To be fair Microsoft was always shitware. I don’t remember a time when using a Windows machine just worked, didn’t take up gigabytes of space, didn’t crash, and didn’t get messed up by simply using it requiring a yearly or semi-yearly reinstall.

I remember when Windows didn't take gigabytes of space because there wasn't gigabytes of space, and it was still shitware.

Windows in the 95-XP era wasn't exactly high-quality software, but it was genuine technical innovation, doing what you otherwise couldn't do.

Windows 7 was also incredibly good.

And yeah, there was some pretty neat stuff. Of Linux, macOS and Windows, Windows was the first to get GPU crash recovery, just chugging onward after a stall instead of bringing the entire system down.

The biggest sign for me that Microsoft just doesn't care about Windows (aside from the ads stuffed everywhere after a fresh install) is they stopped caring about its bones. Where is Windows' equivalent of APFS / BTRFS (or even EXT4)..? NTFS is more than 20 years old by now.

> Where is Windows' equivalent of APFS / BTRFS (or even EXT4)..? NTFS is more than 20 years old by now.

There's ReFS, but a lot of NTFS features are basically baked into the filesystem API, so replacing it is hard.

That being said, NTFS works extremely well and reliable. I don't really see a compelling need to replace it (which is always a messy transition unless you're completely backwards-compatible -- but in that case, NTFS has evolved a lot already).

Nothing since then. Thats a long 30 years.

Windows 3.1? It was only 6 3.5” disks.

To be fair, I had stretches of 2K, XP, 7 and 10 working acceptably.

These eras of Windows had their own dark patterns that were incredibly anti-consumer. No one's lives were improved because they installed the Ask Jeeves toolbar, but people were asked to install it millions and millions of times.

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Microsoft BASIC was a pretty decent interpreter, I wouldn't call it "shitware", so there you go?

I don't remember DOS 6.22 blue screening on me. Maybe it wasn't so bad.

I would have preferred a Forth on my C64 seriously. But no, we were stuck with this "38911 bytes free" crap.