What y'all talking about?

Not really
Windows 7 was pretty, it was customisable, it was stable. And microshaft had yet to start fucking about with ads everywhere and invasive "features". Peak windows right there.
XP was also pretty good for its time. At that point Linux and OSX had caught up and surpassed it in many ways, but it did what it had to without getting in the way.
95 was an innovator if anything, ahead of pretty much anything else on desktop at the time, even if it DID fart and die whenever someone looked at it funny.
It was always a proprietary creation by an anticompetitive tech megacorp, and therefore bad from THAT angle, but it didn't start being truly shite from a pure user experience angle until like. 8.
- Win 7 was ok but remember, it still came with three control panels, a fucking registry and 8bit palette drwatson icon in system32 along with gigabytes of absolutely useless shit.
  It was good for a windows, but it was still windows.
  
  Nothing wrong with the Registry
  It's a different way of handling things compared to how Linux (and most unixes) does it with 18391823 text files
  But it's a perfectly functional and sensible solution for storing system configurations.
  
  A centralized place to store settings (e.g. the registery) isn't a bad idea in and of itself.
  
  Anyone who saw Mac at the time would know what pretty was for interfaces. Windows has never been pretty.
- I have an old rig for old games and I still have Win7 SP1 installed on that. It never gets updates as it's not connected to the internet. I know everything works there and thus it is now a time capsule. Never change a running system lol
- You've perfectly summarized my own feelings toward the best versions of Windows. Thank you. I feel more centered seeing it summarized so well in writing.
  I'll add that I found Vista cool and interesting on a technical level, even while the practical outcome was pretty awful.
- I always get pooped on when I say this, but I didn't like 7. it brought the confusing libraries, ugly glass theme, and all computers I used it on, explorer (file manager, taskbar) crashed a lot and had to do win+r -> explorer.exe to get it going again.
  I liked vista, but I only used it on my very first pc and for not much else but web browsing. I also liked 8.1, just needed to tweak it a bit, like replace that horrible start menu. I had instructions for myself for all kinds of registry stuff that needed to be done to a fresh install.
  hated 10 from the beginning because it immediately seemed like it fights back too much, forcing microshit down your throat, and all that spying crap.
  and finally when I saw 11....well, I've used mint for about two years now.
  
  People who don't like Glass Themes can't be my friends. Frutiger Aero looks like happiness and a better time when technology was exciting instead of alarming.
  You are otherwise entitled to your opinion (fwiw I never used those libraries and still don't know what they were FOR) and I entirely believe your experience of having instability. Windows just be like that sometimes. No pooping here.
  
  I totally forgot about explorer just s****ing the bed randomly in 7 lmao.
  XP was bloated to hell and back, and yeah 10 was okay overall but the “kiddie gloves” hostility towards users sucked, especially hiding away control panel and trying to get rid of it altogether in 11 is what pushed me to Linux.
  
  explorer (file manager, taskbar) crashed a lot and had to do win+r -> explorer.exe to get it going again.
  This still happens on up-to-date Win10 occasionally. I've seen it on multiple machines, hardware tests good. A variant I've seen is that the Start button responds to click (changes color) but does not open the menu.
- 95 can suck eggs... The GUI was largely items they had co-developed with IBM for the next release of OS/2 that they instead split last minute due to contractual arguments since Microsoft wanted a larger cut of profits. There's more depth of course but tldr version.
  It's a large part of why 95 was so crashy until osr2.5... it was largely 32 bit GUI stuck onto rushed 16 bit DOS with some quick protected mode hooks.
  That said, XP was the first version I could stand.
  7 was actually pretty good.
- XP was also pretty good for its time.
  Pretty good at collecting every virus under the sun and beginning the anti consumer practices.
  95 was an innovator if anything, ahead of pretty much anything else on desktop at the time
  Huh? Coming from an Amiga it really didn't seem innovative. Or OS2 or BeOS (which ran circles around Win 95) or Macs. Windows 95 was still just another dos program on top of a shell.
  
