Evolution of Windows

Linux be like:

Linux would be more like a random assortment of planks, slabs of glass, paint cans, and a handwritten set of assembly tips and tricks.

Would have swapped 8 and vista. Vista was awefull. 8 was very special but 8.1 was actually good... but I was one of the few wierdos with an windows phone, so I liked the design.

The Oas was actually pretty solod. The only real problem was the removal of the start menu and traditional interface for non-touch computers. It's just that it was a huge fucking problem that destroyed the perception of Win8 even after the issue was addressed.
If Metro had been the alternative interface and the traditional experience the default, it would have been celebrated as a great OS.

NT/2000 always gets left out of these, I ran 2000 on an old PC for years past XP and Vista even. But all it was doing was running a vinyl and laser cutter.

They forgot 95 and ME as well.
- ME would just be a brick wall.
  And I would happily go back to using 2000 if I could. I held out all the way up to about 2012, at which point the number of games that wouldn't run out of the box got to an untenable amount. :(

W2K was the shizzle

No no, we're not doing this. We're not pretending Vista wasn't absolute dog shit.

Vista will always have a special place in my heart. I learned so much from Vista, like 'Oh, wdym I can't go back to XP?" "This is a torrent, and this is an ISO." "This is how you install an OS." "Wdym they're stopping support for XP?" and "This is what Ubuntu is."
- Bro vista was such garbage my father, the kinda guy who helps salesmen sell you extra features (believes new = quality/posterity), asked me if it was possible to go back to XP after a week of Vista.
  It's not like vista didn't work, it just took 800 years to open any application, and longer to open two at once. He just wanted to play Diablo 2 bro lol
Vista was horrible. 8 was actually not that bad I barely remember 7 existing
But XP and 98 were the best ones
- Oh man, 7 were the glory days. Gates came back to save the company.
It works though because compared to XP, I'd pick XP every time.

Win95 and Win2K forgotten again.

And millennium edition. Everyone forgets ME...god I wish I could. I was stuck with it for years
- Oh crud. Did that even have a different kernel version?

Win 7 was definitely the pinnacle of Windows.

With that out of the way, I want to say that I am one of the very few that actually liked Windows 8. Especially on touch devices it worked flawlessly. I was upset when they removed the swipe gestures in Windows 10, like alternating between two apps. On Desktop it could have used a "Windows 7" mode.

Obligatory: Windows 11 is the worst so far. The level of disrespect this software shows towards the user is next level. And this downwards spiral seems to pick up the pace.

Also: Linux is awesome! All who are still hoping that Windows will again respect you one day: just get out now. The more people move to Linux, the better it will be supported.

Edit:

https://lemmy.zip/post/51119369

I rest my case.

