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I completely agree. People fondly remember XP, but Windows 2000 was peak Windows. It almost looks like a real operating system :)

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I agree. People often forget that early releases of XP was basically just a re-skinned 2000 but with a few tweaks for games and fonts. The problem was those skins ended up doubling the memory and CPU requirements. In fact XP was a pretty bloated OS on hardware from 2002. It wasn’t until much later into the life of XP when hardware caught up and newer service packs added enough to the OS to really differentiate it from 2000. But for the first few years of the life of XP, it was an embarrassment.

People also often forget that Windows XP was the first Windows to have WGA, which was fairly controversial. Windows 2000 was the last Windows version you could truly own, instead of having to beg Microsoft for permission every time you reinstalled or replaced hardware.

Windows XP volume licensing still gave customers full ownership without online activation.

I remember a friend used magic jelly bean to pull keys off every pc he came across to stockpile new volume keys he could use after the initial key that went public got banned for windows updates.

I used to run around the big tech shops with my phone and took photos of the Windows Licence sticker (WinXP and later Win7) to have enough keys for my experiments.

I preferred XP with the classic theme, some of its utils were improved.

Which utils?

I think XP introduced the “switch user” option. But I couldn’t find much in XP to justify the additional drain on memory and CPU. However I might not have needed the same utils you came to prefer (Every user is different).

XP was the first that shipped the RDP server in the base... before that you pretty much needed to go up to one of the server SKUs of the OS, or buy third party remote access software. It also added a bunch of newer parts of 802.11 that were necessary for many wifi networks -- particularly corporate ones.

A lot of the WiFi improvements came in later service packs rather than the first edition.

I thought a Windows 2000 supported RDP? I’ve definitely RDPed onto 2000 servers. Was an RDP server not included in the ‘Professional Edition’? Or maybe I used VNC on those 2000 systems and forgotten it wasn’t RDP?

Yeah, I don't think RDP was supported at all on the workstation sku (though it _could_ be made to work w/o support or a legal license) and I think may have been an additional license cost on the base server, then only included on advanced server.

I’d forgotten how annoying it was/is picking between all the different Microsoft releases of the same OS.

Honestly, can't remember. Guessing I think it was the task manager and command prompt niceties. A few extra settings in the control panel.

The firewall appeared in SP2 right? Couldn't do without that today. And easy to set the GUI to classic mode.

Fortunately we had a corporate VLK copy so never had to worry about activation.

SP2 wasn’t released until 3 years into the life of XP. Windows 2000 would have been roughly 5 years old by that point and hardware would have caught up with XPs requirements somewhat so upgrading to XP was a more reasonable choice.

I was talking more about when XP was new.

The Command Prompt tweaks were a 2000 improvement IIRC but I do recall Task Manager and Control Panel receiving updates in the first edition of XP.

Not taking anything away from your core point though. There definitely were tweaks in the early releases of XP that many would have liked. It just wasn’t worth the extra CPU and memory footprint for me and by the time SP2 had arrived I’d switched to Linux full time so never bothered to upgrade from 2000.

I’d go even further: XP was 2000 with some UI elements and ideas that came from Windows Me. That grouping in the control panel only made it harder to find what you needed.

Indeed. The good XP is the SP3.

Why do you think Windows isn’t a real OS? It successfully powers I’d guess hundreds of millions of devices.

To be fair, Linux powers quite literally billions of devices

And a hundred million isn't enough to be real?

It is a joke to say that it is not a real OS.

But if you want to argue: You could say that a 'real OS' must be 'mostly POSIX-compliant' [1]. That way most other OS (Linux, MacOS, iOS) but not Windows would be included in your definition of a 'real OS' ;-)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX#Mostly_POSIX-compliant

I wouldn’t get why POSIX is the only way to design an OS.

It’s not. It’s an API. IBM’s zOS has a POSIX-compliant Unix subsystem and it has absolutely nothing to do with Unix under its hood.

It is not.

But that way you could pretend to have an objective definition of the term 'real OS' and exclude Windows while including most other major OS.

Windows is mostly posix compliant as it had a POSIX subsystem until 2000, then it had Windows Services for UNIX/Interix and now days has Windows Subsystem for Linux.

regardless of anything else, windows is older than posix... so posix should arguably be windows compliant :P

And those Windows boxes wouldn’t be able to do much without the ones Linux powers, but that’s beside the point: Windows is an OS. It’s quirky and feels weird for the Unix crowd, but a lot of it will be oddly familiar to the VMS elders.

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