Everyone seems to love the Windows 7 era but for me, Windows peaked GUI-wise with Windows 2000 and everything since then has felt like a poor 'skin' or misplaced 'theme' on top of something else.
Windows XP's level of 'plug and play' for devices/drivers ushered in the modern OS feel from a usability standpoint, but from a 'get-shit-done' GUI and responsiveness standpoint Win 2000 (and up to Windows Server 2003 by extension) was all I ever wanted/needed.
These may be rose tinted glasses though, and I'd be interested to hear counterpoints.
The 2d design of modern interfaces is terrible. Everything looks like a "Label". Scrollbars are terrible. Light gray on dark gray.
And, worst of all, they need 3d acceleration to draw a bloody 2d label.
At work I am made to use Windows 11 and I hate it immensely. Everything's so slow. Nothing operates properly. In addition to forced reboots which are annoying as hell, it also reboots after some time on sleep, for no reason whatsoever. Copilot is everywhere and cannot be truly disabled without admin rights. While not strictly a Windows issue, Outlook is an incredible piece of garbage. It doesn't know if it's running and so can be launched more than once; the icon for new messages doesn't show when it should; search is still as broken as ever; the ribbon, which makes little sense in other Office apps, is absurd in Outlook; folders are useless and confusing; etc.
At home, while I have a Mac Mini 4, a MacBook Air, and several Linux boxes, I still use an old PC on Win7 as my primary machine. Is it insecure? Probably. But today "insecure" feels more like a feature than a limitation. No forced updates of anything => everything that works, keeps working indefinitely.
I work with Windows 11 and don't see any major issue whatsoever. But note that 16GB RAM is "just" enough to run it smoothly. 32GB is better for serious (e.g development) work. I have run it even on Intel 4200U/4200M CPUs fine (CPU is from year 2014).
I agree that new Outlook is buggy and not fully functional - that's why I still use old native MS Outlook.
It's possible half of my problems are because I don't have admin rights, and the other half is because the machine is too weak.
Why do modern OSes need so much power and RAM anyway? I used to produce documents on an Amstrad PPC640. 640 stood for 640k of RAM (no hard disk). It was fine.
I understand the above makes me sound like an old fart (or fool), and we have moved on from DOS. But what does Windows 11 do that Windows 7 couldn't?
I honestly think this is a difficult and fascinating question. This is like the dark energy of software cosmology. Why is the natural state to get larger and more complex for un-proportionate pleasure of use?
Windows 11 can run many more different UI toolkits, all jumbled together. It has more graphical effects in there. It has so much telemetry and Microsoft Defender will never-ever give up and will inspect everything, all the time.
My main issue with Windows 11 (and where I use it I do see quite a lot of issues) is that apparently it won't run on my personal PC at home - and no way am I going to buy a new PC just to run Windows 11. So installed Linux Mint and I'm perfectly happy!
I daily drive Windows 11 (with WSL) and with some tweaks it feels okay: the O&O ShutUp10++ utility (or any number of similar ones, as long as you trust them), some group policy, maybe Everything if you want fast search, LibreOffice instead of MS office and just some Settings changes. It sucks if you don't have the permissions to change that stuff and are stuck with the bad defaults.
In some ways it's a bit like having to customize a Mac to feel comfy (AutoRaise, Rectangle, DiscreteScroll, ...), except in Apple's case it's because they believe that they know better what my computing experience should be like, and in Microsoft's, it's some enshittification and pushing me towards features that I don't really want or need.
At the same time, games work (even the shitty rootkit anti-cheat), lovely software is all there like Notepad++, MobaXTerm, SourceTree (though GitKraken is really good if you want to pay for it), SteelSeries Sonar (the only experience of managing audio devices that wasn't unnecessarily messy or complex, tbh even VoiceMeeter has weird UI/UX), oh and FreeFileSync and ofc all of my dev tools and other software. It's just passable in most categories.
I still believe that something like Linux Mint would give me the best desktop computing experience, cause it almost never is actively hostile to me as a user - all of the instances of it sucking and being broken are either growing pains, ecosystem fragmentation, insufficient development effort (given that there isn't a multi-billion dollar org behind it, or at least not really the DEs or most userland software, or that the drivers don't always get as much love from vendors), or circumstances outside of their control (e.g. the anti-cheat situation with games), rather than a conscious choice on the part of the developers.
