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Comment by coderdude | Hacker News Reader

Although I have a Windows 7 machine sitting next to me, and while I consider Ubuntu to be my primary operating system, I still use XP for much of my work. XP will for a very long time be the OS I most feel at home with. My comfort zone. It reminds me of back in the day when I was clinging onto Windows 3.11 for dear life -- never wanting to upgrade to Windows 95. Memories.

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I avoided vista for similar reasons of not wanting to be alienated, but when I installed the win 7 beta I loved it instantly.

The most visible feature: No more ridiculous searching through the start bar. Everything was just windows-key + some string + enter

windows-key "sub" enter = sublime text is opened

windows-key "ch" enter = chrome is opened

windows-key "control" enter = control panel is opened

Going back to windows XP after using Windows 7 was a nightmare. It felt so unusable.

Should point out that the Win8 start screen still has the behavior, even though the search bar isn't visible at first.

One change is that it groups results. In particular, hit Windows-W if you're specifically searching for a setting.

I've never understood this mindset (though I completely respect your right to have it). Whenever a new version of the OS, or IDE, or whatever tool I'm using comes out, I tend to try to upgrade as soon as possible. For me it's about finding new ways to optimize my workflow. There are almost always improvements to the usability of the product, and once I get used to them I generally feel happy about it ... I'm always trying to find a new comfort zone :)

Some of it is plain-old resistance to change. Much of it has to due with a loss of productivity for a period of time while I get used to what has changed. Sometimes the latest version of my favorite editor contains some change to the UI that I wish had never been made. I always fear there will be a change like when Microsoft switched Office to 'ribbon' toolbars. I completely gave up mastering new versions of Office after that. They threw away years of learning.

I still use Ubuntu 9.x partly because I'm not stoked about the new window manager. Though I'm going to install it anyway because in Ubuntu terms I'm ancient by now and apt-get has become pretty much useless at this point.

> I completely gave up mastering new versions of Office after that. They threw away years of learning.

If you'd stuck with it for even just a couple of months, you'd have rapidly realized that the ribbon UI was much more efficient than the old, menu-based UI. I hated the ribbon UI at first too, but now I don't have any problems with it.

YMMV. I used it every day at work for years. I never got used to it, never fell in love with it.

I love the new Office ribbon, but I always end up using it on underpowered machines and it takes forever to switch between menus on the ribbon. On my desktop, it's wonderful. On my netbook or work laptop, it's a horror.

Well in some cases. We become extremely proficient using a particular tool. I'll admit, the more time I've spent away from using MS Windows, I've really begun to suck when relatives call for support. I have one Windows 7 machine in the house now and I wanted to map a network drive to a share on the Mac. After fighting through all the wonderful wizards in the network control panel, I still could not browse the network. Finally I just said SCREW THIS CRAP. Start->Run->cmd..... net use m: \\server\share /persistent:yes

Screw you Microsoft for making a mundane task so damn difficult....

I find it ridiculous to use an OS that is almost 12 years old but to each their own I guess.

While I agree that there is less and less reason to use XP these days, age alone is a pretty terrible way to judge the merits of an OS.

How old is Linux now?

apple and oranges, mate. linux is not a monolithic release like windows XP. its thousands upon thousands of individual programs pulled together ad hoc and at will. My kernel is less than a few hours old, but my version of some software is 7-8 years old.

XP is receiving less and less support, and the time for when it will stop being supported altogether is coming up fast. Linux on the other hand is being continuously worked on.

A more fair comparison would be to ask if he was still using the same distro without doing any updates from the same time the last update to Windows XP was released(which still isn't even fair because it assumes that the updates solve the exact same thing, which they are clearly not).

Well... The OS I'm using right now traces its roots to the late 60s and early 70s. I use the terminal a lot and that's an interface that was designed for teletypes. My favorite editor, Emacs, is similarly old. Yet, those metaphors are profoundly powerful and enable me to just forget I'm using a computer and focus on my work, which is, to borrow from Google, to teach computers do amazing things.

I find using a GUI ridiculous most of the time, but, like you said, to each its own ;-)

Seriously? Windows 3.11 was a horror compared to OS/2, which had proper multitasking, memory protection, and could even run DOS and Windows as a program for compatibility.

But then, OS/2 was a horror compared to Windows NT 4.0 ;).

