experience changes a little between different Windows versions, oftentimes making the experience a little more clumsy (have they finished migrating everything from the Control Panel to whatever the new settings panel is called yet? They started that back in like Windows 7), and the "power users" are the ones who get shafted worse.

For me, 10 will most likely be the last version of Windows that I use. I've reached a point in my life where I will happily stop using services/doing business with companies based on some of the stuff Microsoft is doing, like the ad integration, AI nonsense, forced Microsoft account and data harvesting, and the awful security threat that Recall was (and probably will be again when they repackage it and try it again). I'd honestly still be using 7 if it was still supported because I liked it much more than I do 10.

Probably this whole list, there is lots of code shared with Windows 7, but who really knows? Nobody is checking against Vista anymore.

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-26/product_id-17153/Microsoft-Windows-7.html?page=1&year=2018&month=-1&order=3

Whoops, this was supposed to be a comment reply, not a separate statement.