Windows Versions and cultural "Moods"

[TaoPhoenix]

Okay, this is a very jagged and halting post, probably going to suffer more from my own erratic perceptions rather than offending too many people. But here goes.

I feel I am representative of a certain class of Windows user: I am not a "fan". I have no need to embark on promotional enthusiasms.

I am just still with Windows because my stray efforts to do other things just ended up worse.

I am still on XP, modified over the years and creaking at the seams, until it totters just a little. I am not a "fan" of XP - just very respectful of it as a solid baseline that let me just do things for a good chunk of time, and that longevity has formed my current computing opinion.

But I did take strong notice, and am taking baby steps to begin thinking about upgrades. (Right now it's a race between the slowly growing concerns about the end of security support for XP, with pondering some slowly aging hardware, starting with my comp cpu fan that's going to go fairly soon.)

A brief history of my eyeballing of Windows versions follows. Picture "rhetoric quotes" around everything.

95: Saw it from afar, def preferred it visually over Windows 3.11. However I heard how buggy it was.
98: Win 95 like it should have been. This will become more than a one-shot deal - it seems it will become how MS works.
Win 2000: Workhorse version that was safe and stable, because we forget just how bad XP was for a couple of *years* in the early days before it became what it is now. But support also began to die out "a little too soon".
Win XP: After certain critical chunks of time to get deeply repaired, XP finally evolved into the successor of Win2000. Your choice of which SP was the "turning point", but it was def one of them, and not XP "raw". I'll just idly suggest it was SP2.

... And then it all stalled out. So when my old temp machine began to age badly, I set out to build a strong machine to just "buy as much time for key info and moods" as I could. I believe I mostly succeeded. That waiting time involved:

Vista: After the old dreams of Longhorn died, and after someone's "Implosion Memo" at Microsoft, (nominee for one of the worst bad days for someone in a decade!), MS desperately slammed out Vista knowing it was total junk, and feebly tried to bluster its way into something barely above total panicked embarrassment.
Win7: What Vista should have been. What people of "that and this time" are using as a way-station in these kinds of decisions.
Win8: The Metro fiasco, though reports have emerged that if you find your choice of ways of dealing with that, there's still an engine under the hood.

And so we get to where I am now: Win10. Naming silliness aside, early reports are saying that once again, it's a "should have been", in this case Win8 as it should have been.

A few more notes next post.

[TaoPhoenix]

And now, for me, the deep waiting is over. The info, such as it is, is in, for me.

As I've remarked elsewhere, the grand slam would be if my deeply envisioned comp from 2006 can (maybe slightly slowly) run Win 10. (If not, it just comes down to economics of a new machine.)

But through those last four Win iterations, it feels like the mood is changing. Current "mainstream" support of Win7 is ending. Under MS's confusing terms, it will still get emergency security patch support, but no new features. Nothing actually exciting.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2452702/dont-panic-yes-windows-7-is-leaving-mainstream-support-but-it-isnt-being-abandoned.html

And trying to merge the following article with some basic older news elsewhere:

MS declared a while ago that it would basically support only "two major OS versions at a time". So in many ways, while I was "waiting and buying time", Vista is now clearly just a fading old feeble giggle, Win 7 was important ... but starting to age as well! Win 8 is newer, but everyone is also racing to forget it as fast as possible. In doing so, it counts as one more clock-tick of past OS versions that will start to fade out.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2461486/microsoft-waves-goodbye-to-major-windows-updates-with-august-release.html

To me, that leaves me banking a LOT of hopes on Win 10. Early reports are coming in that Satya Nadella is starting to put some sanity back into Windows. And because it's the crisp freshest new chance for them, it's the "good version" that they tend to do after one of their "disaster versions".

So if they are going to ever add anything really nifty, it will eventually show up in Win10. It might also just fix a few backbone gripes.

So, like a student who only got C's in prophecy school, unless some giant catastrophe shows up which I doubt, I can't see anywhere at all what a "Post Win-10 mood" will be. It's a total blind spot. But if it's decently solid as an OS with not too much silliness grafted onto it, that could be the next one I sit on for six years waiting for the next safe waystation.

And by that point, something monumental could have happened in the computing cultural world. But that's 2020's problem. For now, I just really want this version to be something I can count on.