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Comment by timetraveller26 | Hacker News Reader

Windows XP installation process seemed something similar.

I remember I was blown away the first time I installed from an ubuntu live cd.

I installed from a couple of graphical CDs around 2008 (... how did I even burn that first CD?) ... then shortly after that Linux finally made full-resolution TTYs work by default and I used text mode thereafter. Usually via `mini.iso` (since I install rarely, start with a small base system, and like not starting with out-of-date packages).

I'm trying not to have a panic attack that "Windows 98" unambiguously counts as retrocomputing now though.

> I'm trying not to have a panic attack that "Windows 98" unambiguously counts as retrocomputing now though.

Oh you can totally go up to Windows XP for this denomination. Some would argue you may even go to 7.

Windows 10 is 9-10 years old and nobody ever cared or will ever be nostalgic about Windows 8 which is 12 years old so it’s not unreasonable to consider anything before that, "Retro".

> Some would argue you may even go to 7.

This is highly subjective, but I'd consider Windows 7 as retro at this point. As of 2024, Windows 7 is 14 years old. Windows 95, for instance, was already 14 years old the year when Windows 7 was released (2009). And Windows 95 was already seen as "retro" by that time.

I guess it's more than Windows 7 and Windows 10/11 share a lot in common in terms of their architecture, which programs run on them etc.

I am typing this on Windows 7 and lots of programs e.g. utorrent still produce new versions which run fine on Windows 7, so I'm thinking many of the older Windows APIs are still in use and haven't changed much.

Whereas Windows 95 vs Windows 7 are very different architecturally with one being clearly superior to the other, and also Windows 95 was at the start of its series and got more mature with Windows 98 etc. and Windows 7 was already mature.

I really can't believe Windows 10 is 10 years old and is still a heaping pile of trash. I'm so glad I switched to Mint 3 years ago after being pissed at Windows 10 for 3 years.

The only thing keeping me on Windows really was gaming, and all of that works perfectly for me thanks to Steam.

Is it really that bad? It doesn't have my preference either, but I've never really understood why people think it's that bad. Especially with Windows 11, it's honestly a nice visual improvement over 10 imo. The fact that it's spyware is a different discussion, I'm mainly talking about usability and stability here.

I still use 10 every day. I think detractors are mostly annoyed that its terminal facilities are still subpar out of the box (even with Windows Terminal).

> I think detractors are mostly annoyed that its terminal facilities are still subpar out of the box (even with Windows Terminal).

All the spyware, forced updates and restarts causing loss of work forcing you to wrestle your own computer into submission via tweaking a plethora of knobs and levers that MS subverts with updates.

But terminals...

I restart once a month, when compulsory updates are rolled out, and it's hardly a sacrifice if user programs are half-decent (i.e. sessions are restored, something every good browser or editor can do these days).

As for spyware and subverted preferences, Apple does it worse; and many Linux updates will carelessly break DE stuff too... so it's all much of a muchness to me.

You can set "Active Hours" to include up to 18 hours of the day effectively limiting forced restarts to whenever you are sleeping. They also only seem to happen when you leave the computer idle. Combine this with hibernate and you can delay an update indefinitely.

It is still annoying to deal with but manageable especially on single boot machines.

> Is it really that bad?

Yes! YES.

> it's honestly a nice visual improvement over 10 imo

O_O

Good hypothetical gods.

Long term Windows user here, before I defected to Linux (supplemented with Mac OS X) in about 2002. I started on Windows 2.01 in 1988.

The best version of Windows ever was 2000, and it's been accelerating downhill since then. The last version that was pleasant to use, and the best-looking, was Windows 7. Win8.0 brought in the flat look that destroyed all visual appeal. Win 8.1 reinstated a broken crippled copy of the Start menu.

Win10 formalised that and it was minimally usable.

Now 11 is the one that I simply cannot bear to use at all.

Broken taskbar, glamorised into uselessless, pinned at the bottom when it should be at the side. Fitt's law making it easy to find the Start menu in a corner, a big easy target, broken: it now moves around floating somewhere left of bottom centre. It has advertising in it, in a paid product! WTAF? Ribbons everywhere, destroying the usability of the world-beating Explorer UI that the entire industry copied. The return of the deeply useless desktop widgets. The b0rked up MS web based video-conferencing tool is always there, always open, although I never ever use it. It constantly nags me about low free space in my never-used OneDrive, and I can't turn it off.

