[unscaled]

Oh, Yes. Windows 10 had big issues on arrival. But this is also selective Amnesia. The Windows 8 UI was nearly unusable on release. Windows Vista was so legendarily broken on release, that even after it became stable, the majority of technical users refused to give up Windows XP went straight to Windows 7. And even Windows XP that everybody fondly remembers was quite a mess when it came out. Most home users migrated from the Windows 9x line of Windows, so they probably didn't notice the instability so much, but a lot of power users who were already on Windows 2000 held up until SP2 came out. And let's not even talk about Windows ME.

The only major Windows version release that wasn't just a point upgrade that was stable in the last century was Window 7 and even then some people would argue this was just a point upgrade for Windows Vista.

I'm sure that Microsoft greatly reducing their dedicated QA engineers in 2014 had at least some lasting impact on quality, but I don't think we can blame it on bad releases or bungled Patch Tuesdays without better evidence. Windows 10 is not a good proof for, consider Vista had 10 times as many issues with fully staffed QA teams in the building.

[lemoncookiechip]

It also doesn't matter. It doesn't feel like it, but Win11 released almost 5 years ago (October 5, 2021) and there's already rumors of a Win12 in the near future.

We're way past the "release issues" phase and into the "it's pure incompetence" phase.

[sgjohnson]

> Win11 released almost 5 years ago

Oh wow, I hadn't even paid any attention to that. To me Windows 11 was released on October 1, 2024, when the LTSC version came out, and is roughly when I upgraded my gaming PC to the said LTSC build from the previous Windows 10 LTSC build.

[sgjohnson]

> Windows Vista was so legendarily broken on release, that even after it became stable

Vista is different. Vista was _not_ bad. In fact, it was pretty good. The design decisions Microsoft made with Vista were the right thing to do.

Most of the brokenness that happened on Vista's release was broken/unsigned drivers (Vista required WHQL driver signing), and UAC issues. Vista also significantly changed the behavior of Session 0 (no interaction allowed), which broke a lot of older apps.

Vista SP2 and the launch version of 7 were nearly identical, except 7 got a facelift too.

Of course, the "Vista Capable" stickers on hardware that couldn't really run it didn't help either.

But all things considered - Vista was not bad. We remember it as bad for all the wrong reasons. But that was (mostly) not Microsoft's fault. Vista _did_ break a lot of software and drivers - but for very good reasons.

[kstrauser]

Vista was good by the time it was finished. It was terrible at launch. I bought some PCs with early versions of Vista pre-installed for an office. We ended up upgrading them to XP so that we could actually use them.

[anonymars]

Yeah. I challenge the idea that Vista was terrible but 7 was peak. 7 was Vista with a caught-up ecosystem and a faded-away "I'm a mac, I'm a PC" campaign

[Izkata]

I have this vague memory of people being shown a rebranded Vista and being told it was a preview of the next version of Windows, and the response was mostly positive about how much better than Vista it was. It was just Vista without bad reviews dragging it down.

[Finnucane]

Every version of Windows released was an unusable piece of garbage, back to the beginning. MS put it out, it was crap, but somehow managed to convince users that they needed to have it, patched it until it was marginally usable, then, when users were used to it, forced them to move on to the next.

[Izkata]

> The only major Windows version release that wasn't just a point upgrade that was stable in the last century was Window 7 and even then some people would argue this was just a point upgrade for Windows Vista.

IIRC Windows 7 internally was 6.1, because drivers written for Vista were compatible with both.

[dayvid]

Windows 8 was an insane product decision to force one platforms UI to be friendly to another (make desktop more like tablet). Mac is doing this now by unifying their UIs across platforms to be more AR friendly

[firesteelrain]

Speaking of XP. Windows XP SP2 is really when people liked XP. By the time SP2 and SP3 were common, hardware had caught up, drivers were mature, and the ecosystem had adapted. That retroactively smooths over how rough the early years actually were.

[joe_mamba]

Same thing with Vista. By the time WIndows 7 came out, Vista was finally mature and usable, but had accumulated so much bad publicity from the early days, that what was probably supposed to be Vista SP3 got rebranded to Windows 7.