Then Vista came along and people said XP was the good one.
However, it also has a ton of advertisments everywhere, and those annoying auto-installing apps.
When I sit in the front of the computer, I feel like I'm inside the big space ship in the Wall-e. All the advertisements, forced consumerism and everything.
I know tr0nscript has fallen out of favor since, don’t know the exact reasons. I did need to fix the hosts file to allow windows to get security updates - but otherwise, that machine still feels as usable as win7 except for the degraded shell (which could be replaced with classic shell, I guess, but I didn’t bother).
Looked to what it's doing in every step [0]. It's a bit overzealous while doing what it's doing. Also, its default are not the most sensible ones so, if you're not running it after installation it may change the behavior of the system quite a bit.
Removal of metro apps, resetting IE, purging %APP_DATA% storage, removal of some VCS snapshots... It's a thermonuclear option to take. To be able to run in a milder, sensible manner needs a lot of tuning. So it's not practical.
[0]: https://github.com/bmrf/tron/blob/master/README.md#full-tron...
For me the icing on the cake was segregating different apps between "tablet mode" and "desktop mode," where the former would take up the entire screen with no reasonable way to multitask between programs. Not only that but how many apps had (and even still have) both a UWP and standard implementation, from my experience that just confused users as to which they were supposed to use. Heck even today we still have the Settings app and the Control Panel (which is increasingly difficult to access I might add), both with various controls and settings only found in one but not the other.
IMO Windows 10 (sans tracking and forced pre/auto-installing apps) is what Windows 8 should have been from the beginning. Many beneficial changes under the hood, and minor UI changes that don't entirely change the workflow of the OS, but instead augment it for a better experience for both regular and power users. Somehow we've eclipsed the 5-year mark since its release, yet Windows 10 still feels incomplete. Not even just that, but they manage to make it feel even less finished with every new update.
Always amused me that the OS X Launchpad is also a ugly grid of huge app icons that takes up the entire screen, just like the Windows 8 start screen, yet nobody says a word about that.
I do use Windows, in as much as I have to for work, and I still can't make Win8's launcher work.
Edit: Wrong version of Windows.
Though I've been inpressed by how snappy windows 8 feels, especially the boot time which is the fastest of all versions.
And both XP and Win 7 were criticized at the beginning because they had to compete with very solid predecessors, and because they came with plenty of teething problems even if they had potential. That potential was fully realized some SPs later.
W95 was 60% bugs and 40% OS. There was even a really obvious bug in the calculator app. There were all kinds of very very weird - i.e. bad - design decisions both in the code and in the UI. Trying to find fixes and workarounds literally wasted days of almost everyone's time.
The initial release of XP was workable, but by SP1 it was fairly stable and you could actually use it as a working OS without having to deal with driver issues and constant crashes.
Vista was another dog. W7 was very possibly the best Windows. 8 was another WTAF release. 10 is 8 with some improvements, but some added evil in the form of forced telemetry for most users, and such.
Me too, for a simple reason: Windows 7 can be made to look and behave almost identically as Windows 95 did in terms of UI - which is, to this day, widely praised: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21878006
Windows 8 and 10? Not at all. It's a wild, wild mixture of the good old UI and... an abomination of stuff clearly "designed" for touch screens. Not to mention all the privacy and advertising issues.
The are several reasons why vista churned so badly at startup was the indexing service and the service that was trying to load everything into memory. Turn those 2 off and vista worked as good as 7, I did this to dozens of computers and the owners were so happy. Several other background services needed about 1.5GB of memory just to get the system up and running. This was when 4GB of machine was considered 'huge'. By the time 7 came out they had fixed both of those services and a 'crappy' machine had 4GB. Dumping it on a box that 512MB of memory and it struggled badly (512-1024 was the sweet spot for XP). 8GB for Vista and up and for proper use of that, you need the 64bit ver.
I am currently using Windows 7 in my personal machine (and Linux in others).
The indexing service often gets disabled because it makes the machine slow down a lot.
Also I really miss Linux "swapyness", Windows Vista+ (10 included) are really aggressive in swapping, more than needed, often my machine ended trashing because of Swap while still having 20+ GB free, this is in part because of that stupid indexing and cache, Windows 7 has a habit of giving priority to the cache, putting files from the most accessed programs in the RAM, and not caring if your CURRENT program need RAM...
Something also changed around sp2 with 7 and file writes. Files get fragmented very quickly now even when there is plenty of space not to do so. I usually would only end up with systems badly fragmented in XP if the drive is full (much like ext4) now it just does it as a matter of course and is acting like the old DOS alg of find the next free spot.
You can still turn off the readyboost/superfetch cache service (not sure where it is win10). If you have an SSD you should not notice much difference on or off but it can happen. Turning those off makes your free RAM act more like in linux where it just caches recently read items and gives it up right away if needed.
with 1+ year -> with 1+ year of bug fixes
giving bugs -> fixing bugs
As this leak is only XP SP1, it will be missing a lot of the bugfixes and upgrades that XP added by SP3 (and beyond).
I had my Win XP, Photoshop and MS Office with ever lasting licsenses. You need FOSS today for that. As soon as you pay for software nowadays you are a loser, in general.
