I personally tried to use Windows XP (for my Windows systems, which is mostly VMs nowadays) for as long as I could.
First, it was the first solid (in relative terms) consumer operating system from MS.
Second, it was lightweight (in relative terms) in terms of UX and, somewhat consequently, engineering. With Windows Vista (but in particular, Windows 8), MS started to add complexity on every layer.
Nowadays, I'm really afraid to update Windows. I don't know what new services and programs are going to be added. I don't know if the tweaks still work. I don't know if I'm imposed some new behavior. I don't know where certain settings (even entire setting domains) are going to be located, and how they're going to be named.
In a way, Windows XP is the Windows equivalent of the Linux XFCE/LXDE desktop environments.
XP, when it was first released, was a more resource hungry and uglier version of Windows 2000.
Win 2000 was amazing when it was released. Games (albeit not DOS ones) worked well, it was stable and really your only other options were worse (Mac OS 9 was less stable than Win 98, ME was a dumpster fire, Linux wasn't quite ready for the desktop and BeOS was awesome but barely supported).
Then when XP was released, it had twice the minimum and recommended hardware spec than 2000, it had those stupid skins and it didn't offer anything functionally more beneficial over 2000 (aside faster boot time if you had hundreds of fonts installed).
Granted XP got better with SP2 or SP3, but it definitely wasn't the first solid nor even lightweight when it was originally released.
Totally my experience as well, Windows 2000 really was the only Windows version I actually liked, it had very few faults for its time. Windows 7 probably comes second.
What I remember from XP is that it took until SP2 before all the problems were worked out, and SP3 actually introduced more annoyances in the name of security. I also think the default theme and general visual style of the XP is downright terrible and completely unworthy of a large professional company like Microsoft. The very first thing I always did was to switch back to the classic UI for everything (theme, start menu, all control panels, etc).
I don't care for any of the 'modern' Windows versions. They work, behind the scenes the technology has improved, but I they still annoy me in many ways, and the UI is IMO the worst it has ever been in the history of Windows. It looks cleaner but behind the veneer its just a giant heap of historical accidents piled on over the years, with no consistent direction of vision to be found. I get no joy using it, but I guess if you are used to working in Windows the OS is perfectly fine for what it does.
Agreed about the UI. Even at a distance of twenty years, Windows 2000 looks more pleasant and professional. The Windows XP UI managed to be somehow childish in its aesthetic and stressful in its complexity.
Of course every Windows OS eventually gets stable and fast on current hardware, at which point everyone starts praying that they'll get to use it forever and they'll never have to deal with a new major release again.
Yup. When saying "XP was great", people mean "XP SP2 and on" - for me, the move from W2k to WXP was "the same thing, now with Fischer-Price aesthetic!"
I say this as somebody who really enjoyed W2K, but the complaints about WinXP's default theme are very difficult to understand when:
- The classic theme was just a few clicks away
- Of all the problems with XP, I would not even list the "easily changed default theme" in the top.... 100 or so. I would not expect to see such sentiment on HN, of all places.
> XP was a pretty damn good OS that came out of a time when there wasn't a lot of options.
That's more true of Windows 2000 though. By the time XP was released Apple had released a few iterations of OS X and it was looking pretty decent. Not to mention desktop Linux becoming stable. Neither of which were true in 2000.
In fact with Windows 2000, I used to dual boot Win 95, Linux Slackware and BeOS 5 but I always came back to Windows 2k for day to day work. Then when Windows XP was released I gave it a try and got so fed up with it that rather than installing Win2k again I just switched to Linux full time instead (sadly BeOS had ceased development by that point).
The look was superficial, sure: For someone moving from Win2K to XP, this was not the main frustration, but a easily recognizable sign for the myriad other issues (note: original XP, XPsp2 was the release that should have been).
(We did some printing. In the range of 1M pages/workstation. It...worked...on XP. Eventually.)
It was easy to switch but there is a lot to be said for sane defaults. With each new iteration of Windows I'd find more and more insane defaults (for me at least). It started with file extensions being hidden by default. Then system files too. By the time XP was released I was finding that I had to spend an hour just configuring the system how I liked...and that was before I installed any software.
Users will sometimes reach a point where they say "If I'm having to spend this much time configuring new installs to function how I like, then I might as well install something else that already ships with the defaults I like". And this is why many power users started drifting away from Windows in the decade of 2000 to 2010.
Windows Server having file extensions turned off by default still drives me crazy. I get it for the desktop versions, but it would be fantastic if server editions had it on, or it saved and picked up the toggle from your AD account/profile.
I agree generally about the importance of sane defaults, but the theme was just soooo damn easy to switch, and a lot of non-techy people I know did so.
I actually don’t really associate Windows XP with its theme in my memory, because I so rarely saw it in use.
I have to stick up for XP because i have so many fond memories from my young adulthood of using it. I never had a problem with it's default theme but it also shipped with a few other themes that were better. like olive and then later the zune theme which was arguably the best one.
I hear that said a lot about Windows 2000 but my experience was that it was only really true of legacy DOS games that didn't work right. Anything written for OpenGL or DirectX worked fine. In some cases even better (for example Quake 3 ran so much smoother on my BP6 board running Windows 2000).
My migration from 2000 to XP meant blue screens. Most likely caused by drivers. But that left me with a lasting impression that 2000 was way more stable than XP.
It wasn't. It was just as stable as 2000 as long as you weren't a tweaker and stuck with stock. Almost every single OS becomes unstable with shitty drivers and/or cheap hardware that wasn't designed for it.
