Agreed. Windows Server 2000 through Windows 7 were peak Microsoft operating system.

By Windows 2000 Server, they finally had the architecture right, and had flushed out most of the 16 bit legacy.

The big win with Windows 7 was that they finally figured out how to make it stop crashing. There were two big fixes. First, the Static Driver Verifier. This verified that kernel drivers couldn't crash the rest of the kernel. First large scale application of proof of correctness technology. Drivers could still fail, but not overwrite other parts of the kernel. This put a huge dent into driver-induced crashes.

Second was a dump classifier. Early machine learning. When the system crashed, a dump was sent to Microsoft. The classifier tried to bring similar dumps together, so one developer got a big collection of similar crashes. When you have hundreds of dumps of the same bug, locating the bug gets much easier.

Between both of those, the Blue Screen of Death mostly disappeared.

Drivers can crash the rest of the kernel in Windows 7. People playing games during the Windows 7 days should remember plenty of blue screens citing either graphics drivers (mainly for ATI/AMD graphics) or their kernel anticheat software. Second, a “proof of correctness” has never been made for any kernel. Even the seL4 guys do not call their proof a proof of correctness.

For me it's windows 7, if nothing else for being the first and last major Windows where Universal Search worked well.

The Windows 8.x line gets some credit for having the strongest pen interface integration, which regressed significantly in the 10 line, but the overall shell in Windows 8 was rough, and a lot of features were broken in the rushed out and mostly failed attempt to Appify windows and redesign much of the UI at the same time.

A modern reimagining of Windows 2000's UI - professional, simple, uncluttered, focused, no cheapening of the whole experience with adverts in a thinly-veiled attempt to funnel you into Bing - with modern underpinnings and features such as WSL2 would have me running back towards Microsoft with open arms and cheque book in hand.

There are Linux distros that meet your description (no need for WSL2 either!). I am guessing you're not running towards them with open arms and cheque book in hand ... or maybe you already ran to Linux and are just nostalgic about going back to Microsoft ... ?

While DEs often emulate the look of macOS or Windows, they always get the feel wrong. You can put a global menu bar, Dock, etc into KDE, but ultimately it still acts like KDE and nothing like macOS.

Not an obligation, but ReactOS exists and needs help:

https://reactos.org/donate/

Surprisingly close. I recently tried its package manager and installed a recent Python! So better than the original XP-era Windows in some respects.

Windows 7 was my all-time favorite. I remember you could not use it straight out of the box, there was a whole bunch of UI tweaks that I would make right away. After that, it was perfect.

The fact Windows 2000 was peak Microsoft and OS X 10.5 was peak Apple is proof that the golden age of software is way behind us, unfortunately.

Fedora Kinoite with KDE Plasma 6 is pretty good. And will not get worse in the future either. Just need to look outside of the commercial offerings...

They really did offer a lot of features that really helped productivity. Snapping windows, jump lists, having libraries act as a virtual folder for many folders, etc.

I thought 10.6 Snow Leopard is peak OS X?

10.6.8

Still kicking myself for not getting an Axiotron Modbook running Snow Leopard.

God, I wanted one of those so badly!

2K 100% was the best Windows. The NT benefits with none of the XP downsides.

WinXP was also NT family. It wasn't from that married-in Win9x gene pool.

Hard agree. The windows 2000 UI was peak UX and each step since has been a downgrade, (with a possible exception of windows 7)

Windows Server 2003 was the best Windows by far. All of the good parts of NT/2000 with any parts of XP available when you needed them.

I agree here. I ran server 2003 on my early 2000's desktop for a while.

Except that AFAIK 2003 kernel was different enough that a few apps and specially games refused to run, properly or at all, compared to XP.

Perfectly stated. It was more stable and had better UX than NT4, but didn't have all the unwanted anti-features that came in later versions of Windows. It was the last version of Windows that didn't get in my way.

Definitely. If 2K supported ClearType I would have stuck with it on my personal machines for another half a decade.

I preferred XP/2003 in classic UI mode. Lots of little improvements.

If you could get winterm on it and recent Firefox it’d be quite usable. Perhaps ReactOS one day.

yeah while 2K was their best ever single breakthrough improvement, it was a v1 and XP/2003 in classic mode was a more refined 2K eg more drivers and better plug and play, more graphics compatibility. And 2003 Active Directory had a number of quality of life improvements.

