I ask friends who are more intelligent than me

And if they don’t know I assume it is forbidden knowledge that would drive me mad to know

(I am only half joking)

Nothing wrong with the Registry

It’s a different way of handling things compared to how Linux (and most unixes) does it with 18391823 text files

But it’s a perfectly functional and sensible solution for storing system configurations.

Not really

Windows 7 was pretty, it was customisable, it was stable. And microshaft had yet to start fucking about with ads everywhere and invasive “features”. Peak windows right there.

XP was also pretty good for its time. At that point Linux and OSX had caught up and surpassed it in many ways, but it did what it had to without getting in the way.

95 was an innovator if anything, ahead of pretty much anything else on desktop at the time, even if it DID fart and die whenever someone looked at it funny.

It was always a proprietary creation by an anticompetitive tech megacorp, and therefore bad from THAT angle, but it didn’t start being truly shite from a pure user experience angle until like. 8.