The service packs were mainly minor bug fixes, security changes, and support for new hardware. Besides a handful of new settings pages, almost none of the changes were noticed by users.
Also, of the whole windows XP era, SP2 is the one that most users experienced and remember.
, and then it was only “good” because it sucked less than what came before.
Windows XP came after both 2000 and ME. 2000 only focused on businesses and they loved it, and ME only lasted 2 weeks and was recalled, so almost no one had to deal with it. XP came after both good and bad versions of windows and was generally loved.
Windows 7 was only “good” because they undid the worst of the changes in Vista
Actually 7 was good because it continued the changes. Vista was half baked and rushed out due to the failure of the longhorn project. The user facing problems of vista fit into two buckets:
New hardware driver model
Poor optimisation
The new driver model wasn’t given to hardware teams early enough so almost no hardware worked out of the box with Vista. And the hardware that did, often had stability issues because there wasn’t enough time to test the drivers that they launched with.
Windows 7 used the exact same hardware driver model as Vista. People often thought changes were made to Windows but no, it just the fact that the hardware folks had enough time to sort out their own drivers and test them.
The poor optimisation was a Vista problem however. Vista was pushed out the door generally feature complete, but the devs didn’t have enough time to optimise Vista’s processes. Windows 7’s internals were mostly the same as Vista’s, except that the features were already there, so the devs could just focus on the already existing software.
and 8 sucked more.
8 actually continued the optimisations from 7, but the replaced UI was definitely a major screw up.
The same is largely true of 10, it’s only “good” because it’s less bad than 8.
10 actually continued the optimisations from 8, and the new UI resembling 7’s was a welcome change.
Funnily enough, 11 actually continued some optimisations from 10, but you would never know because there’s so much bloated adware inside it. That’s why people like the “fixed” versions of Windows 11, like the regular version after running open source fix of choice (Win11Debloat, tronscript, etc…), the open source debloated installs (like Tiny11), or the official debloated/debloatable installs (Windows 11 IoT LTSC, Windows 11 Enterprise).
Windows 11 is optimised enough that a bunch of devs enjoy sticking it on ever underpowered and unsupported hardware. Someone ported it back to a 9 year old smartphone (32-bit arm), and recently someone got it running on a smartwatch. Technically, you could run an app in a containerised Windows 11 install on a server and have it take up 290mb storage but I wouldn’t call that a typical windows 11 user experience.
I actively like my hybrid CLI + GUI workflow, and Windows offers a terrible CLI experience.
Windows used to offer a terrible CLI experience.
Now it comes with Windows Terminal and either powershell for a powerful non-posix shell, and WSL2 for whatever posix shell you want (and wslg for launching linux gui apps from said shells).
The service packs were mainly minor bug fixes, security changes, and support for new hardware.
There were a lot of security fixes, to the point where anything before SP2 was dangerous to run.
Windows XP came after both 2000 and ME. 2000 only focused on businesses and they loved it
Windows 2000 was supposed to be super secure, but it ended up being a security nightmare. ME was recalled because it was incredibly unstable.
Windows 98 was fine, though it was pretty old by the time XP came out.
The poor optimisation was a Vista problem however.
I recall it being a massive memory hog, because it tried to do something with app optimization and ended up just eating all the RAM.
But yeah, Windows 7 was just a better Windows Vista. They seemed to fix the memory situation, and they removed a lot of the eye candy that seemed to cause issues in Vista.
10 actually continued the optimisations from 8, and the new UI resembling 7’s was a welcome change.
Yeah, I don’t know what they were smoking with 8. They seemed to really want to make mobile happen and I guess Win 8 was part of that, and then they completely abandoned the Windows Phone idea a few years later, even after buying Nokia. They were late to market and didn’t invest enough to catch up.
It was a really weird time for Windows.
And yeah, I get that they continued optimizations with each release, that’s generally what I expect from an OS. The problem is that they shipped half-baked ideas with each release.
Windows used to offer a terrible CLI experience.
Now it comes with Windows Terminal and either powershell for a powerful non-posix shell, and WSL2 for whatever posix shell you want (and wslg for launching linux gui apps from said shells).
Yes, they now technically support it, but it’s not going to be the same workflow. WSL1 has a lot of gaps, and WSL2 is a VM and has associated tradeoffs.