That is so true! I buy'd a Lifetime License for Insync and Jaikoz, Insync's lifetime was 4 Years (then they changed the license for updates) and Jaikoz "Lifetime" was 6 Years, change the name of the Software and split it in two different product and the 'old' one was not maintained anymore.
First, it was the first solid (in relative terms) consumer operating system from MS.
Second, it was lightweight (in relative terms) in terms of UX and, somewhat consequently, engineering. With Windows Vista (but in particular, Windows 8), MS started to add complexity on every layer.
Nowadays, I'm really afraid to update Windows. I don't know what new services and programs are going to be added. I don't know if the tweaks still work. I don't know if I'm imposed some new behavior. I don't know where certain settings (even entire setting domains) are going to be located, and how they're going to be named.
In a way, Windows XP is the Windows equivalent of the Linux XFCE/LXDE desktop environments.
I remember reading Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist and it talked about trade. Basically it said with trust, trade is unlimited.
But what's been happening with computers and software is that trust been going downhill so quickly that many people don't install anything ever anymore. Privacy, dark patterns, monetization, form over function, qa by customer, and just a general lack of empathy, respect and common sense.
It's a shame.
also see how software has stabilised over the years, both as a product and as a marketplace. there are now clearly defined best in class software that will take years to be disrupted.
but one of the major aspects against computer software has come from mobile. lots of development time has gone to browsers and mobile than desktop.
That was actually Windows 2000, based on the NT 4 code base. It was near perfect, given the era it was made in.
The only reason I upgraded from Windows 2000 was that Microsoft was extremely reluctant to back-port USB- or WiFi-fixes and support, effectively forcing you to upgrade to XP if you wanted to fully use your modern hardware.
For that reason alone, XP always left a sour taste in my mouth.
I also remember Windows 2000 fondly. It was really really stable. Even if it looked like it's frozen like a polar ice cap (they weren't melting that bad back then), a short coffee break would give it enough time to normalize itself and continue like nothing happened.
Should retry it in a VM sometime. :)
I was an intern at Microsoft in 2004, and personally helped make it clear that WinFS also wasn’t ready anyway. Fwiw, I think the iOS model of “makes users and apps no longer care about directories” has been more successful than the original WinFS plan of “maybe it’s all a SQL-ish database instead”.
Windows 2000 was the last version of the NT branch where Dave Cutler was in charge. He's a legend for a reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2GV_bCfnCw
Computer History Museum long form interviews:
Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29RkHH-psrY Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVgSLud50ss
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10271716...
You can see why they didn't want to/couldn't backport USB drivers.
Edit: Comment made me look like an enemy of forests and trees so, clarified the situation.
I used Windows 3.1 for years and I never had to reinstall it for stability reasons. At some point I also switched to XP and after 2 years it wouldn't boot anymore because of a blue screen appearing before the graphical interface would show up. That made the decision easy for me to use Linux exclusively - which I had on dual boot already for a considerable time.
To me Windows 95-XP were really frustrating to use since random parts of the system (CD-ROM, Word, Games...) would stop working at random times. Or for instance on Windows 95 sometimes the system would only boot if I opened and closed the (empty) CD tray.
At work I sometimes used Vista and 10, I think they are okay but macOS and Linux are far more fun.
However, I've briefly used NT4 as my "development box" (Delphi addict for a while, though in my defense, I was like 15 at the time) for 6-12 months, that was as stable as anything you could get. But it had the same problems as Linux: it was very specific as to what hardware it supports. The same "soft modems" (called "winmodems" at the time) were equally unsupported in NT4 just like in Linux, so you had to get yourself external hardware modems which were like 5-10x the cost (whatever came out of US Robotics?).
So since I was more into the hacker mindset, I moved into GNU/Linux world and never looked back.
But I did grow an appreciation for MS engineering: they can develop quality software, and did it even in 96, but their consumer OSes strive for unparalleled compatibility and allow anybody (literally anybody) to write system level code that runs on the kernel ring level due to that.
A couple years down the line, I've even seen an article how many workarounds they had to introduce into '95 to allow old software employing their own extended/expanded memory management tricks to continue to function (think stuff like DOS games, WordPerfect...).
For all the fun we make of it, Windows 95 was a marvel of engineering when you consider the constraints and requirements. Just oppose that to the new web app approach to software engineering: breaking backwards compatibility is such a common theme that nobody bats an eyelid.
However, I always wonder what makes your experience so different than mine.
For me I can simple replace what you said and it will still be valid:
To me Linux were really frustrating to use since random parts of the system (CD-ROM, Word, Games...) would stop working at random times.
(well the part about the CD tray never happened to me with any OS).
I really like the customizability of Linux and such, but in the end, Windows 2000, XP, and 10 just works 99% of the time. At least for me who I consider an advanced user.
Of course there are things I don't like, like telemetry, but the pros vs the cons, at least for me, make me always return to Windows.
I have also worked with macs and for 4 years my wife had a MacBook. Not only do I find the prices crazy expensive, compared with ThinkPads, but I never found anything that was better in OSX than in Windows.
Again, I can use macOS if needed be, and I find it just fine. But I prefer Win/ThinkPad.
Of course this is my own opinion.
