this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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Oh how I miss the beautiful simplicity of Win95/98/NT UIs. It seems as our screens have become larger, they found more shit to put on them that I don't want to see.
XP was the last good Windows.
I remember when people were saying this about Windows 95 because XP was so cursed
Everybody who did know what they were doing were using Windows 2000. That was a really, really good one.
The initial release was a bit rough but holy shit that OS was basically magic when it was dialed in. 100% my favorite.
Next to no resource usage. Reasonably secure (for its time - especially compared to other offerings) ... and all settings were right in reach.
No bullshit, no fluff. It played the os role perfectly. Run your shit and get the hell out of your way. I still believe they killed it off early to force people to switch. It was murdering the new os in performance benchmarks.
In my experience people were saying that about 98SE after ME came out. People didn’t really have many issues with XP until the internet got really popular, and by then we had some nice service packs to help with the security nightmares of ye ole internet.
7 was decent too; I personally feel like 8 is where things went off the rails.
It was a known rule that every second version of Windows was good. 95 was good, 98SE was good, XP was good, 7 was good, but sadly they never released Windows 9, so we're still waiting for the good version to come after 8.
I liked Vista and 8.1.
Vista was fucking terrible on launch, it got better towards the end it it's life, much like 8.1 was to 8, but it was still a mess when 7 came out.
No problem, we don't kinkshame here.
Prior XP they were really bad at memory management and isolation.
They were still good windowses for their time, especially when you compare them to DOS and Mac OS 9 which would have been the alternatives. For a fair comparison with professional OSes with full memory protection like UNIX you'd have to look at Windows NT, but there the preimise is true as well (as far as I can tell by googling, I only ever used 2000 Pro): 3.1 was bad, 3.5(1) good, 4.0 bad, 2000 good, 2003 meh.
There was also OS/2. But yes, for the time they were running decently on "cheap" hardware.
8.1 was ok. Fight me.
I’m with you. 8.1 was underrated. Yes the start screen wasn’t for everyone, but I didn’t mind it. It was the last native Windows start menu that would just find the apps you wanted to run. No Cortana, no web searches, no ads.
98 for me. Was good stuff.
... or less. For some reason they think desktop PC operating systems need to look like modern websites that are 90% whitespace.
Ugh true, it's really the worst of both worlds somehow.