Leaks confirm low takeup for Windows 11::Time to rethink Windows 10 support cycle then?
You forgot Vista. Nobody wanted Vista because it was a piece of junk. 8 was ok, but since 7 was still supported and people hate change they stuck with 7. The worst thing about 8 was the dumb full screen start menu… once that was gone after 8.1 I enjoyed it just fine and was pretty close to windows 10.
Same goes for 11 for me. I don’t mind it, I hate the tracking and built in news and ads but it’s pretty easy to stop a lot of that. I think the thing I hate the most is the small stuff they release for 11 that 10 could easily have but they will never release it for 10. Like tabbed notepad, or window arrangement, and now built in winrar support. I love these things, but hold them back from 10 just to get people to switch without realizing it’s not enough for people to care that much.
Vista was pretty bad. That was another one most people skipped. They had 2 excellent releases prior to that - 2000 and XP - and then shit the bed with Vista. I still think 8 was worse though. But 2000 was my personal favorite Microsoft OS so what the hell do I know.
People seem to forget about how with 8 Microsoft tried to make everything fullscreen squares, the desktop also being a square but by changing settings you can get away with using the “Desktop” square exclusively.
I had a laptop that came with Win8.1. I forget exactly why I refused to upgrade to 10, partially because I had switched to Linux by then.
Windows 8/8.1 was a bit of a brainfuck, because they introduced that tile-based UI which opened apps in single-tasking full screen mode like a phone or tablet OS. The traditional Windows desktop was treated as one of those full screen apps. As were several of the baked-in default utility programs, to include the fucking PDF reader. So if you were working on an essay or something in Word on the desktop, and then went to open a PDF as a reference, instead of opening a new window, the entire screen turned orange, and then the PDF loaded full screen without any way visible way to get back to the desktop.
Such “apps” could be tiled, but in a different way via a different system than window tiling on the desktop. The desktop itself could be tiled.
There’s one other thing I always hated about the Windows 8 Tile Hell: The tiles intermittently moved. Weird connection: You know that weird horror game Roberta Williams made, Phantasmagoria? There was a sequel second game in that franchise made that bore little resemblance to the first other than it was a horror/confrontingly adult FMV game made by Sierra. In it, you play as a guy slowly going insane, and one way they simulate going insane is they make you sit at a computer and read work documents, except sometimes some of the words flash for a brief moment to a scarier word like “murder” or “stab” or something. That’s the effect that Tile Hell had. While you were trying to find the app you wanted, the labels of some of them would change in your peripheral vision, drawing your attention to them.
