Windows 2000 Modernization Guide
w2k.phreaknet.org
w2k.phreaknet.org
I would gladly pay for Windows if it wasn't a hot pile of incomplete and disjointed consumer-focused noise.
I have an i7 3770k box that I repurpose occassionally for random projects. It runs Linux really well, but Win10 is an absolute dog. I can't even imagine Windows 11? Overclocked, 16gb RAM, SSD's in RAID... it doesn't make sense.
At work, another team is in charge of point of sale and other similar devices running Windows IOT or whatever it's called now, and apparently licensing is completely different from the "regular" desktop and server installs.
Now, Windows is made up of "layers" - Onecore, OnecoreUAP, ClientCore etc.
Desktop, Embedded, Server, Xbox are just one of these layers now.
Just leave me WSL and Winget. Put the control panel back in one window.
Most of that other junk can go - UI framework of the day, Cortana, Bing in my start menu, Windows Store, enhanced error reporting? Don't need it. Don't want it.
There are reasons I run Xfce on Linux desktops. Fast, has the features I need (which isn't much) and the features it has work reliably. I'm looking for a way to move and switch windows and launch programs. Everything else is just distraction.
You are not expected to. Most people believe the new features in proprietary operating systems are for them. Sure, a few of them are (although in the case of Windows 11 they might not be obvious). But today most of these are aimed at extracting value from the existing position - hence tons of adware on a fresh copy of your OS.
And that’s about it. It is completely infested with low quality apps, almost as bad as the Kindle App Store.
In Linux/BSD it always blows my mind that you can do "crazy" configuration changes like bring a LACP/LAGG interface online with essentially one command and zero downtime, while on Windows you will peck around 23 different UI's like a chicken in the sandbox only to break yourself.
If they refactored everything in a single update, which I believe they are very capable of doing, I can't imagine how much shit they would get from users and businesses, look how much fuss was generated over the start menu.
By doing the snail pace transitions they can rebuff anything with a "you had years to get used to it / it's been there for ages and we didn't hear anything about this". I just don't have a clue of why they decided control panel needed to go, settings is absolutely subpar.
Or just make good software. Do it right the first time. Accept responsibility when things go south. If your mission is righteous the rest will fall into place.
Whenever something is brought to that forsaken app, the old functionality is simplified and changed. Sometimes everything makes it through to the new app, sometimes breadcrumbs are left in the back of the couch, meaning you can click on stuff and end up in XP land.
With this current strategy, I do not believe Windows will ever have one single UI for its settings like macOS.
- the bold window title font is wrong
- the window border chrome is too thick
- the border around the desktop icon text is too big and off center
All together it gives me an "uncanny valley" feeling.
WINE and Proton have made the situation better. My desktop remains Windows and I more or less treat it like a game console. It runs games, some recording/modelling software, Adobe Reader for some terrible gov't PDFs, and my wife's cutting machine. The rest are my Linux distro choice of the week.
We get closer all the time.
I've got a laptop that's only a CPU generation younger than yours, and Windows 10 for general use works okay for me. I don't see a great overall difference in performance when compared to Gnome on Linux. Do you use a lightweight desktop or something on Linux?
(FWIW, I run Fedora for the majority of the time, and I've been using mostly Linux for nearly 20 years, at times exclusively, so this isn't Windows advocacy.)
Aside: I was planning to switch to Linux too, but apparently this CPU/chipset is "too new" for Ubuntu to work, so I'm stuck on Windows for a few more months.
i7 to i9 isn't an age thing. The i9 costs almost double the i7 within a single release year.
And the slowness in compiliation isn't a Windows thing, it's a heavy workload thing. Windows is slow because of IO, not CPU speed.
I was mostly interested in the perceived differences between Windows 10 and present-day mainstream Linux desktops because I don't generally feel a great difference between those.
My previous Windows 7 device with similar specs was slower on compute tasks, but “felt” faster, and was running all of the same corporate bullshit that the new box runs.