But now things are of course a bit different, especially when choosing well supported hardware. On the other hand driver support tends to be more stable and long-term oriented on Linux since they tend to be maintained centrally in the Linux kernel. I agree that macOS is a bit mediocre in some sense, but somehow it unites the worlds of Linux and Windows.
For me, Linux is easy to install, and it has been for a while, but then trying to customize it to do what I want, is much more complicated than Windows.
For example, I want RAR support. There is no LinRAR, so I had to download a library and install it. It wasnt that bad, but in the end I ended up with a tool that was not as simple to use as Winrar.
Want to use Total Commander? Either install Wine or run Midnight Commander or some other similar program that are not up to par with TC.
Want to use Office? Wine or Crossover. Want to use Illustrator? Same.
Need to install VMware? In Linux you have to import some signing key first and do some additional steps (don't completely remember). Nothing major, but you need to find out first how to do it. In Windows, just download the installer, double click and follow the wizard.
For me it seems like it is always more complicated to do simple things in Linux, and you end up with some not as good solution.
Also, I don't understand how can I download an installer from Windows XP and will 99% of the time install in Windows 10. However, if I want to install something old in the latest version of Linux, it won't install, will have to fix dependencies or similar.
And for me the worst thing is that energy management for notebooks is not exactly the same. If my battery lasts 4 hours in Windows, it lasts 3 or 2 in Linux.
Drivers it could be what you say for old ones where the manufacturer did not update to Windows 10, but if you have a supported device, usually the support is better on Windows.
Of course there are advantages, like no telemetry, no antivirus, but for my use case, I found the experience worst.
I am not saying totally worst. Maybe it is a 10 to 20% worst.
Of course, I have used maybe 90% of my time Windows and 9% Linux and 1% MAC, so maybe I am just more experienced.
For what it's worth, I equivalent teething pains when using OS X for a while. It took me a few months before I finally learned to adopt Mac-isms and I still don't feel at home on it like I do on Linux and BSD (my preferred platforms). Windows, however, always felt somewhat alien to me (and not through a lack of experience, I used to be a Windows developer and have written some pretty low level software for the platform. But even with all of that experience I still couldn't see eye to eye with the OS).
By the way, there are Linux-native builds of WinRAR.
In the case of downloading vs package manager, the problem is that there is lot of software that I use that is not on the repositories. If everything was there, I have no problem on using 100% package manager.
Regarding the apps, there off course the issue is that some apps have no equivalent in the Linux world.
There is no MS Office, LibreoOffice is good but not so good, and same for Adobe Suite. Total Commander I can more or less replace with Double Commander, or TC under Wine.
Afaik, there is a unrar.dll equivalent in Linux, but not a proper WinRAR.
Thanks for your opinion!
I totally agree that Windows has an "unfair" advantage here as manufacturers make sure that their hardware works in Windows while for Linux most of the time they don't even provide drivers.
I have helped friends and family configure their MACs and honestly I never felt wow this does not gets in the way. Not all apps in MAC are installed the same way IIRC. For example Adobe apps. Never had issues with installers that take forever in Windows. Same with Transparency.
About the availability of the software, 99% of it is on Windows, so that is a big plus. But I am not talking so much about that, I am talking about the complexity to do things in Linux.
Most of the time, at least for a user like me that tries it/uses it sporadically, I need to search for a way to install or do something. It is good that most of the time there is a response, but I find it weird that all is so complicated.
For example, this is how I installed virtualbox some years ago (it might be better now)
wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/..._vbox_2016.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add - wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add - echo "deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian xenial contrib" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/virtualbox.list sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install virtualbox-5.0
In windows it was download, double click, next, next, next. Done.
Here is how to install MKTOOLNIX (again, a couple of years ago)
wget -q -O - https://www.bunkus.org/gpg-pub-moritzbunkus.txt | sudo apt-key add - sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://www.bunkus.org/ubuntu/xenial/ ./" >> /etc/apt/sources.list' sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install mkvtoolnix mkvtoolnix-gui
In windows, download, double click, next, next, next.
Again, if you use it all the time, maybe it becomes natural to you.
Also Windows has no managed way to keep applications up to date. Which means you either have to manually repeat all those steps yourself or run background agents for every publisher to keep that software up to date. But by far the most annoying in Windows is software that doesn't check if it's up to date until you run it and then demands you update it there and then (great way to kill productivity). Yet those steps you've exampled is a one time pain and then all software is managed for you. Updates are easy.
I used to be a hardened Slackware user and was prepared to download and often compile my software manually. Then I discovered package managers in Linux and from that point onwards I lost any respect for an OS that didn't manage software for me. It's amazing that it's two decades from me discovering package managers, ten years since iOS App Store was announced, and yet people are still stuck on shitty first party solutions on Windows and macOS (thank god for homebrew et al).
Firs cons: lack of key apps (Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite).
Second cons: lack of OEM produced drivers, which means that some things work worst than in Windows. Example, energy management for my ThinkPad.
Third cons: it seems to me that most things are more complicated to do than in Windows. Case in point, even if we do not consider the wgets, installing mkvtoolnix and vmware.
