Windows 98 was good once, and then came ME, which sped up to the point of tripping over itself. Then came XP/2000, the most stable post-SP2 OS that I can remember. Then actually Vista, and then Windows 7 again was kind of an XP-like experience compared to Vista (and yeah, Vista can’t be blamed, drivers were updated poorly by manufacturers, who remember the Soundblaster affair?). Windows 8/8.1 was another dragon, with Windows 10 a breath of fresh air again. However, I feel like this is finally broken with Windows 11, where the taskbar in the middle is a surprising development.

This is a perception that still exists.

At the time, ME was used a lot in my area, because it was a great OS and remained a popular OS among gamers in the XP era. It supported all the games and most importantly it was less demanding on the hardware.

XP has been poorly received by many people. Printer drivers and other peripherals that no longer work, more than twice the memory required and a bit heavier on the CPU. It wasn’t until XP SP2 that many people switched from Win98, ME, and Win2000. The hardware was old however it had been replaced, many bugs were gone, people had added RAM in the meantime, peripherals support got a lot better.

XP was the first Windows to have a bad reputation for a very long time With the help of the emerging Internet and the hordes of Windows XP CD-ROM boxes that were turning things upside down.

Vista was poorly received because Microsoft got pressure from manufacturers with those damn “Vista Ready” stickers… If you have XP with 64MB RAM and a Pentium I 166, it’s also impossible to burn ahead.
Vista itself was a bit annoyingly strict with UAC, but it ran smoothly from 2GB of RAM and the simplest dual core. Those specs were (too much) advanced around the Vista version, 256-512MB was still the most common amount, 128MB is still very common.

By the time those specs were down, Windows 7 was about to come out. Which, in a sense, is why it was better received.

Windows 8 was good, especially a lot of camper haters. Your desktop background will now appear with icons on top (Majority of Windows users don’t use the start menu appropriately) Big squawk (Windows 8 was the result of listening a lot to user feedback). The average user still basically uses the desktop and pinned taskbar to open everything. With ordinary users, I came across those Win8.1 tablets and laptops for a very long time, right up to Windows 10, where, with the exception of a few, no one had any complaints and few were at the level of “was on Facebook” or was a fellow drug addict.

Windows 11 also has a bad reputation, but I only came across it on the Internet or among fellow IT workers (about half of whom are positive). Again, I’ve never heard the average user complain except “it’s just different”.

I like it as a spectator myself (or especially before throwing fuel on the fire) Always entertaining. Every recent Windows has been basically better than its predecessor, one step bigger than the other, one more technically impressive than the other. Like my personal favorite: Windows 8 managed to separate the user space and kernel from each other!! In the Linux world _old_ 1 of the greatest anti-windows arguments of all time. I found this technically impressive.

The overall impression of the newer Windows has always been subjective. Always part for, always part against. The bulk of the opposition is mainly against the change itself “look different again”.

It is no coincidence that those stupid interfaces from Apple and Android are so popular. Windows XP was considered Fisher price at that time and current GUIs are only Fisher price. Windows 11 follows this trend.