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Comment by airstrike | Hacker News Reader

I miss Windows 8.1. There, I said it.

I liked 8.1 because they compartmentalized the new junk—with a start menu replacement app (of which there were many), you could get away with never touching the Metro apps and just using a faster, cleaner, more secure version of Windows 7.

Windows 7 was the best version they shipped and the last worth installing.

I'm going to keep running it until the SSD it's installed on melts, and burns a hole in my desk! Win10 is a monstrosity and I loathe having to support all my customers who use it.

Windows 2000 for 4life

I wonder if it's possible to use it with modern hardware. May be someone will make a modern Windows 2000 distribution with backported drivers and fixed vulnerabilities. Source code was leaked, so should be possible.

As far as I know, the Windows 2000 source code leak was incomplete, actually; or if it isn't, then not the entire thing ended up getting leaked. For example, the code to the setup program was missing.

To the best of my knowledge, the most recent complete leak was NT 4.0. That one did have a short-lived burst of retro affectionados under the name "OpenNT 4.0", though it's not entirely clear if it died on its own or if a cease & desist helped that along.

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'entrate

https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=33250

What was good about it compared to Windows 7?

Not the biggest fan of 8 series, but the best thing about it was some of the energy optimisations - as they were going to target mobile. The kernel hibernation is good, for quicker start up. But sadly that's at the expense of hibernating proper.

8.1 brought back things like the closing button on metro apps, and some other fudging, to make it a bit more Win 7, and it just felt like even more of an abomination. The control panel/metro settings mixed UI - is the thing that killed Windows for me. In Windows 10, I can't find anything setting wise particularly easily. And on a recent new laptop start up, I cringed at all the options that I had to turn off, and at the apps I tried to remove.

Here's unpopular opinion: start menu really did need a remake and I like the designs 8.1 had compared to 10. Also, IIRC 8 has some optimizations (including some tweaks to better support ssds).

My poor old computer got stuck on that release. I'll look at it in a more positive light now.

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