Fourth cons: Why do I need to look for the specific distribution version of a program? I can install a Windows XP program in Windows 10. I can even install a Windows 95 program in Windows 10. But I have to look for the specific version of Ubuntu 20.08 of a program. The version for Ubuntu 17.06 would not work.
Again. I can for sure use Linux if needed to (I am currently trying BSD on my ThinkPad), but if given the chance, I feel much more comfortable and productive in Windows.
Propitiatory commercial applications, sure. But there's plenty of open source counterparts. I've been using LibreOffice (and OpenOffice before then) for years and while it does lack a lot of polish compared to MS Office most of the issues with it are really just cosmetic. Plus I never liked the ribbon bar anyway. Adobe Creative Suite is a bigger problem. I have heard of professionals uses open source counterparts and getting on well with it but the last thing a person wants is technology getting in the way of their creative process (a sentiment I'm intimately familiar with from a music composition perspective).
Ultimately though, if you're unwilling to try changing muscle memory to use open source applications then Linux is never going to be the right fit. The problem there though isn't that it's not possible to do something on Linux but rather than you just more comfortable with Windows. And that's fine -- but it is literally just habit rather than a technical reason. > Fourth cons: Why do I need to look for the specific distribution version of a program? I can install a Windows XP program in Windows 10. I can even install a Windows 95 program in Windows 10. But I have to look for the specific version of Ubuntu 20.08 of a program. The version for Ubuntu 17.06 would not work.
> Second cons: lack of OEM produced drivers, which means that some things work worst than in Windows. Example, energy management for my ThinkPad.
I honestly prefer Linux for driver support. Windows was such a pain in the arse with having to install 3rd party drivers (though that's less the case these days) where as on Linux everything just worked with the default install.
That said, you do sometimes find edge cases where drivers are missing functionality but it's not all that common.
With regards to battery life, I a lot of that will also be down to tuning. Windows ships some pretty aggressive tuning features where as Linux basically ships untuned. You can do that manually and it is a bit of a joke that users have to do it manually. But I've found losing an hour or two off a 10 hour run time isn't all that painful.
> Third cons: it seems to me that most things are more complicated to do than in Windows. Case in point, even if we do not consider the wgets, installing mkvtoolnix and vmware.
I actually find the opposite to be true. Most things are more complicated to do in Windows. Developer tools, programming language support, containerisation/docker, debugging tools, networking tools, automation (this is by far the worst thing about running Windows for me), resolving issues (far easier to fix a broken Linux install), documentation (far better documentation in Linux), error reporting, etc.
Updates are a key thing too. Windows: you need a thousand different update managers running on start up. You need to regularly reboot due to Windows update (which forcefully locks you out of your system whether you want it to or not). Linux: everything is managed from one package manager and no reboots required (unless it's a kernel update but even then it installs it without locking you out and the reboot is just to load the new kernel)
Another bugbare is having to browse for applications on the internet, avoiding phishing sites for popular software, then manually downloading and installing it. Repeatedly for some applications that don't have update managers too. Users shouldn't be doing this in 2020 -- it's just a crap way to manage software.
> Fourth cons: Why do I need to look for the specific distribution version of a program? I can install a Windows XP program in Windows 10. I can even install a Windows 95 program in Windows 10. But I have to look for the specific version of Ubuntu 20.08 of a program. The version for Ubuntu 17.06 would not work.
That's why you use package managers ;)
> Again. I can for sure use Linux if needed to (I am currently trying BSD on my ThinkPad), but if given the chance, I feel much more comfortable and productive in Windows.
BSD is going to be much more painful for you than Linux given the complaints you're making about Linux. You're better off trying a Mint Linux. Or if you don't mind the one time pain installing Arch then go with that (Arch has no installer, you have to do it all manually. Which sucks for non-techies but once you're over that hurdle it's probably the most painless OS I've ever ran over long periods of time)
I don't rate Ubuntu much as a distribution. Canonical spend too much time reinventing the wheel and not enough time fixing the common complaints with Linux (though `snap` is an attempt at that but unfortunately even there Canonical's solution is hamfisted).
Ultimately though, it all boils down to habits and personal preferences rather than X being better than Y.
> Ultimately though, it all boils down to habits and personal preferences rather than X being better than Y.
I have no problem changing systems if I see the value/advantage. I have changed systems in the past. Started with Ti994a, DOS, OS/2, Windows 95, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 10. In the middle I tried Linux, may variants: Mandrake, Redhat, Suse, Gentoo, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, Manjaro, and many others just to see how they looked/worked. I even worked with AIX and Solaris at work. What I mean is that I can adapt and work if needed be. My main point is that I don't suffer all of the pains, with the exception of telemetry, that Linux users have against Windows.
> Propitiatory commercial applications, sure. But there's plenty of open source counterparts. I've been using LibreOffice (and OpenOffice before then) for years and while it does lack a lot of polish compared to MS Office most of the issues with it are really just cosmetic. Plus I never liked the ribbon bar anyway. Adobe Creative Suite is a bigger problem. I have heard of professionals uses open source counterparts and getting on well with it but the last thing a person wants is technology getting in the way of their creative process (a sentiment I'm intimately familiar with from a music composition perspective).
