my older brother thinks they peaked with win 95. I think they peaked with Win 98 SE.
Comment on Did Microsoft do anything right in 2025? Wins, fails, and WTF moments
Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
I maintain that Microsoft peaked with Windows 3.1 and they’ve been fucking it up ever since.
NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
Jason2357@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
Having played around with it recently, I have to say the ui was pretty bad (try it: www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/windows/3.11/ ) Go to Windows 95 and you get all the basic desktop ui principals that modern desktops use.
Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
I grew up with it so to me, the UI was great.
I’m from the line command era.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I think peak was XP.
Vista was shit. 7 was alright, but not better than XP. 8 was terrible. 10 was worse than 7, but still meh. 11 is dog shit.
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
XP was when everything went to shit. It was awful and all the enshittification began right there.
3abas@lemmy.world 3 days ago
98*/2000 was pure garbage. You could literally bypass the login screen on 98 because it had no real user account and tokens, just profiles for convenience. Driver support was awful, there was no memory protection so drivers constantly caused bsod. XP was the first time the consumer desktop got the NT foundation, meaning real user/session security, far better stability under load, and way fewer “one program crashed, so the OS is toast” moments.
XP had its problems too, it’s still Windows afterall and Windows was always garbage. But 98 was awful.
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Yes 98 was terrible. 2000 wasn’t so bad.
But XP started the data harvesting, the lying to users, the forced applications, and so much more.
On top of even worse security than 2000 (also nt) had.
I could go on for days how bad it was.
Lee@retrolemmy.com 3 days ago
I think you’re mixing up ME and 2000. ME (consumer) came after 98 (consumer) and 2000 (business) was the NT (business) version. I ran 2000 for a few years. Huge step up from 98/ME in stability and less eye candy bloat than XP.
Jason2357@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
XP was the first consumer OS with the NT kernel which was far far more reliable than win32 in the previous ones. I remember people bragging that they could leave their computer running and it wouldn’t crash -and that seemed crazy. I used windows 2000 for many years as a stripped down XP, but not many people got it. I think the interface peaked around 95, but the kernel was terribly unreliable.
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
My main focus (apart from zero security and horrible multi user) was all the anti consumer additions they put into it.