A few clicks and XP SP3 looks exactly like 2k, with a few useful features thrown in.
A decent number of not-ancient floss software supports it as well. Not so with 2k. Add thousands of security patches and firewall, and the choice is clear.
> A few clicks and XP SP3 looks exactly like 2k, with a few useful features thrown in.
There wasn't much added to Windows XP over 2000 in the original release of XP (service pack 3 was released 6 years (!!!) after XP was originally launched. So it's not really fair comparing XP SP3 to Win 2k). I remember this era in computing vividly and it took a few service packs before XP really came into it's own. However you still paid the price running XP because it demanded double the hardware requirements to run when compared with Windows 2000. So sure, you could disable themes in XP but for many people sticking with Windows 2000 was more appealing because you had more preferable defaults out of the box plus less bloat / hardware overhead too.
I thought the issues with games on Win2k was that it didn't have an uptodate DirectX version. I recall various hacks to try to get around this after XP showed up but Win2k was always the odd one out for games if memory serves.
Funny that, because Win2k was a glossy, less stable version of WinNT 4 that we had to move to, to get USB support. Had USB been backported to NT4, I never would have moved.
Did you run any specific hardware or something? W2k was rock solid for me from RC2 and onwards. The only thing that really didn't run stable was the drivers for Via's crappy chipset, and they released improved drivers fairly quickly.
Agree, Windows XP was sluggish when it was released. Same applies to Win2K though when it first came out compared to WinNT 4.0. 2K was the first Windows to include a shadow effect under the mouse cursor. Oh the extra compute cycles it had to do to render that...
I do agree but don't forget that the difference between NT4 and 2000 was night a day. 2000 wasn't just a reskin of NT4, there were lots of compatibility and usability improvements too. The problem was most people simply couldn't run NT4 outside of an office environment because very few games would run on it, driver support was relatively limited, etc. Windows 2000 was the real bridge between NT office machines and home machines, not XP. Granted consumers wouldn't have seen it that way because most stores didn't sell 2000 on home machines (instead opting for the dumpster fire that was ME) but technology wise XP (original release -- pre-service packs) wasn't a huge advancement from 2000 where as 2000 from NT4 was.
I think a lot of people have sort of backed their chair away from the table like you.
I remember reading Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist and it talked about trade. Basically it said with trust, trade is unlimited.
But what's been happening with computers and software is that trust been going downhill so quickly that many people don't install anything ever anymore. Privacy, dark patterns, monetization, form over function, qa by customer, and just a general lack of empathy, respect and common sense.
I consider XP to be the first instance of Microsoft tightening the screws, as it was the first version to require activation, with the potential for hardware upgrades to require reactivation. Even then, I thought that it would ultimately lead to locked-down bootloaders and other such tomfoolery, and we're now most of the way there, or, indeed, already there for mobile.
i think you are onto something, but i don't think the market cares that much about privacy, dark patterns etc
also see how software has stabilised over the years, both as a product and as a marketplace. there are now clearly defined best in class software that will take years to be disrupted.
but one of the major aspects against computer software has come from mobile. lots of development time has gone to browsers and mobile than desktop.
> First, it was the first solid (in relative terms) consumer operating system from MS.
That was actually Windows 2000, based on the NT 4 code base. It was near perfect, given the era it was made in.
The only reason I upgraded from Windows 2000 was that Microsoft was extremely reluctant to back-port USB- or WiFi-fixes and support, effectively forcing you to upgrade to XP if you wanted to fully use your modern hardware.
For that reason alone, XP always left a sour taste in my mouth.
> That was actually Windows 2000, based on the NT 4 code base. It was near perfect, given the era it was made in.
I also remember Windows 2000 fondly. It was really really stable. Even if it looked like it's frozen like a polar ice cap (they weren't melting that bad back then), a short coffee break would give it enough time to normalize itself and continue like nothing happened.
I stuck with Windows 2000 for many years after XP was released. XP brought absolutely nothing I wanted and a lot of things I didn’t want. All the truly interesting stuff, like WinFS, never made it in.
WinFS wasn’t destined for Windows 2000 nor XP, but rather Vista.
I was an intern at Microsoft in 2004, and personally helped make it clear that WinFS also wasn’t ready anyway. Fwiw, I think the iOS model of “makes users and apps no longer care about directories” has been more successful than the original WinFS plan of “maybe it’s all a SQL-ish database instead”.
I actually ran a series of them in VMs for years because of their quick response and light resource usage, and they still ran all the stuff I needed. Loved that OS
I have a Windows XP VM to run the software for my MD player. You're right, the OS from that era is lightning quick in today's hardware, even in a VM. Also, the USB passthhru is problem-free interestingly.
Windows 2000 was the first rock solid OS from Microsoft, targetting both desktops and servers,but the desktop version was targeted at business users, not consumers. The consumer version at the time was the horrible Windows ME.
Ha! I had the same with windows 2000 as compared to NT4. I stayed on NT4 as long as I could, and never really liked windows 2000 because it took twice the resources to do the same job at half the speed. Windows XP was 2000 with more (ugly) eye candy and a lot of bloat, so I didn’t like that either, but hardware improved enough that by the end of its reign it was quite fast.
One thing I read when dicking with how USB drivers work is that the Microsoft's first USB driver model was hopelessly broken, so they started over. And that also turned out badly enough that they redid it again. That's what ended up in XP and it mostly worked okay.
You can see why they didn't want to/couldn't backport USB drivers.