  Windows 95 was still just another dos program on top of a shell.
  That's just straight up misinformation. Even 3.1 wasn't really like that anymore (though, it was closer). Windows 9x uses DOS as a bootloader, and retains the original DOS components for backwards compatibility, but loads into a fully 32-bit kernel with preemptive multitasking and many features DOS couldn't dream of touching. It is built atop the original 16-bit DOS, and inherits a lot of jank from that, which is why eventually they ditched it to use the developed-from-the-ground-up NT kernel everywhere instead (and broke compatibility with a lot of old hardware and software because of it, much to the chagrin of the users--)
  Huh? Coming from an Amiga it really didn’t seem innovative. Or OS2 or BeOS (which ran circles around Win 95) or Macs.
  OS/2 and Windows are siblings, with most of OS/2 being written by the same people within Microsoft. Windows NT is what happened when Microsoft decided to backstab IBM (again) to increase their profit margin (as I myself have said, Microsoft has always been bad from the 'evil megacorp' angle).
  BeOS was, at the time, an operating system only for Be's own PowerPC based workstations (and workstation != desktop, especially in those days) -- Though there were talks to bring at least parts of it to desktop as the basis for MacOS Copland, that didn't go through (instead Apple vored NeXT and used its nutrients to make OSX). -- It didn't get a public, user-facing, desktop release that a mere mortal could buy until 1997 (on PPC Mac. 98 for the x86 PC version), which in mid-90s tech terms is like a geological epoch later. Are we also going to compare Doom 2 to Half Life and shit on Doom 2 for being behind HL?
  MacOS at the time was still using Cooperative Multitasking (which is what Win 3.0 used, and is unreliable af because any crashed program takes out the entire OS with it) and wouldn't get true Preemptive Multitasking until OSX in '99.
  The amiga did get Preemptive Multitasking to the desktop first (in '86, even. Commodore seriously didn't know what they had, or they would have ruled the roost), but preemptive multitasking wasn't the only feather in 9x's hat.
  DirectX was so good at doing what it did (acting as a layer of abstraction between gamedevs and hardware, allowing them to just ask the library to draw and play stuff, and it would figure itself out with the hardware) that alternatives like SDL took another 3 years to exist and much longer to catch up -- And it was necessary, because the PC space, unlike the likes of the Mac or Amiga, was an industry standard rather than being controlled by one company, and users could have any combination of wacky third party video and soundcards, and DirectX just dealt with it.
  And Plug-and-Play, while buggy as fuck to the point that it really only worked when it wanted, was something that hadn't been done before. Adding new hardware and the OS just figures that shit out, no reboot required? Unheard of.
  Edit: BeOS in 97, not 98. Still retains the whole 'this was a geological epoch by 90s tech standards' comment though.
  
  @westyvw Pretty good at collecting every virus under the sun
  Not really.
  It did have some fails security-wise but 99% of exploits happened on non-updated machines which also had firewall disabled.
  98 was far worse in that regard.
- 95 was an innovator if anything, ahead of pretty much anything else on desktop at the time, even if it DID fart and die whenever someone looked at it funny.
  com/com 😂

7 from start to finish was the most polished and stable imo. Early 10, I would put right up there with it. 8.1 wasnt as awful as many claimed, despite gui changes. Xp took FOREVER to get to a good place, 95 was jank city.
- XP was fine after sp2 but to claim it was good is to give it too much credit.
- 3.11 was solid. No frills, just basic Windows. Limited in use.
  Bells and whistles may have been available depending on your own personal hardware and software limitations.
- WinXPSP3 was a mainstay for so long. Vista wasn't going to take that crown.
- Windows 8 was when MS were trying to break into the phone OS market to complete with Android and iOS. They wanted to have the "same OS" across phone, tablet, and desktop, which isn't a terrible idea except for the fact you need to betray your entire desktop customer base to get there.
  
  That, and they confused "Window Manager" and OS. There were third-party apps to make Win8 look like Win7, don't tell me they couldn't have included the option in the OS.