NT3.5 was perhaps the most stable version I ever used. NT4 brought the new UI, making NT5 aka 2k not the first version of the 95+ UI.

and 64-bit (x86_64 not IA64), which no version Windows 2000 was AFAIK

Windows 7 with classic UI is probably the most-recent decent version.

Agree. My company ran a bunch of web servers on Windows 2K and Apache web server, because management was afraid of Linux (general FUD and Microsoft's lawsuit threats) and the engineering staff was afraid of Microsoft's IIS web server (security dumpster fire at the time). It was actually a pretty good system, super easy to maintain.

Microsoft never should have dropped Xenix to invent its own OS.

I'm just surprised that it feels like very little deep innovation in the OS world has happened since windows 2k. 3.11 brought networking in. 95 brought true multitasking to the masses and 2k brought multi-processing/multi-user (yes, NT3.1 had it, but 2k is where most normal users jumped in). And, yes, I know these things existed in other OSes out there but I think of these as the mass market kick offs for them. In general I just don't see anything but evolutionary improvements (and back-sliding) in the OS world beyond this time. I had really hoped that true cloud OSes would have become the norm by now (I really want my whole house connected as a seamless collection of stuff) or other major advances like killing filesystems (I think of these as backdoor undocumented APIs). Have we really figured out what an OS is supposed to be or are we just stuck in a rut?

[edit] 3.1 should have been windows for worgkroups 3.11

Definitely stuck. We found a pretty strong optimum that no one has been willing to venture outside, strong enough to keep selling and that seems to be all that matters these days.

Looks like there is some negative feelings towards this comment. So if we aren't in a rut, what are the big revolutionary OS advancements that have happened since this time?

This is a forum populated almost entirely by people whose day-to-day existence depends upon building the new stuff that sucks :) (mine too!)

You can't say WDDM wasn't a step forward... Being able to crash your video drivers and reboot them without crashing and rebooting your whole machines made Windows a lot more stable.

Peak doesn't mean that it's a monotonic decline without any steps forward.

For folks that pick Windows 2000 Server, why not Server 2003? Is it just because by then NT had XP out as the "Windows for Home Users" and people didn't use Server 2003 as much or were there changes about it folks hated for some reason? To me it always seemed to bring so many more features/capabilities without trashing the classic UI.

Remember that it also introduced Active Directory. I helped build out a global enterprise network that was consistent and supported the same way, with like a quarter million users and tbh, it pretty much worked flawlessly.

Of course that innocence was lost with Welchia and other issues, but Windows 2000 made the year 1999 feel like ancient history in 2001.

It's a shame ReactOS never got mature enough to be a serious competitor. If it had modern app and hidpi support but was suck in a 2000-era UI and didn't have feature bloat, it could be a great daily driver.

ReactOS is not dead though. They just made a release.

And it has the 2000-era UI and the modern app support.

It's just dragging on other things, such as SMP and 64bit. But development focus seems to actually be focused on precisely these two.

Are we just doing OSes or are we doing the entire conglomerate?

#1 Windows 7

#2 DOS 5.0

#3 Office 2003

#4 Windows 95

Honorable mentions: IntelliMouse Optical and XBOX (2001)

It felt solid.

If MS stripped *ALL* ads and bloatware (telemetry for calc??) out of Win 11 and restored the traditional UI of start menu + desktop, it would be fairly good overall. Certainly within their top 5. They really are close to peak yet again but cannot realize they are striving to make it worse.

11 is mostly a solution looking for a problem. I don’t do windows day to day anymore, but the folks I work with who do aren’t excited anymore.

This brings back a lot of nostalgia and I wholeheartedly agree. Back then I ran Windows 2000 server beta 2 on a dual proc system with P2-300s. It was rock solid.

In the 90s, Windows was simple enough that I was able to read tech articles and understand a lot of what is going on inside, up to the point of Windows 2000, and to a certain extend, Windows XP. That completely changed with Vista/7 where I can no longer recognize the name of many processes that are running or understand what actions/situations make my computer lag.

Nowasdays, even through I don't worry anymore as Windows 11 is happy as long as you give it a quadcore cpu, ram, and an SSD, sometimes I still wonder why it writes 40GB to the SSD everyday.

