GOG's new owner can't stand Windows either: 'It's such poor-quality software ' (opens in new tab)

I was there when XP came out and it was clearly better than any of the entries in the two "parents" that it replaced (NT/Win2k, and 9X/ME). I was the local "hey, my PC is broken" guy and the first thing to try was always to replace whatever version of windows they had with XP.

I certainly have some anti-fondness memories as well (I had the service pack burned to a CD because it took longer to download and install the updates than it did to get infected with one of the various worms around at the time), but there was zero doubt in my mind that XP was the best windows yet when it came out.

Never had any nostalgia for Windows, and I’ve met plenty of full of themselves developers being ‘nah, Windows is good, you just incompetent’ with their vibes. I could write books about their technical decisions, but I’d just mention none of them knew even slightest bits of Linux. It’s just absurd to me, like man, you do that for work, and the things you were over engineering could be done within one day, if you care to learn something new, instead of applying things you learned 40 years ago. I see no point in even attempting to explain anything to those people. Yeah, nothing wrong with Windows. XP was good, 7 was good, 11 is also no problem. I feel the same, I just mostly never used them myself, with occasional horror of things I’ve seen with others. Like those in abuser relationships who keep telling it’s how things should be and nothing wrong.

> Only in hindsight did people ever express fondness in public for Windows XP (and maybe a bit for Windows 7).

I don't agree. Those of us using it for embedded development skipped from XP to 7 to 10.

Windows XP started off a bit rough. Once it had some time to mature, nobody in their right mind wanted to go back to Windows 95/98/9x, though.

Windows 7 was definitely lauded as decent contemporaneously. Vista was a disaster by comparison (but a necessary one--Vista took the arrows to allow Windows 7 to appear). And lot of people avoided Windows 8 like the plague it was.

Windows 10 was definitely a step back from 7, but wasn't ... terrible? Especially relative to Windows 8. But Windows 10 definitely wasn't genuinely good on any axis. And everybody was constantly bitching about all the stuff that was clearly the beginning of enshittification that got turned to maximum on 11.

My favorite version of Windows was Vista, and it receives unearned hatred thanks largely to OEMs bundling it with underpowered PCs.

It was miles ahead of XP from an architecture standpoint, Aero looks positively futuristic today, security was improved, file transfers improved.

It was rock solid and good to look at. I used Vista right up until EOL.

What was shocking to me is discovering that Windows 11 on a managed company laptop and Windows 11 on a store bought personal laptop feel so different, they might as well not share a name.

It's insane the amount of bullshit Microsoft is pushing on private users.

My daily small annoyance is that when my work laptop goes to sleep, it doesn't shut off primary and secondary displays at the same time and moves all my windows onto one monitor. Which monitor seems totally random, so I'm perpetually moving windows back to one screen or the other. And it doesn't respect my sleep settings if I put up the lock screen, instead almost immediately turns the monitors off.

Surely there are ways to measure its quality objectively, and separate dumb nostalgia from real concerns. Are support tickets down? Is the OS a less frequent root cause for tickets? IT people with big enough fleets could settle this debate.

I’m a Mac person but Windows 11 seemed as fine as Windows 10 when I used it.

I was definitely somebody who rolled their eyes when people were up in arms about XP, Vista, and 7. Was OS X becoming better at the time? Sure, I’ll concede that. There were also initial driver issues with Vista and too many UAC prompts, but they worked to smoothe those out for 7 because they still prioritized the user experience.

What is happening now is even the longtime Windows power users and defenders are throwing up their hands and giving up. This is very different than the people running Gentoo in the 2000’s badmouthing Micro$oft on Slashdot

To be fair, compared to Linux (and to an extent, Mac), Windows has been sluggish, bloated and unreliable for a long time. XP was the last one that felt "solid", aka: fast, reliable and "just works".

It's an unpopular opinion, but I genuinely believe that 11 is the best version of Windows yet. I've been using computers for 30 years and you're right, everyone has _always_ complained about Windows. The only reason people have a fondness for XP is because it was pretty much the world's first Windows. It's the OS that was used to connect the world, and IE being (for the time) the competent browser played a huge role in that.

Well, that's because 11 and 10 are similar while being substantially worse than XP.

I keep hoping the EU comes out with a "No Means No" legislation to end this "Ask Again Later" nonsense.

Tricky to thread the needle on what would/not be allowed, but the pattern has been abused long enough. Maybe even saying it cannot re-ask for 30 days would be a significant improvement.

I suspect they would put out a GOG Galaxy that works on Linux well before promoting it on their web site that aggressively.

I'm not familiar enough beyond casual use of Steam on Linux and a few one-offs to know the current state of gaming... but can only posit that a GoG installer/launcher for Linux that uses Proton (like Steam) wouldn't hurt.

Surprisingly, Linux-based distros often have better chances of running old games compared to Windows.

wine is probably better for backwards compatibility than modern windows / microsoft.