That's why I said " this odd cyclic pattern (more or less) ".

However, you are correct, I did leave off Windows ME,

....but let's not forget that it was preceded by Windows 98, Second Edition. :)

Says the guy that profits from MS' dealings.

Do you really think you have any credibility here? The only time I see you show up is when people are complaining about the obvious inadequacies of Windows and you astro-turf over the top with tons of bullshit.

Then if this is the case where the fuck did all this subscription shit come out of the woodworks from?

You just hate Microsoft we get it.

Microsoft got rid of those crappy Metro tile interfaces in Windows 10, the start menu is back albeit with the tiles in it and Windows 10 is faster than Windows 7. How can you possibly hate Windows 10 when it's nothing compared to Windows 8's horrible Metro? And stability is better as well.

From online idiots looking for more ad hits on their websites, and retarded MS haters that have nothing better to do with their lives.

As I've said before, I hate poorly designed, expensive, garbage. MS has been at best solidly mediocre. The best release they've ever had was 7, and even that was barely mediocre. For those of us that actually want to get things done with our computer, Windows is an embarrassment.

And like I said, you benefit from talking them up. It's very hard, if not impossible to get stoked by anything that MS releases because it's at best mediocre. Which is an embarrassment considering how much money they spend on it that they can't even do better than the open source guys.

My desktops have Windows 7, laptop has 8.1 and I've been using Windows 10 insider preview basically since it was available. Without hesitation I will say 10 is better than 8.1, and I'm even intending to wipe/reinstall my desktops with it as well. There are some significant back-end improvements that 8 made, even if the UX was horrible and I refused to upgrade. 10 has all the back-end improvements, and new ones, as well as bringing the UX back to Windows 7. That McAfee baggage is from your OEM, not from Windows 8.1, to be fair. I am "one of those cool-handed 'make my own rig sort types'" and I won't put XP on any of my systems anymore these days. Maybe in a virtual machine (which I do have set up), but certainly not as the main OS. That's just asking for trouble, especially if you're not "one of those cool-handed 'make my own rig sort types'" who would typically know how to properly harden and secure their system. Which is why I have XP in a virtual machine, specifically for older games that I just don't want to deal with hacky patches or ini tweaks to get working, even on Windows 7. A game old enough to still be using ddraw is old enough to run full speed in a virtual machine.

I also have a Windows 98 VM for even older games that even XP had problems with.

Say what now? DOS 6 was fantastic, and Windows 95 was pretty terrible until the C release. 98 was better than 95 in every way. ME was terrible (noticed you skipped that). 2000 was good, but not for gamers, XP finally merged the 9x code base with the NT code base, and was actually a good release.

Microsoft is notoriously bad about initial announcements being clear and concise, fear mongers jumped on the lack of solid initial information and started screaming to the heavens that Windows was going subscription based, and people easily persuaded by that rather than doing their own research have kept perpetuating the myth.

Meh I just wait until there is concrete evidence

Or you could, you know, look at the links JMich provided and you replied to.

This all the way. I hate win 8 so much it almost pains me physicaly.

I would advise to wait a little. Just in case.

Where does any of this crazy stuff come from? I think in this case an executive quite some time ago was musing about it a bit. But, it wasn't in connection to this release and even then it wasn't something that was a real proposal.

There has been talk of this being the "last" release and proceeding more like FreeBSD does as in a continuous set of updates that are periodically bundled together on a new disk. Sort of like the difference between Win 98 and Win 98 SE.

But, you're not going to find them making a definitive statement on the issue because there was never a serious proposal to create a subscription system for the OS.

The other bit was that Office has a SaaS model now, I don't follow up on Office, so I might well be wrong about that. Anyways, it's a turd that I won't touch anyways, so it doesn't much matter to me.

this. adopt a wait and see approach while not burning any bridges. at the end of the year of 'holding' my free copy of 10, I'll decide whether or not to use it. In the end its just a hundred bucks and not the end of the world if I need to buy a copy in a few years. I'm super happy with win 7 right now but realize that resistance is futile and will have to take this one day

I think they were trying to offset my (albeit opinionated) statement about the different OS'es by taking into account my omission of Windows ME.

I did use Windows 95 (as an end-user) and really did like the user interface better than Windows 3.1. Of course, that interface was based off of the experimental shell that became the user interface for Windows NT 4, back when Windows NT users looked down upon the lowly 'Windows' users. Windows NT, in my opinion, was much better architecturally than the mainstream consumer Windows.

I've actually used each of the different OSes to some extent as I was developing software which needed to run on each of these Operating Systems and maintain some modicum of backward compatibility.