How large is the company you work at? I'm guessing large. What is the general sentiment across layers in the company? My guess is everybody hates it (all layers)?
It's a client of mine; the IT department is extremely small (fewer than 5) but the company has maybe 500 employees total? Since I work there, I've not heard anyone complain specifically about their computer or the Windows version. Most people don't care / don't know better, they just use what they're given.
Outlook should be illegal. My biggest pet peeve is that its search doesn't work properly and it misses showing emails. I cannot count how many times I had relative crying calling me that someone is deleting her emails. The emails were there, just incredibly hard to find. Oh and the "Focused" mode that has zero sense.
I don't know how businesses operate using this garbage.
I once got abuse from an Income Tax official for claiming that an email with the details they requested had been sent to them, as the official opened Outlook and searched for it in front of me and couldn't find it! Had to convince the guy to try multiple different keywords before it luckily emerged in the search results.
Just to offer a counter point - I'm at Windows 11 Enterprise at work(as a game developer) and it just works. We don't have any copilot stuff because it has been disabled by corporate policy. I don't see any ads. The system is mega stable, for search I just use Everything, I don't have any issues with Explorer really, other than the stupid change of copy/paste into icons, which I've undone with one powershell command. I think as a C++ dev it's a great environment to work in.
Don't think it's really accurate to describe restoring an old theme to an OS as "stealing". It would be stealing if they made their own OS using the Win7 theme.
I just want my brightness/volume indicator back in the middle of my screen without fluffy graphics.... :( I dont know why it isnt even a power-user option....
Windows XP's level of 'plug and play' for devices/drivers ushered in the modern OS feel from a usability standpoint, but from a 'get-shit-done' GUI and responsiveness standpoint Win 2000 (and up to Windows Server 2003 by extension) was all I ever wanted/needed.
These may be rose tinted glasses though, and I'd be interested to hear counterpoints.
I hope it comes back
If you think, "I should try this", Any reason why? I'm really curious to know
The 2d design of modern interfaces is terrible. Everything looks like a "Label". Scrollbars are terrible. Light gray on dark gray. And, worst of all, they need 3d acceleration to draw a bloody 2d label.
At home, while I have a Mac Mini 4, a MacBook Air, and several Linux boxes, I still use an old PC on Win7 as my primary machine. Is it insecure? Probably. But today "insecure" feels more like a feature than a limitation. No forced updates of anything => everything that works, keeps working indefinitely.
Why do modern OSes need so much power and RAM anyway? I used to produce documents on an Amstrad PPC640. 640 stood for 640k of RAM (no hard disk). It was fine.
I understand the above makes me sound like an old fart (or fool), and we have moved on from DOS. But what does Windows 11 do that Windows 7 couldn't?
Because code writers are lazy and prefer to use 20 levels of abstraction or a 5MB library for a simple function.
In some ways it's a bit like having to customize a Mac to feel comfy (AutoRaise, Rectangle, DiscreteScroll, ...), except in Apple's case it's because they believe that they know better what my computing experience should be like, and in Microsoft's, it's some enshittification and pushing me towards features that I don't really want or need.
At the same time, games work (even the shitty rootkit anti-cheat), lovely software is all there like Notepad++, MobaXTerm, SourceTree (though GitKraken is really good if you want to pay for it), SteelSeries Sonar (the only experience of managing audio devices that wasn't unnecessarily messy or complex, tbh even VoiceMeeter has weird UI/UX), oh and FreeFileSync and ofc all of my dev tools and other software. It's just passable in most categories.
I still believe that something like Linux Mint would give me the best desktop computing experience, cause it almost never is actively hostile to me as a user - all of the instances of it sucking and being broken are either growing pains, ecosystem fragmentation, insufficient development effort (given that there isn't a multi-billion dollar org behind it, or at least not really the DEs or most userland software, or that the drivers don't always get as much love from vendors), or circumstances outside of their control (e.g. the anti-cheat situation with games), rather than a conscious choice on the part of the developers.
I don't know how businesses operate using this garbage.
The repo is only 8 months old, which could be seen as good or bad.
for windows 8 on linux, there's this: https://github.com/er-bharat/Win8DE