On the flip side, Windows 8 was a superior interface for the Surface and similar devices to either 10 or 11.
While I wouldn't want to go back to 8 due to subsequent quality of life improvements for developers like WSL and winget, I still miss the UI every day. It looked clean and simple and worked great with a touchscreen and keyboard alike. Trying to navigate a Surface on Windows 11 with the utterly useless widgets hijacking the left swipe, the microscopic start menu, the on screen keyboard which can no longer be undocked and resized and the now-missing notification toggles is an exercise in frustration.
The backlash against Windows 8 from purists who hated anything mobile is exactly what led to the current enshittified version of the Windows user interface imo. Microsoft overcorrected and have now ended up in a worse place than they were when they started.
For the longest time, I was a die-hard MS guy, fully immersed in their ecosystem. From my Surface Pro to the Lumia Windows Phone, I embraced every facet of their landscape. It was like the stars had aligned perfectly, granting me a seamless and efficient workflow across all my devices. But then, as if the planets themselves shifted out of harmony, everything fell apart and now we are here.
We get these slivers of full-integration from time to time. We see it today with the Vision Pro. It's not hard to imagine what could be! But I'm not counting on it anytime soon.
> The backlash against Windows 8 from purists who hated anything mobile
I think that you're being a bit uncharitable here. The issue wasn't "purists who hate mobile". The issue is that what makes a good mobile UI is worlds apart from what makes a good desktop UI. You can't combine the two without making one or both use cases worse.
The pushback was due to Windows 8 being terrible on the desktop.
Microsoft's mistake was in trying to make One UI To Rule Them All rather than having different UIs for different form factors.
I don't know, I've been using Windows on desktop since 3.1 and found Windows 8 perfectly usable. In fact it was immediately better than Windows 7 because there were more keyboard shortcuts for window management.
The biggest regression in 8 was the Control Panel disaster that continues to this day and is less related to mobile friendliness and more a mismanaged attempt to try break free of some very ugly legacy components that were already behaving inconsistently in 7. Setting up a custom DNS still requires diving deep into multiple layers of ipv4 settings and popups, exactly as it did in Windows NT, I believe. It's a nightmare.
The Start menu at least since 8.1 was toggleable from full screen to corner mode, so I don't think that's really a worthy area of complaint. In every other respect, 8 behaved more or less like 7. Keyboard shortcuts worked the same. Double click worked the same. Explorer was still Explorer.
Edit to add: I just checked and Start menu was still full screen only in Windows 8.1. I guess it never bothered me because Ctrl+Esc still popped it, you could still type the name of the shortcut to find it, Win+X was there for admin menu and you could still hit Win+R to run binaries directly. Having a two-dimensional arrow key navigation felt faster than tree-based to get where I wanted too. Maybe for keyboard-centric users it didn't feel much different, while for touchscreen it was clearly better.
It's Windows 10 where they actually started actively removing features, and Windows 11 has taken that to the extreme by replacing the entire start menu and task bar philosophy that's been a core part of Windows since 95 and replacing it with some hideous MacOS dock like thing. Don't even get me started on the messing up of right click in Explorer. It's like Microsoft got taken over by Apple developers who never used a Windows PC in their lives. Awful.
The fact is that Windows 8.1 was far better that the shit hole that Windows 10/11 has become. Windows 7 was the last great Windows. Windows 8.1 was the last decent/good Windows.
While I wouldn't want to go back to 8 due to subsequent quality of life improvements for developers like WSL and winget, I still miss the UI every day. It looked clean and simple and worked great with a touchscreen and keyboard alike. Trying to navigate a Surface on Windows 11 with the utterly useless widgets hijacking the left swipe, the microscopic start menu, the on screen keyboard which can no longer be undocked and resized and the now-missing notification toggles is an exercise in frustration.
The backlash against Windows 8 from purists who hated anything mobile is exactly what led to the current enshittified version of the Windows user interface imo. Microsoft overcorrected and have now ended up in a worse place than they were when they started.