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Comment by smackeyacky | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

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