> UX of 8 and 8.1 was awful

The UX of Windows 8 was amazing on tablets, to the point where it's still my favourite touchscreen UI. The keyboard+mouse UX wasn't very good though, which is all that >99% of users ever used.

> 1gig of memory, a spinning hard drive and a single low powered x86 core were enough to get some image editing for a then school course done with some wiki pages in the background. I'd hardly believe it, had I not lived it. 10 and 11 have been regressions in my book.

I had a similar experience with the earlier releases of Windows 10 also [0]. I'm not really sure when Windows's performance got worse, but it was definitely some time after that.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743066

It’s after the 2019 release, they started optimising for ssds.