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The day Windows died

thomasbandt.com

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Re: The day Windows died

#581

Post by aembleton »

piyush_soni wrote: post #380
safety1st wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post is basically about the author's nostalgia for his early days of computing with Windows 95 and how he wanted his son to have the same experience. This post is screaming out for Linux. Linux is the solution to his dilemma. If he reformats that drive and puts say Kubuntu on it - the kid's first PC experience is going to be a vaguely retro 90's style shell with a start menu, the start menu is going to have a Ga…

> And of course it's Linux, so there's infinite opportunity to get under the hood and tinker. - Or keep trying to fix the environment + hardware compatibility issues and not do the actual work/study. Or keep editing some random xorg.conf file because his monitor's display suddenly became weird. Or try to fix some other random files since the sound driver doesn't work. He's 10. I'm 40 and still horrified to deal with…

> his monitor's display suddenly became weird

Not experienced that for a decade on Linux, but it happens every day for me on MacOS. Not sure why, but coming out of sleep, half the time one monitor will be at the wrong resolution and a third of the time the other monitor will be rotated 90 degrees.

I've resorted to leaving the displays setting window open so I can change them back when it happens. Really frustrating and the same monitors, HDMI cables and USB-C hub cause no issues on Linux.

Re: The day Windows died

#582

Post by anthk »

mise_en_place wrote: post #570
elihu wrote: post #485

I just bought a Lenovo Ideapad from Costco for about $500. The last time I bought a computer preloaded with Windows was about a decade ago. My experience so far: I turn it on, there's a license agreement. Actually, there's two. One is from Microsoft, and it's rather long but I guess it's about par for the course. Then there's the Lenovo license agreement, which is actually a bunch of other license agreements concaten…

> I guess I'll crawl back into my cave and keep using Linux for the foreseeable future. Yeah you could do that, but now even Ubuntu includes ads when invoking apt. There is no escape from the ads, and it will only get worse. Even flatpak must be immediately removed, and snaps for that matter. As it is adware clutter for the system.

Don't use Ubuntu then. Use a libre distro, as Trisquel.

Re: The day Windows died

#583

Post by ducknalddon »

majkinetor wrote: post #405
apatheticonion wrote: post #332

It's really sad that there is no where for us to go in the desktop OS space right now. I, weirdly, daily drive all 3 OSes. MacOS; Work issued laptop and longish-time user (about 6 years with it). Windows; Desktop PC mostly for games. I've been using Windows since I could walk. Fedora; Desktop PC, dual booted which I use for most everything else. I cannot believe how much of a dumpster fire Windows has become. From th…

But the difference is, you can fix Windows with lots of powershell and mumbo jumbo. Others still unfixable.

Until the next update. I spend far too much time trying to make Windows behave in a non-obnoxious way.

Re: The day Windows died

#584

Post by nkotov »

thombles wrote: post #99

I bought my child an old Celeron running Windows 98SE, about 7 years in advance of when they’ll be ready for it. They’ll get the experience of playing with Paint, installing software from CDs, digital encyclopaedias, Commander Keen, all that good stuff without the internet. Then when they’re a bit older they can choose their own least-worst option.

Doing something similar but with an iMad G3 - no direct internet access before they are in school.

Re: The day Windows died

#585

Post by benrutter »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #524
elihu wrote: post #485

I just bought a Lenovo Ideapad from Costco for about $500. The last time I bought a computer preloaded with Windows was about a decade ago. My experience so far: I turn it on, there's a license agreement. Actually, there's two. One is from Microsoft, and it's rather long but I guess it's about par for the course. Then there's the Lenovo license agreement, which is actually a bunch of other license agreements concaten…

I don't understand how Microsoft can cheapen their main OS that much. If they really wanted to emulate Apple, they wouldn't fill their OS with trash in every corner. This also extends to the default landing page of Edge. This is the worst form of bullvard, it is a tiny bit better than directly advocating for penis enlargement on the internet. But not by much at all. There should be no ads on the OS level. Especially…

> I don't understand how Microsoft can cheapen their main OS that much.

There's genuinely no economic incentive for them not to sell their own OS down the river at this point.

Mac has established itself as a only-on-mac-hardware market, which rules it out as an option for the majority of corporate and educational settings, and while I wish the year-of-the-linux-desktop was actually coming, most coorporations just aren't set up to / don't understand how to manage OSs without the fallback of a company guaranteeing support.

I see a lot of people celebrating Windows 95 as a high point, and it isn't really a surprise - that was one of the last times that Windows had to genuinely attempt to compete economically for their OS share.

Re: The day Windows died

#586

Post by anthk »

TylerE wrote: post #411
einr wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or keep trying to fix the environment + hardware compatibility issues and not work on the actual study. Or keep editing some random xorg.conf file because his monitor's display suddenly became weird. Or try to fix some other random files since the sound driver doesn't work. He's 10. I was doing this stuff in Linux when I was… well, not 10, but 12. Today I work with computers. What do you think ”tinkering” means? I do…

In a lot of ways it was way easier back then as you didn't have the fragmentation. You ran X11/Xorg (no Wayland), sysv init (no systemd), OSS or ALSA, not pulseaudio, you had sane/not insanely bloated desktops like KDE2 or XFCE. Even unicode wasn't something most really had to care much about...world was still mostly ascii.

