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Comment by markus_zhang | Hacker News Reader

TBF XP and 7 are both decent. Everything went down after those, including the Ads, the update, etc.

I didn't upgrade to 10 until I purchased a used Dell laptop (which includes 10 prof) a few years ago, and I never used 11 and hopefully never needs to use it.

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I love 2000 and XP but 7 has a special spot for me because it’s a “modern” Windows (supporting proper alpha blending in its theme drawing and such) without the various problems that 8 and newer bring. I have an old laptop with it installed and booting it up is honestly refreshing. Its visual style is a little dated feeling but not that much.

I like it for the same reasons. I just wish it supported high DPI. It, and Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion era OSX, at high res would be peak desktop usability.

I believe XP was when Windows Activation started, so that's a pretty big negative for me. Other than that, XP, 7 and 10 were pretty good, although 10 introduced advertisements if I'm not mistaken.

XP also inexplicably required at least twice the ram as 2000. when XP came out that was a significant cost, and I personally was able to salvage many laptops at the time by downgrading them from XP. Eventually XP became the default for me because ram got a lot cheaper and the service packs and driver support made it more viable.

But then, tangentially, I started using ubuntu at work, in a sort of misguided belief it would make me a better sysadmin, and it was only a matter of time before I couldn’t stand windows at home as well.

I thought win7 was pretty solid, though I didn’t upgrade until well after win8 was shipping. But lucky for me, proton finally got really good, and that allowed me to basically skip win10+. Now it’s only for the rare tool that I even boot into my windows partitions anymore. When I do, being bombarded by random attention grabbers is completely jarring and I want flee as fast as I can.

If you think 11 is bad, I bet 12 will be even worse. When 10 is unsupported and 12 is out, you will probably be reaching for 11 by then...

I'm already moving into Linux for one of my laptops. If the drivers and desktop experiences are good enough (or bad enough in Windows) I might move 100% to Linux in a few years.

Fair enough! I am probably just projecting my own probable fate haha.

I made the jump a few years ago and the experience has been largely great. Lots of learning, which has been half the fun, and no goddamn ads in my start menu.

Totally usable as a daily driver, provided you don't need Windows only software. The year of linux on the desktop was probably about 2020.

Steam's proton has made gaming on linux astoundingly good. The only thing that still needs improvement is mod support, as mod managers, game downgraders, bin patchers, some more involved mods involve little utilities written for windows that are not easily runnable on linux.

It is slowly improving though. The steam deck has moved things forward in leaps and bounds.

It seems like basically all the games I play aren't supported on this unfortunately and it feels like they never will be.

You do competitive games? Those have been so far Proton's biggest weakness, but that's usually less of a technical limitation and more of a company decision, which given enough pressure can be changed

All I play are online multiplayer games so yeah.

I play Battlefield 2042, Call of Duty Warzone, Apex Legends, PUBG, Rainbow 6 Siege, and Fortnite all somewhat regularly and none of these as far as I know work.

The only games that I do play regularly that work are Counter Strike 2 and DotA. Though I can't use Faceit for CS2 which would be ideal.

Ah, see as a guy in my 40's, my reflexes just aren't what they used to be. I used to be lethal in my teens, but these days I tend to mainly play single player or coop games. If you play games that require kernel level anti-cheat, yeah those will probably never be supported on linux.

Force override it in the game settings. Works on 99% of games. Probably not multiplayer games with anti-cheat, because if you're not using a software chain fully validated by Microsoft then you're cheating.

Even then, a VM can get you really far.

If you need direct hardware access (like for gaming) then you can run a passthrough VM. You can do that even on a single video card system.

> You can do that even on a single video card system.

Like with consumer video cards? Tell me more.

With consumer video cards: https://github.com/martinopiaggi/Single-GPU-Passthrough-for-...

