I was there when XP came out and it was clearly better than any of the entries in the two "parents" that it replaced (NT/Win2k, and 9X/ME). I was the local "hey, my PC is broken" guy and the first thing to try was always to replace whatever version of windows they had with XP.

I certainly have some anti-fondness memories as well (I had the service pack burned to a CD because it took longer to download and install the updates than it did to get infected with one of the various worms around at the time), but there was zero doubt in my mind that XP was the best windows yet when it came out.

I was definitely somebody who rolled their eyes when people were up in arms about XP, Vista, and 7. Was OS X becoming better at the time? Sure, I’ll concede that. There were also initial driver issues with Vista and too many UAC prompts, but they worked to smoothe those out for 7 because they still prioritized the user experience.

What is happening now is even the longtime Windows power users and defenders are throwing up their hands and giving up. This is very different than the people running Gentoo in the 2000’s badmouthing Micro$oft on Slashdot

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Well, that's because 11 and 10 are similar while being substantially worse than XP.

> Only in hindsight did people ever express fondness in public for Windows XP (and maybe a bit for Windows 7).

I don't agree. Those of us using it for embedded development skipped from XP to 7 to 10.

Windows XP started off a bit rough. Once it had some time to mature, nobody in their right mind wanted to go back to Windows 95/98/9x, though.

Windows 7 was definitely lauded as decent contemporaneously. Vista was a disaster by comparison (but a necessary one--Vista took the arrows to allow Windows 7 to appear). And lot of people avoided Windows 8 like the plague it was.

Windows 10 was definitely a step back from 7, but wasn't ... terrible? Especially relative to Windows 8. But Windows 10 definitely wasn't genuinely good on any axis. And everybody was constantly bitching about all the stuff that was clearly the beginning of enshittification that got turned to maximum on 11.

I suspect they would put out a GOG Galaxy that works on Linux well before promoting it on their web site that aggressively.

I'm not familiar enough beyond casual use of Steam on Linux and a few one-offs to know the current state of gaming... but can only posit that a GoG installer/launcher for Linux that uses Proton (like Steam) wouldn't hurt.