Kind of, to varying degrees. Posting the ones I've actually used enough to have an opinion:
Win 3 through 3.11 and below: Limited
Win 9x: unstable
Win ME: don't get me started
Win 2k: Decent, actually. At least after a couple of service packs
Win XP: Win 2k with teletubbies theme
Win Vista: "users are too stupid to be allowed to do this just like that"
Win 7: Decent, actually
Win 8: worst UI ever
Win 8.1: sometimes MS actually listens to feedback
EDIT: While I absolutely hated using Vista, I think it's unfair to complain about its performance compared to that of Win XP. XP was 6-7 years old at the time of Vista release - of course it's going to demand less of your PC.
- Win 10: 'the final version of Windows' actually kinda decent
  Win 11: "when we said f'inal version of Windows' we meant it's the final version that your old ass computer would run. Go buy a new one."
  
  Win10 was extreme crap, you just feel it was good because Win11 is worse.
- I think it’s unfair to complain about its performance
  I disagree. If your software runs like a damn snail on inexpensive current-gen hardware, then it's not worth using.
- This lines up with my own takes on Windows versions. I think 8 was better than people give it credit for. I never minded the UI personally, and it was fast and responsive.
- Windows 8.1 was amazingly good, simple and fast, if you ignored whole Metro thing. You could also install 3rd party start menu alternative, if you needed it.

@drq @linuxmemes some noses work better than others
but calling windows shit is unfair. shit can still help plants grow. this is the kind of stuff you lock away in a mine forever and put a sign in front that says this is not a place of honor.
- @lritter Yeah, looks like this is what it will take because nothing else works (or everything else is much worse that no amount of enshitification offsets it).
  
  @shuro security-wise, being the less popular one has its advantages.
  
  @shuro @lritter what this unknown desktop os?

It's subjective, but I clearly remember saying Windows couldn't get any worse around the time that (Microsoft was claiming that) Internet Explorer was irrevocably integrated with Windows 98.
Never believe it when someone says such-and-such can't get any worse. Somehow it always can.

It's been less shit at running games than Linux for... Well, always?
Downvote all you want, I've seen what makes you cheer.
- So long as the game in question doesn't block you for running linux (fortnight, for instance), then no, you are absolutely wrong. I get much better game performance on Arch Linux cachyos kernel than i do on windows 10. Every single time.
- spasms due to rage
  At least the future is looking good with Valve supporting the cause
- Cry all you want. Gaming performance on Linux is usually better.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D45AknAsIPw

Doesn't the prefix "en" in enshittification mean "more of"/"increasing"?
Because "Windows is even more shit" makes perfect sense to me.

No. Windows 7 was pretty good. Certainly a better desktop experience than Linux at the time (go on, roast me, I've got my flame proof undies on). Windows 10 started out pretty decent, until they ramped up the enshittification. I used Windows for over 30 years and never saw any reason to switch, although I've worked with Unix before Windows was even a thing. Only in the last couple of years did it really become unbearable. And I wouldn't even consider ever using Win11 on any personal machine.
- Completely agree! Windows 7 was the best Windows.
- Looks like Win7 came out in 2008. So did KDE4 https://timeline.kde.org/. I've pretty much always used KDE so it's a good measuring stick for me.
  My completely subjective opinion is they were pretty equivalent. Win7 wasn't bad. But neither was KDE4.
- @Diplomjodler3 @drq win7 is shit, really shit. It renamed "My computer" to "Computer"...

My understanding was it used to be windows was decent enough, whilst Linux was an upgrade for those who valued freedom.
Now Linux is quickly going from 'upgrade' to 'only sensible option.'
- That's where I'm at. LMDE is what my desktop will run soon.
- Yep and that happened right about when windows XP came out.
  
  XP was hated when it came out, but it wasn't that bad. Then Vista and 7 happened. Then it got worse.

I think Windows 7 was the last version that wasn't there for the purposes of advertising and collecting data in the effort to achieve recurring revenue.
Legitimately Microsoft was trying to make it a better product until Windows 10. 10 was a better product on accident, but it's also where they started sliding down that slope...