It’s fine if you want to run a few commands every so often, but it’s not going to be an integrated experience. For example:
WSL2 has better performance and compatibility, which is what you’d expect from a VM, with the huge caveat of IO issues when interacting with the host OS
WSL1 has better host IO, but lots of missing features (systemd, various system calls, etc)
I was never really a fan of powershell, so I can’t really comment on that. The new terminal is better though.
That said, maybe it’s better now. I haven’t used Windows for a few years. But at least at the time I tried it, it felt like a gimmick to try to keep people on Windows, instead of a legitimately useful feature for people who want or need both. I always felt like you should just use a VM or dual boot instead.
The service packs were mainly minor bug fixes, security changes, and support for new hardware. Besides a handful of new settings pages, almost none of the changes were noticed by users.
Also, of the whole windows XP era, SP2 is the one that most users experienced and remember.
Windows XP came after both 2000 and ME. 2000 only focused on businesses and they loved it, and ME only lasted 2 weeks and was recalled, so almost no one had to deal with it. XP came after both good and bad versions of windows and was generally loved.
Actually 7 was good because it continued the changes. Vista was half baked and rushed out due to the failure of the longhorn project. The user facing problems of vista fit into two buckets:
The new driver model wasn’t given to hardware teams early enough so almost no hardware worked out of the box with Vista. And the hardware that did, often had stability issues because there wasn’t enough time to test the drivers that they launched with.
Windows 7 used the exact same hardware driver model as Vista. People often thought changes were made to Windows but no, it just the fact that the hardware folks had enough time to sort out their own drivers and test them.
The poor optimisation was a Vista problem however. Vista was pushed out the door generally feature complete, but the devs didn’t have enough time to optimise Vista’s processes. Windows 7’s internals were mostly the same as Vista’s, except that the features were already there, so the devs could just focus on the already existing software.
8 actually continued the optimisations from 7, but the replaced UI was definitely a major screw up.
10 actually continued the optimisations from 8, and the new UI resembling 7’s was a welcome change.
Funnily enough, 11 actually continued some optimisations from 10, but you would never know because there’s so much bloated adware inside it. That’s why people like the “fixed” versions of Windows 11, like the regular version after running open source fix of choice (Win11Debloat, tronscript, etc…), the open source debloated installs (like Tiny11), or the official debloated/debloatable installs (Windows 11 IoT LTSC, Windows 11 Enterprise).
Windows 11 is optimised enough that a bunch of devs enjoy sticking it on ever underpowered and unsupported hardware. Someone ported it back to a 9 year old smartphone (32-bit arm), and recently someone got it running on a smartwatch. Technically, you could run an app in a containerised Windows 11 install on a server and have it take up 290mb storage but I wouldn’t call that a typical windows 11 user experience.
Windows used to offer a terrible CLI experience.
Now it comes with Windows Terminal and either powershell for a powerful non-posix shell, and WSL2 for whatever posix shell you want (and wslg for launching linux gui apps from said shells).
There were a lot of security fixes, to the point where anything before SP2 was dangerous to run.
Windows 2000 was supposed to be super secure, but it ended up being a security nightmare. ME was recalled because it was incredibly unstable.
Windows 98 was fine, though it was pretty old by the time XP came out.
I recall it being a massive memory hog, because it tried to do something with app optimization and ended up just eating all the RAM.
But yeah, Windows 7 was just a better Windows Vista. They seemed to fix the memory situation, and they removed a lot of the eye candy that seemed to cause issues in Vista.
Yeah, I don’t know what they were smoking with 8. They seemed to really want to make mobile happen and I guess Win 8 was part of that, and then they completely abandoned the Windows Phone idea a few years later, even after buying Nokia. They were late to market and didn’t invest enough to catch up.
It was a really weird time for Windows.
And yeah, I get that they continued optimizations with each release, that’s generally what I expect from an OS. The problem is that they shipped half-baked ideas with each release.
Yes, they now technically support it, but it’s not going to be the same workflow. WSL1 has a lot of gaps, and WSL2 is a VM and has associated tradeoffs.
It’s fine if you want to run a few commands every so often, but it’s not going to be an integrated experience. For example:
I was never really a fan of powershell, so I can’t really comment on that. The new terminal is better though.
That said, maybe it’s better now. I haven’t used Windows for a few years. But at least at the time I tried it, it felt like a gimmick to try to keep people on Windows, instead of a legitimately useful feature for people who want or need both. I always felt like you should just use a VM or dual boot instead.
I don’t have the time for a proper reply but just a heads-up about WSL2:
You can set up a dev drive to get around any IO issues by mounting a real storage drive directly into WSL2.