Not sure if software enshittification really makes people switch. I wish they would but I'm not convinced. I'd say the windows freefall started after windows 7:

8 was universally agreed to be complete horseshit because they were trying to make it work for both, touch and keyboard/mouse, which obviously failed.

10 felt like a sponsored-by-ads freemium cheap spyware, adding even more inconsistencies with these different system settings windows, adding cortana which literally not a single person on earth wanted to use but was hard to disable/remove and embracing the microsoft store which is the most cursed shithole of all (including google playstore which is already bad enough).

11 Is just like 10 but takes away essential settings, making every professional users workflow 40% slower for no reason.

Win7 also had issues, but it felt much more usable for professional use. Also much less bloated with bullcrap nobody ever asked for (preinstalled candycrush anyone?). So for me that was clearly peak windows. Obviously, every half-decent linux distro was at least as good, many were better even from a pure users perspective. After that, linux desktops got better and windows got worse. Nowadays its no competition if you ask me. But still, few people swicht from the pre-installed OS...

[–] agentshags@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Win2k was fun

[–] mustardman@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Win7 also had issues, but it felt much more usable for professional use

What issues did you have? I remember it only being light on resources, stable, and aesthetically pleasing. The UI introduced snap-to-edge, which was such a game changer at the time and really makes Windows versions before it feel archaic in comparison. It was the last Windows version before the layout of settings stopped making sense.

I'm sure this is just rose-tinted glasses so I might be ignoring some issues, but I can't recall anything in particular.

[–] words_number@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

Yes I also remember it as pretty awesome! It had some normal windows fails, like the search in explorer searching through many file formats content instead of only just file names (which would be a reasonable default), thus being slow, needing to build a search index (doing heavy work in the background on its own, which is terrible) and making it super weird to navigate the results. And of course windows update, which was always enormously heavy and slow and required reboots. And of course hiding file extensions by default (I think they still do it. Who the fuck is so damn stupid to make this the default?! Heck, I wouldn't even allow this setting at all).

Thinking of it, these three little examples all stayed the same or got even much worse with later versions (updates!). E.g. in win10 the explorer search is still unusable but they managed to fuck up the start menu search as well (which worked well in win7).