Rust

The service packs were mainly minor bug fixes, security changes, and support for new hardware.

There were a lot of security fixes, to the point where anything before SP2 was dangerous to run.

Windows XP came after both 2000 and ME. 2000 only focused on businesses and they loved it

Windows 2000 was supposed to be super secure, but it ended up being a security nightmare. ME was recalled because it was incredibly unstable.

Windows 98 was fine, though it was pretty old by the time XP came out.

The poor optimisation was a Vista problem however.

I recall it being a massive memory hog, because it tried to do something with app optimization and ended up just eating all the RAM.

But yeah, Windows 7 was just a better Windows Vista. They seemed to fix the memory situation, and they removed a lot of the eye candy that seemed to cause issues in Vista.

10 actually continued the optimisations from 8, and the new UI resembling 7’s was a welcome change.

Yeah, I don't know what they were smoking with 8. They seemed to really want to make mobile happen and I guess Win 8 was part of that, and then they completely abandoned the Windows Phone idea a few years later, even after buying Nokia. They were late to market and didn't invest enough to catch up.

It was a really weird time for Windows.

And yeah, I get that they continued optimizations with each release, that's generally what I expect from an OS. The problem is that they shipped half-baked ideas with each release.

Windows used to offer a terrible CLI experience.

Now it comes with Windows Terminal and either powershell for a powerful non-posix shell, and WSL2 for whatever posix shell you want (and wslg for launching linux gui apps from said shells).

Yes, they now technically support it, but it's not going to be the same workflow. WSL1 has a lot of gaps, and WSL2 is a VM and has associated tradeoffs.

It's fine if you want to run a few commands every so often, but it's not going to be an integrated experience. For example:

• WSL2 has better performance and compatibility,, which is what you'd expect from a VM, with the huge caveat of IO issues when interacting with the host OS
• WSL1 has better host IO, but lots of missing features (systemd, various system calls, etc)

I was never really a fan of powershell, so I can't really comment on that. The new terminal is better though.

That said, maybe it's better now. I haven't used Windows for a few years. But at least at the time I tried it, it felt like a gimmick to try to keep people on Windows, instead of a legitimately useful feature for people who want or need both. I always felt like you should just use a VM or dual boot instead.