I still have a desktop running windows XP that my parents refuse to upgrade, partially due to a piece of software licensed per computer that costs >300$. Thankfully chrome no longer opens half the websites so they are limited on the web side at least. 14+ years of service, the only times it blue screemed were due to hardware breaking down. Rock solid.
No I'm not touching it with a 10 feet pole. Besides the fact that I would need new hardware for that( it's a core 2 duo system) which they are unwilling to fork the money for, anything that happens with it in the future will be my fault.
No I'm not able to reinstall. I am also not willing to deal with tech support. If and when it dies I'll just order a dell for them and they can sort the software issue themselves.
> First, it was the first solid (in relative terms) consumer operating system from MS.
I used Windows 3.1 for years and I never had to reinstall it for stability reasons. At some point I also switched to XP and after 2 years it wouldn't boot anymore because of a blue screen appearing before the graphical interface would show up. That made the decision easy for me to use Linux exclusively - which I had on dual boot already for a considerable time.
To me Windows 95-XP were really frustrating to use since random parts of the system (CD-ROM, Word, Games...) would stop working at random times. Or for instance on Windows 95 sometimes the system would only boot if I opened and closed the (empty) CD tray.
At work I sometimes used Vista and 10, I think they are okay but macOS and Linux are far more fun.
Before committing to GNU/Linux in 1998 or 99, I've had a similar experience with moving away from DOS/Windows for workgroups 3.11 to '95: Windows 95 tried to achieve too much in terms of backwards compatibility between 16- and 32-bit software, and was very flimsy as a result.
However, I've briefly used NT4 as my "development box" (Delphi addict for a while, though in my defense, I was like 15 at the time) for 6-12 months, that was as stable as anything you could get. But it had the same problems as Linux: it was very specific as to what hardware it supports. The same "soft modems" (called "winmodems" at the time) were equally unsupported in NT4 just like in Linux, so you had to get yourself external hardware modems which were like 5-10x the cost (whatever came out of US Robotics?).
So since I was more into the hacker mindset, I moved into GNU/Linux world and never looked back.
But I did grow an appreciation for MS engineering: they can develop quality software, and did it even in 96, but their consumer OSes strive for unparalleled compatibility and allow anybody (literally anybody) to write system level code that runs on the kernel ring level due to that.
A couple years down the line, I've even seen an article how many workarounds they had to introduce into '95 to allow old software employing their own extended/expanded memory management tricks to continue to function (think stuff like DOS games, WordPerfect...).
For all the fun we make of it, Windows 95 was a marvel of engineering when you consider the constraints and requirements. Just oppose that to the new web app approach to software engineering: breaking backwards compatibility is such a common theme that nobody bats an eyelid.
I admire what the community has achieve with Linux. I think is really great and I have used Linux in the past (Redhat, Fedora, Suse, Ubuntu, Mint).
However, I always wonder what makes your experience so different than mine.
For me I can simple replace what you said and it will still be valid:
To me Linux were really frustrating to use since random parts of the system (CD-ROM, Word, Games...) would stop working at random times.
(well the part about the CD tray never happened to me with any OS).
I really like the customizability of Linux and such, but in the end, Windows 2000, XP, and 10 just works 99% of the time. At least for me who I consider an advanced user.
Of course there are things I don't like, like telemetry, but the pros vs the cons, at least for me, make me always return to Windows.
I have also worked with macs and for 4 years my wife had a MacBook. Not only do I find the prices crazy expensive, compared with ThinkPads, but I never found anything that was better in OSX than in Windows.
Again, I can use macOS if needed be, and I find it just fine. But I prefer Win/ThinkPad.
If you buy a system made with known linux compatible hardware you'll have zero problems. Just like a mac. Windows has the advantage that it gets first tier service and thus a greater chance with being stable with a broader swathe of hardware. OSX to me is much better than Windows because it doesn't get in your way. You want a new app download it and drop it in Applications. I don't know WTF windows does but some installs take forever; on Mac OSX and Linux install times are so much more reasonable and transparent. Obviously it matters WHAT you do with the OS, for some situations only Windows will have the software you need, and on those occasions I reluctantly use it. As far as stability on good hardware, for the average user, there's very little difference in the 3.
I have always used ThinkPads, which are among the best supported notebooks for Linux afaik.
I totally agree that Windows has an "unfair" advantage here as manufacturers make sure that their hardware works in Windows while for Linux most of the time they don't even provide drivers.
I have helped friends and family configure their MACs and honestly I never felt wow this does not gets in the way. Not all apps in MAC are installed the same way IIRC. For example Adobe apps. Never had issues with installers that take forever in Windows. Same with Transparency.
About the availability of the software, 99% of it is on Windows, so that is a big plus. But I am not talking so much about that, I am talking about the complexity to do things in Linux.
Most of the time, at least for a user like me that tries it/uses it sporadically, I need to search for a way to install or do something. It is good that most of the time there is a response, but I find it weird that all is so complicated.
For example, this is how I installed virtualbox some years ago (it might be better now)
That's not really a fair comparison though because most of those stages are just part of the download stage you glossed over in Windows (I really hate having to browse the web looking for software then having to manually download the thing after I've found what I want).
Also Windows has no managed way to keep applications up to date. Which means you either have to manually repeat all those steps yourself or run background agents for every publisher to keep that software up to date. But by far the most annoying in Windows is software that doesn't check if it's up to date until you run it and then demands you update it there and then (great way to kill productivity). Yet those steps you've exampled is a one time pain and then all software is managed for you. Updates are easy.
