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The last great Windows before Microsoft began its enshittification.
It was the last Windows version that felt it was primarily made for desktop use.
Windows 8 tried to be a hybrid between mobile operating system, and Windows 10 and onward feels more like an advertising platform for Office 365 and Microsoft’s AI services.
Was 10 actually alright early on in its life, or was I just unaware? I don't remember any of the advertising and spyware crap back when I first upgraded from 7.
Yes. It installed candycrap automatically and had several other such apps in the start menu.
Oh yeah I do remember that one
AFAIK it has always been nagging about how much better things will be if you just connect your login to their Microsoft account.
I foolishly did that right away so I must have never seen the extra nagging
And let's not forget Cortana.
TBH I think 10 was worse before but I use LTSC so my perspective is different.
I would disagree. I feel xp was the last good windows. After that it all went to shit.
You mean Windows 2000?
You mean whatever one you first used and have an unhealthy nostalgia for. I mean Windows 98.
Give me Windows 95 with Microsoft Plus!
Nah, Windows 3.11 is peak
You say that until you think back and TCP/IP wasn't a native protocol so you had to use and configure something like Trumpet Winsock for your SLIP or PPP connection. Dark days, man.
Man Microsoft plus was awesome. I used to stare at the foucault pendulum for hours when I was a kid.
You mean 98SE
3.11. So good you had to type WIN <ENTER> to fuck your PC.
The first version of Windows I used was 2.0. NT was a huge improvement over the DOS based ones, but things started to go downhill with XP.
SE
This is the right question, it was the last 100% NT kernel before 9x ruined everything.
Funny you say that. I did tech support when XP first came out, and I quit my job and switched to Linux.
XP SP2 was actually pretty good though.
7 was the first and last version of Windows I didn't immediately despise.
Windows 7 made me switch to Linux ! I skipped over Visa entirely by using some obscure XP 64bit version for years. Then, 7 came out, and I was like "WTF is this crap ?". I was particularly infuriated by the complexity to setup network shares, you always had to navigate to some obscure menu to turn off some hidden "security" settings, but "media share" on he other hand, this shit was always ON even if nobody asked for it, or ever used it. Now I have to use Win11 at work. In retrospective, 7 wasn't so bad...
I didn't mind 7, some things I even thought were great compared to XP (like the search).
I can tolerate 10 well enough still given the de facto convenience of running windows for gaming, but the moment end of service comes around next year I'm switching to linux. I also have to use win 11 at work and it's just infuriating how much worse it is. And conveniently Linux gaming got pretty good in the meantime, and I've been told I can now even set up a windows VM with GPU passthrough that activates when I start the VM for the cases where Linux just won't work (though idk if that'll work when the issue is anticheat, but I don't play anything where that's relevant anyway).
VM GPU passthrough is a thing, but I wasn't successful with it (didn't try that hard TBH). You need to make sure your CPU and Motherboard and GPU all have the required features and they are activated (iommu and what not). Not sure if you still need a second GPU for this setup to work (e.g. embedded graphics)? Anyway, don't count on this solution to work until you have check that your HW can absolutely make it work and that you are ready to spend hours setting this up. It can be an interesting learning experience, definitely the more advanced stuff when it comes to VM. I think some were successful with Anti-Cheat with this method, by using the Microsoft Hypervisor from inside de VM somehow.
I had the same plan as you have, switching when win10 goes EOL. but since Microsoft decided that they would backport stuff like ads in the start menu, i just switched.
I'm a gamer, so i decided to give nobara a shot. it works really fine, and i have found only one game so far that didn't work. Lutris and heroic launcher is everything you need, i do have the VM but i haven't spun it up since i finished the configuration :-) a few hours in and i decided that i won't need my windows partition anymore.
If you have a few hours spare time, give it a spin, you'll be surprised how good gaming has gotten under linux :-)
I recently got a used gaming laptop for the rare times I'm away from home for a while (next time likely for christmas) so the plan is to put linux on that from the start and see how it goes. And maybe getting diagnosed for adhd and getting on medication will mean I actually have the motivation to switch from windows before it becomes absolutely necessary, though thankfully I don't get any start menu ads since I got rid of those with WinAeroTweaker, so I'm mostly happy with it.
Though I've been having some weird crashing issues that look like broken ram but aren't, so if I end up replacing my mainboard from that (because at this point idk what else it would be) I'd likely have to reinstall windows anyway, and at that point I'd just switch.
You may well be the only person on this planet who preferred Vista over 7.
i remember downgrading to windows 7 on my old laptop it orignally ran windows 7 as well in 2019 bcs windows 10 was slow for it
