Aside from security patches, I see nothing that prevents 7 from being used today. Subsequent OSes added nothing useful that I noticed, and a lot of negatives.
Ironically, you may actually be more secure today running 95 than 7, since any modern exploit would be incompatible with it.
Steam is EOLing 7 because Chrome dropped support. No modern hardware manufacturer is going to continue churning out drivers with 7 support.
You're right that it works ok now, but that's rapidly changing.
As for whats better? Who knows. The new MS OSes are tremendously painful to use, personally speaking.
>Ironically, you may actually be more secure today running 95 than 7, since any modern exploit would be incompatible with it.
that's an interesting concept. Reminds me of how prepper types have recently been into MS-DOS machines -- but is 95 all that incompatible? I mean, I guess nothing trendy will run, but a good old-fashioned malicious assembly executable? do they no longer exist in the wild?
I suspect the real reason is Microsoft themselves dropping support for W7. Once that happens you can’t really claim Chrome is a “secure browser” because the underlying OS might be exploited and never patched.
The reason is precisely because it doesn't check for it.
That is: instead of checking for older Windows releases, and using fallback code paths for them, it simply assumes the presence of newer APIs (or that older buggy APIs now work properly). As time goes by, the cost of maintaining these fallback code paths only increases (and in some cases, having to stay compatible with them prevents important enhancements and cleanups), and since they're less tested (because they're only used when running on older operating system releases), they tend to break. As an example from an unrelated project, before they dropped Windows XP support, the fallback code for panic!() in Rust was broken when running on Windows XP (https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/34538).
EDIT: yep, there's already one: https://github.com/Alex313031/chromium-win7
What now?
And almost by definition everything that was available, was all self-contained, because it was all pre-Internet.
Some big problems with that idea are: 1) the machine would probably use a lot of power (unless you got some weird unmaintainable MS-DOS palmtop), 2) if the SHTF where are you going to get parts (especially for an obsolete retrocomputer)?
Practically, it would make far more sense to use Rasberry Pi with a DOS emulator. Then put ten more on a shelf as as your "spare parts." But I'm very skeptical of the use of a computer at all in "prepper" scenarios, so it makes even more sense to just not bother.
Other things that may not be noticeable to most people but matter to others may also have improved, such as audio latency; I don't know how e.g. Pipewire or PulseAudio compares to plain ALSA in terms of that, but at least plain ALSA apparently wasn't enough for audio work back then because there was Jack, and I'm also under the impression that latency and responsivity in general have improved a lot on the kernel level as well, and not just in terms of audio.
Open source graphics drivers have also improved a lot over the years. Perhaps the entire graphics stack has, or perhaps overhauls of the stack have facilitated some of the improvements in the drivers themselves, but I don't have enough expertise to judge that.
Improvements (or degradation) in performance are rarely something that happens evenly across the board.
In that case, I doubt it. You probably couldn't even use all your RAM. Linux back then also supported only a single processor (if it boots at all): symmetric multiprocessing support was added in 1996.
Linux had the recommended API as OSS, alsa, pulse ... In the same time frame FreeBSD just had OSS and it still works pretty well.
On the Mac side I think I'd go up to at least 10.5/10.6 for its native virtual desktop implementation (Spaces) that's actually better than modern Spaces by way of being a 2D grid instead of a single row.
Whoa, the memories to NDISWrapper. And 802.11g
That's a name I haven't heard in a long long time haha
Security patches for Windows 7 are still released each month, you "just" have to download [1] them manually and convince Windows Update service to apply them [2].
[1] https://catalog.s.download.windowsupdate.com/c/msdownload/up...
[2] https://www.deskmodder.de/blog/2019/12/07/windows-7-erweiter...
I'd guess a lot of malware is opportunistic and not really designed to maximize compatibility, so I imagine you're right but I would be curious to hear from someone who actually studies malware.
In a similar (also ironic vein), the lack of modern HTTPS probably also makes Windows 95 "secure" in that it will be inconvenient to use a Windows 95 machine for anything that needs securing.
Edit: It does make me wonder how fast computer viruses and malware goes "extinct." Probably much faster than biological viruses (if that's the right term) since malware doesn't evolve like viruses do.
2. It needs another computer infected with blaster to get infected.
Windows 95, on the other hand, was barely usable. My installation would go down literally every day. Running DOS programs in emulation on a more recent version of Windows is a vastly better experience than running them on DOS ever was.
I think this is pretty rude to the many people who have contributed to Windows in the years gone by. I won't argue that there hasn't been some crappy things added or on the advantages/disadvantages of later Windows versions but there have been plenty of things added since Windows 7. Some I can think off just off the top of my head
* Credential Guard - protection of secrets in the lsass process even from kernel access
* gMSA support - Windows 7 could only use standalone MSA accounts which weren't as useful
* Windows LAPS - now supports encryption and is builtin to the OS
* Schannel improvements - newer cipher suites and TLS protocols (cipher suites in Win 7 are right at the edge of what people might support these days)
* SMB 3 - encryption, compression, better integrity/mitm/downgrade protection over SMB 2
* WSL
* Windows Sandbox
* Windows Terminal - including ConPTY support in the underlying APIs
There's plenty more out there but these are pretty important features for me to have on Windows. Granted some only make sense in a more corporate/domain environment but not all of them.
I just want the window borders easy to grab on a high resolution and a sensitive mouse, and no latency when I activate a program in the task bar. I want no ads in the start menu and no telemetry. I want an operating system doing work in the background, and not an anonymous entity called "we":
https://www.itmagazine.ch/imgserver/artikel/Illustrationen/2...
Re-reading your list of improvements it doesn't impress me either for a decade of work. And I don't think people in this thread are particularly 'rude', i.e. they're not expressing what they really think about Windows 10+ ...
Yes, there was some tearing when you played several AVI videos at once on the desktop, but anything else would have been SGI level sourcery and black arts and not expected.
Windows NT 4 felt faster than Windows NT 3, but NT4 felt jittery. NT 3 never slowed down, it was like cream.
Once I saw Windows NT 3 on a trade-show on Alpha CPUs. That felt just like the future arrived, an evil smirking corporate future which laughed at whatever I knew about optimization, 68k assembler, blitter objects and sound chips.
The future was here, and it was here to tell me that none of that arcane juggling mattered anymore. The only thing that matters from now on is raw speed, of the core and the bus.
>Windows 95 is reasonably fast in performance, and is not compromised by the arguably frivolous animation and eye candy features in Windows 98 and newer versions.
>I prefer to have as much native compatibility as possible with DOS applications such as older games I own.
Back to before they implemented the ability for apps to lock your clipboard.
(Ever notice how sometimes you ctrl+c and you end up pasting something you thought you copied over? yeah...)
i really hate this modern trend of every single good desktop os telling you what to do, not allowing you to remove stuff, banners that ignore settings, ads, terrible uis, etc
That said I'm going to have to bite the Win10 bullet soon as several applications are phasing out Win7 support, Chrome being the main one right now. It's disappointing as having grown up with Windows since 3.1 I'm still partical to the compact classic theme (even despite the old grey colour). I still find the Win10 and up UI to be a waste of space.
Oh well... progress?
So the blog post is not so out of the ordinary.