Spanish it's more widely spoken natively than English and ISO-8859-* and it sucked a lot.

Yes, you could map ISO... to ASCII to avoid 'cosas horribles de ver cæmo ⌷stas'. Most words can be read fine without the stress mark in Spanish, except for some verb conjugations where they look odd without them. But, reading n instead of 'ñ' gets tiring after a while.

Thank Plan9's gods for UTF-8.

On the rest, a separate comment it's better.

Also:

I use Hyperbola GNU/Linux. UTF-8. IceWM. Rox if bored, or for photo galleries with thumbnails, here a file manager makes sense. Metal2 theme with CDE icons. I liked the aesthetics from late 90's/early 2000's. I still use

    gv -smartan
and

    mplayer2
But... X.org works. No 30-70h, 50-160v, you know what I mean. Sndio works perfectly, so does ALSA. No encoding issues on switching from English to Spanish making voodoo in order to guess which $ENCODING_OF_THE_DAY does use the Spanish Slashdot clone. Everything works universally. Unifont for the terminal it's a godsend.

Re: The day Windows died

#587

Post by majkinetor »

ducknalddon wrote: post #583
majkinetor wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the difference is, you can fix Windows with lots of powershell and mumbo jumbo. Others still unfixable.

Until the next update. I spend far too much time trying to make Windows behave in a non-obnoxious way.

Use ShutUp10 then reimport after update.

Or better:

    1. You disable update (group policy or WuMgr tool or whateva)
    2. Install-Module PSWindowsUpdate then cherry pick with Install-WindowsUpdate 
    3. Reruns scripts you created in pwsh to disable junk.

Re: The day Windows died

#588

Post by catach »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #524
elihu wrote: post #485

I just bought a Lenovo Ideapad from Costco for about $500. The last time I bought a computer preloaded with Windows was about a decade ago. My experience so far: I turn it on, there's a license agreement. Actually, there's two. One is from Microsoft, and it's rather long but I guess it's about par for the course. Then there's the Lenovo license agreement, which is actually a bunch of other license agreements concaten…

I don't understand how Microsoft can cheapen their main OS that much. If they really wanted to emulate Apple, they wouldn't fill their OS with trash in every corner. This also extends to the default landing page of Edge. This is the worst form of bullvard, it is a tiny bit better than directly advocating for penis enlargement on the internet. But not by much at all. There should be no ads on the OS level. Especially…

Apple is probably Apple because individuals in management believe that maintaining "good taste" is in their professional interest, above goals like boosting a quarter's revenue through any means possible.

That's not a simple switch you can flip on in an organization. Especially if you lack a culture that has a consensus view of what good taste even is.

Re: The day Windows died

#589

Post by dale_glass »

TylerE wrote: post #411
einr wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or keep trying to fix the environment + hardware compatibility issues and not work on the actual study. Or keep editing some random xorg.conf file because his monitor's display suddenly became weird. Or try to fix some other random files since the sound driver doesn't work. He's 10. I was doing this stuff in Linux when I was… well, not 10, but 12. Today I work with computers. What do you think ”tinkering” means? I do…

In a lot of ways it was way easier back then as you didn't have the fragmentation. You ran X11/Xorg (no Wayland), sysv init (no systemd), OSS or ALSA, not pulseaudio, you had sane/not insanely bloated desktops like KDE2 or XFCE. Even unicode wasn't something most really had to care much about...world was still mostly ascii.

Very rose tinted glasses there.

XFree86 in the early days required you to at least know the refresh rate for your monitor, if not to actually write a modeline which is damn near black magic for most people. This stuff also came with a warning that theoretically you could break your monitor. When you're 12 that stuff is terrifying.

SysV was extremely flaky and system specific. Every distro out there, especially the friendly looking ones like Mandrake bolted on a top of fancy stuff on top that added a whole new layer of complication. Stuff that worked with Debian didn't work on Red Hat.

OSS and ALSA were pure hell unless you had a fancy soundcard with hardware mixing. Dmix required magical incantations to get working, and wasn't reliable because a lot of stuff back then still tried to go through /dev/dsp -- which would break audio for everything else if you had the wrong hardware.

ASCII was probably an okay thing in America, but if you were anywhere else, internationalization was a very un-fun thing to deal with. And if you by chance needed to deal with two non-English languages, that was a constant annoyance.

Bloat is kinda relative. You can still use IceWM if you want to, pretty much every distro has every desktop imaginable.

Re: The day Windows died

#590

Post by majkinetor »

pjmlp wrote: post #436
einr wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or keep trying to fix the environment + hardware compatibility issues and not work on the actual study. Or keep editing some random xorg.conf file because his monitor's display suddenly became weird. Or try to fix some other random files since the sound driver doesn't work. He's 10. I was doing this stuff in Linux when I was… well, not 10, but 12. Today I work with computers. What do you think ”tinkering” means? I do…

Not everyone wants to tinker when it isn't part of the job description.

Then accept reality that you have 0 control. You will always be unhappy with whatever setup. Its not realistic that 3rd party will replicate your mind state about how your OS should look like.
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