It is a horrible broken sh1tshow of an OS, the end of a proud dynasty.

I am really seriously shocked to find anyone might prefer it.

> I am really seriously shocked to find anyone might prefer it.

Prefer it? Not really. The core issue is they keep changing the GUI metaphors. Now at this point if you click on the right program you may see stuff from win3.11 all the way up to win11. With some GUI's stuck in 'the window is a max of 640x480 mode' and is crap to use on a even semi recent computer. Then is as tradition MS moves junk around into non logical places. Even the task manager has had junk moved around for no real reason and it really does not look better or worse than the win10 version it was however an 'ok' improvement upon the old win9x style.

The win8 debacle was them not testing it on users and thinking everyone would have a touch tablet for windows?! It shows. Win9x and WinXP you can see they did their usability studies. Then just decided to not do it anymore. Discoverability is terrible, usability is skewed across at least 7 different windows idioms and things you are used to doing just randomly disappear and reappear somewhere else (if you are lucky). Then tools are deprecated and replaced with new shiny but do the exact same thing but not quite and usually surrounded by techno bable. Just fix the old ones and update it please. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/deprecat...

The only reason I still use it is I am fairly committed to this eco system. Moving to another one is possible but not something I really want to do. Just upgrading a computer is a painful thing for me to do at this point much less changing to another OS. It gets more and more tempting as WINE gets better and better.

> Moving to another one is possible but not something I really want to do. Just upgrading a computer is a painful thing for me to do at this point much less changing to another OS.

At some point the pain of moving will probably be less than the pain of these constant borkedness-upgrades.

And quite possibly that point is already somewhere in your past.

I use all 3 of these systems usually many times a month. My biggest complaint is junk moving around for no real good reason. Changing OS's makes that issue much worse. plus the fun of finding software that I use to get things done may or may not work anymore. I use some software that has not had updates in 15 years...

I only tolerate Windows 11 on my gaming machine because of Open Shell https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu

Honestly, I work with MacOS daily and very often on Linux. I use my Windows PC for gaming.

The UX for windows 7, 10 and 11 is literally the same for me except for some details. I press start and type a query and hit enter as soon as I see what I need appearing (i.e. immediately). I don't really care where that menu appears and I prefer my task bar on the bottom. Yes it looks a bit different across versions but it's not something I cannot get used to.

> Especially with Windows 11, it's honestly a nice visual improvement over 10 imo.

You gotta be joking.

IMO, Windows 11 is trying desperately to look like MacOS, which is probably the greatest bug Microsoft has ever introduced into Windows besides EternalBlue and MS08-067.

Microsoft is completely ignoring a huge market segment that chooses Windows because it's not MacOS.

Windows 7 with the Classic theme was hands-down the best Windows UI. The modern shift to flatness and hiding information/options is terrible UX. It absolutely destroys discoverability when it's not clear what elements are interactable. But it looks "clean", I guess, so somehow people prefer it.

The modern shift to flatness and hiding information/options is terrible UX. It absolutely destroys discoverability

Yes, but they're adding "helpful" hint dialogs that clutter the screen to compensate that loss of discoverability, so it's all good.

I know a guy who actually liked all the Metro nonsense. I'm sure he's nostalgic about Windows 8 these days. Not me though.

The folk over at Retrocomputing Stack Exchange disagree: https://retrocomputing.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1155/278

> For one, it still has about half a percent desktop share (60+% in Armenia). While this may sound small, it's still a huge number of everyday users — not to mention all the appliances, kiosks and other control systems running XP.

Per Statcounter, XP makes up 0.39% of desktop Windows machines now, which is more than Windows 8. I'm not sure what to conclude from that.

Windows 8.1 and 10 were free upgrades from 8 with identical system requirements and similar performance on supported hardware.

Windows Vista was a paid upgrade from XP with increased system requirements and poor performance on low-end supported hardware.

