Even complaining about Vista raises eyebrows. It had two huge issues: overactive UAC, and Microsoft handing "Vista Certified" to basically anybody who asked. (Frequently to machines that would barely run XP pre-SP1.)

Most of the complaints can be reduced to one of those.

Yes- I hand wave away a lot of other things: because they were required for a huge step towards a decently secure and stable OS.

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samplatt 3 days ago | parent [-]

>a huge step towards a decently secure and stable OS

It absolutely was an important (and required) step towards a more secure and stable OS. What it was not, though, was a secure and stable OS.

Windows ME was the same. A required step on the path towards something better, and ALSO something that had the "Windows XX-ready" badge slapped on anything that asked. But no one is lining up to try Vista again apart from technical challenges.

	▲	privatelypublic 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		ME is... not comparable? There's no security boundaries ME could implement- it was still DOS and fat32. The list of changes Vista made were never going to go off without a hitch. When you put new boundaries in place in the kernel, and a driver violates them because it was recompiled not updated to handle a separation and handle errors from it: there's no choice but to Kernel Panic. Compatibility Shims were introduced for userland changes. Despite the hate, DWM handled the most frequent crashes: graphics. Microsoft is STILL working on pulling graphics code out of the kernel and into userland.