Microsoft keeps releasing new versions of Windows.
They say each version is better than the previous one.
Is there some truth to this ? Or is this mostly marketing bullshit to push people to spend money?
Once upon a time it was true that each new version of windows was more performant than the one before.
This hasn’t been literally true for quite awhile. Windows 11 doesn’t have any net performance benefit over windows 10, and neither was 10 a raw-performance improvement over 8.1.
There is some userland code changes in system provided apps like terminal, explorer, and the task manager, but these have tended to be more “better LLM hooks” and “why didn’t we do this sooner” fixed than actual performance bits.
On the plus side, it’s not really a money grab. MS gets more from Xbox and Office subs than windows licenses, which have been non-transferable all-OS licenses going back to the windows 8 era. The version switches are still really dumb, though, and EOLing windows 10 is just penny-pinching BS.
Personal Opinion
Windows 10 and 11 are the worst so far, though I didn’t fall on the Win 8 dagger.
Windows 10: Forced OneDrive, always running-but beyond useless Cortana
Windows 11: See above, plus we did everything we could to hide interface options (right-click copy/paste is now hidden behind another click)
I switched to Bazzite a few months ago, and so far the only game I’ve had issues with is Fallout 4, single digit frame rate, but ymmv.
You can disable everything you mentioned here
I haven’t had forced OneDrive on Windows 10, or Cortana.
It comes with shit installed that it shouldn’t, but every thing I have uninstalled, has stayed that way.
Other than the shitty settings menu, Windows 10 ended up okay. You just had to tweak and work around some things, which you will be doing with Linux too.
Windows 11, on the other hand, is a complete pile of shit. I dual boot Linux now and use Windows less and less.
I’ve never seen OneDrive forced on Win10.
It’s an option, it’s there by default, but you don’t have to use it. I never have (used the default stuff), and I use OneNote heavily with my PC, iOS, and Android, which requires sync to OneDrive - which I setup later with a user account unrelated to the account on my PC.
If you worked with Windows NT you’d see that there hasn’t been a lot of change. Probably the biggest code changes include control panel and start menu.
Insider, there’s been massive change along the way.
Yea, fundamental paradigm hasn’t changed from a UI perspective, but that’s just to keep people from having to re-learn too much at once.
Under the hood, the change from NT3.51 to 4 was noticeable from a stability standpoint, then from NT4 to Win2k was massive - true plug-n-play, dynamic event capability, performance and stability were significantly improved. XP was a small increase over that.
I had to reboot NT4 every day, often multiple times if I changed hardware, like using a vendor dock even.
Then Win7x64, another massive increase in performance and stability.
Win8 can die in a fire, because it wasn’t any better than 7, with some dumb stuff in the UI and the beginning of MS really scewing up control panel.
Win7 is the high water mark to me, though Win10 is virtually identical to server, it even runs exactly the same Hypervisor framework. The differences from 10/11 to server are mostly tuning, how updates are managed, and server lacks some user-focused services.
I’ve run Server Core and Win10 (for Hyper-V) on the same hardware and the performance difference wasn’t visible. It would take running a large server and heavy VM workloads (eg databases, regular VM migrations, etc), to see the difference.
I don’t see a major performance increase going to Win10 as a single-user machine, but virtualization is much faster than if I were running even Win10 with VMware workstation (naturally).
My preferred Windows versions, 3.1, 98Se, 2000, 7, and 10.
Win98 SP2 and Windows 7 for me. Windows NT blew my mind. You are telling me that an application could crash without compromising the stability of the rest of the system??? Witchcraft!! (And I know other non-Win systems that did this existed long ago before Windows, but I didn’t know in my teen years.)
I liked Windows XP though I hated how insecure it was.
Yeah XP was good, but once 7 was mature XP wasn’t worth the time.
Heterogenous scheduler support for big.LITTLE CPUs seems like a big deal to me, especially with the Advent of P+E core Intels.
Is there really a technology difference between Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10 and Windows 11 ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_8