You are likely not old enough to remember windows 2000. It had the NT kernel and did nothing more than expected. It got out of your way so you could do work.
There have been some improvements over the years, but Microsoft's goals for windows changed after that, which is when enshitification started.
- XP was like 2K, but with fancy plastic appearance and some unneeded things.
  I have fond memories of reading Star Wars books in Notepad, in plain text (or RTF containing only text), in some font like Fixedsys, I think, black on white, at night. Ironically my eyesight didn't get much worse then.
  XP was nice enough.

Windows 7 was the last good a Windows
- People hated on 7 and said the same thing about XP.
  
  Aka enshittification
- Slow as all get out though. I ran it in a VM just for fun and lacks the performance improvements of newer Windows.

98SE, 2000, XP (Service Pack 3) and 7 were Windows at their peak.
Windows 8 and 8.1 were screwed by Microsoft's insistence at creating a more mobile-friendly OS, when the Metro menu was just bad for the desktop user experience. A lot of disgruntled 8/8.1 users did flock to 10 because having the Start menu back was seen as a compromise to having forced telemetry tracking in your OS.
As for Windows 11, it's getting super shit. Recall AI is being baked into the OS, which will effectively allow Microsoft to snoop and capture data on your computer activity. They claim to not capture sensitive info like bank details or credit card numbers, but I think that's been proven wrong.
Also, 11 is hardly an upgrade feature-wise, yet requires a significantly beefier PC, and was released at a time when the world was still going through a significant semiconductor shortage.
The only real hurdle for widespread Linux adoption is anti-cheat support. That, and either getting Linux versions of industry standard software (Microsoft 365, Adobe CS, 3DS Max, etc) or decent support through Wine/Proton.
- That, and either getting Linux versions of industry standard software (Microsoft 365, Adobe CS, 3DS Max, etc) or decent support through Wine/Proton.
  You won't. Industry doesn't want to waste money to port such enormous legacy codebases to Linux, when most people still run Windows.
  Windows has to become a minority OS first.
  And anti-cheat - I don't like it, but it seems there will be working kernel-level anticheats for Linux.
  You forgot hardware support, nice that it seems not an issue for some people today, but Linux hardware support is still not there. Drivers for Windows are made by manufacturers, drivers for Linux are often made by Linux developers.
  
  The way you handle "industry standard software" is you make other software that is better. Do what Blender did. Thing is, for some reason a lot of developers especially of the old projects like GIMP actively avoid doing so.
- I honestly liked 8.1 quite a bit - once I installed Classic Shell to not have to deal with the new UI. A first year usability student could have foreseen the massive issues trying to weld a touch screen UI and a traditional desktop metaphor would raise, but Microsoft for some reason were completely pig headed about making it work. It didn't. It can't. You can not staple two completely different UI paradigms together and have it work smoothly. Other than that, 8.1 was remarkably good experience for me. It felt really snappy under the hood. Good OS brought down by hubris. Well, good for a Windows release, at least. Use Linux.

As for later Windows versions 7 and 8.1 were pretty stable and lightweight. It was only in the later versions of Windows 10 when it became filled with ads and some stupid bloatware.
Earlier Windows 2000 and XP were of course also amazingly well made and even lighter, but weren't exactly as stable.

This isn't a Linux meme
- Indeed, it is a Windows meme.
  Like 90% of memes here on Linuxmemes
- It should be "Wait, are you still using Windows??"

Windows 10 was great without the bloatware and telemetry that was slowly added to it. At first it was only a small amount that could easily be removed with a script.
- Nah man. Windows 10 was full of telemetry from day 1. It was the first version of Windows that hid away the ability to even use a local-only login, trying to push every user onto a MS account for that sweet tracking and advertising dollar.
  They even gave the OS away for free - absolutely unthinkable to 90s/2000s era Microsoft, now why would that have changed?
  Pushing the users to their cloud offerings for those that they can tempt, and tracking, profiling, advertising for every user. From conception.

Yes, but now there is blood in the poop.
- And it is a dark red.

I miss Windows 7 and the early days of Windows 10. Windows 7 was definitely peak Windows and I can't really remember any complaints I had with it. It did everything I needed it to and very rarely ran into issues. Gaming was great and the bloatware was minimal, at least compared to now.
Nowadays Windows is full of bloatware and shitty decisions. Gaming has been better on Linux ever since I started using it a couple months back. I'm playing games like the Final Fantasy VII Remake and No Man's Sky this past week and they've been running better on Linux.