I don't care if it is commercial or free, proprietary or open source. I care that is the best software for the job. That said, Office has become easier as I can use the Online version or Gsuite.
> I honestly prefer Linux for driver support. Windows was such a pain in the arse with having to install 3rd party drivers (though that's less the case these days) where as on Linux everything just worked with the default install. That said, you do sometimes find edge cases where drivers are missing functionality but it's not all that common. With regards to battery life, I a lot of that will also be down to tuning. Windows ships some pretty aggressive tuning features where as Linux basically ships untuned. You can do that manually and it is a bit of a joke that users have to do it manually. But I've found losing an hour or two off a 10 hour run time isn't all that painful.
The problem is that I don't see the point of expending a week trying to fine tune Ubuntu, or whatever version I want to use, when I can just install Windows 10 and it works perfectly out off the box. At least for my use cases.
> I actually find the opposite to be true. Most things are more complicated to do in Windows. Developer tools, programming language support, containerisation/docker, debugging tools, networking tools, automation (this is by far the worst thing about running Windows for me), resolving issues (far easier to fix a broken Linux install), documentation (far better documentation in Linux), error reporting, etc.
I never found using developer tools, programming languages, debugging tools, networking tools, are more complicated in Windows. Same for resolving issues (I had to reinstall Windows very phew times, maybe one or two because I couldn't fix something and it was easier to just reinstall). I don't use containers/docker, so I cannot comment there.
> Updates are a key thing too. Windows: you need a thousand different update managers running on start up. You need to regularly reboot due to Windows update (which forcefully locks you out of your system whether you want it to or not). Linux: everything is managed from one package manager and no reboots required (unless it's a kernel update but even then it installs it without locking you out and the reboot is just to load the new kernel)
This one I totally agree. Linux is much better at updating than Windows. No discussion here. The main problem is when there are non-official repositories.
> Another bugbare is having to browse for applications on the internet, avoiding phishing sites for popular software, then manually downloading and installing it. Repeatedly for some applications that don't have update managers too. Users shouldn't be doing this in 2020 -- it's just a crap way to manage software.
I don't see it as a big problem. I know the apps I want and I can just install them. But I understand how this could make life easier for some.
> That's why you use package managers ;)
The problem is that not all apps are on the repos ;) In my experience if the repo has the app, and it is installed regularly, all fine. If it not updated or does not exists, it is a pain.
> BSD is going to be much more painful for you than Linux given the complaints you're making about Linux. You're better off trying a Mint Linux. Or if you don't mind the one time pain installing Arch then go with that (Arch has no installer, you have to do it all manually. Which sucks for non-techies but once you're over that hurdle it's probably the most painless OS I've ever ran over long periods of time)
I don't mind. I tried OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFly. I have OpenBSD running. As a desktop OS I don't see the advantage over Linux, much less over Windows.
> I don't rate Ubuntu much as a distribution. Canonical spend too much time reinventing the wheel and not enough time fixing the common complaints with Linux (though `snap` is an attempt at that but unfortunately even there Canonical's solution is hamfisted).
Don't get me there :)
Anyway, I always have a Linux laptop running around. I currently have Manjaro, but I will be trying Tumbleweed soon. I would love to one day totally move to Linux. I am not loosing hope.
I don't really much else to add aside that the boundaries these days are definitely a lot more blurred due to WSL (bringing many of Linux's tooling to Windows) and web applications (levelling the playing field somewhat in terms of application support). Both of which are largely a good thing for users.
Thanks again for the conversation. These topics often end badly and it's been nice to have a discussion like this without any of the flamewars :)
Can you open a coconut with your bare hands? Now go and tell vegetarians that sausages grow on trees, because they do https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sausage_Tree
Win 2000 was amazing when it was released. Games (albeit not DOS ones) worked well, it was stable and really your only other options were worse (Mac OS 9 was less stable than Win 98, ME was a dumpster fire, Linux wasn't quite ready for the desktop and BeOS was awesome but barely supported).
Then when XP was released, it had twice the minimum and recommended hardware spec than 2000, it had those stupid skins and it didn't offer anything functionally more beneficial over 2000 (aside faster boot time if you had hundreds of fonts installed).
Granted XP got better with SP2 or SP3, but it definitely wasn't the first solid nor even lightweight when it was originally released.
That is the perfect description. It’s one of the ugliest UIs I’ve ever experienced.
Users will sometimes reach a point where they say "If I'm having to spend this much time configuring new installs to function how I like, then I might as well install something else that already ships with the defaults I like". And this is why many power users started drifting away from Windows in the decade of 2000 to 2010.
I actually don’t really associate Windows XP with its theme in my memory, because I so rarely saw it in use.
- The classic theme was just a few clicks away
- Of all the problems with XP, I would not even list the "easily changed default theme" in the top.... 100 or so. I would not expect to see such sentiment on HN, of all places.
XP was a pretty damn good OS that came out of a time when there wasn't a lot of options.
It was pretty stable. You could change network settings without restarting. It was built on the NT core instead of whatever 95/98/ME hot mess was.
The main issue was it's exposure to viruses. Which was address in 8+ (windows actually started acting more like linux with regards to user/admin).
Windows7 IMHO had the best ui out of the box. 10 grew on me. Let's just not talk about 8.
