I have been using Linux exclusively (personal) since 2008, distro hopped for a few years then settled on Ubuntu, until they shot themselves in the foot with 22.04 and the snap debacle; moved to Mint (after trying Pop, MX and a few others).
I have to say a big well done to the Mint devs, it is better than Ubuntu ever was; part of this is newer drivers etc…but it is very polished and it gets out of my way and lets me do my work.
Been working with the various flavors of Windows in a work capacity over the same stretch, in my opinion windows peaked with XP, 7 was ok, and 10 is also ok. But it really has been down hill since XP was retired.
I was a young sysadmin during this era, I don’t know if I agree with this sentiment. It got tolerable by the time of the last service pack, but it was a security nightmare otherwise and didn’t offer much over Win2k.
That said, I’m not a Windows fan in general, but I’d class the following as the “good” ones:
NT 3.5 (user-mode GDI FTW!)
Phone 7.0 (this was probably what I’d call the Practically Perfect version of Windows. WP7 is just so good)
NT 3.1 gets an honourable mention
8 (after WP7, this is the first version of Windows that was pretty much stable on day one. Say what you will about the UI, the core was the best Microsoft has ever one; ditto fir Server 2012)
10 (8 but with refinement; I’m cautious putting it here because you can see the genesis of the decisions that gave us 11)
Vista (a lot of what people like about 7 really came from Vista, like the WDDM driver model and the improved security infrastructure; Vista, like NT, came out before hardware was commonly available that could run it)
Anchoring the bottom
98 & ME (IE integrated everywhere and the security nightmare it begat deserves a special place in hell)
1.0 (you had to be there, but this thing made Atari TOS look sophisticated)
95 pre-OSR2 (VxDs, DLLs and a login screen you could bypass with an escape key!)
NT4 (it wasn’t bad, per se, but I still resent how unstable it was versus 3.5)
CE and pre-5.0 Mobile (hey, guess what, replacing your battery wipes your device because we didn’t implement persistent storage!)
11 (10 without most of the redeeming features, plus an Android launcher for a Start menu. Now with extra spyware!)
A lot of people really like 7 and 2000, but I tend to think of those as polish releases of Vista and NT4. They’re Microsoft eventually fixing their mistakes, after having everyone drag on them for years.
After a lot of back and forth between MSDOS/Win98SE (I used to play a lot of QuakeWorld which did not need much), I finally got an AMD Duron 800 around 2000, and someone recommend me Win2k. It was a really stable system, way ahead of its time in terms of user management and services compared to Win98SE and early XP. I think I’ve stayed on it well past it’s final release. I got sucked into WoW in 2008, so definitely had to move on by then.
Good choice on Mint.
I have been using Linux exclusively (personal) since 2008, distro hopped for a few years then settled on Ubuntu, until they shot themselves in the foot with 22.04 and the snap debacle; moved to Mint (after trying Pop, MX and a few others).
I have to say a big well done to the Mint devs, it is better than Ubuntu ever was; part of this is newer drivers etc…but it is very polished and it gets out of my way and lets me do my work.
Been working with the various flavors of Windows in a work capacity over the same stretch, in my opinion windows peaked with XP, 7 was ok, and 10 is also ok. But it really has been down hill since XP was retired.
I was a young sysadmin during this era, I don’t know if I agree with this sentiment. It got tolerable by the time of the last service pack, but it was a security nightmare otherwise and didn’t offer much over Win2k.
That said, I’m not a Windows fan in general, but I’d class the following as the “good” ones:
Anchoring the bottom
A lot of people really like 7 and 2000, but I tend to think of those as polish releases of Vista and NT4. They’re Microsoft eventually fixing their mistakes, after having everyone drag on them for years.
I feel vindicated that Vista and 8 where my favorite as well.
Yeah, XP was pretty good.
After a lot of back and forth between MSDOS/Win98SE (I used to play a lot of QuakeWorld which did not need much), I finally got an AMD Duron 800 around 2000, and someone recommend me Win2k. It was a really stable system, way ahead of its time in terms of user management and services compared to Win98SE and early XP. I think I’ve stayed on it well past it’s final release. I got sucked into WoW in 2008, so definitely had to move on by then.
To be fair, you never forget your first. Amiga workbench for the A500 was some of the best computing…