The biggest issue with Linux is the culture. I get that longtime users get and understand how to use it. They understand the commands. They know what -r and -n do.
I still look at my microwave daily to remember what the buttons do. There's only 6 buttons and a dial. Although, 7 buttons. I just remembered the dial is also a button. It's the start button.
Point is, I'm not going to learn terminal. I'm going to point the thing. Then I'm going to drag the thing. And I'm going to double click the thing.
I've attempted to learn terminal since 2014. I have a 0% success rate doing anything. Even copy/pasting other peoples commands. I always get an error, and I don't understand the error. So I google the error, and then I don't understand the explaination.
The way I have always explained it is, the OS is like a car. And terminal is how mechanics diagnose and fix the car. I tried changing my oil once, and blew up the car.
- If you haven't checked it out here, the culture is actually super helpful.
  Also, look up the "man" command. Everything you need to know about every command is already built into your OS, you just have to access the "man file" for it.
- Thanks to distros like Bazzite there really isn’t a need to learn the terminal.
- I've been on Mint for like two years and have not opened the terminal yet. You do not have to be a developer or even a power user to run Linux. It's just another operating system.
- They know what -r and -n do
  No we don't magically know that. We know that we have to look it up in the manual to know that.
- It's not a culture thing. You'd have the same issues in Windows if there was a problem. Plenty snarky and dismissive answers. Some people just want an appliance and that's okay.
  The biggest issue is that people end up running on poorly or non supported hardware. Buy a system from a company that designs with Linux in mind. System 76 Tuxedo etc. 90% of the issues are gone, poof. The final bit is dependence on or inability to leave a piece of software. There are options for most things on Linux. But not everything, and not always as you're familiar with. If that's a deal breaker, it's a dealbreaker. And that's too bad but understandable. No shade.
- Did you delete /etc? (friendly, sympathetic, Gnuification of Win jokes))
- (Only tangentially related, but) To be fair, most microwaves are needlessly complex and/or have terrible user interface. I stand by all any microwave needs is one or two knobs, and that’s it. One for time of course, and another for power selection if desired.
  I always hate using new microwaves at work break rooms or such because somehow they are all different and I feel like a caveman trying to figure them out every time.
- I can't tell you what -r and -n do, because those are option flags. They mean different things depending on the command you're running.
  Imagine you're going to zip a file. That is, put a file in a compressed archive. You'll probably right click on the file, on the menu that pops up you'll click Compress..., and then WinZip pops up with text boxes to type in the name of the zip file, it probably defaults to name_of_file_you_right_clicked.zip but you can change it, maybe some check boxes for different options like if you want to password protect the archive, etc.
  In a command line interface, the first thing you type is the command you're going to run, then usually flags (which are like check boxes) or options (which are like text fields or dropdowns, you need to type in additional information after options) and then the name of an input file, and then the name of an output file. The terminal has a built-in manual, you can read about a particular command's options by typing man [command]
  Don't know what command you need? The apropos command will search the manual for keywords. Say you want to use the command line to convert some image files from one format to another, but don't know what command can do that. If you type apropos -a image format convert it will search the entire manual for entries, and this will probably return the commands convert, magick, and magick-script among others. Those are commands from the ImageMagick suite. Note the -a. In this case, it stands for and, it will cause apropos to only return commands whose descriptions match all of the keywords you type in. If you don't put that -a, and only type apropos image format convert you'll get a much longer list of commands that include at least one of those keywords. Apropos, of course, has a manual page, which you can read with the command man apropos.
  Let me really bake your noodle now: The terminal is a programming environment. Bash is a programming language. You can create variables, use if, for and while statements, do arithmetic, etc. You can use a text editor to save your programs as files, traditionally with a .sh extension, to run them later. This lets you automate...basically anything. Moving files around, converting files from one format to another, using programs like ImageMagick, ffmpeg, or several others to edit photos, videos audio clips, whatever. For publishing pictures to my blog, I've got a script that takes a photo, reduces it in size by half, adds a watermark, and saves the result to a special folder. And by using a .desktop file, I added that script to the right click menu, so it's an option like Open, Open With... etc. So I run that script from the GUI.
  There's a reason most Linux distros come with an easy way to get to the terminal, usually a launcher on the panel or desktop. It's because it is a powerful end-user tool.
- Linux is not for everyone. If you don't like it, don't use it. The terminal is used so much because it's often the quickest way of doing things - instructions in WIndows are like "click on that icon, scroll down to this and choose that, then select that tab..." but with a terminal it's like "copy and paste this into a terminal". It's a powerful and useful tool. There are distros like Ubuntu which try to avoid doing terminally stuff, but it's just so useful it's difficult not to use it.
I do kinda dig the Vision of Windows 8, y'know? Huge focus on Convergence, the unified design language of Metro, Windows Phone's slick design...
Problem is they didn't stick the landing at all, threw everything good in the trash with 10, set the trash can on fire with 11.
Call me crazy but I do think Metro was a much more cohesive design motif than the Fluent that Microsoft slapped on right at the end of 10 and still haven't decided how to handle on 11.
Just put Linux mint cinnamon on my laptop a few days ago. It was stupid easy and now my laptop is running fantastic.