I used to be a hardened Slackware user and was prepared to download and often compile my software manually. Then I discovered package managers in Linux and from that point onwards I lost any respect for an OS that didn't manage software for me. It's amazing that it's two decades from me discovering package managers, ten years since iOS App Store was announced, and yet people are still stuck on shitty first party solutions on Windows and macOS (thank god for homebrew et al).
Again, I find incredible cool what the Linux community has accomplished. And yes, the update process in Linux is much more simple in theory (sudo apt update). However, at least for my use case, the pros do not outweigh the cons.
Firs cons: lack of key apps (Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite).
Second cons: lack of OEM produced drivers, which means that some things work worst than in Windows. Example, energy management for my ThinkPad.
Third cons: it seems to me that most things are more complicated to do than in Windows. Case in point, even if we do not consider the wgets, installing mkvtoolnix and vmware.
Fourth cons: Why do I need to look for the specific distribution version of a program? I can install a Windows XP program in Windows 10. I can even install a Windows 95 program in Windows 10. But I have to look for the specific version of Ubuntu 20.08 of a program. The version for Ubuntu 17.06 would not work.
Again. I can for sure use Linux if needed to (I am currently trying BSD on my ThinkPad), but if given the chance, I feel much more comfortable and productive in Windows.
> Firs cons: lack of key apps (Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite).
Propitiatory commercial applications, sure. But there's plenty of open source counterparts. I've been using LibreOffice (and OpenOffice before then) for years and while it does lack a lot of polish compared to MS Office most of the issues with it are really just cosmetic. Plus I never liked the ribbon bar anyway. Adobe Creative Suite is a bigger problem. I have heard of professionals uses open source counterparts and getting on well with it but the last thing a person wants is technology getting in the way of their creative process (a sentiment I'm intimately familiar with from a music composition perspective).
Ultimately though, if you're unwilling to try changing muscle memory to use open source applications then Linux is never going to be the right fit. The problem there though isn't that it's not possible to do something on Linux but rather than you just more comfortable with Windows. And that's fine -- but it is literally just habit rather than a technical reason.
> Fourth cons: Why do I need to look for the specific distribution version of a program? I can install a Windows XP program in Windows 10. I can even install a Windows 95 program in Windows 10. But I have to look for the specific version of Ubuntu 20.08 of a program. The version for Ubuntu 17.06 would not work.
> Second cons: lack of OEM produced drivers, which means that some things work worst than in Windows. Example, energy management for my ThinkPad.
I honestly prefer Linux for driver support. Windows was such a pain in the arse with having to install 3rd party drivers (though that's less the case these days) where as on Linux everything just worked with the default install.
That said, you do sometimes find edge cases where drivers are missing functionality but it's not all that common.
With regards to battery life, I a lot of that will also be down to tuning. Windows ships some pretty aggressive tuning features where as Linux basically ships untuned. You can do that manually and it is a bit of a joke that users have to do it manually. But I've found losing an hour or two off a 10 hour run time isn't all that painful.
> Third cons: it seems to me that most things are more complicated to do than in Windows. Case in point, even if we do not consider the wgets, installing mkvtoolnix and vmware.
I actually find the opposite to be true. Most things are more complicated to do in Windows. Developer tools, programming language support, containerisation/docker, debugging tools, networking tools, automation (this is by far the worst thing about running Windows for me), resolving issues (far easier to fix a broken Linux install), documentation (far better documentation in Linux), error reporting, etc.
Updates are a key thing too. Windows: you need a thousand different update managers running on start up. You need to regularly reboot due to Windows update (which forcefully locks you out of your system whether you want it to or not). Linux: everything is managed from one package manager and no reboots required (unless it's a kernel update but even then it installs it without locking you out and the reboot is just to load the new kernel)
Another bugbare is having to browse for applications on the internet, avoiding phishing sites for popular software, then manually downloading and installing it. Repeatedly for some applications that don't have update managers too. Users shouldn't be doing this in 2020 -- it's just a crap way to manage software.
> Fourth cons: Why do I need to look for the specific distribution version of a program? I can install a Windows XP program in Windows 10. I can even install a Windows 95 program in Windows 10. But I have to look for the specific version of Ubuntu 20.08 of a program. The version for Ubuntu 17.06 would not work.
That's why you use package managers ;)
> Again. I can for sure use Linux if needed to (I am currently trying BSD on my ThinkPad), but if given the chance, I feel much more comfortable and productive in Windows.
BSD is going to be much more painful for you than Linux given the complaints you're making about Linux. You're better off trying a Mint Linux. Or if you don't mind the one time pain installing Arch then go with that (Arch has no installer, you have to do it all manually. Which sucks for non-techies but once you're over that hurdle it's probably the most painless OS I've ever ran over long periods of time)
I don't rate Ubuntu much as a distribution. Canonical spend too much time reinventing the wheel and not enough time fixing the common complaints with Linux (though `snap` is an attempt at that but unfortunately even there Canonical's solution is hamfisted).
Ultimately though, it all boils down to habits and personal preferences rather than X being better than Y.
Let me start by saying that I don't want to convince you to use Windows ;) What I am trying to do is show how it all depends from where you are coming from, where your experience is at.
> Ultimately though, it all boils down to habits and personal preferences rather than X being better than Y.
I have no problem changing systems if I see the value/advantage. I have changed systems in the past. Started with Ti994a, DOS, OS/2, Windows 95, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 10. In the middle I tried Linux, may variants: Mandrake, Redhat, Suse, Gentoo, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, Manjaro, and many others just to see how they looked/worked. I even worked with AIX and Solaris at work. What I mean is that I can adapt and work if needed be. My main point is that I don't suffer all of the pains, with the exception of telemetry, that Linux users have against Windows.