I only used Windows at work and I was very happy with NT, when XP came out I was able to go to Linux (RHEL) for my workstation at work.

I never had Windows 2000, but lots of people said it worked great compared to the other Windows systems.

But really for me, the best M/S setup was DOS with Desqview.

I don't know whether Windows is for corporate desktops, enterprise servers, PC manufacturers, Azure, home users or advertisers. It certainly doesn't feel like it is the right product for me anymore.

I think I am not the only one who memorized this: FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8

Raises hand: I always remembered the first series of numbers as f*ck GW (as in Bush).

I always heard it as FuCK GateWay (the PC maker)

the point of an OS is to be out of the way, w2k was both the best and last windows to do so

The way I see it (and similarly with browsers now) is that the OS is a venue providing a stage for others to perform on, they provide the facilities so every act doesn't need to build their own venue. Most of the time people don't visit/use a venue for the sake of it.

TBF XP and 7 are both decent. Everything went down after those, including the Ads, the update, etc.

I didn't upgrade to 10 until I purchased a used Dell laptop (which includes 10 prof) a few years ago, and I never used 11 and hopefully never needs to use it.

Come try out Fedora, or whatever flavor of Linux you want.

It's surprisingly fantastic for almost all modern computing tasks. Yes, it's true, some software won't work, such as Adobe Photoshop, but most people aren't using software like that anyway. For gaming, I'd say we're close to 99% of games supporting Linux out of the box on Steam. The few left that still don't choose not to via kernel-level anti-cheat or forgetting to toggle a checkbox for Linux support (EasyAntiCheat and friends).

The point is, it "Just Works" for darn near everything these days and is a very pleasant experience. Try it out!

The best Linux I have ever seen is Linux Mint. I tried it out because I needed to do something with firewire, but all of the other Linux kernels had dropped firewire, and it was the only one left that still supported it. I found it to be intuitive and friendly and everything just worked.

If you intend to stick with Windows for the long haul, you will have to upgrade eventually. I hung on to 7 for a while, but several apps stopped getting updates: iTunes, the Spotify desktop client, Google Chrome, and even Firefox dropped support. I was using iTunes to download podcasts, which after a while became impossible with some feeds because I would get an SSL error each time on that old version. For 10, the ESU period ends one year after 10/14/25 for consumers and three years for organizations. It's possible that apps will continue to receive updates during that time.

Thanks, yeah, I figured. Maybe I can move to Linux in 5 years. I'm already using Linux for my dev laptop.

I love 2000 and XP but 7 has a special spot for me because it’s a “modern” Windows (supporting proper alpha blending in its theme drawing and such) without the various problems that 8 and newer bring. I have an old laptop with it installed and booting it up is honestly refreshing. Its visual style is a little dated feeling but not that much.

I like it for the same reasons. I just wish it supported high DPI. It, and Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion era OSX, at high res would be peak desktop usability.

Windows 10 LTSC IOT has all the bloat and spyware stripped out and will get security updates for years. It's super lean.

Will third party apps keep installing updates ? Hard to say. The adobe suite already refuses to install the latest version on any LTSC (for no reason other than they don't want to support it - it works great) so who knows.

Suspect my next OS will be Windows 12 LTSC if I can hold out long enough - every other Windows version alway seems to be experimental crap going all the way back to ME (millennium edition)

I tell customers that they should use LTSC for things like virtual desktops. You need stability, such as it not randomly deciding to install a 4 GB game like Minecraft for every user as a “critical update”.

Microsoft joined a meeting and told the customer that they don’t agree with my recommendations because they want to make sure all users get the “latest experiences”.

There’s your problem right there: pushing your own KPIs instead of what’s best for the customers.

If you think 11 is bad, I bet 12 will be even worse. When 10 is unsupported and 12 is out, you will probably be reaching for 11 by then...

I'm already moving into Linux for one of my laptops. If the drivers and desktop experiences are good enough (or bad enough in Windows) I might move 100% to Linux in a few years.

I made the jump a few years ago and the experience has been largely great. Lots of learning, which has been half the fun, and no goddamn ads in my start menu.

Totally usable as a daily driver, provided you don't need Windows only software. The year of linux on the desktop was probably about 2020.