It’s not the hardware, because Linux runs better in a VM.
It sounds like its probably more because of all the corporate bullshit. Does that Linux VM also run all that corporate bullshit?
Also how fast is this SSD for reference - windows seem to absolutely chug on my mother's laptop despite it actually being fairly snappy when the data is loaded into memory.
I have a new-ish ultrabook laptop with a mobile Intel processor that dual-boots Windows 10 and Linux with the Openbox desktop environment. On Linux, doing Lisp development with Emacs and SLIME hovers around 3-5% CPU usage. Windows 10, with no applications open, idles between 8% and 15%. As a result, I get significantly worse battery life in Windows than in Linux (despite the opposite situation usually being true due to better power-management (drivers) in Windows) - 7 hours vs 10.
(Windows 10 also uses more RAM doing nothing than Linux+Openbox does, but that's not as much of an issue for me - RAM does nothing if it's not being used, while a CPU not in use directly translates to longer battery life)
There's a number of background tasks that Windows will run periodically (update checks, search reindex, etc) so if you don't regularly boot into Windows it'll end up running those soon after you boot up. Those should really only take a few minutes to complete so it should drop back down to a normal idle level within a short period even if you don't boot into Windows often. But if you're checking CPU load only a few minutes after boot when you haven't booted in a while, its not surprising to have some amount of CPU activity in Windows.
Its really strange you experience that much CPU load idle. I have an i5 3350P running Windows 10. I use it for Steam Home Streaming, Emby, and a few other tasks. Normally its CPU load is <5%. Having your machine use 15% CPU at idle is definitely not normal, I imagine there's something other than just Windows churning away.
I've always attributed it to Windows Defender and all it's subcomponentes or sister components (Credential Guard, ...)
From my perspective it appears to be an OS designed by MBAs with no understanding of how software is designed or refactored. It very much feels like there was heavy handed too down instructions without any input taken from those building.
That was a master troll move by Apple...
It's easier to say "only works with Windows 11" than "requires TPM 2.0 computer".
Also, maybe they want to support Android apps with DRM and wish to do it via TPM. Android apps support is only for Windows 11.
So at that point it's just safer to use an older combination of OS and software that you know has been working fine.
I've upgraded the CPU to a Xeon E5-2667 v2 (basically a 4th gen i7) to get PCIE 3 for my GPU. I've installed Windows 11 on it for my curiosity / gaming needs. It works very well, I'd say it's smoother / snappier than Win 10, but I'm wondering whether that's just some tweaked animation delays.
It's undeniably better than on some 8th gen i5u + NVMe I have on a work laptop - which is officially supported!
I don't follow / automatically agree on second part. I have three ThinkPads with i5-2520M that my family and I use daily with windows 10. Email browsing word excel etc. Some light games, lots of photo browsing and sorting and minimal editing via acdsee. If windows 10 is lagging in what is clearly a superior system from specs perspective, something doesn't work right. My first suspicion is ssds in raid as there's a myriday ways to get that wrong, but who knows?
My main laptop is ThinkPad t25 which is basically t470 with traditional keyboard layout. 512mb ssd. No room for secondary HDD.
My main desktop is an aging beast - amd fx8350 and rx470 8gb. Bunch of ssd and HDD drives at any given point :).
Speaking of storage, synology 918+ as Nas fwiw.
Bunch of other computers around such as ThinkPad e545 and e580, plus an intel nuc around every tv. None of it fancy anymore, I have no time left for complex vlans or VMs or breakable OS's, but computers are my hammer so there's plenty around :-)
Photos? Tons of frameworks for scanning my photos and adding 3d custom emojis to Messages? They also lead the way for vulnerabilities like the latest NSO.
What if we could just have a bare OS with all core frameworks and let users decide what to install.
If nothing else for reducing the attack surface.
My friend, https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux
It's incredibly subjective.
