I cannot be contained, I am now ranking Windows versions. Here are a few things to note:
I am only ranking versions of Windows that I’ve used for a good amount of time. I’ve rarely ever used Windows 95, 98, or any other MS-DOS version of Windows. Windows XP is a year older than me, so I mostly missed the era of Windows 9x and started from using computers from XP onwards.
I am not scoring down versions for limitations of the time period or things that have got worse with time. It’d be unfair to call Windows XP slow when it was fast for computers in the 2000s, but it is fair to call Vista unstable as that was a common issue for many people upgrading from XP to Vista at the time.
I will only give credit for new features or improvements that the OS itself made. It’d be fair to say that Windows 10 improved the start menu compared to what Windows 8 did, but it’d be unfair to credit Windows 7 for introducing the Aero UI design when in reality Vista did it first but didn’t get the credit due to computers of the time not being powerful enough to handle the translucency effects.
With all that said, here’s the list:
comments (single view)
lately i’ve been using windowblinds, explorerpatcher, and start11, which do a great job of restoring the old look, though it’s far from perfect, and stardock prices are… not something i’m looking forward to once my free trial runs out
i used to install tons of random mods to customise the look of 7 back in the day, but honestly i quite like the look of Windows 11 which i use atm so yeah, but i do think Aero was such a pretty UI choice, and clearly Microsoft knows that since W11 takes cues from it with its transparency effects.
yeah, i’m glad that w11 is at least inspired by aero instead of just completely abandoning it.