Today's reminder of how old I'm getting: this is totally predictable. Microsoft has been doing this for 30 years. Disclaimer: I'm aware of these things and have used most of them, but really none as a daily driver since Windows 2000. So I'm probably leaving some stuff out.

Windows 95 and 98 were great releases. Windows ME was so bad they scrapped the Win9x codebase entirely.

Windows 2000 was game-changing. One of the best OS releases of all time. Windows XP was very successful as well (although I, and many others, despised its default theme). Windows Vista was monumentally bad.

Windows 7 was the release they HAD to get right and they did.

Windows 8 was Vista all over again. Everyone hated it. The iPad had just come out and everyone lost their minds trying to develop some kind of convergence UX where everybody was convinced modal/tablet was the future. The OSS guys got into it to: Unity Desktop and GNOME3 went in the same direction. In fact GNOME is still like this.

Windows 10 unwound the experiments again and took us back to the good old Start Menu.

Windows 11, from a UI perspective, at least still feels like Windows. I get the annoyances though.