You might have ordered the CD! It was possible to order free installation disks of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and more

I was blown away when the Windows XP installation process required me to find a 3.5" floppy for storage drivers.

on my case, I need to install Windows 3.1 and then update to 95 and then update to 98. Windows 95 and 98 update editions

I remember discovering that you could do a fresh install of XP or 98SE on a blank drive from CD from the upgrade media.

At some point it would eject and ask you to put in the Windows you were upgrading from, and you could just put the same CD back in and it happily counted it.

Because on PC, the FDC is probably the only storage component you could be sure to address at one time.

because early pc's often completely ran of floppy disks as hdd's were expensive

XP wasn't that early. IDE worked out of the box. But if you had a RAID setup or something else that needed a driver (early SATA?) you could load the driver there

By the time XP was released no one ran their systems off floppies. A floppy was still the most common removable medium, though.

This process was super cumbersome since floppy disks were well on the way out even when XP was introduced and by the end of its life they were gone.

Floppy is the only universal driver the installer can count of having for storage media, besides the media it installing itself. I always thought it would be smarter if this process allowed you to insert a CD temporarily in the same drive keeping the installer in memory.

Windows XP required a minimum of 64 MB of memory. The installer must not only fit in that space, it must be able to run at the same time. Not an impossibility, but a much taller order than running the same/a previous version of the OS directly off the disk.

I have definitely used OS installers that allowed/required CD swaps, though. Maybe Ubuntu at one point? Now that's a slick setup process. Opening Firefox to read the orange site while your OS installs on the same computer is a great trick.

Back when NT 3.1 and 4.0 were mainstream, and where this storage driver on floppy process originates from, absolutely.

By the time XP rolled around, CDROMs were common place.

NT always installed from CDROM. The floppy loading process is because all platforms then could be relied upon to have some form of floppy from which you could install whatever custom HAL.DLL and storage driver for your specific controller that wasn't included in install media, for example any kind of HBA that was newer than your OS release.

The older style alternative was to wait for special "hardware update" release of the operating system you wanted to install.

Yes, I said that. Storage drivers needed to reside on floppy. I never said anything about NT not installing from CD.

I've installed NT4 god knows how many times. I'm very familiar with the process.

ah, it wasn't clear to me, so I just wanted to point out exactly what the floppy was supposed to pass to the system.

NT4 was magical, I remember reading on the jewel case "for 386, Pentium Pro, MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha" or something like that, and the instructions on how to boot the installer - with only PC referencing a boot disk (and having done so before ElTorito that was truly magical for me)

Yeah, you had to slipstream in the storage drivers if you had no floppy drive.

> slipstream

The vocabulary that people came up with in a time of Star Trek: Voyager and Fast & the Furious…

I had a floppy drive in my PC for that sole reason since I also had a SATA disk which was a new thing at the time. Later learnt to build a custom CD and include the drivers in it, but it wasn't long then until I switched to Linux anyway.

...not to mention the 'Aaaaarrrgh!!!!' moment I had when finding that the brand spanking new network adapter I had purchased during my student days had no floppy with drivers in the box.

Oh no. The manual stated I could simply go online to find the required drivers on the new-fangled world wide web.

Which, incidentally, was why I had bought the adapter in the first place.

I was blown away when I installed OS X from the internet directly without downloading it and copying to a usb/cd.

Next time I was blown away with installs was when I unbricked my pixel phone from Chrome!

I thought Windows XP's installation process looked just like Windows 2000's? Text mode display and everything, but running the Windows NT kernel.

It used text mode with NT for the first part, then followed up with a Win 9x and Win XP based step 2 and 3 that were themed like the Win XP login screen. Really neat tbh.

There's no Win 9x phase in Win XP setup, of course. :) There's optional DOS phase, then text-mode phase (running NT kernel under the hood, but UI is in VGA text mode), and then finally GUI phase of the setup.

You're absolutely right, I noticed my mistake only when I couldn't edit the comment anymore.

Still, the graphic part with progress bar on left does kinda mimic the 9x installer

My start of my entire interest in IT can essentially be pinpointed to receiving that red CD.

I was 12 and they sent a CD to me in India from the US for free! They have since discontinued the program. But meant a lot to me as a kid

I was blown away when I installed Ubuntu via Wubi. (It wasn't my first time installing Ubuntu, and my first time was much more traditional.)

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