> Propitiatory commercial applications, sure. But there's plenty of open source counterparts. I've been using LibreOffice (and OpenOffice before then) for years and while it does lack a lot of polish compared to MS Office most of the issues with it are really just cosmetic. Plus I never liked the ribbon bar anyway. Adobe Creative Suite is a bigger problem. I have heard of professionals uses open source counterparts and getting on well with it but the last thing a person wants is technology getting in the way of their creative process (a sentiment I'm intimately familiar with from a music composition perspective).
I don't care if it is commercial or free, proprietary or open source. I care that is the best software for the job. That said, Office has become easier as I can use the Online version or Gsuite.
> I honestly prefer Linux for driver support. Windows was such a pain in the arse with having to install 3rd party drivers (though that's less the case these days) where as on Linux everything just worked with the default install. That said, you do sometimes find edge cases where drivers are missing functionality but it's not all that common. With regards to battery life, I a lot of that will also be down to tuning. Windows ships some pretty aggressive tuning features where as Linux basically ships untuned. You can do that manually and it is a bit of a joke that users have to do it manually. But I've found losing an hour or two off a 10 hour run time isn't all that painful.
The problem is that I don't see the point of expending a week trying to fine tune Ubuntu, or whatever version I want to use, when I can just install Windows 10 and it works perfectly out off the box. At least for my use cases.
> I actually find the opposite to be true. Most things are more complicated to do in Windows. Developer tools, programming language support, containerisation/docker, debugging tools, networking tools, automation (this is by far the worst thing about running Windows for me), resolving issues (far easier to fix a broken Linux install), documentation (far better documentation in Linux), error reporting, etc.
I never found using developer tools, programming languages, debugging tools, networking tools, are more complicated in Windows. Same for resolving issues (I had to reinstall Windows very phew times, maybe one or two because I couldn't fix something and it was easier to just reinstall). I don't use containers/docker, so I cannot comment there.
> Updates are a key thing too. Windows: you need a thousand different update managers running on start up. You need to regularly reboot due to Windows update (which forcefully locks you out of your system whether you want it to or not). Linux: everything is managed from one package manager and no reboots required (unless it's a kernel update but even then it installs it without locking you out and the reboot is just to load the new kernel)
This one I totally agree. Linux is much better at updating than Windows. No discussion here. The main problem is when there are non-official repositories.
> Another bugbare is having to browse for applications on the internet, avoiding phishing sites for popular software, then manually downloading and installing it. Repeatedly for some applications that don't have update managers too. Users shouldn't be doing this in 2020 -- it's just a crap way to manage software.
I don't see it as a big problem. I know the apps I want and I can just install them. But I understand how this could make life easier for some.
> That's why you use package managers ;)
The problem is that not all apps are on the repos ;) In my experience if the repo has the app, and it is installed regularly, all fine. If it not updated or does not exists, it is a pain.
> BSD is going to be much more painful for you than Linux given the complaints you're making about Linux. You're better off trying a Mint Linux. Or if you don't mind the one time pain installing Arch then go with that (Arch has no installer, you have to do it all manually. Which sucks for non-techies but once you're over that hurdle it's probably the most painless OS I've ever ran over long periods of time)
I don't mind. I tried OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFly. I have OpenBSD running. As a desktop OS I don't see the advantage over Linux, much less over Windows.
> I don't rate Ubuntu much as a distribution. Canonical spend too much time reinventing the wheel and not enough time fixing the common complaints with Linux (though `snap` is an attempt at that but unfortunately even there Canonical's solution is hamfisted).
Don't get me there :)
Anyway, I always have a Linux laptop running around. I currently have Manjaro, but I will be trying Tumbleweed soon. I would love to one day totally move to Linux. I am not loosing hope.
I don't really much else to add aside that the boundaries these days are definitely a lot more blurred due to WSL (bringing many of Linux's tooling to Windows) and web applications (levelling the playing field somewhat in terms of application support). Both of which are largely a good thing for users.
Thanks again for the conversation. These topics often end badly and it's been nice to have a discussion like this without any of the flamewars :)
For me the main difference between (early) Windows and Linux is, Windows is quick to setup and quick to break. Linux is hard to setup and hard to break - I cannot tell how much time I spent tweaking my Linux desktop. Also I could for instance use an old SCSI scanner on Linux much longer unlike Windows where they eventually stopped developing drivers for new Windows releases.
But now things are of course a bit different, especially when choosing well supported hardware. On the other hand driver support tends to be more stable and long-term oriented on Linux since they tend to be maintained centrally in the Linux kernel. I agree that macOS is a bit mediocre in some sense, but somehow it unites the worlds of Linux and Windows.
It could be a matter of experience. If you are more experienced with Linux, it could be easier than if you are more experienced with Windows.
For me, Linux is easy to install, and it has been for a while, but then trying to customize it to do what I want, is much more complicated than Windows.
For example, I want RAR support. There is no LinRAR, so I had to download a library and install it. It wasnt that bad, but in the end I ended up with a tool that was not as simple to use as Winrar.
Want to use Total Commander? Either install Wine or run Midnight Commander or some other similar program that are not up to par with TC.
Want to use Office? Wine or Crossover. Want to use Illustrator? Same.
Need to install VMware? In Linux you have to import some signing key first and do some additional steps (don't completely remember). Nothing major, but you need to find out first how to do it. In Windows, just download the installer, double click and follow the wizard.
For me it seems like it is always more complicated to do simple things in Linux, and you end up with some not as good solution.
