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new versions of windows just kind of feel like new phones now. It's good but.. who cares?
I can remember as a teen and upgrading from windows 98 to XP felt like jumping into the future.
Or, more recently, getting the first samsung galaxy after having a basic candybar phone.
Just seems like more of the same all while charging an arm and a leg for it.
Then xp to vista happened and it looked pretty but was unusable. Then 7 came out and it solved all the BS and was a relief. Then 8 came out and it looked pretty but was unusable. Nobody is quite sure what happened with 9 but 10 was ok I guess, better than 8. Then I started using Linux because I was sick of the bullshit.
9 was skipped because there was concern with old/lazily coded programs running in compatibility mode for Windows 9x versions.
Basically, when the windows versions went from Win95/98/ME to 2000 and XP, some lazy programmers went “well by the time Windows 2090 rolls around I’ll be dead” and just had their programs check the windows version for a 9 when deciding whether or not to run in compatibility mode. If it detected a 9, then it would run in compatibility for 95/98/ME.
Microsoft wanted to avoid this potential issue, so they just skipped version 9 altogether and jumped straight to 10.
Unrelated but didn't a lot of things about that time skip a few versions to land at 10? Like I don't think there was an iPhone 9 and so on.
Regarding why they just jumped to 10, I subscribe to the theory that enough software that required XP or greater checked for OS compatibility by looking for the string "Windows 9*" to catch both 95 and 98
Funny thing. The reputation of Vista is universal, so I don't doubt it at all. However, I ran Vista starting from beta and never had a problem with it. I must have had the magic hardware combination that worked. My least favourite Windows release was 8.
As someone who was stuck on vista as a teen towards the end of its life is wasn't a bad OS, but it did deserve the hate early on for being a buggy OS that was poorly optimised for the average hardware of the time. But then I moved to 7 and fell in love with it( or at least I thought it was great).
Then I upgraded to 10 and hated it. I switched to Mac for a couple of years and started liking unix but missed the hardware of PCs and didn't like the 10.15+ direction of MacOS.
So I switched to Linux( which I had messed with on an old laptop on and off as a teen, but at the time liked all my proprietary crap I was used too) and have never looked back.
The stuff that made Vista shitty to most end users wasn't truly fixed with W7. For the most part W7 was a marketing refresh after Vista had already been "fixed." Not saying that it was a small update or anything like that, just that the broken stuff had been more or less fixed.
Vista's issues at launch were almost universally a result of the change to the driver model. Hardware manufacturers, despite MS delaying things for them, still did not have good drivers ready at release. They took years after the fact to get good, stable, drivers out there. By the time that happened, Vista's reputation as a pile of garbage was well cemented. W7 was a good chance to reset that reputation while also implementing other various major upgrades.
W7 was really just a vista service pack, but they had to rebrand it to make people want it.
Isn't windows 11 still... unfinished?
I’m not thinking about upgrading until W11 is 50-60% market share and they actually have to take bugs seriously
I bought a Dell XPS for work with a 12th gen Intel Evo CPU that came with Windows 11 and it ran like absolute dog shit. Slow, poor battery life, etc. I reinstalled 11 from scratch with an MS ISO to remove any Dell bloatware and it was actually worse. I ran the "old" Windows 10 Media Creation Tool and downgraded (through the upgrade option, ha) and it has been running great for months ever since. The Evo platform isn't even supposed to work fully on 10, and definitely not run faster or with better battery life. That's the inverse of what should have happened. Also, the bugs went away and I got a functional Windows Explorer back without having to pay for fucking third-party start menu software.
E: clarity
Is any piece of software ever truly finished?
Not when its from ms
windows 11 isnt even the majority of installs yet and they're trying to push for windows 12? They tried doing "windows as a service" with Windows 10 but that never really manifested either.
I know people whine that Linux users always harp on about Linux, but there's a better alternative to having a £100 tax on every new laptop you buy, or having to buy a new license every time you upgrade a PC a little too much in one go. Or being locked out of security updates because you dont want to subject your system to adware.
And with the Steam Deck entering the picture, we have a huge company like valve making it even easier to jump ship now. Its the ship jump I used
Microsoft might be leaning into an old reputation. Windows 95 was crap, Windows 98 fixes it. Windows ME was crap, Windows XP fixes it. Windows Vista was crap, Windows 7 fixes it.
They might be expecting that people think Windows 11 was crap in the same way Windows ME or Vista was crap, and they'll flock to Windows 12. But it's not like Windows 11 is horribly broken like that. The actual problem is that Windows 11 doesn't give many compelling reasons to upgrade over 10, and it has a bunch of useless bloat.
As a developer, having WSL2 open up X11 apps without having to jump through hoops of running an X server on Windows is quite nice. Other than that, I don't know why I'd bother.
In actuality 98 was crap until SE and XP was crap until SP2.
I don't think Microsoft charges OEMs remotely close to full price for OEM licenses, so it's more like a $10 tax, but I agree with everything else here
As long as 10 is supported, I'm not updating. At least I'm not hammered with ads like on 11.
If 10 is sunset, I'll probably switch back to Linux. I rarely game on my laptop anyway.
Out of like 1000 games I can play about 997 on linux, you'll probably be fine on linux even gaming now
I don't understand Linux, but gaming on my steam deck is amazing and occasionally runs games better than my much more powerful windows computer.
Certain things do run better on Linux. So if a game heavily relies on one of those things, it’ll run better. But there’s still a lot of game engine stuff that is experimental or just plain non-functional on Linux, so the games that utilize those are basically unplayable.
Until fairly recently, things like Ray tracing and DLSS were windows-only, because they almost universally used DirectX, which is a windows API.
If you game via Steam, there's a good chance you can use their Proton layer to play Windows games on Linux.
I see no compelling reason to accept this "upgrade."
That's why it'll end up beig forced on people. Just like what's happened with 11. And 10 before it. Didn't happen to everyone, but there were lots of complaints about it happening.
Fucking fix your bloated background service's, every update they add more and more services and background applications that serve little purpose, like the touch screen service that's running on my fucking desktop that only has a mouse and keyboard
another thing that annoyed me was the useless setting page, when control panel worked fine.
especially since you end up needing to get to control panel to do anything anyway
Don't worry! Control panel is being slowly phased out in favor of the settings.
I wonder if they will provide a "Windows 13" after that.
And another thing in Windows I am waiting for is the moment when they encrypt all your data "for security", then blackmail you into a subscription service where you can only access your files while you pay your monthly dues. And how long it will take for this being hacked in a way that hackers, microsoft, and the relevant government agencies can all read your data, and you can not.
Any bets on this Refresh not supporting 8th-gen and below Intel chips except the Surface Studio for “reasons”?
Still peeved my 5930K isn't supported, despite still being petty capable.
A new version of windows coming next year isn’t really shocking news.
But Windows 10 was supposed to be the last version, they said so. 🙄
rumored to be an enterprise tier "windows in the cloud" solution . But that doesn't mean there won't be an offline solition personal OS where u have basic functionality with ads on the desktop. If you know win11 and xbox new startmenus, expect more of those unmovable ad spots...sorry recommendations
~~windows refresh~~ cash grab
Thank god my PC doesn't have a TPM.
Otherwise, I am just waiting for some industrial software to be usable on Linux (they're migrating now!) so I can finally drop Windows for good.
If not 12, an incremental patch release to 11 as a "revamp" version they've done with all the others, but no significant changes. Meh.
Maybe they'll move to the MacOSX model with friendly-named feature updates, but otherwise I don't see Windows 12 coming out next year.