Ah, the entire MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco, which I have written about in comments many times, including for example on os2museum.com. Why did it take ten years after Intel introduced the 386 before 32-bit programming became popular?

Being a Mac user myself (now), I enjoy windows XP every time i have to use it. On todays machines, its just snappy as and has a certain bare-bones feel to it. I love that.

Then again, I hate configuring XP, it is a horror.

True. Using XP on a machine from today is actually not so bad. You can fly around the interface with ease.

Flashback to 2003: Dell ships their Precision/Optiplex towers with a base level of 256Megs of RAM. XP will install... but you're going to WAIT if you do something crazy.... like hit the Start button.... And you'd better leave that PC running, cause you do NOT want to have to reboot and wait for the systray to load. God forbid you have Mcaffee or Norton installed....

Assuming you're a developer, why would you have clung to 3.1? NT was available then and was considerably better operating system for development.

I maintain an XP partition for when the corp I work for require mandatory training (ethics, insider trading, workplace safety etc) but there's no way I'd ever consider using it over Ubuntu for development. I suppose if you're coding in python then the underlying os makes little difference, the abstraction level is so high. Personally even in python missing the unix toolset is a primary reason to stick to unix-like operating systems. I couldn't imagine not having sed, awk, grep, vim, wc etc. I am aware of ports and even the Cygwin environment, but it's just a lot easier to skip the whole thing.

Speaking as someone who started his career on hp-ux and since then included probably every major unix distribution both proprietary and open source, having an intimate knowledge of unix has served me well. Windows has finally caught up and (despite still getting the path delimiter wrong) is now a robust and usable operating system. The two worlds have merged, unix added curses, then x, and now looks as pretty as anything else out there, meanwhile windows added multitasking (yield didn't count) and ever wider addressing, a native tcp/ip stack, support for larger drives and so on.

Unlike you I have no good memories of windows 3.11

I wasn't a developer back then. I don't think I started programming until I hit Windows 98 (I was 12 in '98). I prefer developing under Ubuntu. It's a vastly superior environment for most kinds of programming work (a notable exception being game development). IMO Windows is better for web development and that's what I've been working on the most lately so I spend more time in XP for that. Windows 3.11 wasn't a good OS -- I just have happy memories of it because it was what I used when computing was mostly new and unexplored territory for me. That and my only prior experience was DOS.

Doesn't Windows accept forward slashes in most situations?

> yield didn't count

Interestingly enough, I've been using yield in Python for what could be described as cooperative multitasking. Works very well with web workloads, btw.

python's yield and the windows api yield() do quite different things, but at some abstract level, in windows 3.1 the yield() function would let the UI service the main event loop, thus keeping your ui responsive to user activity. yield in python is abstractly similar but returns control along with a reference to the generator. Why I said these are abstractly similar is because in python the yield function saves away the stack frame and restores it upon the next iteration of the generator. In this respect it's similar to windows 3.1 yield because when the event loop comes back to your process, you have a minimal 'stack' consisting of the original hwnd, along with wParam, lParam, where the lParam was a ub4 that could be used for a pointer allowing a larger 'stack frame'.

I know they are completely different. I just thought it was curious that I have been using the same word with completely different meanings in completely different environments to similar results.

3.1/3.11 was what was bundled with almost all store bought computers at that point. Most people weren't out there grabbing up NT 3.51 licenses to do dev work. There were quite a few OS/2 devs around. The hardware support for NT was just craptastic. NT 4.0 got a whole lot better.

The thing for many people was, Visual Basic was the entry point. Or Turbo Pascal in my case. But it was DOS based, so it didn't really matter to have a real 32bit OS under the hood.

I'm a bit curious why you'd never consider Ubuntu for development. At the end of the day, it's all the same if you're doing C/C++/Python/Ruby/Node/PHP. Then again, I've been a Linux fan since Redhat 5.2. (1997ish) I had to use IRIX at work (Graphics animation stuff for TV) and even though it was "unixy" I rarely had to fight the typical unix battles. Same for AIX at my next job... dealing with cell masters and all that crap was an IBM thing, not a unix thing.

I'm a bit curious why you'd never consider Ubuntu for development.

I intended my words to mean the exact opposite of that. Unix for development gets my vote every day.

Also, dev's don't use store bought computer operating systems, they install the best one for the job, which back then was NT. OS/2 was good but nobody else was running it, except Lotus Notes shops.

*edited for typos

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