Also, I don't understand how can I download an installer from Windows XP and will 99% of the time install in Windows 10. However, if I want to install something old in the latest version of Linux, it won't install, will have to fix dependencies or similar.
And for me the worst thing is that energy management for notebooks is not exactly the same. If my battery lasts 4 hours in Windows, it lasts 3 or 2 in Linux.
Drivers it could be what you say for old ones where the manufacturer did not update to Windows 10, but if you have a supported device, usually the support is better on Windows.
Of course there are advantages, like no telemetry, no antivirus, but for my use case, I found the experience worst.
I am not saying totally worst. Maybe it is a 10 to 20% worst.
Of course, I have used maybe 90% of my time Windows and 9% Linux and 1% MAC, so maybe I am just more experienced.
The issue there is you're trying to run Linux like it is Windows. If you do that then you're never going to have a good experience. For example if you're after Windows software on Linux or insist on downloading software rather than using the package manager then you clearly prefer the Windows-style workflow. Which is fine -- everyone has their own preferences. But if that is your preference then the issue isn't Linux doing things wrong, the issue is you just prefer Windows.
For what it's worth, I equivalent teething pains when using OS X for a while. It took me a few months before I finally learned to adopt Mac-isms and I still don't feel at home on it like I do on Linux and BSD (my preferred platforms). Windows, however, always felt somewhat alien to me (and not through a lack of experience, I used to be a Windows developer and have written some pretty low level software for the platform. But even with all of that experience I still couldn't see eye to eye with the OS).
By the way, there are Linux-native builds of WinRAR.
In the case of downloading vs package manager, the problem is that there is lot of software that I use that is not on the repositories. If everything was there, I have no problem on using 100% package manager.
Regarding the apps, there off course the issue is that some apps have no equivalent in the Linux world.
There is no MS Office, LibreoOffice is good but not so good, and same for Adobe Suite. Total Commander I can more or less replace with Double Commander, or TC under Wine.
Afaik, there is a unrar.dll equivalent in Linux, but not a proper WinRAR.
A lot of it has to do with experience. Linux is definitely rougher around the edges than Windows and OSX, but it also allows you to be free to do what you want with the OS as a hacker or programmer. Also I don't like being tracked while I'm on my computer. OSX is much better than windows in that respect so I'll throw that out there for the record. Windows tends to be more opinionated and tries to bind you to it's work flow and update schedule. On linux you can have your system update everyday or once a year; not recommended but if you're airgapped it doesn't really matter. I choose freedom over walled gardens. I still play games on windows though, but that's the only reason :)
Do people not recall that XP, even after SP3, was the OS of over a decade of botnets, ransomware, and worms that crippled the web? Even Vista and 7 were guilty if you were lax and disabled UAC.
All of the things people are complaining about here, like Microsoft becoming the de facto admin of of their Desktop Windows 10 products, are direct results of a period they manufactured.
All anyone who waxes nostalgic should do to test is install anything earlier than 10 on an internet facing computer and then wait. It's terrifying how fast they get compromised.
In early Windows XP days everybody said it was crap compared to Win2k. XP was the first one with product activation as well. And people called the Luna theme childish.
Then Vista came along and people said XP was the good one.
That doesn't prove anything. People said it was crap because it was. Then SP1 was released with 1+ year and it became pretty good. By SP3 it was rock solid because that's 7 years of bug fixes keeping other changes to minimum. That's what giving bugs does to software, no surprise here.
Microsoft made a big security pivot during XP. Gates put his foot down and forced the company to reprioritize secure engineering over everything else during the SP(2?) timeframe.
They also made a pretty big push toward formal verification of drivers, which were often the culprit for insecure/unstable machines. Their SLAM model checker [0] was avant-garde (in industry terms, at least).
Yep, the whole Trustworthy Computing initiative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trustworthy_computing There was a huge investment in training, tools, and creating security specialists. It took a long time to turn the ship around but security issues started trending down a few years after that.
Don't forget Windows 2003 Server in that list. That, to me, was the ultimate Windows. Had the XP stuff, but with the ugly theme disabled by default. Was super stable even compared to Windows 2000. Was lightweight. Only annoying thing was it came with sound disabled, but a few clicks in the Control Panel after installing, and you were golden.
7 was just rebranded vista. It was basically vista sp3. MS knew the vista name had been badly tarnished.
The are several reasons why vista churned so badly at startup was the indexing service and the service that was trying to load everything into memory. Turn those 2 off and vista worked as good as 7, I did this to dozens of computers and the owners were so happy. Several other background services needed about 1.5GB of memory just to get the system up and running. This was when 4GB of machine was considered 'huge'. By the time 7 came out they had fixed both of those services and a 'crappy' machine had 4GB. Dumping it on a box that 512MB of memory and it struggled badly (512-1024 was the sweet spot for XP). 8GB for Vista and up and for proper use of that, you need the 64bit ver.
I am currently using Windows 7 in my personal machine (and Linux in others).
The indexing service often gets disabled because it makes the machine slow down a lot.
Also I really miss Linux "swapyness", Windows Vista+ (10 included) are really aggressive in swapping, more than needed, often my machine ended trashing because of Swap while still having 20+ GB free, this is in part because of that stupid indexing and cache, Windows 7 has a habit of giving priority to the cache, putting files from the most accessed programs in the RAM, and not caring if your CURRENT program need RAM...