Windows 2000 was the last good windows version.
- @teft No, not really. It was stable but lacked versatility. It was nice for business but gave some headaches at home.
  Also some people went even further and run Server 2000 on home computers :)
  
  @shuro @teft this was last version that not broke interface consistency.
  And not' it was not stable. It was buggy like any OS at this time. But at least they found how consistent desktop interface should look.
  I like how internet explorer 5-6 seamlessly turns to explorer windows and back. How everything looks good using system theme
  Or menus and system dialogs, easily extendable by custom modules, registered in registry. Or like internet explorer, using gdi is drawing very fast when launched with RDP even with slow internet connection.... Imagine something like this in wayland, which only operates pre-rendered bitmaps, it's just impossible now. And where developers cannot use one toolkit that usin system theme and extending system settings of kde/gnome for 3rdparty app is just impossible.
  And all of this runs good on 32mb ram.
  Even now both windows and linux modern desktops are long far way from this.
- I used to say that, but XP and 7 with proper 64 bit support would like a word.
  I just shut down a win7 box a couple months ago. Ran continuously for 10+ years.

Naw, Windows 2000 was legit. Everything after that was shit.

No, it was a bit crappy before, then got pretty good, but then went to shit.
Even the solitaire game in Windows now needs an Xbox account, shows an ad before you can play, nags you for s subscription to make ads go away and keeps sending notifications for challenges.

I liked XP. Never had any issues with it and things mostly made sense

3.11 was pretty good. After that it's been a mixed bag. A bag of shit, but mixed.
- The moment they removed hotdog theme was the moment it started to fail
- It was better than Linux up until windows 7, and it was objectively more compatible with games until Steam Deck.
  
  Isn't windows more compatible with most games? Very few are Linux native, and most games require a bit of compatibility troubleshooting to get working properly in my experience.
- 3.11? Which couldn't even network properly?
- "Down" was awesome.

I remember having a bit of fun playing things like Stunt Car Racer on MS-DOS back in the early 90s for a few days. Yeah, that's about it. That's the best I can do even when I'm trying to be charitable. As soon as I owned my first computer (late 90s) I bought a Linux magazine, installed a distro from a cover CD-ROM, and never looked back.

Windows 2000 wasn't bad.
- That was probably my favorite version. It’s when the integrated the NT kernel into the regular consumer desktop windows iirc, which led to XP.
  It did the job pretty well. And I’m sure even Windows 11 is good enough for most. But these days using even windows 10 after being used to Linux is painful.

I would say right up to about Windows 7. Then the enshittification started.
BTW, I have no idea how to spell enshittification.
- You spelled it correctly. The image macro missed a T.

Yes, yes it has.

I think its just become inconveniently bad now lol

@drq @linuxmemes Even nt5.0 was shit, but it's interface was really good. Later microsoft lost interface consistency. First is enabled/disabled visual styles, and second it dotnet interfaces, looking completely different This is enshitification :)

Haven't cared for any version of Windows, going back before 3.0 .

If it was always shit, it wouldn't be so popular.
- @Honytawk Billions of flies can't be just wrong, can they.
  
  @drq This sort of flippant fanboyism never helped anything.
  Myself I think this is one of those things that really stall FOSS as it just dismisses both competition and coexistence.
  
  Good things we aren't flies then.
  Because if we were, shit would be the shit and you would be eating it as well.
  It is only because we are human that we think of shit as something negative.

I wouldn't call it shit. However, the design limitations of Windows have always been there. At least with Windows 10/11 the OS is way more solid than it was.
- Makes sense, you want your spying software more robust than something unimportant like an OS.
  
  Windows XP came with telemetry as well. Realistically Windows is not any worse than Chrome OS or Mac OS.
  If you want privacy you need Linux

I liked Windows 97.

Pretty much, in short. But it used to be far less shitty

3.1, 98Se, xp, and earlier windows 10 was all pretty sweet.