No 7 sucked too. It just came off the back of Vista which was a real hot mess, so 7 appeared better.

The thing is, Microsoft has always had an adversarial (or abusive) relationship with its customers, forcing things on them that most of them don't want. Like active desktop and IE integration in Windows 9x, "activation" and Fisher Price UI in XP, bloated (for the time) Aero UI that required a 3D capable GPU in Vista, UAC in Vista, forced automatic updates in 7, abandoning the start menu in favor of that awful tile UI in 8.x, telemetry you can't disable in 10, a start menu that acts more like an app store and advertising place in 10, forced TPM and Microsoft accounts in 11 ... the list is endless. And then when they back down on one thing, people are like: "Hurray, the czar heard us! Windows is actually good now!" ... forgetting all the other things they have been forced to swallow in the past.

I did, but I didnt feel it was necessary to go into an excruciatingly detailed list of all OS's from now to all the way back to LEO I in my OS criticism, just to avoid some pissy OS ping pong of "You thought that was bad? You obviously never used (insert older OS here)!"

Seriously. Windows 7 was the first genuinely stable OS from Microsoft.

Everything before it required regular reformating. Granted, the frequency of the reformating less over time, but still required it. Like, Win95/98 required it like every 3 months, XP every 6 months to a year, just to avoid the bloat and slowing down and issues. Same with reboots, it didnt have to be rebooted every time you ran a program, either.

Windows 7? My longest run between formats was like 4-5 years iirc, and that was due to hardware changes, not due to any performance or maintenance need. Ans for reboots? Only time that computer ever got rebooted is when a windows update demanded it, or when the power went out. Neither of which was particularly frequent.

It was also slick, agile, easy to use. You didnt have to think about shit when you used windows 7, you just did shit.

I'm not a fanboy, despite what this sounds like, but 7 was legitimately the best Windows OS, hell it wouldnt take much twisting for me to say it was the best Desktop OS, period. It was the first time ever that I was able to use the computer, and not have to stop and think "Well, I just finished running a heavy game, I need to reboot before I do something else" I just stopped one heavy task, gave the background processes a second to finish up, then went right to another heavy task without issue or concern.

It also had a very good UI. But Windows always had the best UI, by comparison, in the market, cause they spent billions on developing it so that the most computer illiterate could pick it up and use it with 15 minutes of instruction.

Fuck the 9x kernel.

If we're doing that we gotta go back to at least 95 if not 3.1. Are we counting 98se?

Nah. Fuck the 9x kernel.

5 was terrible. No redeeming qualities whatsoever.