>> Arch
> but systemd
Gentoo still "officially" supports openRC, if "systemd" is a pain point, as it is for me and several of my datacenter populating friends.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/234111/ca...
And then use group policy etc to disable it. It worked/works for me.
Back then, the enhancement community was huge. Every Android version since then has seen fewer and fewer enhancements because they just keep getting broken over and over again by some new OS requirement. New versions require you to turn off permanent notifications for every application that needs to do anything in the background (signal, wire, email, etc.); I can no longer modify the status bar because the developer for that mod gave up after Android 8 and I can't find a new one; I can't slide over the notification bar to adjust brightness (useful when the screen is too dim to see the brightness slider); the concept of just returning an empty contacts list instead of breaking the app by denying a permission is gone; etc.
Just look at the number of workarounds OsmAnd needs to apply and tell users about to keep track recording working, you can ctrl+f for nearly every android version and find remarks like "No good solution found for now. Current mitigation is we do not use AlarmManager wake-up, instead keep GPS always on": https://docs.osmand.net/en/main@latest/osmand/troubleshootin... (Of course, Google has no problem keeping location history for you. Only if you want to store it locally...)
As a developer I will concede that many of the new APIs are so much nicer than the ones available for Android 4 so I do understand people drop support for it.
Another thing is that battery drain of garbage apps is a real problem, but similar to the Win2k style OS proposal, this isn't meant for the mainstream. The mainstream can have their OS manage things for them, but as a power user that knows how to run 'htop' I'd really rather just manage my own device by myself.
android 8+ do massively fancy trick .. but it feels as sexy as noisy
This OS has that look and feel of Windows 2000
The drivers that never worked correctly were industrial and "weird" things like radio programmers, stereoscopic headsets, and limited run PCI[e] cards and specialized USB peripherals, but most of those had issues with XP 32-bit as well, and never worked past XP, in general.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100718055750/http://findarticl...
XP's design choices were... rather unique.
But what it was is consistent. Every program looked like it belonged on the system, except for some wacky video or audio players that consisted of text rendered on top of bitmaps.
From the bootloader to the web browser, early Windows felt like it was all part of a single experience. Windows XP provided the same, except it was around for so long that the ecosystem around it tried harder and harder to mimick different operating systems. Win2k was right in the sweet spot.
I'd love for Windows 11 to have a Win2k mode available. Keep the impressive kernel improvements, the virtualization based security, the WSL system, and just give me a UI that doesn't take a second to render the start menu.
Even modern Windows explorer is quite usable (without the menu redesign), it's honestly just the shell and everything that you'd call an "app".
The general public can take their candy story Fisher Price Windows if that's what they want, full of gaudy colours and fancy effects.
I really enjoy Windows 7 though. It's fast, very little bloat, and modern enough that pretty much any Windows software works on it. Also, something about the Aero theme feels warm and cheerful to me. I can't replicate the feeling on Linux or Windows 10, and it saddens me.
Yeah? Well, y'know, that's just like, ah, your "opinion" man...
(use of the word "honestly" like this is a massive turn-off)
Jeez at the beginning of the day I just want to write code with only the distraction of measuring my work against user requirements. shouldering aside Guilt tripping adware all day harshes my mellow, upsets my flow, makes me waste my energy daydreaming of revenge hacks (fantasies of course, I’m very mellow at heart, but with a wellspring of ideas definitely NotSafeForPublicAttribution).
https://www.prajwaldesai.com/turn-off-windows-10-microsoft-c...
I'm in a similar situation.
I have to fire up the company ThinkPad every other month or so. It's amazing to me what is permitted in an so-called "Enterprise" edition of Windows 10.
The part I find most annoying is the way Windows 10 automatically connects to my wifi, even when the setting to not permit auto-connect is enabled. I didn't care when I was in the office, but now that I'm in a work-from-home situation, no, Windows, you don't get to connect to my LAN whenever you feel like it.