That's more true of Windows 2000 though. By the time XP was released Apple had released a few iterations of OS X and it was looking pretty decent. Not to mention desktop Linux becoming stable. Neither of which were true in 2000.
In fact with Windows 2000, I used to dual boot Win 95, Linux Slackware and BeOS 5 but I always came back to Windows 2k for day to day work. Then when Windows XP was released I gave it a try and got so fed up with it that rather than installing Win2k again I just switched to Linux full time instead (sadly BeOS had ceased development by that point).
(We did some printing. In the range of 1M pages/workstation. It...worked...on XP. Eventually.)
There were plenty of games for 9x that assumed its lax memory and permissions model, especially for stuff like DRM.
What I remember from XP is that it took until SP2 before all the problems were worked out, and SP3 actually introduced more annoyances in the name of security. I also think the default theme and general visual style of the XP is downright terrible and completely unworthy of a large professional company like Microsoft. The very first thing I always did was to switch back to the classic UI for everything (theme, start menu, all control panels, etc).
I don't care for any of the 'modern' Windows versions. They work, behind the scenes the technology has improved, but I they still annoy me in many ways, and the UI is IMO the worst it has ever been in the history of Windows. It looks cleaner but behind the veneer its just a giant heap of historical accidents piled on over the years, with no consistent direction of vision to be found. I get no joy using it, but I guess if you are used to working in Windows the OS is perfectly fine for what it does.
Of course every Windows OS eventually gets stable and fast on current hardware, at which point everyone starts praying that they'll get to use it forever and they'll never have to deal with a new major release again.
A decent number of not-ancient floss software supports it as well. Not so with 2k. Add thousands of security patches and firewall, and the choice is clear.
There wasn't much added to Windows XP over 2000 in the original release of XP (service pack 3 was released 6 years (!!!) after XP was originally launched. So it's not really fair comparing XP SP3 to Win 2k). I remember this era in computing vividly and it took a few service packs before XP really came into it's own. However you still paid the price running XP because it demanded double the hardware requirements to run when compared with Windows 2000. So sure, you could disable themes in XP but for many people sticking with Windows 2000 was more appealing because you had more preferable defaults out of the box plus less bloat / hardware overhead too.
All of the things people are complaining about here, like Microsoft becoming the de facto admin of of their Desktop Windows 10 products, are direct results of a period they manufactured.
All anyone who waxes nostalgic should do to test is install anything earlier than 10 on an internet facing computer and then wait. It's terrifying how fast they get compromised.
God the future sucks. IT has been destroyed by complexity fetishists and resume driven development.
Outside of Linux and other FL/OSS OS's I have to agree though.
Which I guess brings me back around to where you started.
XP is certainly not the proper OS to be running today, it's been passed by especially in a security sense.
But when it was released, it was the first really truly stable and consumer focused operating system MS had released. The NT series prior had been stable (to a point), and was good for business uses, but try gaming or doing much that a home desktop user wanted to do and it really fell down there. XP picked up the mantle of being the successor to both Windows 98 and Windows 2000, and it really did a great job of it.
Was it perfect? Of course not. But it did a job and did it better than anything else in its time for its specific uses.
Even then my use of Windows was low. I now have no need for it at all. From what I've heard Windows 10 is not in the same class.
> did not expect proprietary operating
> systems to be actively working against you.
Things were still overridable, but XP started the trend where the end user was not an allmighty sysadmin responsible for its own deeds good or wrong, but a consumer that should follow the vision of Microsoft and not touch the holy internals.
I can partially defend microsoft here. Everybody and their dog was messing around in the registry, was installing all kinds of system-breaking software, etc... But it also signifies a point where Microsoft realised it got powerfull enough to ignore the wishes of its own clients.
The analogy would hold if, dunno, buying some DRM Music also made you relinquish the ownership of your speakers to the vendor. It’s not quite as bad.
DRM is, for example, a way to kill the second hand market or lending. I can sell my table without approval from its manufacturer, or drag it to my neighbours for a day. I can't sell my songs.
In the same spirit, if I as a computer enthousiast want to upgrade my computer hardware or reinstall windows, I should not depend on microsoft's goodwill.
Windows Vista and onwards, MS, while claiming it was for technical and stability reasons, nixed a lot of features that were annoying to movie studios, basically they changed how driver stack worked in a way to make DRM easier and make harder to pirate movies.
But as consequence of that, a lot of cool stuff outright stopped working:
* Some interesting video modes
* Some obscure ways to output data
* And the one that annoyed me the most: Soundcards became useless.
Before that, Soundcards could do a LOT, they could have their own processor and do a lot of fancy stuff, most famously they could do "3D Audio", and it was super cool, Thief for example is a game that uses it well, it would use its own processor to do same thing GPUs do for graphics, and do it for audio, it would even raytrace sound (ie: suppose a character is on the other side of the wall, but there is a door on that wall, the card would calculate the sound of that character footsteps reflecting on the walls and reach you, then if you were using headphone or 4+ speakers it would make you hear the sound coming from the reflections, thus a person with good hearing could deduce where an enemy was, on the other side of a wall).
That stunt basically killed off the soundcard market, people then were making cooler and cooler cards, after that the cards became little more than just output ports soldered on a tiny board.