Steam's proton has made gaming on linux astoundingly good. The only thing that still needs improvement is mod support, as mod managers, game downgraders, bin patchers, some more involved mods involve little utilities written for windows that are not easily runnable on linux.

It is slowly improving though. The steam deck has moved things forward in leaps and bounds.

It seems like basically all the games I play aren't supported on this unfortunately and it feels like they never will be.

Even then, a VM can get you really far.

If you need direct hardware access (like for gaming) then you can run a passthrough VM. You can do that even on a single video card system.

> You can do that even on a single video card system.

Like with consumer video cards? Tell me more.

Fair enough! I am probably just projecting my own probable fate haha.

I believe XP was when Windows Activation started, so that's a pretty big negative for me. Other than that, XP, 7 and 10 were pretty good, although 10 introduced advertisements if I'm not mistaken.

XP also inexplicably required at least twice the ram as 2000. when XP came out that was a significant cost, and I personally was able to salvage many laptops at the time by downgrading them from XP. Eventually XP became the default for me because ram got a lot cheaper and the service packs and driver support made it more viable.

But then, tangentially, I started using ubuntu at work, in a sort of misguided belief it would make me a better sysadmin, and it was only a matter of time before I couldn’t stand windows at home as well.

I thought win7 was pretty solid, though I didn’t upgrade until well after win8 was shipping. But lucky for me, proton finally got really good, and that allowed me to basically skip win10+. Now it’s only for the rare tool that I even boot into my windows partitions anymore. When I do, being bombarded by random attention grabbers is completely jarring and I want flee as fast as I can.

I don’t know why they always alternate a good with a bad release. Technically Windows 12 should be good.

It feels like Windows 12 will be riddled with AI stuff nobody wants and ads, and forced to be online and connected to Microsoft in some way.

Win 11 and Vista have been unfairly maligned, with some minor tweaks (and start11) both are solid performant windows releases.

Vista was indeed fine. I used it for many years and had nary a problem with it. The problem with 11 isn't the core (everyone seems to agree that is fine), it's that Microsoft insists on putting ads and other user-hostile BS in.

I basically skipped windows XP entirely, only seeing it on other people’s computers.

I staying on a thinkpad R31 with win2k until I got a R61 (4gb ram) with vista on it several months after vista’s release. At that point it seemed like driver and other early teething had been worked out, so my experience was pretty positive.

When I eventually moved to win7 I didn’t notice any real difference.

Windows 11 is the only version of Windows I’ve used where the taskbar routinely crashes on login and refuses to load.

I think the vista hate is well earned. Remember when Microsoft had to trick users into trying it by calling it 'Mojave' instead?

Also the unending and relentless UAC prompts.

It felt like malicious compliance. Oh, you want security? OK, here you go, hope you choke on it.

Windows Vista was essentially unusable on release unless you had very high-end hardware.

A couple of weeks after release the first step after getting a new computer was changed from "downloading firefox" to "downgrade to windows xp". Unironically, many people did that.

And that unusuability was mostly due to the driver model change, once native Vista drivers appeared it performed better than XP/XP64 unless you were running old video hardware that couldn't handle aero - in which case you were still better off running Vista with the classic UI, although that did entail forgoing the Luna styling.

People always say that, but it’s not really been completely true.

< 3.1 Bad

3.1 Good

3.11 WfW Good

NT 3.5 Okay

95 Good

NT 4.0 Good

98 Good

Me Bad

2000 Good

XP Good

Vista Bad

7 Good

8 Bad

8.1 Okay

10 Good

11 Bad

There just really isn’t a pattern to it.

XP was the last that I really REALLY used. I've had Windows 7 (on my work machine that I didn't use) and I have a Windows 10 machine that I boot from time to time when I want to mess with recording gear. But I kinda fell into "they're all bad, I was just used to them".

I'll give my prime example. I used to know Device Manager/Control Panel SO well. I could just get things done. Now I have to hunt around forever to do any sort of hardware related task. In their attempt to make it "so easy, even your grandma could use it" they've alienated power users. My grandma still has to call me to help her attach a printer... but now I have to say, "I dunno... let me watch a YouTube video and pray that it matches the sub-version that you're using".

Windows 3.0 was good. 3.1 was a minor improvement.

