I’d say that the ‘modern’ era of Microsoft Enshittification started with IE4 as well as Windows 98. The Channel bar put ads on the Windows 95 & 98 desktops. It was easily disabled, but even that far back, Microsoft was starting to work on making their stuff suck just that much more.
Next was Windows ME blocking DOS access, while still running on DOS, making the OS a bit … unstable, followed by your point of Software Activation in XP.
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Agreed, XP was the turning point - I decided I will never let such an intrusive software on my private computers, so I switched from Win2k to Linux.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
People think I’m nuts when I say Win2k was my favorite Windows. I switched to Linux before Vista came out. People say WinXP was good, but really, it was just tolerable.
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 4 months ago
High five, brother :) I think the XP crowd was just the generation of “one step more tolerant towards privacy intrusions” / not quite computer knowledgeable enough to understand the implications of letting your operating system phone home. In terms of user interface, it was indeed tolerable - you could still configure it to look and behave like Win2K mostly, which is what I had to do for work for quite a long time.