Sound Cards pre-vista: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/95/Cr...
Sound Cards post-vista: https://http2.mlstatic.com/D_NQ_NP_768672-MLB41729093507_052...
I'll just add—forced upgrades to Win10. Still hard to believe how much (some divisions of) MS despises its own customers. I call them the "Balmer camp" as a shorthand.
Despite parts of MS turning over a new leaf, the sociopath wing persist.
What a WARPed perspective. (hehe)
It's great that this was stolen and distributed? There's nothing great about that. This source was not lost and has essentially zero risk of being lost. It would have been held for all time immemorial within the vault of its owner.
> Windows XP is probably the greatest operating system if you factor usability and how many people it has reached.
Sorry, but that honor must certainly go to Linux? The OS itself perhaps doesn't have usability, but it has flexibility and everything in modern life depends on it. Every single person in the world, everyone, today depends somehow on Linux.
I'm not poo-pooing XP in anyway -- it was and is a great OS. Both for its time and still today. But I think it is far in Linux' shadow.
Much more fun is writing your own.
I tend to disagree. In my opinion it is the worst OS ever created and the reason it's popular has nothing to do with quality.
Where is this happening ? Are we expecting this now ? What did I miss
macOS ... Is special. Some of the most notable changes in the last few years have been to try to restrict what an app can do.
Both the UI lag and general performance in macOS is just a sad story.
My windows machine runs 24/7 for months without needing a restart. I am forced to restart macOS weekly, usually because of system issues.
I'm a developer on Windows and OSX, so I have MacBook Pro and a ThinkPad.
I want to run the ThinkPad over with a car and then drop it in the sea.
The Edge update comes to mind that had reset the browser preference presumably to be able to push edge again.
Get a new browser installed, prompt for your choice of browser. This is an improvement to "get Edge installed, have Edge take over everything silently" and an improvement on "I installed a thing and it doesn't do anything, where is it", and an improvement on "IE 11 for eternity".
one of the updates most certainly was not just a mime handler update. They pushed a new edge (when they swapped to chromium) and rather than leave people with old edge as their browser, they just flat out set new edge as your browser without checking what you had otherwise, and set it to auto run on your next boot.
"Its easy to install arch, all you have to do is run these 10 arcane commands"
With some linux distros is definitely feels like it is hostile to entry-level users. Which is probably by design, but I'm just saying that Windows isn't the only OS where you have to do a bunch of weird hostile setup stuff when you first install it
Automatic updates on reboot. For example when someone giving a presentation or class has to restart their computer for some reason (quite common in Windows still, or one just ran out of power). Boot up the computer, people waiting impatiently - and then have to wait for 5-30 minutes for the computer to finish updates before being able to use it. No way to cancel/post-pone, no time-estimates for when it will be done.
Or telemetry made it way simpler.
Also, beneficial does not imply necessary.
Forced telemetry and opt-out telemetry are two different things.
The former is clearly evil. The latter can be helpful if it’s communicated clearly and not hidden in some EULA.
One could argue that telemetry _is_ the poll. If a user decides to disable feature-usage-tracking telemetry, and then realize they’d prefer to have a voice regarding feature selection, one possible solution would be for them to re-enable it.
If they absolutely won’t opt-in, they’re always free to email developers to tell them about their use case – a pretty powerful way to make yourself heard.
[German pro basketball team relegated to lower division due to Windows update | Ars Technica](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/germa...)
> "But as both teams warmed up, the computer crashed," he said. "When we booted it again at 7:20pm, it started automatically downloading updates. But we did not initiate anything."
> After all the updates were installed, Paderborn was ready to start the game at 7:55pm.
> But then Chemnitz formally protested, saying that because Paderborn had delayed the start time of the match by 25 minutes (instead of the 15-minute maximum as allowed under the German basketball rules), they should be penalized. As a result, Paderborn lost another point (Google Translate) in the standings, according to a Basketball Budesliga press release, which meant that it would certainly be relegated to the "ProB" league of German pro basketball.
Windows is by design meant to be used by not very computer literate people and unfortunately these kinds of users need to be forced to do the right thing sometimes. As they said back in the day: "the user will do everything possible to see the dancing bears, including downloading that toolbar, installing that gizmo, disabling security settings".
People smugly complain about this, in many cases from their Linux box (= technical users on a system with a 1% desktop market share => smaller target and better human protection) or MacOS box (= slightly more technical users than the average Windows user, on a system with a 5%-10% desktop market share).
I really wish people who insist on claiming some right to control how users use their own computers would leave IT forever.
People cannot be trusted to upgrade. It REALLY IS good to force people to upgrade.
The very idea that users should be at the mercy of their computers instead of the other way around is contrary to the concept of personal computing.
People like you are why I hate IT these days. You seem to think that because you have some specialized knowledge about computers that you're smarter than everyone who doesn't. You're totally willing to sacrifice hours of peoples lives, ruin their projects, and break their systems in the name of "I know better". It doesn't matter what they're doing, or how important it is to their lives, what matters is what you think is important.
Hate me or not...but people can't be trusted (broadly) to maintain things...thats just the way life works.
