The crazy thing was Vista was great with good hardware. The huge problem it had was strong security. Everything was locked down and required admin elevation to change.
You know how Linux requires su for every system change and everyone thinks that’s fine? That was Vista but it enraged techies to click an ok box for su.
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.
I wasn’t very old then but the main thing was RAM. Fuckers in Microsoft sales/marketing made 1 GB the minimum requirement for OEMs to install Vista.
So guess what? Every OEM installed Vista with 1 GB of RAM and a 5200 RPM hard drive (the “standard” config for XP which is what most of those SKUs were meant to target). That hard drive would inevitably spend its short life thrashing because if you opened IE it would immediately start swapping. Even worse with OEM bloat, but even a clean Vista install would swap real bad under light web browsing.
It was utterly unusable. Like, everything would be unbearably slow and all you could do was (slowly) open task manager and say “yep, literally nothing running, all nonessential programs killed, only got two tabs open, still swapping like it’s the sex party of the century”.
“Fixing” those hellspawns by adding a spare DDR2 stick is a big part of how I learned to fix computer hardware. All ya had to do was chuck 30 € of RAM in there and suddenly Vista went from actually unusable to buttery smooth.
By the time the OEMs wised up to Microsoft’s bullshit, Seven was around the corner so everyone thought Seven “fixed” the performance issues. It didn’t, it’s just that 2 GB of RAM had become the bare minimum standard by then.
EDIT: Just installed a Vista VM because I ain’t got nothing better to do at 2 am apparently. Not connected to the internet, didn’t install a thing, got all of 12 processes listed by task manager, and it already uses 500 MB of RAM. Aero didn’t even enable as I didn’t configure graphics acceleration.
Unpopular opinion that I have no justification for: I don’t mind windows 11 all that much
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.
That’s fair, I just like windows and that’s really all there is to it. I’ve had a few Linux installs in the past, but never really found an advantage to anything except compiling this one specific python library, but these days I can do that very easily running WSL, VS code SSH’d to my server or more recently a jupyter server that I can connect to from any device with a web browser.
Now macOS on the other hand, I absolutely despise. It was one of the first OS’s I learnt to use back in primary school, and now that I have to use it for work I have absolutely no nice things to say. Unintuitive, missing basic features and slow to navigate, and I can assure you that none of this is due to unfamiliarity…
It’s certainly better than Windows 8 and it’s awful mandatory touch interface.
Other than messing around with the beta for half an hour, I thankfully never had to use it.
Oh it was great.
Want the regular desktop? Well now it’s an app you need to open!
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.
For Windows 11, it would be an ad for Hitler instead of just a picture.
I’m confused. You think Windows 11 is better than Windows 10?
Yeah, idk, ive never actually used win 11 and have barely used win 10. It just a meme.
The embed on my client only gave me the middle 2 panels for context and honestly still funny
I’m still running Vista, what’s wrong with it?
Probably this whole list, there is lots of code shared with Windows 7, but who really knows? Nobody is checking against Vista anymore.
I do not Linux. Actually, I don’t even computer. I do everything on my phone. The Vista machine is something offline to store photos and some docs.
Whoops, this was supposed to be a comment reply, not a separate statement.
Android phone or iPhone?
Android.
Then you do Linux!
