Oh you can totally go up to Windows XP for this denomination. Some would argue you may even go to 7.
Windows 10 is 9-10 years old and nobody ever cared or will ever be nostalgic about Windows 8 which is 12 years old so it’s not unreasonable to consider anything before that, "Retro".
The only thing keeping me on Windows really was gaming, and all of that works perfectly for me thanks to Steam.
Yes! YES.
> it's honestly a nice visual improvement over 10 imo
O_O
Good hypothetical gods.
Long term Windows user here, before I defected to Linux (supplemented with Mac OS X) in about 2002. I started on Windows 2.01 in 1988.
The best version of Windows ever was 2000, and it's been accelerating downhill since then. The last version that was pleasant to use, and the best-looking, was Windows 7. Win8.0 brought in the flat look that destroyed all visual appeal. Win 8.1 reinstated a broken crippled copy of the Start menu.
Win10 formalised that and it was minimally usable.
Now 11 is the one that I simply cannot bear to use at all.
Broken taskbar, glamorised into uselessless, pinned at the bottom when it should be at the side. Fitt's law making it easy to find the Start menu in a corner, a big easy target, broken: it now moves around floating somewhere left of bottom centre. It has advertising in it, in a paid product! WTAF? Ribbons everywhere, destroying the usability of the world-beating Explorer UI that the entire industry copied. The return of the deeply useless desktop widgets. The b0rked up MS web based video-conferencing tool is always there, always open, although I never ever use it. It constantly nags me about low free space in my never-used OneDrive, and I can't turn it off.
It is a horrible broken sh1tshow of an OS, the end of a proud dynasty.
I am really seriously shocked to find anyone might prefer it.
You gotta be joking.
IMO, Windows 11 is trying desperately to look like MacOS, which is probably the greatest bug Microsoft has ever introduced into Windows besides EternalBlue and MS08-067.
Microsoft is completely ignoring a huge market segment that chooses Windows because it's not MacOS.
Windows 7 with the Classic theme was hands-down the best Windows UI. The modern shift to flatness and hiding information/options is terrible UX. It absolutely destroys discoverability when it's not clear what elements are interactable. But it looks "clean", I guess, so somehow people prefer it.
This is highly subjective, but I'd consider Windows 7 as retro at this point. As of 2024, Windows 7 is 14 years old. Windows 95, for instance, was already 14 years old the year when Windows 7 was released (2009). And Windows 95 was already seen as "retro" by that time.
I am typing this on Windows 7 and lots of programs e.g. utorrent still produce new versions which run fine on Windows 7, so I'm thinking many of the older Windows APIs are still in use and haven't changed much.
Whereas Windows 95 vs Windows 7 are very different architecturally with one being clearly superior to the other, and also Windows 95 was at the start of its series and got more mature with Windows 98 etc. and Windows 7 was already mature.
> For one, it still has about half a percent desktop share (60+% in Armenia). While this may sound small, it's still a huge number of everyday users — not to mention all the appliances, kiosks and other control systems running XP.
Per Statcounter, XP makes up 0.39% of desktop Windows machines now, which is more than Windows 8. I'm not sure what to conclude from that.
Windows Vista was a paid upgrade from XP with increased system requirements and poor performance on low-end supported hardware.
