Was Vista a sucky OS?

[Vash The Stampede]

You are stretching this beyond reason. There is no rational sensible way to come up with 'it is the 10th release'. Are you seriously going to talk about 'kernels' and then put Win95 and NT4 in the same basket? The only way to make that statement is to look at the major version number, and by that count Win 10 is the 7th. If you include the minor version number, then Win 10 is the 16th. If you branch out after 3.11 into a NT lineage, then Win 10 is the 13th. '10' is just a commercial name dude, get over it.

Win95, Win98, and the Millennial Edition are all using the same core, so you can lump them together. Windows 2000 and XP use nearly the same kernel, so you an lump them together. Same goes for Windows 3.1 and 3.11. Windows Vista and Windows 7 also use nearly the same kernel. Windows 8 and 10 are hard to say what's changed. I personally haven't used Windows 8, and Windows 10 just works for me. But yes, Microsoft likes to change names of their OS's for marketing. Any new features could have easily been included with an update, as they do now with Windows 10.

For me Vista was the beginning of the end of Windows. They did a lot of things that weren't ready for prime time. Windows 8 was when I really considered using Linux, and Windows 10 pushed me to leave 1 of my PCs to run Windows.

[Sturmbringe]

Never even used it. Went from XP straight to Win 7, which I am still using to this day.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

This happens a lot. When something comes out that is completely new it often isnt as good as the older completely polished and heavily engineer piece it is replacing. Vista was the start of this concept so it was new. XP was the tip of the old that was really well done and complete. Vista eventually became what we have no which is pretty good. Still not the tip top but getting there. In about 5-8 years we get to go though it all again. Hip-hip-hooray

[chazus]

It's not Kernel 10 in any logical sense of the term(certainly not in the way you originally framed it). It's not the 10th release either(as you claimed). Thus, 10 is just a name they pulled out of their asses.

But it is. It literally is.

7 is kernel 6.1, 8 is 6.2, 8.1 is 6.3, 10 is 10.0. This isn't an opinion or anything. Windows 10 runs kernel 10.0

[Deleted]

never understood the hatred towards vista tbh, other than maybe the strong uac levels.
if you had a modern hardware machine it was an OS that was vastly superior to XP

[chazus]

And kernels 7, 8, and 9 vanished into the ether. It is literally named 10 but it isn't literally their 10th Kernel. Just like it isn't literally their 10th release.

Okay, yeah. I wasn't saying it was the "10th kernel" but it is "Version 10.0". I was simply saying that, given that it is CALLED '10', it is VERSION '10', and it came three releases after Windows 7, and two after Windows 8, you COULD say that 8.1 was the 9th, and Windows 10 is the 10th.

If you don't want to, thats fine to. But it definitely is Version 10, and Named 10.

[chazus]

It's not version 10, it's named 10. It's version 7(they decided to skip some numbers to make things less confusing going forward). And it's not literally their 10th release(as you said in your first post).

That's just semantics and arguing just to argue.

It's version 10. That's not it's 'name' (well it is, too), but it is literally Version 10.0.

[Artorius]

If you want to argue about something as ridiculously pointless as this, at least use the numbers "10" and "6.4" as options. It's the 6.4 kernel, renamed as 10 and officially called 10 now. There isn't anything to argue here.

[Amalaric]

If you want to argue about something as ridiculously pointless as this, at least use the numbers "10" and "6.4" as options. It's the 6.4 kernel, renamed as 10 and officially called 10 now. There isn't anything to argue here.

Well, you could argue that Windows 10 is really Windows 8.2 which was supposed to be a free update for Windows 8.1 users.

[Vash The Stampede]

Someone the other day hacked Windows 7 and 8 to receive updates when using CPUs like RyZen or Kabylake.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/31912...7-updates.html

[Elim Garak]

It's just an arbitrary name though, it's not literally version 10 as it's version 7.

Every name is arbitrary and version 1 wasn't literally version 1, there were versions before it. Version 1 was probably the one with this output "Hello world".

[Kyr]

All I remember about vista is when I got a new computer back then preloaded with vista I changed it to XP within a couple months.

