Nostalgia

Yep. It feels weird to be nostalgic for windows 7, but it was honestly not bad. I think the reason why the loss of aero glass feels cold and sterile is because it honestly is. The whole metro/material design thing is just garbage. I don't want buttons that look like abstract squares, I want buttons that look like buttons. What brain-dead designer honestly likes minimal design over skeumorphism?

The aero interface was a really good addition, in the early days of it, it sucked because it required alpha blending which wasn't very optimized in graphics cards of the era. So even if it was supported, it ran like shit and ate performance.

I liked Vista. I can still point to examples of stuff in Windows 7 which were broken that worked perfectly fine in Vista. AFAIK, that stuff was never fixed because it was a niche item that most people didn't bother with.

I've been up, down, inside and out of all of these OSes throughout my time in IT, and I can see all the problems. The sidebar/widgets in Vista were a mistake, poorly implemented fluff that consumed too many resources for what they could realistically do. If they were a lot lighter in terms of performance demands, then they would have been fine. Beyond that 7 was basically a reskinned Windows Vista, with some "updates". You could get the same updates for Vista by the time 7 came out, and it made Vista quite reasonable.

IMO, the biggest problem Vista faced wasn't that it was bloated or slow or buggy (though it was very buggy at the beginning - again, mostly fixed with patches by the time 7 landed), it was that Vista was built for the best computers at the time, with the idea that everything would improve to the point where the best computers "today" would become the minimum standard tomorrow. They were right of course, but most people were buying the cheapest HP, Dell, Acer, etc computers they could find with Intel Celeron processors and basically no graphics hardware worth a damn.... They came shipped with Vista and it sucked because you bought a shit PC. The industry was going through a bargain basement type of phase where there were a lot of "discount" CPUs coming out. Before Celeron, you bought an Intel Pentium something or other, and they were all the same. You couldn't get a premium Pentium processor, or a discount Pentium processor.... Celeron was the first foray into what would become Intel atom, or at most the core i3. Intel was looking to expand into the budget households at a time when Microsoft put out their most demanding version of Windows. So people snapped up these Celeron shit boxes pre-installed with Vista and to nobody's surprise, it sucked.

So Microsoft cobbled together a new, somewhat less demanding UI, threw away the widgets, and released the same thing as Windows 7. By the time it hit shelves, most people had figured out (specifically OEMs) that the Celeron wasn't just a cheaper Intel CPU, it was handicapped. So the focus was turned to the core series of CPUs, and away from the hobbled Celeron line.

Look, Celeron had a place, just like Intel Atom. In consumer desktops, is not that place. Something like a point of sale, yeah, that's fine. A glorified web browser or kiosk, sure. All good. A multitasking desktop? Not so much. But OEMs put that shit in everything, and they stopped doing that pretty quickly.

I very successfully ran a core 2 duo system on Vista for a long time in my younger years. 4G of RAM, Nvidia GPU... It worked really well, and I used it for many years. It was even a laptop. I still have it, it still works, but I have more powerful systems, so it's sitting in a protective case and has been untouched for many years at this point. That system was my daily driver for pretty much the entirety of college. I also had a core 2 duo at home, but I spent most of my days on campus with my laptop.

It was excellent.

Yet, everyone praises Windows 7, despite it having features that were non-functional for its entire lifespan, which people either didn't notice, or didn't care that those things didn't work. I don't hate 7. I still think that it's UI and everything was superior over 8/8.1, and that it was a really good OS for average use. As an administrator and a power user, I'm happy on 10. I also used 8/8.1 for a while and though it was functional, it was pretty painful overall. Especially compared to 10.

Don't get me started on W11.

Aero was peak. If I could get Windows 7 with dark mode then I'd bust

W7 was the last version where I felt like a normal user could have full control. I could do updates once a week without having to worry about setting safe hours. Settings weren't duplicated and scattered across multiple locations and UI styles. As far as I remember there were very few un-uninstallable features, it was the OS and what ever the user wanted. No McAffee demo, Candy Crush, OneDrive, XBox, Spotify, etc.

what if i told you you can have this on linux?

https://store.kde.org/p/1012735/

I love 7. It's the last good version of Windows. I didn't use Linux as much during the Win 7 years. Search still sucked though.

I did love Aero. And Aero Snap was legit useful and remains so. macOS for whatever reason has had trouble implementing what I would now consider an essential feature: at least a basic ability to drag to the side of your screen for some basic tiling (yes... I know later versions have a "tiling" feature, but it is as if they looked at Aero Snap and said "wow, so complicated" and purposefully made it dumb).

Also, just use Linux.

Man, Windows 7 was great. All the excellent parts of Vista (and contrary to popular belief, the were many excellent things about that OS), and none of the nasty. Although that can be somewhat attributed to computing power having caught up by the time 7 was released.

I remember switching from Vista to 7 fulltime as soon as the beta came out. Even then, it was faster and more stable than Vista on the same hardware.

Coincidentally, Windows 7 was around for a whole lot of good times in my life..

I love windows 11, windows 7 aero felt cheap and plasticey. I much prefer the minimalist look of 11

For me it's the reverse. Windows 2000, for me, was the best looking windows to date. Windows vista, XP, and indeed aero felt child like, non-serious, unprofessional.

I just got this set up in virtualbox and am planning on using jt for things. What things I will find out later.

People smack-talk Windows 8, but it brought a lot of under-the-hood improvements that are really nice to have. If it hadn't been paired with the full-screen Start menu, I think it would have been remembered much more fondly.

Hardcore Windows people do not like UI change is the message I think Microsoft needs to learn, and I say this as someone who actually really liked the Metro design language in 8. If they'd made something more like Win10, I suspect it would have gone down a little easier.

Personally, I also liked 8 & 10's Start menu. I hated the upteen-nested-folders-deep trainwreck that was the 95-to-7 era's Start menu. I liked having tiles I could easily move & manage.

It was my last Windows too. I used it until shortly before the end of Extended Support, stubbornly refusing to upgrade.

I had been running Dualboot with Ubuntu for a while, but something bricked my bootloader (I didn't bother investigating just what nor trying to fix it) and I decided the time was as good as any to take the leap and go fully Linux.

I'd love to say I never looked back, but every now and then I'm tinkering to get something to run and think of the days when the question "will it work?" was reserved for complex mod setups in Skyrim. The compatibility tools have gotten a lot better and I've gotten more experienced and confident with them and the system itself, but there are days where I miss the comfort.

Still, the newer Windows versions never appealed enough to consider going getting, and they're growing less and less appealing with each new update. I'm using Win10 at work and it has only cemented my conviction to not get it for myself.

Have to agree.

This was the last version of Windows that I used though I liked the skinny Vista style toolbar better.

For my Linux friends out there who want XP: https://github.com/rozniak/xfce-winxp-tc

8/8.1 still had a unique, warm vibe to them tbh