141–150 of 219 posts
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I wonder what is the rational of removing features like allow for customization.
Technical debt, requiring someone to maintain it.
I could see staying with Windows 7. That was the best version Microsoft ever made. Microsoft finally figured out how to make it stable, and it didn't have all the ad and cloud crap nailed in. You can run current Firefox, current Thunderbird, and current LibreOffice, which covers the basics. Most Windows software still works.
> That was the best version Microsoft ever made No. 7 was a rollback on Vista. The best one which was not a step back but rather a step forward was Windows 2000. (Some even swear by NT4, which I feel also has some merit.)
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really? who, when? I have actually lived through that era, and I can't remember there being negative sentiment about XP. I don't know about the dark corners of the internet, but the people in my circles were neutral about XP, hated Vista, loved 7, hated 8, hated 10 and hate 11 to this day, the only criticism of XP I saw is about the UI, which doesn't make sense to me - switching it was a matter of 3 clicks
The general sentiment for a very long time in my circles was along the lines of "Windows 2000 is the best Windows".
I could see staying with Windows 7. That was the best version Microsoft ever made. Microsoft finally figured out how to make it stable, and it didn't have all the ad and cloud crap nailed in. You can run current Firefox, current Thunderbird, and current LibreOffice, which covers the basics. Most Windows software still works.
Groan , the luddite mentality about Windows is and has always been out of control, with so many people insisting on living on decade-old software for silly pedantic reasons like "cloud crap" that can be turned off in 5 seconds. Don't move my cheese, nothing else can possibly be better, Windows peaked 10 years ago. No, my Windows 11 system doesn't use a Microsoft Account. No, I don't get ads on Windows (web search and…
Ironically, I haven't made the jump to 11 yet just because my decade old Dell has an i7 that's been remarkably resilient for the kind of work I do on it.
My favorite thing about Windows is the backwards compatibility. I had a 2005 era Dell laptop that had come with XP. I think I paid $35 for an upgrade to Win7 after running the beta. Had the Win8 beta on there, which upgraded to a full version for free, and eventually upgraded to Win10 freely somehow as well. By that time, it struggled to run more than a web browser, and the internal wifi card no longer functioned, but it was remarkable that the upgrades all just worked.
And I've got some pretty nice Firewire audio hardware that runs flawlessly on Windows 10 despite the last driver for it having been released in 2006.
I wish ReactOS were ready by now...
I do wish they worked differently though. They're trying to build the entire thing from scratch all at once, but it would've made much more sense if they took a Windows installation and started replacing Microsoft components one by one with their own until there are none left. This would guarantee 100% compatibility with everything imaginable, because you get complete integration testing for free, and probably won't break any licenses either. Didn't the Haiku project use this approach with BeOS?
I am very curious of how long it would take to be ‘pwned’ whilst browsing the web with internet explorer on XP. Seconds, minutes, hours? Time to fire up a VM I think.
Depends on your browsing habits. If you're only visiting a handful of trustworthy websites maybe never. If you spend nine hours a day on bootleg hentai streaming sites, maybe very quickly.
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Yes, 2000 was by far my favorite Windows. Very solid, very clean style. I have a burning hatred for the visual design of Windows 7 (and Vista to a lesser degree) - it may have been technically great, but the design felt appropriate for a toothpaste, not for an operating system. I could only stand XP with the 2000 style as well. What the hell were they thinking?
I consider Windows 2000 the top that Microsoft reached with regard to style (both look and feel). But you can choose "Windows Classic" as a style in Windows 7 and it will not to be too different, although some thing may be annoying. For example, Windows 2000 was more keyboard-friendly. In Explorer, you edit the path on the top input, then you tab and you move between files. Since Windows XP that has been increasing,…
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You can switch Win7 to classic theme and pretend it's an improved Win95. That's what I do in my VMs since I don't need to be burning cycles and RAM on eyecandy.
Ironically in Vista and newer the GUI is GPU accelerated and switching to the classic theme switches from GPU acceleration to CPU rendered.
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Doesn't MS still offer paid updates for win7?
yah for another month. The official paid support is "Extended Security Updates (ESU) through January 2023" But, it wouldn't surprise me at all if a couple large (or important) customers with some special cases have some kind of incident support contracts which basically dictate that MS fixes exploits or bugs in embedded systems/whatever. Its happened in the past, so no reason to think that some nuke plant tied to win…
Extended Security Update Year 3 - End Date 2024-10-08
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows...
and you also have 0patch
https://blog.0patch.com/2022/10/two-more-years-of-critical-s...
Microsoft was wise to fear open source. If Windows XP had been free software, the vast majority of institutions would have just kept using it and Microsoft's future OS sales would have plummeted, along with all the ad and user data revenue that they indirectly generate. Instead, being closed source, Microsoft can just force users to update to systems that they don't want, by withholding critical security fixes and fe…
to play the devil's advocate, you're saying that microsoft should continuously make critical security fixes for old OS versions, add updates/features with which modern web requires to function, all while not taking any income except for the initial payment purchase price?
No business could do this.
Edit: to make the point, i would say that microsoft _should_ charge a subscription for old versions of windows, and use that revenue to upkeep it, instead of pushing what they're pushing right now.