I challenge you to show me an old Slashdot article and its discussion that represents what you mean with "good old times". They are all archived. I have occasionally read them again. There is about the same amount of trash-talk and sophisticated comments as we have here today. The only clear difference is that back then there was a lot more mod points in circulation.

I have a particular plan which involves some unnamed hardware and software. I won't go into details, but let's just say that everything of it is implemented through some specific steps. It allows the users to leverage various possibilities. Maybe this could be the solution?

The article precisely says this:

UPDATE: As I’ve seen in some discussions of my post on the Internet (not the comments here) that people apparently thought the screenshot represented the next KMail desktop UI, I’ve updated the screenshot and the caption to make clear what it is.

Yep. Some other classic ones:

- "Your distro is configured wrong for KDE."
- "Everyone knows how broken KDE is. That's why I switched to Linux Mint and haven't looked back."
- "I have never had that kind of problems and I have used Linux on desktop since 1997."
- "How much does Microsoft pay you to write that?"

Meanwhile, full Windows 7 and 8 runs smoothly on those same underpowered systems with all animations and compositing enabled, all the way down to Atom N270 systems.

Everyone can try this themselves if they do not believe it.

There's also some new vomit-inducing screenshots of the Start Menu colors of Windows 9. It's still nice that the menu is coming back, but they seem to be going full-kindergarten in terms of appearance.

Yeah, I have seen a clear Stockholm Syndrome developing around XP. :)

Same goes for me, I also moved full-Linux as XP was such a trash can. Came back when Windows 7 was released.