After checking and re-checking the setting probably a dozen times, but it persisting in auto-connecting to my router, I had to ban the ThinkPad at the router level. Now on those occasions when I use the machine, I have to remember to un-ban it from my network for the duration of the task, then re-ban the machine.
Microsoft (and my billion-dollar healthcare company) are working with a definition of "Enterprise" with which I was previously unfamiliar.
Have you tried disabling the network adapter? That's something it won't try to revert... (and I'm almost tempted to add "for now", given all the other abusive behaviours they've introduced.)
Honestly would have been frustrated if it was a politician I actually liked.
But I agree it's absolutely nuts that advertisements and "suggested content" is included as standard without a very clear prompt on first use saying "you can turn this off if you like" -- or perhaps a "set this PC up as a work machine" choice in installation that automatically shuts the noise off and adds the Windows classic theme rather than the weird start-metro hybrid we have now.
I'm not sure I'd pay any price for modern Windows 2000, but I'd certainly sing its praises which is something I've never been able to do.
I'd pay to remove the 2021 social media/marketing BS, sure.
But there's no reason for them to do that. They can instead offer Windows VIP down the line as a subscription-model recurring payment to keep ads and other shit away.
This isn't anything specific to Microsoft, this is what any company that wants to maximise its profits would do.
Doing the right thing isn't "what's right for the consumer" any more, it's "what's right for everybody" -- but where "everybody" is defined as the provider, its shareholders, and perhaps whatever subset of all customers contribute the most to the bottom line.
Has to benefit the provider, "they're running a business not a charity" -- an innocuous line of dialogue from the movies that can be used to justify almost any shitty, consumer-fucking decision you can think of, because we're capitalists, it's 2021, if you're not squeezing every dollar out, you're not doing it right.
Except people in the movies who said shit like that were typically gangsters or at least crooks. But they're the heroes now. The notion that they did wrong never really stuck -- they made lotsa money, you can't blame them. But they got caught, so work hard, run after that dream, they got the idea right -- money is what you want, just gotta be smarter than those silly gangsters.
Do it cleverer -- make your racket legit. It's not extortion, it's a subscription. It's not protection, it's premium. It's not more than they can afford, it's almost too little, they don't even know it's gone.
And yet, this is what we have to put up with. If it was free I’d understand…
To acquire an Enterprise license legitimately, you need to go through a reseller and pad the order with inexpensive client access licenses to reach the 5-license minimum order.
Right now, the trend is all about the recurring revenue. Not just Windows, every bloody product is that way. It doesn't matter what bridges they burn in making a horrible customer experience, as long as they can show Wall Street a chart saying it returns 35 cents per month per customer in ad/behavioural tracking data sales.
But what happens if we have something that shows that's not a winning strategy? If, say, the Windows Enterprise license at $175 ends up outselling a $100-plus-$50-in-nickel-and-dime-revenue-over-the-next-five-years Windows crammed with bloatware? How would investors respond?
You can't, really. De-Crapifying Windows 10 (and I imagine 11) is a never-ending task.
Doing it manually is exceedingly painful. Doing it even with Scripts is fraught with danger and may result in things just being broken because of stupid dependencies.
And then there's a good chance that you'll find it's been undone with the next Windows update. That chance goes to 100% over the course of a year or so.
Don't think it's necessary to put politician in quotes.
He won his seat for the European Parliament five times before it was abolished and led UKIP, which forced the Conservatives to have the EU referendum.
The older versions of Windows were definitely far "quieter", but I guess MS saw how a lot of average users had installed adware themselves, and thought that they could also profit from bundling it by default.
It's not perfect, but it is wildly better and more stable than the consumer-available versions.
I’ve never bought windows. Except one dell laptop prior to Linux editions.
I don't think you realize that, no, they couldn't.
Then buy an MSDN subscription and use the enterprise or even server editions. You did say "any price" after all.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/min...
