I thought 10 was a decent OS once debloated, used it for a while.
Back to Linux now though.
Other than it rebloating itself
I miss windows millennium, which would be a hammer made of a turd.
At least you can despyware 10…
Why should you need to? That’s my beef with it. It means they don’t respect you enough to give you something good in the first place and hope 99% won’t bother.
The plain old basic hammer probably should have been Windows 2000, and then a big playskool plastic stuff slapped on for XP, but ultimately pretty much exactly the same.
I use arch BTW. But I liked XP and 7.
Eh, I’d consider sliding the window a little differently. Command prompt only OS’s like DOS or maybe even BASIC as the “rock.” Windows was more like a Model T car. Make W11 a Pinto or something.
Windows peaked at 7, I only moved to Windows 10 when Windows 7 lost support
Windows peaked at DOS. It was small, inoffensive, and easily killed.
That’s mostly due to your age. Older people say it peaked at XP, younger people are saying it peaked at 10. Truth is, they’re all kinda the same shit.
I think it’s a hard case to make that 7 wasn’t objectively better than XP.
Windows 10 did roll back some of the more egregious stuff from Windows 8, but still was sort of committed, sort of not. You had a platform with multiple personalities, multiple right click context menus, multiple ‘control panel’ with a new one being emphasized, but not actually completed, so it’s an awkward mix of the platform they had suceeded with and a platform they wished it could be (combined with telemetry). Forced microsoft accounts and using the desktop as a platform to promote products and services…
Yeah I think a fair argument can be made that WIndows 7 was the ultimate execution of the general vision that started with Windows NT, and what came after was something else that also happened to have bits of that original product hanging on.
I’m not too terribly excited by any Windows in particular, but I can recognize something categorically different they wanted to do starting with 8 that remains partially executed to this day, starts to emphasize Microsoft’s interests at the expense of the users, and a direction that no one really asked for.
Exactly this. 7 was absolutely the peak of Windows. Everything after was enshittification, and everything prior was still less user-friendly and rough around the edges.
And anyone arguing XP was peak should try installing XP and try connecting to wifi. Talk about a mess. XP was only a marginal upgrade over 98/2000, but with some glossy paint. 7 was the first time Windows felt modern.
Is it though? From a privacy perspective I think Windows 10 quite clearly started introducing some shady surveillance practices which were absent in earlier versions. Of course, 11 took that waaay further, but 10 was a turning point imo.
95, 98, xp, and 7 were all great; each improved on the last. But 7 was the true peak. 10 was pretty good and unfortunately was the turning point into enshitification.
95/98 was another operating system, though. Windows
98ME (forgot about that one) was the last OS in the original Windows series– that Windows that was basically just a graphic shell for DOS.IIRC, XP was the 5th version of Microsoft’s fork of OS/2. OS/2 was rebranded as Microsoft NT in its 3^rd version due to the success of the brand Windows and the failure of OS/2 despite OS/2 having been the superior OS.
Do not make me find the pic of The Dude.
I might be slowly turning into Jeff Bridges.
Edit: missed the joke. My opinions about windows are grounded in my own experience, obviously. I’m the ‘wait for the first SP’ person historically. 10 was the first time I was not excited to install a new operating system. Everything was behind shitty UI that took away simple functionality. Funny enough I’d go back to it over 11 lol.
Oh how I wish we could just go back to W7 :(
I agree. This is why I think literally all software should be FLOSS. People should be able to use a platform as long as they like on their own hardware.
As a programmer, my world changed when Windows 95 came out, what with being 32-bit and having an extremely powerful (if difficult-to-use at first) low-level audio API, since I mainly wrote software synthesis and music composition apps. I have not given two fucks for anything that has happened since 95. Quite amazingly, that audio API has remained in existence, unchanged, all the way until today. 30 years of not having to change what I’m doing at all has been absolutely amazing. That shit even worked, without modification, for Windows CE (Compact Edition) and Windows Mobile, so I was able to make versions of my software synthesizer that ran on shitty smartphones from 2005. It worked on Windows Phone as well, albeit it quite uselessly.
That is super interesting! I could read your comments on the windows audio API all day! Do you have a development blog? I’d also love to read more about this audio API.
In a way you can. Install ZorinOS or Linux Mint. Add WINE, and you can set wine to “emulate” an version of Windows. I was using it to run some old engineering program and WinAmp
I’ve got Windows installed on a separate drive in case I wanna play Forza Horizon 5 (which I stupidly bought on Microsoft store because stepdad had an Xbox at the time and it was nice to be able to play on that as well when I was visiting - now even he moved to PS5). I haven’t booted it in over half a year despite missing the game at times. If it was Windows 7, I’d probably boot every now and then.
