Hacker News Reader

Comment by rafaelturk | Hacker News Reader

Tempting.. Windows XP, best OS ever created, in MacOS keyboard combined with M2 legendary battery life....

> with M2 legendary battery life....

Is this true when running non-MacOS? A lot of the things that make a system blow through battery are OS-related things. XP wasn't exactly designed with battery life in mind.

Heh, I once wrote a script that disabled pretty much every darn service I could get away with on XP, and ended up with an estimated 7 hours (or so, it's been a while) of offline battery life on an Eee PC 901...

It definitely won't be true when you're emulating an x86 OS, regardless of other power saving features.

Do you just like Windows XP's UI, or do you really like the OS?

Not GP, but I think NT as a whole is great OS. It likely has the largest and oldest software repository out there, excluding phone app shovelware.

I think I'm not as fond of XP's UI as I am fond of the early NT UI as a whole. The UI was relatively the stable from 95 to Windows 7 with the classic theme. I adore this UI and I'm glad to see it still carries on in modern projects like SerenityOS.

But at the same time, we have high DPI displays now and the classic UI doesn't scale well, so I'm happier to have a flat high res UI than a tiny classic UI these days.

Windows 2000 was peak Windows, I agree 100%.

>Not GP, but I think NT as a whole is great OS. It likely has the largest and oldest software repository out there, excluding phone app shovelware.

The sheer history and depth of the Win32 library of programs is the reason Windows continues to be dominant in the desktop space.

Just the other week we had a thread about how Windows 11 will happily run Win32 programs from 30 years ago. Kudos to Microsoft, their dedication to backwards compatibility is exceptional.

> Just the other week we had a thread about how Windows 11 will happily run Win32 programs from 30 years ago. Kudos to Microsoft, their dedication to backwards compatibility is exceptional.

Yes, that is indeed a strong point. They place great emphasis on upgrading your Windows being a no-brainer, instead of a potentially risky decision.

(As developers we dislike the ugly technical compromises that brings. But the consumer benefit is definitely there.)

Btw, the Linux kernel people are also quite fanatical about not breaking user space. But the rest of the Linux ecosystem ain't.

See https://www.computerworld.com/article/2821929/torvalds-patch...

> Btw, the Linux kernel people are also quite fanatical about not breaking user space. But the rest of the Linux ecosystem ain't.

Yes, even for basic end users. If I'm just using Ubuntu, the entire GUI layout changes randomly over the years for no reason. And we have Linux workstations at work that I hardly use; one day, they all changed desktop environments because of some chain of incompatibilities involving X and Wayland, idk idc.

Best UI..

SP2 to be precise, was the best.

I kept using XP SP2 way, way later than I was supposed to. Everything later was plain annoying.

Was there anything wrong with SP3?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com