I use the indexer setup to ignore parts of my system. That works pretty good. Especially if you are doing any work with nodejs. Also defragging just the index file helps a lot. That thing can end up with thousands of bits all over the drive. Even with SSD it is not great as random seek on many SSDs are fairly terrible and contig read is amazing. One trick I also do is pre-allocate my swap file (I usually pin it to 4GB). As the default is to grow/shrink.. That can do the same thing as the indexing file.
Something also changed around sp2 with 7 and file writes. Files get fragmented very quickly now even when there is plenty of space not to do so. I usually would only end up with systems badly fragmented in XP if the drive is full (much like ext4) now it just does it as a matter of course and is acting like the old DOS alg of find the next free spot.
You can still turn off the readyboost/superfetch cache service (not sure where it is win10). If you have an SSD you should not notice much difference on or off but it can happen. Turning those off makes your free RAM act more like in linux where it just caches recently read items and gives it up right away if needed.
When Vista came out I bought a new machine with AMD A6 4600+ and 2GB of RAM with Vista 64bit and it ran great. I had no driver issues or performance issue even with default install. You didn't need 4GB of RAM, you just needed new hardware. Limited RAM and drivers for the older hardware were the biggest problems, Microsoft drastically changed the driver DDK and many hardware venders had poor quality or no drivers which led to many of the problems people had. Kinda sad I got rid of this machine, it would be interesting to benchmark it to a Raspberry PI 4 in Linux.
I'm convinced if they had set a higher minimum system requirements and hid the pre-loaded memory from the task manager or labeled it more clearly Vista would be a lot more fondly remembered. Most of the people I met with negative experiences were running it on walmart "vista ready" computers that should have never certified in the first place or upgrading their old pentium 4 machine with 1GB of ram and expecting a good time.
The humorous but not wrong "consensus" was that you always had to skip a version. In this case 95 > not 98 > 98SE > not Me > XP (this was a bit of a departure because it was a successor to both the 9x and the NT lines) > not Vista > Win 7.
And both XP and Win 7 were criticized at the beginning because they had to compete with very solid predecessors, and because they came with plenty of teething problems even if they had potential. That potential was fully realized some SPs later.
This is because since at least ‘95, MS has alternated focus between base technology and polish/reliability/UX. The ones we think of as good (98SE, 2000/XP, 7) are the ones with the focus on polish. The ones we remember as flaky (ME, Vista, 8) are the ones with substantial new tech in them that hadn’t had the additional years of refinement.
I think Windows Me was just an attempt at making 98 more modern and multimedia-friendly. It was just bad, with no relevant upgrades at any layer of the stack.
i think it was the only still dos-based windows to automaticall install usb drivers for mice and usb sticks and things. we had a sony laptop running ME for a long time because it was too slow to run XP, but had a USB port already
Yet, NT4 -> W2K -> XP.... strange how the consumer degraded but the business was a real progression. I was using NT4 at my first job in 98, through till 2000 became more wide spread. Win2000 was a step up, but the driver support (IIRC) could be a bit spotty. But overall it was great. Then XP came a long and added Crayola UI and Zip folder access. It took me a lot longer to move to XP, and when I did I would always go to Control Panel and turn off the dreadful UI and make it go back to using the classic desktop style. But XP stayed relevant right up till 2013 when I changed jobs and no longer needed to use VMs as much... even then there was still one VM I needed to use that was supplied by head office. So XP for me was still in use when they EOL'd it, though only to run a legacy simulation in a VM.
W2k was the first possibly-not-utter-crap version. In the consumer space W3.1 was just DOS with Windows, and didn't even have full multitasking.
W95 was 60% bugs and 40% OS. There was even a really obvious bug in the calculator app. There were all kinds of very very weird - i.e. bad - design decisions both in the code and in the UI. Trying to find fixes and workarounds literally wasted days of almost everyone's time.
The initial release of XP was workable, but by SP1 it was fairly stable and you could actually use it as a working OS without having to deal with driver issues and constant crashes.
Vista was another dog. W7 was very possibly the best Windows. 8 was another WTAF release. 10 is 8 with some improvements, but some added evil in the form of forced telemetry for most users, and such.
For me, Windows 95 OSR2 (OEM service release 2) and 98 were more stable than stock 95. I remember having to obtain it via one of those "100 in 1" pirated CDs, because the OSRs weren't made available to the end users.
I don't use Windows day to day anymore but, my family has Windows 10 and I manage it.
When I sit in the front of the computer, I feel like I'm inside the big space ship in the Wall-e. All the advertisements, forced consumerism and everything.
I had run tr0nscript on the computer I support for family a few years ago, and that made the experience almost reasonable.
I know tr0nscript has fallen out of favor since, don’t know the exact reasons. I did need to fix the hosts file to allow windows to get security updates - but otherwise, that machine still feels as usable as win7 except for the degraded shell (which could be replaced with classic shell, I guess, but I didn’t bother).
> I know tr0nscript has fallen out of favor since, don’t know the exact reasons.
Looked to what it's doing in every step [0]. It's a bit overzealous while doing what it's doing. Also, its default are not the most sensible ones so, if you're not running it after installation it may change the behavior of the system quite a bit.
Removal of metro apps, resetting IE, purging %APP_DATA% storage, removal of some VCS snapshots... It's a thermonuclear option to take. To be able to run in a milder, sensible manner needs a lot of tuning. So it's not practical.
I really don't know what people are talking about ads? My win 10 has zero ads on it. I turned off all telemetry (i think) with a couple of programs dedicated to doing that. Maybe my pi-hole is blocking the ads?
To me it's always been win2k, win 7, win 10, win 98. In tthat order. I've been using win2k rather than windows xp when I need legacy application support, though you might need to jump through some hoops for XP compatibility and drivers.
