Skipping windows 9 is what did them in. Remember when they announced they were skipping 9 and going straight to 10? The writing was on the wall, and plenty of people mention it then.

Media Center was... extra

[–] meathorse@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I found Win8 ok but Win8.1 was good since it dialed back the stupid start-screen and under the hood it brought a lot of great functionality for support, management and for power users where it introduced the right click on the start menu for utilities.

It was also fast, I remember at the time it felt snappier than win7 then I saw a video earlier this year comparing all the recent versions vista and higher, and 8.1 came out on top for performance almost across the board

[–] hexagonwin@lemmy.today 1 points 1 day ago

8.1 didn't dial back the start screen, they only added the start button back.

8/8.1 was indeed faster than both 7 and 10. it flies on a core2duo with hdd.

[–] ShawiniganHandshake@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

They had to skip Windows 9 for technical reasons. A lot of poorly written software was checking the version string and refusing to run because it assumed any version number that started with "Windows 9" was Windows 95 or Windows 98. They didn't skip a whole release cycle, they just changed the version number from 9 to 10.

[–] Bluegrass_Addict@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago

looks like they doubled down on poorly written software instead