Still can't get over them making a big deal about 10 being the last one ever.

They didn't. A single low level.employee misspoke at a trade show and the press/internet commentators made a big deal out of it.
- I specifically remember "last version of windows" in the commercials and stuff, but I looked it up after reading your comment, and you appear correct. Mandella effect, or just faulty memory?

Windows 1.0: Just four sticks tied together with rough twine, not attached to any building or anything. Just held in the frame of the photograph in mid air by a pair of really hairy hands.

Windows 12: Same as Windows 11, except missing a window on the door all together.

Windows ME: The driver's side window of a clown car.

Windows 95: Identical to Windows 98.

(There are a lot more like CE, NT, 2000, Server, FLP, RT, Mobile, etc, but I'll end my list there.)

Also, the photo gives way too much credit to Vista. Also, everything from XP and after should at least have bars on the windows. Having to phone home to activate was always unreasonable. The fact that things are way worse now doesn't mean earlier versions were unrestrictive by a long shot. (And believe me. People in XP's era were also horrified at how restrictive and enshittified XP was compared to previous versions.)

Windows 13: The "window" is back in but actually it's just a 1 way mirror so they can look in but you can't look out
Windows 95: Identical to Windows 98.
No because it worked most of the time
Vista was excellent if you had a decent machine. It didn’t run on the ancient machine my parents had, but it ran quite fast on the laptop I had. Never experienced a single crash besides the one when it slipped out of my hand.
- I didn't mind Vista at the time, but after I started using Linux Mint, I went back to my old Vista machine and holy god that dim the screen "this needs privileges" pop-up that happened 9 times a nanosecond.

Vista needs way more glass and bubbles.

Milennium:

Windows ME

Windows 7. Best ever. Miss those days.

I don't get why everyone's so hostile to Windows Me. It was a perfectly good operating system for its time. It certainly didn't crash on me any more than 98 did before it, or XP did after it. And it had some genuine improvements grandfathered in from Win2000.

That said, I'm now a Linux user, so my opinions are invalid /j

You are in the minority with your experience. Either you lucked out on ME or you had especially bad luck with XP.
Brand name PCs were being sold in 2000 with ME installed, that fresh out of the box would hang just trying to load the applications that were shipped with it.
Windows ME had the same fixed 64KB user resources and 64KB GDI resources memory limits as Windows 95 and Windows 98 for system resource allocation regardless of how much actual RAM you had. Since ME was more resource-intensive than the previous versions, you could run out of these resource allocations while still having very much free RAM much faster.
The end-result was the computer becoming unusable even though you had resources available that the OS could have otherwise used. Certain inefficient applications like I believe Quicken could snarf up all of the system resources so you had to restart with everything you could disabled to run that one application. Same computer on Win2K would run circles around WinME.
They broke stuff frequently and implemented half baked ideas that didn’t really go anywhere.
ME had the same problems as Vista and 8
By their end of life the next product was a good one because of the problems we went through with the half baked one.
ME brought us XP
Vista brought us 7
8 brought us 8.1
I think it was overall a step down from win2k but that was the best software Microsoft has ever shipped.

Another one of these with no Win 95…😩

Seriously, 98 was just the third addition of 95, it wasn't really some big thing of its own.
- You could also put Windows 98 Second Edition in there with some niceties.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_98
Nor Millennium Edition or Windows 2000
Millennium Edition was so bad, it had all the blue screens of their predecessor and successor combined.

In XP, the original Office Word95 assistants were my study buddies for countless hours. This is my homage to them.

Fuck Clippy. He's a wind chime now.

Where Win95

Where Windows 2000

Where Windows NT

Mmm, windows 9. My childhood is flooding back to me.

What version is this one?

UBUNTU!!! But then account free. As soon as we do not need an "account" anymore to install an OS we're truly free again (and yes gen-z, there was a time where that was normal)