For some of us the last sane Windows was XP, so we're well over it. XP was the end of the era when geeks ran Microsoft.
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2026
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I'd say Windows 7 was last that was relatively normal, even though I was all in for Linux even then. It had fairly coherent UI, wasnβt crazy about adverts, it didnβt feel like 10 layers glued on top of an old OS so that it could make impression that itβs contemporary. It also didnβt try to be anything but desktop OS
Working at MSN Tech support during the. Blaster Worm and its subsequent variants which triggered reboots in Windows 98-XP, I was put off from every version of Windows including XP, and it was the last windows I installed.
After working an 8 hour shift of repeating the same proceedure on a customers machine to properly fix the virus every 15 minutes, the same thing I had done every day for three weeks, I came home to find my XP machine bootlooping due to the second variant (Sophos) finding its way into my patched machine as the fix for it had come out while I was at work. Instead of joining the Freelancer LAN party I was due to be at that weekend, I spent the time fixing my machine and learning Linux. That year Windows became a secondary install, and remained that way until Wine had stabalised for most games I played. I think I dropped dual boot around 2011.
Praising windows 10 is just wild. (From someone who experienced 95 onward). I mean, it was alright. I think 7 was my favorite.
10 was the last one with a technical improvement (its kernel had a scheduler that was better at scheduling on modern processors where some cores share caches while others don't). Though the anti-features meant it was a tradeoff vs 7 (and just ignore 8 entirely).
It was kinda funny because before I switched to linux and made the question moot, I kept searching for some technical reason, anything, to actually want to switch from 10 to 11. All I'd get were things that other desktops have been able to do for decades (virtual desktops, which I first saw in Litestep (I think?) back around 2003), or anti-features like recall and copilot integration.
Mine too, it had a good looking UI and the addition of combined tabs changed everything.
Windows 10 only exists because of how much Windows 8 sucked.
Windows 7 also only exists because of how much Windows Vista sucked lol.
XP and 7 was Microsoft at their best. They'll never reach those heights ever again.
Windows 7 was the peak. everything since has been a decline.
Windows 7 was the first Windows OS that didnt require constant reboots, didnt require regular reformat/reinstalls to fix random over time slowdowns/degredation/crashes/etc.
Windows 7 had a relatively light weight, and very easy to use interface.
Windows 7 was the last Windows OS that you actually owned when you bought it.
Every OS after Windows 7 was centered on taking control and usability away from the owner/user.
iirc microsoft began going heavy on telemetry (and consequently cutting their QA and testing budget) at some point during Windows 7. That's why it went downhill after that (Windows 8 and after)
They had QA before?
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Even Vista was ok, it was just pre-installed on computers that could barely run it and UAC was overtuned but it was solid with the later service packs.
Yea, vista was the ME problem all over again.
People running it on old hardware and old software wasn't written to use UAC yet.
Well, sort of, but it was SOLD on hardware that couldn't run it
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I've used everything from XP to 11. Win 7 was definitely, and by far, the most comfortable for me to use. 8 was hot garbage, 10 was tolerable, and 11 made me switch to Linux a week in.
I made the mistake of starting on 95, now I can't stand anything fancier than XFCE.
8 was pretty solid under the hood, but they really pushed that Metro interface, and even if you managed to disable it with something like Start8, it was still crippled by the tablet-first design on an OS that had like 2 tablets. And even with the tablets it sucked because lots of settings were still in the old control panel that required a mouse and keyboard.
If we'd had a Service Pack that just gave us the Win7 UI and the Win8 backend it could have been great.
I vaguely remember they might've done that later on? Maybe that was for the business version only. It was at least interesting that Microsoft was trying to directly compete with Apple for a while in having a whole ecosystem. I was waiting for more hardware because I liked metro on the phone, but then that all collapsed.
Really the worst part of 8 onward was the fragmenting of the settings, Vista you could at least fallback to the old stuff but they started removing old functionality. I get that they wanted to "update" from the control panel. But that it's taken them 20 years, and they're not done, and now neither the new system or the old system is feature complete, is fucking bonkers.
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Someday digital archaeologists will search for Windows 9, the legendary Lost OS, said to give its users unlimited power.
When I first got windows 10, I hated it. Then time went on and my hate flowered into a deep loathing. When it was time to say goodbye, I thought about all the times I hated that OS.
yup. Windows 10 made me switch to Linux. About twice a year, always a couple times a year, for whatever reason Windows 10 would essentially kill my wifi card on my laptop. reinstalling drivers didn't work, physically unplugging the card from the mobo and plugging it back in didn't work. nothing worked. the ONLY thing that would work? reinstalling the entire OS. I had to do this twice a year. they'd release some update and just nuke the wifi card.