I'm sorry, but your cpu isn't supported anymore :P.
[1] https://www.ntlite.com/tutorial-for-creating-and-testing-a-7...
I've been using Windows 10 (previously Windows 7) on an i7-3770 for close to ten years (!). That shouldn't be a slow machine. The only way my system might have an advantage would be the GPU or the 32GB of RAM. Sad to think that big chunk of memory might actually be needed, but, might be worth a try?
There are some things that are easy to get wrong in terms of motherboard setup (memory timings!) even if you're not overclocking. It seems farfetched that those would effect Windows a lot more than Linux, which you said is working fine, but again, it might be something to look at.
Contrary to another commenter, I never noticed Spectre and Meltdown mitigations to cause a real problem, and I did some benchmarking because I was concerned about that.
To pull this off, I see a utility (kind of like Chocolatey) with modules that can be run to disable certain annoyances- and changes that can always be fully reverted if necessary. Create some global modules such as "gaming-only" that removes all the bloat needed except for gaming.
Try this out: download SysInternals ProcMon and run both tools and then compare. You'll see.
One's feature is another's bloatware.
As Joel Spolsky used to say, 80% of the people use only 20% of the features, the problem is that each one of those 80% uses a different 20%.
Further countering your argument - minesweeper, solitaire, and paint are no longer included in Windows. If anything had established itself as staple OS accessory “feature” apps those would qualify.
The counterpoint seems tangental as well. Whether or not something is removed or kept isn't what defines it as a staple feature to a portion of the userbase. Most of the uproar about Windows 11 is things people considered core functionality being remove e.g. local accounts during setup on Home or moving the taskbar away from the bottom of the screen. Also iterations of Solitaire and Paint are still default apps anyways.
You completely miss the point. Candy Crush was never an essential feature of the OS. If removing it will piss off some people such that they have to download it from the App Store, so be it (it is less reasonable to expect people to download individual features into a single app like excel - addons non withstanding). The micropayments comment is not about a feature but pointing out that its inclusion was nothing more than a cynical money grab.
As an anecdote I've removed default apps while cleaning many PCs and gotten more pushback about CandyCrush being missing than Calculator. Regardless of how much more base utility I think Calculator provides personally it doesn't mean others don't find the same base value in an entertainment component, even if it has micropayments or other revenue streams built in or could be a click away in an app store (as any component could be anyways).
Candy Crush teaches you what pay-to-win DLC is.
Eg, I ran Server 2003 (instead of XP), Server 2012 R2 (instead of 8.1), and finally, Server 2016 (instead of Win 10).
Much less bloat. Not sustainable for an enterprise deployment, but for my home use it worked quite well.
When it works. CSGO claims to work on Linux but has stopped working for many months now. There is a fix that includes changing a library but you risk getting banned by anticheat.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/csgo-osx-linux/issues/2659
It has been going on for almost a year.
If you want to game, you should just to dual boot Windows or buy a console.
I was ruthless in tearing out cruft. To me this made the consumer versions seem quicker and more stable. I have absolutely no flight sim use case now for any of the Windows OSes, past or present.
> LTSC, Long-Term Servicing Channel (which was until 2017 branded as LTSB, Long-Term Servicing Branch), is a unique version of Windows 10 Enterprise. Unlike all the other versions of Windows 10, LTSC has zero bloatware and the least amount of telemetry (data being sent back to Microsoft).
A friendly intro can be found on this Reddit wiki:
It's not practical for most people.
Also it's a pain to get Store stuff working. Normally that wouldn't be a big deal but Minecraft Bedrock is a common dealbreaker.
At the moment it's Edge getting shoved down our throats at any opportunity and in some cases it even ignores the "default apps" (looking at you links from the lock screen)
I've also started getting prompts to "restore my web browser" settings as a way to get Edge reset back to the default along with a permanent "restore recommended" banner on the top of the Settings app.
