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Comment by slt2021 | Hacker News Reader

slt2021

Seriously, Windows 2000 was one of the most stable OS back in the day, rock solid. I used 2000 server as a desktop OS, instead of 98.

unlike shit show that was windows 95/98/ME

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While I don't disagree with that, in my experience all Windows instability on WinNT family (and I tightly worked with all end user versions of Win from 16 bit W3.11 to the recent Win11 with a very few exceptions) are caused by faulty hardware and/or bad drivers that can't handle it. I don't think I could remember any issue that I can't attribute to bad HW/3rd party driver.

Wrt Win95 & it's kind - all processes in that family essentially run in a single address space, and data "isolation" were "achieved" only through obscurity. If you knew some magic constants that were easily obtainable from disassembly, you could do anything there. So no wonder it was as bad as the worst program you've installed..

Almost all instability I’ve had with modern Windows or Macs has been caused by corporate installed malware - MDM software and virus software.

Haha, yeah, that crap adds indeed

Windows 2000 server was peak windows. All the subsequent versions just got harder to maintain as they gradually ruined the user interface. Nobody cares about the UI on consumer windows but if you’re spending a lot of time in RDP the vista based server products are terrible.

I don’t hate windows 2019 but Linux is better, easier, faster and a relief after any futile attempts to use IIS or sql server in 2025.

> vista based server products are terrible.

The first generation of tabletised 8/Metro interfaces made me audibly groan every time I had to RDP into machines running 2012.

Oh yes. I still have a client that has 2012 and it physically hurts to use

The stuttering over RDP when the start menu animation tried to slide in the tiles was amazing.

windows xp x64 edition was pretty slick; and so was NT4. I agree that 2000 was pretty cool, but perhaps a lot of that is design nostalgia. It was very "serious business OS" where XP and Me looked like jellybeans and cartoons. My favorite windows, though, is win 7 ultimate, Steve Ballmer Edition. i was sad when i had to upgrade to winten.

ninja proof: https://i.imgur.com/l29rDVo.jpeg

I get the nostalgia for XP, it was the first windows consumer edition that didn’t suck, but for a server OS 2000 was so lean and easy to manage it makes me wonder how MS lost to Linux. Back then, it was a genuine competition, now you’d have to be crazy to choose windows to deploy anything.

i never used windows XP, i went from 2000 pro to XP x64 edition, which came out 2 years after XP did.

Maybe, but Win 3.1 was good for me.

Windows Server still has it's place. AD DS, file services, and SQL Server being the big ones. Linux doesn't have apps that do these things 'better'.

I wish MSFT could build Active Directory and the associated constellation of services on Linux. You can make a reasonable simulacrum with Samba but it isn't as well-integrated.

(My fever dream wish is for a "distribution" of NT that boots in text mode and has an updated Interix subsystem alongside Win32. Throw in ZFS and it would be awesome.)

An NT that boots into text mode wouldn't be terribly useful for software designed for NT today given the high dependency on UI libraries.

I too wish for an NT that was CLI-only, striped of services as much as possible.

     Starting Windows NT...
     
     C:\>

It's too bad Microsoft has no interest as a business in on-prem software.

Server Core is close to what you're talking about re: CLI only.

I agree re: MSFT having no interest in on-prem software. It saddens me.

Core isn't close. It's still a graphical interface.

I guess I misread you, then. I thought you were arguing that a text mode wouldn't be useful. That's why I suggested Server Core. It's CLI, but uselessly framed in a GUI framework.

Like I said in my earlier post, text mode NT is my fever dream fantasy. Maybe you were saying the same thing.

Yes, I was saying the same thing. There are very few applications we could run on a text-mode DOS/Linux-CLI type NT due to the upstream dependencies that require (or implement) a graphical interface.

Text-only mode would be wonderful even if all you could do is look at a blinking cursor.

After SP2 the worst wrinkles are taken care of. Oh, and skip ever second OS release, of course.

I'm not as much against windows as I uses to be but I'm not budging off Ubuntu LTS even though they too try really hard to rock the boat.

Powershell was 2006, so I suppose the real "peak windows server UX" was 2016 when PS was relatively mature and came out-of-the-box with the latest version.

If MSFT had back ported servicing stack updates to 2016 it would still be usable. As it stands it bogs down unreasonably when applying updates and needs lengthy DISM /CleanupImage processes to be run periodically to reclaim disk space.

I went from 98 to 2000 (rather than ME) and it was an amazing experience. It showed me what an operating system could be like. Of course, what I really wanted was Linux, but I didn't know better at the time.

> Seriously, Windows 2000 was one of the most stable OS back in the day, rock solid. I used 2000 server as a desktop OS, instead of 98.

Really? Oh, compared to other Windows versions...

Because it never came close to the stability of OS/400, Netware 3, AIX, Solaris or even OS/2 v2.

I dunno how to compare stable to stable but I ran Win2k for so long that I got bored with it (something like 5-7 years) and never experienced a single crash. This is coming from a Linux guy btw… so I’m no Microsoft fanboy, just saying, it was as stable as any other stable OS.

Didn't mean to bash you, sorry.

I saw years of uptime on those systems whereas Win2000 iirc needed a reboot for every single update of the OS, and even for applications like IIS or Exchange.

Compared to NT4 it was probably very stable, since I remember telling most clients to just shut it down Friday evening and boot it Monday morning cause the pre-SP4 NT4 could not stay up more than three weeks.

Compare that to AS/400, where we pushed updates all over the country, without warning clients, to system running in hospitals, and there never was even the slightest problem. It sounds irresponsible to do that today, but those updates just worked, all the time and all applications continued to work.

> I saw years of uptime on those systems

This just means security updates were never installed.

(Or you claim that all those operating systems never had kernel-level security issues which seems doubtful...)

Since these systems were from the 90ies they indeed did not get security updates.

Most were only locally connected (for example OS/2 had a Token Ring in one building). The WAN connection (for AS/400) was trusted.

You are comparing supermarket apples (Windows) with localy grown plums (AS400). Even today, Windows is not able to update Office without closing it.

I will fully agree on OS/400, of the operating systems and platforms I have worked with, it is by far the most stable.

That is easier to achieve when your operating system only runs on your own proprietary hardware. (No mess of millions of drivers to write for one).

It worked well for years without any sysadmin touching it.

Well my mom was trained to be the "sys admin", which meant rotating backup tapes.

Part of my 1994's Summer job role. :)

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