So finally I decided to give Linux a go cause I had enough. been using Linux ever since. and the thing with Linux is that it made me fall back in love with using the computer again. with tinkering and customizing and everything. made me fall back in love with my development work because of the sheer ease of doing dev stuff on linux especially with NixOS. playing around with various configs and modules and what have you is fun. maintaining random packages is fun. hell even just maintaining my nixos git repo is fun. It's a blast.
Sanity died with $(windows_version_i_grew_up_with)
Naw. I grew up with all the Windows, 7 was the last sane one.
Have to agree. Windows 10 LTSC was tolerable, but it still was pretty batshit with how they designed the settings menus. So many things were now tucked away and hidden, with the real settings you often needed being in Windows 7 settings windows that carried over, but virtually always hidden as normal hypertext links below a much larger windows 10 button that didn't actually do the thing you needed. The only real advantage of 10 was the inclusion of many drivers out of the box, updating a bit faster, and being able to swap the SSD between completely different computers without it freaking out and bluescreening.
Windows 7 was just an advanced Windows XP/2000, and for the most part was still very intuitive to use, with logically laid out settings menus.
Nowadays Linux has far surpassed Windows in ease of use and UX for normal settings with the mainstream desktop enviornments.
And what was up with 3 different styles of settings pages? There was the old MSC style, the more UI friendly pages and then the full-page, here's your phone on Windows, you need to reboot to get back to the desktop version where you have 2 buttons for all your network settings. Fucking infuriating.
It's just heinous now. I don't know how people handle it, I get fucking mad within 5 minutes of having to do anything technical on Windows now.
And what was up with 3 different styles of settings pages?
And from a company that used to scaremonger about Linux being inconsistent and therefore wasting time & money...
You handle it because your boss says so.......
I grew up with 95/98, and still think 7 was the best one and it went downhill after real quick.
Windows 10, the last "sane" Windows. Bruh, this is where the bullshit started.
"last sane windows left"
And the bullshit started a long time before that. I think people were complaining about win95 phoning home to MS.
No XP was where the bullshit started. I quit windows then.
2000 was the last sane (and maybe only) windows.
Why did did it start at XP? I'm too young to remember.
A few things that people seem to have forgotten over the years:
The "Fisher-Price" visual style fiasco. (People claiming XP's UI design choices were too unprofessional)
Extremely unstable on base release, with things only getting better after Service Pack 1.
Activation servers required to install the OS.
The start of Window's Customer Experience Improvement Program telemetry.
Integration of Windows Update into the OS, which re-enabled Microsoft defaults like Internet Explorer, after patches were complete.
The start of confusing SKUs: Home Edition, Professional Edition, Media Center Edition, and Professional x64 Edition which was confusingly a re-badged Server 2003.
I'm sure I am forgetting a lot more. It wasn't all sunshine and daisies like people seem to remember... but it was a lot better than now.
You got these right, and I wrote basically similar things.
But I had to reply because if you remember all of this, you might also remember seeing how long an XP machine could last on the internet before being patched enough.
It was crazy that you HAD to upgrade it offline, because it would be owned before you could even get it patched. At the time we saw 10 to 15 minutes tops before it was infected.
In any case, yes, XP was the start of all the things we hate today. Its interesting how much more push back there was back then: anti consumer advocates, government intervention, class action lawsuits, even the EU got their own version because they got involved.
Now everything is even worse, and only the consumers seem to be the ones complaining.
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XP ruled idk what they're on about. Windows 8 really began the death knell of Windows IMO. A new UI people didnt want or like forced down your throat. They started their new hideous and confusing design language, which led to the truly abhorrent Windows 10 half-baked replacement for the control panel. Then the ads. Spyware baked in. Vibe coded start menu that takes 300ms to open. Sigh.
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Windows 10 already had a ton of forced telemetry and more UI clutter than ever. It was a huge downgrade from Windows 7.
I'd rather use a Mac these days and I hate apple products.
Praise be to our Lord and Saviour, Linus Torvalds!
i think that's miku, actually
Have you ever seen Linus and Miku in the same room at the same time? Hmmm
I never liked windows, windows 7 was the most tolerated one
Im loving Bazzite.
Except for the whole "now I have 6TB of SSDs that I can't figure out how to get rhe data off them without buying new hardware"
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