Windows ME broke DOS support just to pretend it wasn’t 9x in a new hat. At the time - this was kind of a big deal. 98 was objectively better for any typical suburban setup.
XP was also NT in a new hat, but they had it fake all the bugs that popular games expected. Plus the hat was nice. That Fisher-Price UI era was genuinely great, especially compared to modern ultra-flat nonsense. Windows 95 had instantly visible hierarchy in sixteen colors. Nowadays you can’t even tell what’s clickable without guesswork and memorization. Or at best you get a dozen indistinct monochrome icons.
Windows 7 was the only time Microsoft nailed everything. Each XP service pack broke and fixed a random assortment of features. Everything from 8 onward is broken on purpose, first for the stupid tablet interface (when WinCE’s 9x UI worked just fucking fine on 3" screens with Super Nintendo resolutions), then to openly betray all trust and control. I would still be using Windows 7 to-day if modern malware wasn’t so scary. It’s not even about vulnerability - I must have reinstalled XP once a month, thanks to the sketchiest codec packs ever published. But since I can’t back up my whole hard drive on five dollars worth of DVD-Rs, the existence of ransomware pushed me back to Linux Mint.
Windows ME broke DOS support just to pretend it wasn’t 9x in a new hat. At the time - this was kind of a big deal. 98 was objectively better for any typical suburban setup.
XP was also NT in a new hat, but they had it fake all the bugs that popular games expected. Plus the hat was nice. That Fisher-Price UI era was genuinely great, especially compared to modern ultra-flat nonsense. Windows 95 had instantly visible hierarchy in sixteen colors. Nowadays you can’t even tell what’s clickable without guesswork and memorization. Or at best you get a dozen indistinct monochrome icons.
Windows 7 was the only time Microsoft nailed everything. Each XP service pack broke and fixed a random assortment of features. Everything from 8 onward is broken on purpose, first for the stupid tablet interface (when WinCE’s 9x UI worked just fucking fine on 3" screens with Super Nintendo resolutions), then to openly betray all trust and control. I would still be using Windows 7 to-day if modern malware wasn’t so scary. It’s not even about vulnerability - I must have reinstalled XP once a month, thanks to the sketchiest codec packs ever published. But since I can’t back up my whole hard drive on five dollars worth of DVD-Rs, the existence of ransomware pushed me back to Linux Mint.