The only 'bad' thing about Vista was it's change (and thus deprecation of many drivers) of driver model. Once tweaked and with good native drivers it was the first good 64bit windows - far more reliable than XP64. At least until 7 came out.

NT 3.51 Best

These are also mixing two separate streams: Win3.x/9x/ME and NT+

>95 Good

That's arguable, I thought it was poor at the time.

On well supported hardware 95 was a major upgrade. The Start menu, long file names, preemptive multitasking, plug and play hardware, and Direct X gaming support. In many ways it even surpassed MacOS at the time.

Windows users have low expectations. I still have PTSD from all the problems 9x caused me.

When Win10 started, it was clearly Bad. No good reason for updates, invasive privacy-breaking telemetry, updates at random moments of the day, and everything was a little different but nothing was better. People flat out refused to upgrade when it was given for free. Microsoft had to force it trough windows update, and did multiple rounds of breaking software people explicitly installed to block the upgrade.

When did it become good? WSL and DirectX 12 were real changes, but all in all, my impression is that the user has been frog boiled over the years, with 2K,XP and 7 becoming distant memories.

I remember that too. Microsoft was more aggressive and hostile towards the user than ever before.

they should’ve just skipped 11 like they skipped 9

The story I heard[1] was that Microsoft skipped 9 because people used to check for "Windows 9" prefix string to identify 95 and 98:

    if(version.StartsWith("Windows 9"))
    { /* 95 and 98 */
    } else {

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2hwlrk/comment/...

Nostalgically, yes, Windows 2000 was amazing. At the time of launch, on period hardware, it was the fastest and most lightweight OS released by Microsoft. And looking back, I always appreciate that I can look in Task Manager and immediately recognize all of the processes by name.

Windows 7 (except for the last few updates that introduced telemetry and ads) comes in as a close second. But everything after is just bloated crapware.

The only bad things I remember about Windows 2000 are that some software written for Windows 3.x and 9x had compatibility issues and it took an eternity to boot up. It was go take a coffee break as soon as you turn your computer on for the day bad.

IIRC, Win2K would wait for most / all service startups to complete before showing the login prompt. XP and later would allow login to occur while many services were still starting up.

It's a tradeoff. A Win2K system was pretty responsive when you log in after a reboot/startup, but you've got to wait for that experience. In the days of spinning disks and single core CPUs, you had to fight those still-starting services for resources, making the first several minutes of XP usage painful.

I remember using the BootVis tool (IIRC was an early part of what would be the performance toolkit) to profile the startup process, and then you could it to optimize the location of data loaded from HDDs to reduce the seeking required. Also back when PATA was still in use depending on your motherboard I seem to remember making sure windows wouldn't try to autodetect link speed on unused attachments as that could take ages trying to find something that wasn't there.

Win2k also had the smoothest mouse movements that I had ever seen. If you had a PS/2 Mouse, you could turn up the sample rate up to the max. Dragging windows looked incredible. Even my Mac to this day with a fancy brand new 4k display can't match it. My mouse still looks blurry as it moves across the screen.

I used the NT 5 betas for a while, and loved alerts not stealing focus. But that came back in the released W2K, and I remember being slightly annoyed by it.

It was anything but lightweight on a Pentium 90 or Pro, or whatever was common at the time. Really needed to upgrade to 16MB of RAM (lol) which was expensive at the time. Why only business and not normal folks used it.

There are software and scripts to decrapify Windows 11. After uninstalling and stopping everything that's not needed and making start menu and the bar behave like in Windows 7, it's quite decent.

This adds maybe 20 more minutes to install time but it's worth.

Unfortunately all that crap eventually comes back. Microsoft likes to reset settings… I’m pretty sure I must’ve spent the majority of my youth setting the same explorer settings over and over and over again … And it never ends with any custom setup you do; given enough time it reverts.

I don't think anyone doubts that you can do this. It's more that I refuse to pay for an OS which needs to be de-crapped in the first place. If Microsoft can't make something which prioritizes my needs above their corporate metrics, then they don't get my money.

LTSC is likely what you want then (needs to be purchased through a VAR but it's not hard to find a smaller one that will sell single copies)

My company has access to these licenses to resell through our distributor Pax8. Contact me (profile) if interested.

It's the Register and therefore too worthless to get worked up about, but their naming a server version of Windows as peak anything is an indication that they probably just polled a few drunks at a bar.