At this point I’ve forgotten if I have Windows 10 or 11. Chances are I did some enterprise version of one of them to get longer support, as I did the OS install like 8 or 9 months ago.
Nah, best (or more accurately: least crappy) Windows version was Windows 2000. Everything got bloated and too consumery after that.
I remember when we were a Unix shop (BSD & Linux) sharing space with guys writing code for some kind of printing software (for professional printing shops that did complex format conversions) that apparently absolutely had to be on Windows (because, unclear reasons, nobody would buy a non Windows printing management box, or something).
Anyway, they were writing for one of the early versions of NT, maybe 2000, not sure, and were pulling their hairs out the whole time we were with them.
A classic I remember was “the system will just decide that our driver (pretty much the only thing running) isn’t that important, and dump it’s priority to the shitter. Once it’s there, it’s dead in the water and we can’t get it active again without physical intervention. We’ve been talking to Microsoft for weeks to get around this.”
I suppose this has been more or less addressed by Microsoft nowadays, but, of course, this kind of thing hasn’t been an issue in unixland, like ever. Because it’s a system that fucking makes sense. And about the versions of Windows, I stopped using their stuff in the DOS days, so it’s not like I even have an opinion.
(and yes, they did have a couple very high end developers, on top of the regular grunts)
I actually really liked NT around 2000. I think it was NT 4.0? We used it for a typing class I took at the local college. That was just as an end user for one single program, but I remember liking it a lot.
Was CUPS around back then? I assume that was a trillion times easier to manage than whatever Microsoft had concocted.
You forgot windows me.
I know it would throw off the whole 9 square thing but if you (or the person that created this) decide to add it then might I recommend a hammer smashing itself into pieces?
Was there any big difference between 95, 98, SE and ME, though? IIRC they were just the yearly rebrandings of Microsoft, there was no major difference between 95 and ME I can recall.
And windows 95.
Oh shit.
I didn’t even notice.
First I forgot about Dre and now I forgot about windows 95. Smh my head.
Isn’t that what the entire thing is balanced precariously on top of? So it’s not absent from the meme, it’s lurking in the background, ever-present.
Windows actually migrated to the NT kernel when XP launched - AFAIK, ME was a dead end.
I’ll take both of your words for it since the only I know about windows me is that it fucking crashed catastrophically all the fucking time.
It’s really incredible how Microsoft is trying to drive people away, by:
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Polluting what works.
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Never actually finishing revamps in progress.
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Pushing so much crap even normal users are conditioned to click Microsoft ‘features’ away as spam.
They don’t have to do anything! They could just freeze Windows 11 and gut development beyond security/api/hardware fixes, and rake in business “stuck on win32” dollars for eternity. But no, they are trying their absolute best to push folks to Android/iOS and open a window for stuff like the steam deck.
I bet we aren’t far from OEMs even getting sick of it, as shipping (admittedly, trashy self made) linux distros.
They aren’t trying to drive people away, they just have learned there’s nothing they can do that will substantially scare people away. So time to pivot to trying to milk that captive userbase for all they are worth. People who are leaving are leaving for mobile class devices and they learned in Windows 8/Windows Phone 7 that they have no idea how to tap into that market segment anyway.
Yes, ‘enthusiasts’ are going Linux but they are a rounding error, hardly worth trying to capture compared to the revenue capture from the rest of the market. Particularly since the enthusiast market tends to be a bigger pain in terms of being picky users who complain and simultaneously unlikely to just say ‘yes I’d like that service you just popped up in the notifications for only $5/month’.
Yes, ‘enthusiasts’ are going Linux but they are a rounding error, hardly worth trying to capture compared to the revenue capture from the rest of the market.
Agreed, it’s a rounding error.
But it won’t be if OEMs get fed up and start shipping it as an option, like Valve is already doing.
Microsoft has already done some questionably ‘OEM hostile’ things like pushing the Surface line, shutting out some OEM bloatware in favor of thier own, pollute performance-sensitive devices like handhelds, and such, and it seems MS isn’t slowing down.
Yup, most people would just use Mint if it came on their laptop and not really think about it.
In Late Stage Capitalism, companies have realized they can maximize their profits by making their product worse. Especially when they have a (near) monopoly.
Unless you are strictly talking next quarter’s immediate profits/stock price, this is just bad for Microsoft. They are sabotaging their already anticompetitive golden goose.
Late Stage Capitalism dictates they’d try to keep their lock-in, but this is more executive dysfunction.
I feel like Frankenstein didn’t know when to quit either. There’s a lot of companies twisting the knife into themselves because shareholders demand infinite growth, but creating systems that work in harmony are in exact opposition to that creedo, so until we eliminate the perverse cancerous idea of infinite growth, we won’t rid ourselves of these obviously bad actors that have themselves gilded with the guise of progress
Even infinite growth has been thrown out. The main objective seems to be ‘growth next few quarters’ like its a desperate act of survival; beyond that is the problem of whoever’s holding the bag then.