Automatic updates were a default. People turned them off because they were annoying. One solution to this problem was to make them not-annoying, but instead Microsoft opted to become aggressive and force people to update.
I will never hold anyone who thinks this is a good idea in high regard because they are actively making the world a worse place.
It's really that simple...cry about it all you want. It's a necessary evil...because humans.
A thousand times this.
This is such a stupid, frustrating argument to hear.
Pro and Enterprise shouldn't be the same in this regard as Home but often are.
Four days ago I had to entertain a courier waiting to pick up a 6-figures piece of equipment for a waiting air-freight cargo plane, for immediate transport to a remote mining site, all because the fucking piece of shit fucking Win 10 Enterprise on a very expensive rugged laptop decided to hang itself in an update loop for an hour.
We dealt with different garbage during the Windows 7 and previous eras, yes, but I'm not sure we're better off on the whole. Windows 10 has given a whole new meaning to the "Blue Screen of Death".
Reality is often frustrating, I agree.
Windows 10X will probably have some more goodies.
Forcing people to update was probably the only way to stop that.
I'm also not a fan, I got burned at least once by a Windows 10 computer restarting in the middle of the night when I had programs running on it, but I guess it's one of these things that's good for 99%, the 1% is just overrepresented here.
That's the thing with tech, and that's why I consider all arguments that "people voted with their wallets" to be bullshit in this space. Most users don't understand how computers work. They don't have mental models to recognize how things should work. They have no choice but to accept whatever they're being given.
Devices around them getting less ergonomic, slower, and more flashy UIs? "There are smart people building this magic, they must know what they're doing!". Their computers slowing down to the point of uselessness in the span of a year? "It must be these viruses!". Techies complain because techies understand it's all greed and laziness, and that same technology is capable of being much better than it is.
I mean, ask your parents whether they like their operating system. I'll bet their answer will be a resounding "no", and you may get an earful about their general frustrations with technology.
One notable moment where the dissatisfaction of masses was voiced in unison was the forced Windows 8 to Windows 10 upgrade. You didn't have to have any sophisticated mental model there to recognize you're being made to do something bad for you against your will.
[0] https://www.kilobitspersecond.com/2020/09/22/people-expect-t...
All this "well, users are stupid so it is ok to treat them like garbage" nonsense is part of the reason I've come to fucking hate IT. I wish all of you who think that way would go away.
I'm mostly very strongly opposed to forced updates, but things like WannaCry make me understand the viewpoint for forcing security upgrades.
I'm not trying to be combative, I'm just trying to better work out my own views on the topic.
Today, you might run an upgrade and reboot to find a more secure operating system -- or a full-screen Edge ad, with Edge being immediately auto-started afterwards and re-pinned on the taskbar. (Guess who had to drive across town in the middle of the Covid-19 lockdown because one of their parents had to teach an online class and couldn't open Firefox anymore. Yep.)
It's a hole that Microsoft dug themselves in, and long before Windows 10, and instead of doing anything to dig themselves out of it, they just dragged everyone else down.
It solves the problem -- nobody's claiming it doesn't -- but it's not something that should be defended for technical or usability reasons, it's the worst solution that happens to still work, more or less.
Users are so used to be annoyed that updates disrupt UX, Microsoft isn't an especially bad actor here. In the end, users tend to disable updates as a response which is bad for security and makes vendors force them to update.
Maybe not "improving" UX with every release would be a solution but there are very few companies that stick with their UX for many years, redesigns are way too easy to sell as a new feature.
Should mandatory reboots every Sunday at 12 PM be introduced in a future Windows update? I mean, someone else has done it before. If you do it every second Sunday it's even better, Microsoft wouldn't be an especially bad actor here.
The fact that other companies are even worse doesn't make this any better. For any program that has a bug, I guarantee there are thousand other programs with even worse bugs. Pointing fingers and returning EWONTFIX may fly for some FOSS projects, where maintainers can at least claim that if you want a fix in open-source software that you didn't pay for you should fix it yourself, but it's a pretty ridiculous stance if you have paying customers.
Also I have a huge problem with so much of this crap needing a reboot. Reengineer the damn thing so it doesn't in 99% of cases.
Do I control my computer or not? If I do then I should be able to control what happens when.
But they should do much better QA and not brick anyone's PC ever, and absolutely NOT ship anything which isn't strictly security-related in this undeferrable-unskippable security patches channel.
http://forum.tabletpcreview.com/threads/fall-creators-update...
and there's no way for me to use my machine as I purchased it (Samsung Galaxy Book 12 bundled w/ a Staedtler Noris Digital Stylus) and I've had to roll back an un-asked for upgrade since, the bottom line is Microsoft needs to completely decouple the OS layer where the security updates occur, from the UI layer.
If I pay for a system with an active stylus, I don't want it to be dumbed down to an 11th touch input which scrolls and won't select text or interact w/ the system as I've been accustomed to since Windows for Pen Computing.
That means you have been spared. For me "getting burned" means endless boot loops and reinstalling windows. Windows updates have bricked my system on every version of windows so far. Windows Vista, 7, 10. Their updates all suck.
Yes, I'm one of those "stupid" people who installed updates as soon as possible. No more bullshit. I'm using Linux now.