[Elim Garak]

Version 1 is the first commercial version of a kernel they released.

That's arbitrary af.

[ScorpioRGc1]

Biggest problem Vista had a launch was bad and buggy third-party drivers. The OS itself worked fairly well, and within a few months it was rock solid (again, largely because folks like Nvidia and ATI finally made proper, functional drivers). Folks seem to forget that XP was a broken mess until around Service Pack 2 (which was far larger in scope than SPs typically are), at which point it became a very, very good OS for its time. Having said that, a few weeks with Vista after the driver mess got sorted, I found it nigh impossible to go back to XP; Vista was just better in every way IMO. Same thing happened with Win7 (other than it had a far smoother launch); it was a great improvement over Vista.

One problem Vista had that wasn't Vista's fault really was a lot of OEMs forced it onto hardware that wasn't really powerful enough to run it (admittedly, Vista had quite a bit higher minimum/recommended specs than XP); notably when it came to RAM. So a lot of folks had a bad experience when they shouldn't have because the likes of Dell or HP and whatnot didn't feel it prudent to put enough memory in their kits for the new software.

Mind you, I suppose I embrace change a bit better than many seem to. I upgraded to Win8 when it came out despite mourning the loss of Aero Glass and having my doubts about the new Start Screen it introduced (ended up loving it...yes, on a desktop, no less!), immediately updated to 8.1 when it released, and again to Windows 10. After 8, I found it hard to go back to 7; too many things felt primitive or unintuitive; same as I felt trying XP after Vista, and currently feel that way about 7/8 after Windows 10.

[ScorpioRGc1]

I didn't see the big discussion over kernel version numbers; I remember seeing a few years back Microsoft said they keep it at 6.x post Vista so as not to run into some of the compatibility problems that Vista saw from some older software (often shoddily written, I may add) that did OS version checking as a mechanic to dictate whether their program would even install or not. Again, folks blaming the OS for issues other software caused.

There may be other reasons they did this too, I forget. These days Windows naming scheme has nothing to do with the kernel version, and I'm not sure how that became such a big discussion in this thread. I mean, they skipped 9 entirely because the post Win8.1 release felt "too big" to be called 9. lol

[Aquinan]

Was buggy till you fixed it a bit then they patched it, was better than 8 though. (Everything was better than 8 haha)

[Deleted]

I just want to hear what people thinks.

From a technical standpoint, it could've been much worse. Longhorn (Vista's beta name) had .NET in the NT kernel, which backfired, because .NET is real heavy. Think if the "Open File" dialog in Notepad took 50MB of RAM alone.
They practically made Vista in the 3 years of development they had left mid-2004 to 2007, when the decision to scrap EVERYTHING up that point, including all Longhorn features (.NET in the kernel, WinFS and all UI/UX) was made.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qmyy-FJGmCc this video glosses over it
For a total reset like that, I think it's alright, almost impressive. I don't dig the theme though, but I was always a bigger fan of the Windows Classic theme.
From a sysadmin standpoint, it brought alot of nice features that I use today, like image-based deployment (.wim and sysprep) and Hyper-V.

- - - Updated - - -

IMO vista's real problems came in its nagging. I mean constant nagging. Granted UAC was in its infancy then, but come on, even XP at its worst didn't nag that much.

That's just like, your opinion, man.
But seriously, XP developers choked when porting or testing their software to Vista, as they had grown lazy when it comes to permissions. When the elevation token was introduced in Vista, aswell as the UAC prompt that would allow user-context applications to elevate, even basic third party applications didn't work without elevation because, as it turns out, developers are fucking stupid at developing secure and stable applications that didn't use potentially destructive APIs or messed with system files.

Windows 7 didn't fix anything, it only made it worse. I actually hate Microsoft for lowering the default UAC level in Windows 7, because that second-highest level allows you to use UAC backdoors that Microsoft had to put there for those lazy third party devs.
So, from a security standpoint, second-highest UAC is the same as the lowest UAC (none at all). Here's a collection of many well-known UAC bypasses put into one tool https://github.com/hfiref0x/UACME. None of these work at the highest UAC level.