Hacker News

My view on the versions of Windows:

• 95 to 98: decent experiences because of a lack of competition back then, but bad at security and stability, but no one really bothered that much back then about such things
• ME: basically 98, just a low-effort cash grab
• 2000: promising new platform based on the superior NT kernel, but not mature yet for widespread consumer use
• XP: probably the first widely usable consumer OS, decent, but it took until SP2 to fix security and stability problems
• Vista: beta version of 7, sold as non-beta
• 7: the last decent Windows version. Windows dominance starts slowly dying after this one
• 8, 8.1: basically still 7 but with an UI experiment gone horribly wrong, plus the first beginnings of unwanted cloud integrations
• 10 (First Windows version with Nadella as CEO): okay so we just need to not do weird UI experiments and then we're probably fine. Oh, by the way you can actually put spyware into everything with some opt-out options and not really get into trouble for it, and this will give us extra profit? Let's fucking go!
• 11: okay so this spyware and cloud integration stuff went great overall, so let's push even more! Also let's add AI stuff which is also even more spyware and cloud integration stuff
• : will feature even more AI and cloud integrations and thus even more spyware that will be even harder to circumvent. It's likely that at this point or the very next version afterwards, that your Windows will likely turn your once "Personal" Computer into a fully Microsoft-owned and operated one.