Technology

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.