Though I've been inpressed by how snappy windows 8 feels, especially the boot time which is the fastest of all versions.
8 was the first version that hibernates the kernel on shutdown so it can reload it from snapshot on boot. That’s why all windows versions since 8 boot so fast.
Still Windows 8 boots faster for me. A clean installation is 2 seconds from bios to login (not hibernated, but "fast startup"), and perhaps 5-6 seconds for windows 10 (also with fast startup enabled, which it is on both on a default install).
Personal experience would indicate that a lot of people hated Windows 8, not just because it took something they were familiar with and threw the biggest curveball at it possible, but because they actively made the UI/UX significantly more difficult to use.
For me the icing on the cake was segregating different apps between "tablet mode" and "desktop mode," where the former would take up the entire screen with no reasonable way to multitask between programs. Not only that but how many apps had (and even still have) both a UWP and standard implementation, from my experience that just confused users as to which they were supposed to use. Heck even today we still have the Settings app and the Control Panel (which is increasingly difficult to access I might add), both with various controls and settings only found in one but not the other.
IMO Windows 10 (sans tracking and forced pre/auto-installing apps) is what Windows 8 should have been from the beginning. Many beneficial changes under the hood, and minor UI changes that don't entirely change the workflow of the OS, but instead augment it for a better experience for both regular and power users. Somehow we've eclipsed the 5-year mark since its release, yet Windows 10 still feels incomplete. Not even just that, but they manage to make it feel even less finished with every new update.
I think the biggest change that killed 8 was the lack of the start menu. Having to go to the start screen - pulling you away from your entire desktop just to launch an app - was awful. I know Win 8.1 got it back, but for the time between 8 and 8.1 Classic Shell was almost necessary to use Windows 8. All that for no discernible benefit over using 7.
Although I find 8.1 still better than 10. Some of its
preinstalled apps and UI were just weird, but at least it wasn't
anti-user by design. Both are a clear downgrade to Windows 7
though.
Windows 8 is fine, _if_ you actually know how to use Windows. (Protip: Win-D takes you to the desktop from the app grid.) I would go so far as to say it's good, if you're using a touchscreen or tablet; the live tiles were useful.
Always amused me that the OS X Launchpad is also a ugly grid of huge app icons that takes up the entire screen, just like the Windows 8 start screen, yet nobody says a word about that.
8 was great on the intended devices. I used it on an asus transformer tablet/laptop and it worked really well. W10 was a step down for that machine because they dialed back the tablet UI.
Me too, for a simple reason: Windows 7 can be made to look and behave almost identically as Windows 95 did in terms of UI - which is, to this day, widely praised: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21878006
Windows 8 and 10? Not at all. It's a wild, wild mixture of the good old UI and... an abomination of stuff clearly "designed" for touch screens. Not to mention all the privacy and advertising issues.
Windows XP SP3 was solid as hell. It was easy to change the theme, which I always did along with the brain dead "hide extensions and system files" and ridiculous swap file settings that guaranteed you'd always be resizing incessantly
Funny enough win2k was the first to have a somewhat decent multi-language management, in particular you didn’t need a dedicated CJK version. So that’s where the nostalgia loop would stop for a lot of us (and it was buggy as hell, of course)
It is quite sad that we might never experience that stability and usuability of commercial big apps/os anymore in the age of penny
squeezing and spyware.
I had my Win XP, Photoshop and MS Office with ever lasting licsenses. You need FOSS today for that. As soon as you pay for software nowadays you are a loser, in general.
>As soon as you pay for software nowadays you are a loser, in general.
That is so true! I buy'd a Lifetime License for Insync and Jaikoz, Insync's lifetime was 4 Years (then they changed the license for updates) and Jaikoz "Lifetime" was 6 Years, change the name of the Software and split it in two different product and the 'old' one was not maintained anymore.
I still have an XP laptop at work because it happens to have a serial port. Every time I use it I'm briefly shocked at how responsive everything is. That's on period hardware.
God the future sucks. IT has been destroyed by complexity fetishists and resume driven development.
Not entirely. There's still Alpine, Gentoo, Void, Debian/Devuan -- All of which still run on reasonably low specced hardware, and can be loaded with XFCE/Tiling WM's for a lightweight UX.
Outside of Linux and other FL/OSS OS's I have to agree though.
You say that as though everything above the Linux kernel isn't a nightmarish hodge-podge of software with interconnections ever increasing in complexity that creates conflicts so readily it needs third parties to carefully maintain specialized builds of each component to keep it all from blowing up.
I guess I've just given up on having a sole first party maintaining a sane system. It makes more sense to me to have something like Linux/BSD vs a first party system that falls apart worse while still being closed, despite being a consistent maintainer.
Which I guess brings me back around to where you started.
KDE runs in less than 400MB which would be fine on 2GB systems of the era. It's browsers and electron apps (browsers in disguise) that chew up all the memory, and once you start swapping it's over.
XP is certainly not the proper OS to be running today, it's been passed by especially in a security sense.
But when it was released, it was the first really truly stable and consumer focused operating system MS had released. The NT series prior had been stable (to a point), and was good for business uses, but try gaming or doing much that a home desktop user wanted to do and it really fell down there. XP picked up the mantle of being the successor to both Windows 98 and Windows 2000, and it really did a great job of it.
Was it perfect? Of course not. But it did a job and did it better than anything else in its time for its specific uses.
Always amazing to hear people sing praise of Windows XP when you remember how everyone was praising Windows 2000 when they were calling out Windows XPs insanely ugly themes and designs.
