The "modern" (aka metro) interface was possibly good on a phone or tablet. Arguably even possibly on a touch screen laptop (not for me though). However it had no business being on a mouse driven computer or even worse a server operating system (Windows 2012).

Even the idea for "metro" apps was horrible. Full screen only. The whole reason the OS is called windows is because you could have two "windows" with two different applications on screen at a single time.

MS could have still included the metro interface if they still shipped the classic Start menu as an opt-in. Yes, its the first thing 90% of users would opt-in to, but at least it wouldn't have had Windows 8 be a rotten footnote in the history of computing.

I was done with Windows when the spying and built in advertising. Poor design decisions are one thing, but untrustworthy untoward actions to the user are another. The last shred of trustworthiness Micro$oft had in my eyes was was being mostly straight in Windows instead of the shady and underhanded shit. We should've seen it coming when they started offering free upgrades

Even worse is the loss of the basic ability to unlock the taskbar; RIP over/under monitor configurations.

but I still can’t get over the crippled start menu

You know you can set it back to “legacy”, right? I’ve been using Win11 since it was beta and when you swap the new default gui elements back to “legacy”, it’s much better than even win 10.

Yeah, I've used windows from prior to 3 (when it was more of a shell to navigate DOS apps) to 3.11, 95, 98, 98 SE, ME, XP, XP SP2, Vista, 7, 8, and 10 (and probably NT via school). The only ones I'd describe as awful are the < 3 version (mostly because I was already using 95 at the time), 95 (unstable mess), ME (even more unstable mess), and 8 (UI screamed "we need to make our OS more appealing for the tablet market"). Vista might be the one I spent the most time on, now that I think of it.

Vista was a terrible OS. You can't just ignore the hike in hardware requirements as if it wasn't one of the defining parts of the Vista experience. It's not just that people didn't have the hardware to run Vista; people bought new hardware with Vista preinstalled that ran like dogshit! In other words, people essentially paid to have a downgrade. An OS that doesn't run well is bad and no amount of features can change that.

Then it's an example of a previous time Microsoft made the same dumb decision it made with Windows 11; setting hardware requirements too high for a large enough subset of your customer base that it will be noticed and cause part of that subset to drop your product instead of purchase compatible hardware. I did use Vista for about a year back when it was the latest Windows version, but even with a laptop that had it pre-installed, it lagged like crazy and eventually straight-up died irrecoverably. Installed Linux on that laptop, it worked fine, and have only really used Windows for work at my job I have to use it for since. If you control an almost monopolistic market share like MS does and you want to keep that market share, you have to keep in mind any types of hardware that a reasonably large portion of your userbase uses and make sure your product works solidly on that hardware. You can certainly drop support for really old or rare stuff, you have to move along SOME innovation, but the whole incompatibility problem with 11 shows that MS didn't quite fully learn their lesson from Vista.

I wish I was old enough to have access to install NT on the family compute at the time. My aunt and uncle had ME and it was bad enough that i knew to keep it off my family's machine. Instead I stuck with 98 SE until XP and it gave me an excuse to build a new machine at the same time.

It was basically supposed to be one last short-lived DOS based Windows version before Windows switched to an NT base with XP, and in that sense it served its purpose. But although it was a separate product, it was basically '98 second edition in a box. It certainly worked to push people towards jumping to XP a year later, lol. XP is still the best version of Windows MS ever made, IMO. Heard good things about 7, but I was already daily driving Linux by the time 7 was released after Vista bricked itself.

It was during this time the transition to 64 bit systems became necessary to deal with needing to have more than 4GB of memory which was not helped by Vista using 2GB just to run, iirc. If you ran Vista 32 bit you had memory problems. If you ran Vista 64 bit you had major compatibility problems. It wasn't until the end of Vista's life did 64 bit go mainstream.