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Comment by hypeatei | Hacker News Reader

It still is if you're an enterprise customer. The retail users aren't Microsoft's cash cows, so they get ads and BS in their editions. The underlying APIs are still stable and MS provides the LTSC & Server editions to businesses which lack all that retail cruft.

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I'm an enterprise user and I find Windows 11 a complete disaster. They've managed to make something as trivial as right-clicking a slow operation.

I used to be a pretty happy Windows camper (I even got through Me without much complaint), but I'm so glad I moved to Linux and KDE for my private desktops before 11 hit.

If anything, right click is faster thanks to dumping the ability for 3rd parties to pollute it with COM controls that needs to be init'ed.

Everything after Win 2000 was a bad idea. Enterprise or not.

Windows 2000 was the last version where Dave Cutler was fully in charge of Windows.

Things started going downhill after that.

Windows 2000 was a bug riddled, poorly architected punching bag for malware.

Things definitely went up-hill AFTER Windows 2000.

What on earth would cause someone to say Windows 2000 was a good release? It wasn't even a good release when it came out, and it definitely didn't stand the test of time.

> What on earth would cause someone to say Windows 2000 was a good release?

An unsubstantiated insistence that a single human being is the bus factor for a thousand-engineer org?

I'm just as confused as you, everyone I've ever met who liked Windows 2000 went on to love XP SP3, usually with the W2K skin on it.

XP was arguably better.

7 was pretty good. But I may be looking through the glasses of nostalgia and my love for the frutiger aero style

https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links

Do you mean Windows 1x Pro/Enterprise?

Yes. Enterprise, Pro, and Home are the enshittified, retail editions. Enterprise just adds a few more features IIRC but still has ads. The other versions I mentioned above don't have any of that.

Enterprise is not retail and is usually done via volume licensing, but probably without any additional configuration it might have that stuff intact.

But you can use group policy etc. freely. I don't know how Win 11 is though

FWIW, ChatGPT advised against LTSC or Server editions for a dev workstation and recommended Enterprise, as you do. However, I can’t find Enterprise from a reputable EU vendor. Do you know of any? Is Enterprise available to end users?

It's not officially, but nothing prevents you from buying licenses.

I don't use Windows anymore but iirc the easiest way is to get the E3 or E5 licenses. The volume licensing is "Contact us" pricing

LTSC is also Enterprise, but it's meant for e.g. computers attached to an industrial machine/line that rarely gets updated and such. But it's used by many prosumers as a way to avoid bloat and e.g. keep Win10 for longer

The problem with Windows after Windows 7 isn't really ads, it's the blatant stupid use of web view to do the most mundane things and hog hundreds of MB or even GBs for silly features, that are still present in enterprise versions.

Start menu search requires 7 web browser processes that consume ~350 MB of RAM to be constantly running.

In my day job, Explorer still freezes every second day, GUI interactions take several seconds and the sidebar is full of tabloid headlines and ads.

At least with regard to the last point, your enterprise admins must be doing a bad job.

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