Use Microsoft recommended browser settings: Set the latest Microsoft Edge as your default browser and pin it to your desktop and taskbar. It's the best browser for Windows 10 with enhanced privacy protection.
The "learn more" takes you to https://microsoftedgewelcome.microsoft.com/en-us/privacy and two of the promises are "control" and "respect". It's funny, I don't feel either in control or respected about my choice not to use Edge.
Platform vendors want to shunt you down very specific paths. The interests of platform vendors and developers are not always aligned, and are often diametrically opposed — especially with regards to creating portable code that runs on multiple platforms.
That said, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Core exists, so maybe someone could run the UI from older Windows versions on it.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=reactos%20comments%3E2&sort=by...
I had a few Windows 2000 VMs and they were a joy to use.
Started in seconds - I could have LOADS of snapshots that would only take up a handful of MBs and generally speaking, it was excellent.
Only reason I stopped was because I no longer needed to run that project.
I'm not stuck in the past - I get why things get slower and are more complex... but, sometimes I do wish we could go backwards a little!
All XP-and-older versions of Windows allowed any program to access the hardware directly. Back then, a Win2000 program would need to access the "in" and "out" hardware instructions to talk with gamepads because... well... gamepads were read to directly through hardware instructions.
Don't look at me like that! USB wasn't really that common yet, and there were all sorts of weird specific hardware differences in controllers still. It was a different world. Gamepads were glorified potentiometers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentiometer) and game-ports were just ADC converters controlled by Windows. And assembly language knowledge was much more common too!
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Letting modern software touch the hardware directly like that is a security nightmare. Vista+ forced everyone to write signed device drivers and hide that direct-hardware access behind a layer of APIs (the Windows Driver API).
Today, if your video games touch hardware directly, you at least know about it... and the practice is discouraged (though still widely used for DRM and other such "features").
-------------
In any case, "stripped down" Windows 10 IoT core builds and runs on the Raspberry Pi.
For compatibility with DOS and 16-bit Windows versions, the kernel may emulate I/O access, similar to modern virtual machines. For simple devices, that layer of emulation may be very thin (with some accesses going directly to the hardware), but that isn't a security problem. A simple polled ADC can't do any harm to the system, at worst you get garbage if multiple programs were to use it at the same time.
IIRC, user-mode programs of WinXP (and earlier, including Win2k) were able to directly access these hardware ports. Which meant that WinXP / Win2k had far better latency, leading to obscure hardware bugs to anyone who upgraded from XP -> Vista (or later). Even if you rewrote the program to use Win Vista+ style COM ports, it wasn't good enough.
So a lot of people stayed back on WinXP / Win NT.
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16-bit programs were DOS / segmented mode. Win95 remained compatible. IIRC, Win2k forced you into 32-bit flat-mode programs, which had some security benefits.
But these 32-bit "flat mode" security benefits were not enough, and were still a far cry from the expectations of the modern computer user.
Virtualization was introduced on IBM mainframes in the 1970s, and in a somewhat more limited version has been present in 32-bit x86 operating systems (even Windows 3.x could run several virtual DOS machines at the same time).
Every 32-bit version of Windows still supports running 16-bit programs. Microsoft could have continued supporting 16-bit protected mode even on 64-bit, or even used the newer virtualization features (in place of V86 mode) to run real mode code, but choose not to.
As for the expectations of modern computer users, those that don't know how any of this stuff works probably believe that everything has to get slower, more restrictive, and less backward compatible in the name of Security :(
We're talking about Parallel-Ports here, aka "The Printer Port". Any printer program written "old-school" would have tried to send data to LPT-1, except you have an X-Ray machine sitting there confused at these messages its getting.
The proper technique of printing, is not to directly contact the LPT-1 port and shove data into it... its to talk to Windows's printer spool and interact indirectly.
The user then configures the LPT-1 port: is it to be managed by the printer spool? Or should LPT-1 port be divvyed out to a particular program and reserved through another manner?
