What y’all talking about?
Not really
Windows 7 was pretty, it was customisable, it was stable. And microshaft had yet to start fucking about with ads everywhere and invasive “features”. Peak windows right there.
XP was also pretty good for its time. At that point Linux and OSX had caught up and surpassed it in many ways, but it did what it had to without getting in the way.
95 was an innovator if anything, ahead of pretty much anything else on desktop at the time, even if it DID fart and die whenever someone looked at it funny.
It was always a proprietary creation by an anticompetitive tech megacorp, and therefore bad from THAT angle, but it didn’t start being truly shite from a pure user experience angle until like. 8.
Win 7 was ok but remember, it still came with three control panels, a fucking registry and 8bit palette drwatson icon in system32 along with gigabytes of absolutely useless shit.
It was good for a windows, but it was still windows.
A centralized place to store settings (e.g. the registery) isn’t a bad idea in and of itself.
That.
I’ll add that a lot of the issues people have with the registry have less to do with the registry itself (it’s just – A database of settings. Nothing shocking about that) and a lot to do with Windows’ philosophy and the problems that creates.
Like yes, the registry of a computer that has been running windows for a few years is a bloated mess which creates a bunch of problems of its own – But that’s not in and of itself because the registry is a centralised binary database.
Rather it is because – Well. Microsoft. Tech corporations in general. Want computers to behave like magic boxes. Not machines you have to learn to operate. This means that whenever you install something or modify something on windows, you are left in the dark as to a lot of the stuff going on under the hood. Windows error messages are very obscure and nonspecific. When you install something, do you know what it has added to your registry? What dlls it has dropped around your machine? And with so many third party programmes and utilities dropping into the system, that shit builds up, and not even an experienced user will fully know what has built up unless they’ve been making a deliberate effort to keep track.
Compare that to Linux, which is made by nerds FOR nerds… And so everything is thoroughly documented. With the general unspoken understanding that a. You will sooner or later go under the hood and mess about in there; and b. If something fucks up, whether it is directly your fault or not, you’re the one who will have to fix it, so here’s ALL the receipts on how shit works so you CAN do that.
You are likely not old enough to remember windows 2000. It had the NT kernel and did nothing more than expected. It got out of your way so you could do work.
There have been some improvements over the years, but Microsoft’s goals for windows changed after that, which is when enshitification started.
XP was like 2K, but with fancy plastic appearance and some unneeded things.
I have fond memories of reading Star Wars books in Notepad, in plain text (or RTF containing only text), in some font like Fixedsys, I think, black on white, at night. Ironically my eyesight didn’t get much worse then.
XP was nice enough.
