>shitty start menu
>metro apps got abandoned after like 5 years
>felt like a terrible redesign of windows 7 with a new start menu
>literally needed classic start to be usable
>had ugly wallpapers
>flat 1.0 design in general never looked good
>no reason/push to use 8/8.1 over Windows 7 at the time
>had terrible hot corners and the metro integration with the fullscreen mode was horrible
>had the worst sounds in any windows version
>late 2010s and 2020s
>Windows 8.1 wasn't THAT bad according to techbros

i must be the only person on the planet who liked that start menu

>>106004945 (OP)
8.1 was largely a flat ui win7 with some ssd improvements

besides needing classic start it never gave me a single problem

never crashed

no viruses

everything worked

even all the sus pirated software I put onto it

didn't want to telemetry rape my soul like 10 and 11

didn't force feed updates

>>106004945 (OP)

What's your point though? Only Windows 10 and 11 are relevant now.

>>106004945 (OP)
>secretly

>>106004945 (OP)
DLL compression was very nice. Good kernel-level change (implemented because they were trying to get it to run on phones with 2GB of RAM)
I used it with a totally modified userland that removed the nu-start menu and added multidesktop support.
Worked better than Windows 10.
Also they ended up removing the DLL deduplication code from the kernel in Win10 because they suck.

>>106004945 (OP)
The removal of the taskbar was a big deal, I hated it. You could force Windows 8 to use a Windows 7 desktop if you wanted to natively.
I think more egregious in recent years (Windows 11) is that you can't move the taskbar to somewhere else without adding in a bunch of stuff that breaks every update.

>>106004945 (OP)
Because it was better than what came after.

>>106005212
When 11 shipped out, you couldn't put the taskbar items on the left. The only option was to have them centered until an update like two years ago. How do they ship an OS while removing basic features like this?

>>106004945 (OP)
Because it was trivial to rice it into looking and functioning like Windows 7