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There's absolutely a security concern about random programs sending messages to the hardware. Maybe the OS doesn't have a security issue, but those medical devices could have commands (such as rewriting firmware) sitting on those ports.
You'd want to make sure that only approved programs directly interacted with those kinds of hardware devices... with the protocols that are appropriately specified by the user.
There were a couple of undocumented but well known NT kernel functions to manipulate the task IO permission level (eg Ke386SetIoAccessMap) and there was a commonly used hack/gaping security hole to manipulate these with a 3rd party driver that was built to do nothing except that (probably the most commonly shared one went by the name of GIVEIO.SYS - first presented in Dr Dobbs Journal in the 90s). This would work similarly on Vista and 7 as it would on the older OSes.
Win2k didn’t so much as force you into flat mode as it was a completely different kernel architecture from Windows 98/95 - the “security benefits” include the myriad other ways that NT is an actual multiuser OS vs 98/95 being a glorified DOS extender. The Windows 11 kernel is an NT descendant through 2000/XP and the preceding NT 4/3 releases preceding those.
* The above mentioned driver has even been updated by internets for 64-but Windows https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/hsn/giveio64.zip/readm...
I honestly can't think of any features of Office since Office 2k that I require for my personal use either.
I just don't allow the Windows 2000 virtual machine access to the network.
I've used this program before:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120824125326/http://www.r1ch.n...
Note: It will timeout when it tries to download the database.
If you want to manually patch it yourself, open explorer.exe in a hex editor and edit this:
---
Original: 57 6A 2C 6A 40 C7 44 24 18 01 00
Modified: 57 6A 2C 6A 40 C7 44 24 18 19 00
---
Original explorer.exe MD5: 59cf2b7dced9111f48f51b4b570e672d
Modified explorer.exe MD5: 9ac937ca2217cf5a9b71cd6e9014f0e7
---
Windows will overwrite your changes since it has file protections. You can fix that via:
http://smallvoid.com/article/winnt-wfp.html
If you are curious as to what this changes, you can look at this file in the leaked Win2k source code:
private/shell/explorer/traynot.c line 991
I agree. It's odd knowing the original classic theme still exists in some form in Windows 10 and 11 for compatibility reasons, but there's no way to access it. You can install themes and lookalikes, but it's just not the same.
https://winclassic.boards.net/thread/413/reversibly-enable-d...
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2527154/microsoft--pat...
But there may be others as well.
On a related note: I have an old scanner that I use about once every year. Drivers max out on XP support, so I installed Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs in a VM, which is a stripped down Windows XP. Perhaps someone in the W2k crowd would be happy with WinFLP as an alternative.
The special LTSC edition of Windows has much more sane defaults, less telemetry, and no ads in the start menu.
It’s designed for kiosks, virtual desktops, and for embedded controllers with consistency requirements.
You might miss out on the latest DirectX features and various integrations, but it’ll feel more like Windows 2000.
I do feel like one could also protest bloat and planned obsolescence with a Linux desktop (as long as they aren't running Ubuntu).
Snaps are useful for packaging dependencies that aren't (AND CAN'T in a timely fashion) be provided by the distro.
But I am afraid that they will make snapd mandatory in the 22.04 and I will have to migrate to something else...
As a side note, I’ve been using macOS Sierra as my main OS for a few years now (until quite recently when I switched to Manjaro), and find it works quite well, aside from not being able to run a large chunk of newer software.
The argument is not that 10 is better or even more secure—surely all the added code has to count for something, although the (glaring absence of) security engineering in 2K gives me a sense of vague horror—it’s that running the latest 10 probably makes you substantially faster than the slowest camper, even if it doesn’t make you faster than the proverbial bear.
It's not very useful on today's web but using Legacy Proxy makes it more useful:
https://metalbabble.wordpress.com/2020/12/06/better-web-brow...