I don't believe you have to VBIOS patch anymore

If you intend to stick with Windows for the long haul, you will have to upgrade eventually. I hung on to 7 for a while, but several apps stopped getting updates: iTunes, the Spotify desktop client, Google Chrome, and even Firefox dropped support. I was using iTunes to download podcasts, which after a while became impossible with some feeds because I would get an SSL error each time on that old version. For 10, the ESU period ends one year after 10/14/25 for consumers and three years for organizations. It's possible that apps will continue to receive updates during that time.

Thanks, yeah, I figured. Maybe I can move to Linux in 5 years. I'm already using Linux for my dev laptop.

Come try out Fedora, or whatever flavor of Linux you want.

It's surprisingly fantastic for almost all modern computing tasks. Yes, it's true, some software won't work, such as Adobe Photoshop, but most people aren't using software like that anyway. For gaming, I'd say we're close to 99% of games supporting Linux out of the box on Steam. The few left that still don't choose not to via kernel-level anti-cheat or forgetting to toggle a checkbox for Linux support (EasyAntiCheat and friends).

The point is, it "Just Works" for darn near everything these days and is a very pleasant experience. Try it out!

The best Linux I have ever seen is Linux Mint. I tried it out because I needed to do something with firewire, but all of the other Linux kernels had dropped firewire, and it was the only one left that still supported it. I found it to be intuitive and friendly and everything just worked.

Mint leans towards the "ultra-stable" side of Linux Distros. Fedora leans towards the "bleeding-edge". Both are great in their own ways. If you want the latest and greatest of everything, Fedora is a great pick. If you just want long-term stability, Mint is a great pick. With both, you can choose the Desktop Environment you prefer (I like KDE personally, but many like Gnome, MATE, Cinnamon, etc).

That's not to say Fedora is unstable - it's just that it iterates fast to keep pace with packages as they release new versions. There's a new major Fedora release every year, for example.

There really isn't a wrong choice here.

Eh, this is going to sound like a I'm a stick in the mud, but I've tried Linux about a dozen times now, and every time has eventually led to 'a Linux evening' that disenchants me from the fantasy and back to reality. It's fantastic as a server OS, however.

Try it again if you haven't recently. I'm unsure what specific issues you encountered, but anecdotally I can say I've been driving Fedora full-time on my home workstation for nearly 2 years now. I love it. I drove Fedora full-time on my laptop off-and-on for nearly a decade as well before that.

For me, gaming was what kept me away. But, besides a few titles, it's been a non-issue. It was very pleasantly surprising.

My desktop runs Fedora Kinoite[1] - an immutable version of Fedora. It poses a set of unique challenges for a development workstation (my primary use), but has resulted in rock-solid stability through several major OS upgrades, and a lot of development-related hackery.

I don't see myself going back to Windows anytime in the future. Every time I'm at the office an on my Win11 machine, I remember why I switched in the first place. Just my experience though.

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/kinoite/

Often Linux is great, until You update some esoteric dependency that breaks a bunch of stuff, and fixing it is just a little past your experience level …

That's the best part of the immutable versions, containers by default so weird dependency interactions are minimized, system is stable and has a good rollbacks in case something does go wrong, and updates are more or less invisible

Takes some getting used to, but has really been a smooth experience

Windows 10 LTSC IOT has all the bloat and spyware stripped out and will get security updates for years. It's super lean.

Will third party apps keep installing updates ? Hard to say. The adobe suite already refuses to install the latest version on any LTSC (for no reason other than they don't want to support it - it works great) so who knows.

Suspect my next OS will be Windows 12 LTSC if I can hold out long enough - every other Windows version alway seems to be experimental crap going all the way back to ME (millennium edition)

I tell customers that they should use LTSC for things like virtual desktops. You need stability, such as it not randomly deciding to install a 4 GB game like Minecraft for every user as a “critical update”.

Microsoft joined a meeting and told the customer that they don’t agree with my recommendations because they want to make sure all users get the “latest experiences”.

There’s your problem right there: pushing your own KPIs instead of what’s best for the customers.

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