There are some companies still thinking long term, but money has definitely shifted to ‘bonkers short term’
That’s the problem, though. There’s always the next few quarters. They still ultimately demand and attempt infinite growth, they just never put any thought into how to do it sustainably, and the short-term fix is to start locking away existing features behind subscriptions, raising prices, putting ads in everywhere, cutting testing budgets, etc. Somehow the mentality turned into chasing infinite short-term gains
I mean…yeah. I said maximize profits, not long term sustainability. Executive bonuses are based on this quarter’s stock price.
The dysfunction comes from incentives to act badly. What makes it “Late Stage” is the complete lack of thought for the future.
My god, imagine a world where all software is produced by OEMs.
If they ever stop making updates, then Wine will catch up and you won’t actually need Windows anymore.
They could keep on developing updates to DirectX and whatever frameworks/libraries CAD software and the like might need. Keep the UI as is, but as 3rd party developers use the new APIs, Wine needs to adapt continuously.
Yeah. But the barrier of installing linux makes that a kind of non-concern now, they can only change so much without breaking Win32.
It’d be hilarious if Windows shrinks and Wine/Proton become the de facto dev target on linux (which is honestly where things are headed now).
Valve even has a docker container target that includes Wine for future proofed porting
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime
A newer approach to cross-distribution compatibility is to use Linux namespace (container) technology, to run games in a more predictable environment, even when running on an arbitrary Linux distribution which might be old, new or unusually set up.
The Steam Runtime is also used by the Proton Steam Play compatibility tools, which run Windows games on Linux systems. Current versions of Proton (8.0 or newer) use the Steam Runtime 3 ‘sniper’ container runtime.
You target a version of the runtime when porting, and then ALL software ported to a given runtime will work on any host environment where you can support that runtime version
In fact, you can even run this on Windows if you want to avoid potentially messing up dependencies on the host OS, or avoid compatibility problems
Well that would explain why Steam works so awesomely in recent years. Even before I moved from my uber weird Gentoo setup to TumbleWeed, it got pretty stable at some point. Things just… worked. I mean the client itself largely, which some time ago was ultra buggy for me, whereas running games with Proton worked fine even then.
It’s hilarious. It’s like they’re eagerly waiting for Windows to self immolate, all prepped to stroll into the vacuum it leaves.
They’ve been preparing since 2012:
… upon the release of Windows 8 in 2012, Valve’s CEO Gabe Newell called it “a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space”, and discussed the possibility of promoting the open-source operating system Linux that would maintain “the openness of the platform”.
Gabe was worried about UWP (and Microsoft’s obvious plan for an App Store) back then. Remember, Windows Phone was a thing, and UWP/Windows 8 was shiny and new.
Microsoft failed spectacularly. Hilariously spectacularly.
But you aren’t wrong; Valve don’t want to hitch their business to the solvency of Windows.
Remember, Windows Phone was a thing
Oh yeah, my poor mother was scammed into buying one of those, just about the most worthless piece of technology I’ve ever seen.
But yeah, it’s quite an amazing journey Gabe has been on. He led the Microsoft team that ported Doom to Windows 95 using DirectX, so he kind of put the first nails in the coffin that was OpenGL back in the day. By 2005 it was all DirectX, and then he clawed that Microsoft victory out of their hands starting in 2012 and 12 years later in 2024 I switched to Linux full time playing Cyberpunk 2077 on a Debian based system of all things. Kinda wild.
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Windows 98 still had DOS built in right? I kind of have an itch to install it in a vm or something.
Nope, they were DOS with a graphical shell on top.
And Windows ME, though they made odd efforts to try to hide this shameful fact.
yeah both windows 95 and 98 were just built on top of dos
Yea, I can never forget this logo
Flashbacks
This is why I am on linux.
What about Windows ME? - the best version of classic windows.
Windows ME was one of those squeaky toy hammers.
Or a jack-in-the-box. You crank the lever hoping it’ll work this time around, and *BLAM*: BSOD.
It’s just a bottle of whiskey
“Peak” performance
They know we liked Win7. They’ll never go back, they’ll just keep making it worse for us and more profitable for them.
That’s why I switched to Linux Mint a year ago. I feel sorry for people who can’t switch for whatever reason.
I did a switch last week and i feel like my life became just a little bit more bearable because THERE IS NO FUCKING BLOAT. Win11 actively makes you feel bad using a computer.
Windows 95, ME, NT, and 2000 erasure.
And 3.11 for Workgroups.
nobody talks about 2000 bc 2000 was solid as fuck and there was nothing to complain about
