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Comment by mikewarot | Hacker News Reader

I'm back to running Windows because of the shifting sands of Python and WxWindows that broke WikidPad, my personal wiki. The .exe from 2012 still works perfectly though, so I migrated back from Ubuntu to be able to use it without hassle.

It's my strong opinion that Windows 2000 Server, SP4 was the best desktop OS ever.

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Server 2003 was the last release supervised by Cutler, so would have my vote. It's even source-available... technically.

Cutler himself wrote code for Vista/Longhorn though. I don't know what you mean by "supervising" it. He also led the efforts for "PatchGuard" kernel protection mechanism that was introduced with Vista.

Source: I reviewed Cutler's lock-free data structure changes in Vista/Longhorn to find bugs in them, failed to find any.

AH, I was repeating something I read elsewhere, but I'll defer to an eyewitness. Must've been pretty cool working on Windows back then. Maybe it was more varied than my line of work. I must escape the drudgery B2B SaaS Webcrapps.

Sometimes I have problems like this on Debian. I have a reliable solution: debootstrap and snapshots.debian.org

I haven't yet gone more than a decade in the past before, so I can't promise forever, and GPU-accelerated things probably still break, but X11 is very compatible backwards.

> It's my strong opinion that Windows 2000 Server, SP4 was the best desktop OS ever.

Meanwhile, in 2025, with 64GB RAM and solid state drives, we hear, "Windows 11 Task Manager really, really shouldn't be eating up 15% of my CPU and take multiple seconds to fire up."

I see my comment was downvoted, and I apologize.

I meant to agree entirely with the parent comment by showing one specific way in which Win2K SP4 is far superior to Windows 11.

In Win2K, Task Manager takes less than a second to start on a 200 MHz, single core Pentium II with 64MB of RAM and a 5400 RPM IDE HDD.

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