Yea, I'd say Win10/11 is on the same good/shit cycle as always

Though whether Win12 breaks it and continues the shitty trend is highly likely at this point

Which are all significantly better than Mac OS and are especially better than Linux

Try to install windows 10 on hdd and see for yourself, Linux works fine no matter which device it's loaded from, windows before 10 did too

Windows 10 should be a dead cat bounce on this chart. Better than 8, worse than 7, better than 11 by a lot.

Win8 was really damn annoying to use without a touchscreen

So many people say that but I actually liked the menu. It opened very fast and you could far more quickly find and hit the right tile than that stupid nested programs tree that was the norm in the start menus of earlier Windows versions.

I'd say considering that telemetry started to creep in primarily with Win 10, 8 was indeed better (meaning less bad).

the graphs are separate, not superimposed. I agree it's confusing

You're absolutely right about this. 7 is basically a Vista service pack that got rebranded.

All of the "good stuff" people credit 7 with came in Vista.

It was never stable for me. I remember I had a laptop that would always refuse to shut down because "shutdown.exe" was running

I think some of the biggest complaints about Vista were its poor driver support and over-active UAC. You couldn’t hardly do anything on the computer without UAC bugging you for permission when Vista first came out.

I remember the hardware situation being very fucked, due to driver authors not updating their shit in time and people trying to get their older stuff working which worked fine under XP, but was incompatible with Vista's new driver model. It took a couple years until the release of 7 for most of those issues to get ironed out.

8 wasn't nearly as bad as people think, and there were big improvements to the kernel that make it a definite improvement over 7.

The problem for most people was the Start screen, which if you could get past, left you with what was a really good OS.

Less ads and telemetry than 10, too.

I'd even argue that 10 as it started out was the best since xp

How can you so batantly skip over Win 7? I've heard some argue 10 was better (it wasn't) but that 7 >> XP was pretty undisputed.

All three are shit compared to Linux, of course (Arch btw).

I would agree that 10 was very good, but i could say similar things about windows 11 which in many ways performs better then 10.

And yet its shortly after upgrading to 11 that i switched to linux to never look back.

I think part of the logic in this meme is that it doesn’t matter how good the basic functions of the operating system are but what does is the design philosophy of the company. Loyalty in other systems decreased while Loyalty in windows gained.

Microsoft force feeding edge, onedrive, burrying the local account option till after the install with Microsoft account.

Randomly finding an update put a second weather widget on my taskbar that shows a different weather then the one in start. Taskbar icons that cant be closed, only hidden.

These things don't affect the OS functionality in a big deal but its like i was in an abusive relationship that i finally got out of. No matter how much sweet talking and promises to do better i am not going back.

Made in China moment.

Red is good in the east, green is bad.

It was the best of OS, it was the worst of OS.

Windows 2000 sold as both a server OS and a workstation OS, but there was no home edition of 2000. There was also no professional version of Me. It would probably be more accurate to say there were two separate paths of evolution that converged with XP.

NT -> 2000 -> XP
98 -> ME -> XP

Though, XP is built off of the NT kernel, so you could also argue that the 9X line ended with ME.

Yep. In the beginning there were two threads of Windows garbage: Win NT (for companies, with NT kernel) and (MSDOS-based) Win 9x for peasants. Win 2000 was the "last" Win NT and Win Me was the last Win 9x.

That's not 100% true as Me used something called "Real mode DOS" which limited the OS interactions with DOS and Windows XP was an evolution of the NT kernel, and all subsequent windowses come from that kernel (Vista, 7, 8, etc.. and the Server variants).

Win Me was the "Mistake Edition" because it was half-baked, most of Microsoft was focusing by then on the next iteration of NT and they even didn't ship to developers the Me version but rather Windows 2000.

And probably Windows Me was on the knowing about 9/11:

"System Restore suffered from a bug in the date-stamping functionality that could cause System Restore to incorrectly date-stamp snapshots that were taken after September 8, 2001. This could prevent System Restore from locating these snapshots and cause the system restore process to fail. Microsoft released an update to fix this problem."

2000 was the first Windows with an NT kernel that was really usable on the desktop. Some may argue NT 4 but in 2000 almost everything worked as expected. XP was clearly better of course.

But you're right - ME was actually a successor to 98 and XP was the joint successor to 2000 and ME.

Why? Just cos.