131–140 of 175 posts
Sorry for being (slightly?) off-topic: Is there a decent way to buy this LTSC edition of Windows?
Only way is usually to buy devices that have such a license included.
Interestingly, I hear a lot of people talk about LTSC, but few talking about their positive experiences. Is this the "I'm moving to Canada," of operating systems?
Everyone seems to love the Windows 7 era but for me, Windows peaked GUI-wise with Windows 2000 and everything since then has felt like a poor 'skin' or misplaced 'theme' on top of something else. Windows XP's level of 'plug and play' for devices/drivers ushered in the modern OS feel from a usability standpoint, but from a 'get-shit-done' GUI and responsiveness standpoint Win 2000 (and up to Windows Server 2003 by ext…
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Just thinking more about how we're told it's "insecure". It's unfortunate that so many tech people are so gullible when it comes to the industry's marketing around this. Many of us know a huge proportion of news stories come from PR firms that just want to sell us something (it comes up on HN every now and then). In the mid-2000s or so, Microsoft had a particular problem selling Office - there was no reason to upgrad…
But... Old software is often going to be insecure on the network. Are you arguing that an OS from 2013 with a browser from the same time is fine on the Web?
If we were talking about even older browsers though... 20 years ago, because of the insecure way browsers generally worked, everybody used third-party antivirus or e.g. Norton Internet Security, which seemed to cause as many problems as it solved. But browsers (and OSes) haven't been so open for years - we don't have quite that class of problems anymore, where just visiting a site was enough to get the browser to download and run all sorts of nasties. I don't remember quite when it was that we'd left the most dangerous period behind, when the security of browsers and OSes had been considerably hardened, but it was before 2013. Windows 7 was, and is, much safer on the network than XP, by design.
Everyone seems to love the Windows 7 era but for me, Windows peaked GUI-wise with Windows 2000 and everything since then has felt like a poor 'skin' or misplaced 'theme' on top of something else. Windows XP's level of 'plug and play' for devices/drivers ushered in the modern OS feel from a usability standpoint, but from a 'get-shit-done' GUI and responsiveness standpoint Win 2000 (and up to Windows Server 2003 by ext…
I agree.
But it's all relative, and I did actually like how Win7 looked. Then "flat design" came along and not only did things get visually boring, nowadays, it's frequently very hard to tell fields from buttons from other controls, where you're supposed or allowed to click and where it's just decoration, etc.
It was a mercy on KDE Plasma: KDE has always been at best plain and homely, but at worst, retina-searingly fugly, IMHO. Flat design at least tamed that.
But on everything else, it's worse than what went before.
Win10 LTSC is now my version of choice. I rarely use Windows -- I mainly use macOS and Linux and am exploring BSD -- but when I need to, it's Win10. Win11 is worse than WinME and Vista put together.
If this can make Win10 look like Win7, I'm interested.
From everything I've heard, running LTSC is not a good idea for a daily-driver pc. App support/compatibility is annoying and not guaranteed. I guess if you have a small set of unchanging apps that you use and that's all it could be a good pick. Interestingly, I hear a lot of people talk about LTSC, but few talking about their positive experiences. Is this the "I'm moving to Canada," of operating systems?
The only time I had an issue was when a DAW installer required me to upgrade to 22H2. I grabbed the enablement package directly and used the DISM tool to install it.
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I used to start with 2000 server (so I could RDP) and then install something like Aston Shell to make it customizable and beautiful. I miss the days when windows was a platform you could extend and customize.
Same, but blackbox (bb4win) was my shell of choice. Along with the Win32 Unix tools, Conemu, xyplorer and shell32.dll icon replacements, my Windows back then looked and behaved very similar to a Fluxbox/OpenBox Linux install. I also recall this 3D shell where your desktop was basically like an first-person shooter, where there would be a literal desk with files that you could click on, a media wall that would display…
Was it Task Gallery from Microsoft Research?
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-tas...
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Now you can hit the Windows key, type Visual Studio and open a Bing search for Visual Studio, instead of actually opening VS. It’s great - if your KPI is bing DAU
I know it should be the default, but if you turn off online searches for the Start Menu, it operates exactly how you'd expect it to on Windows 11. Windows 11 is also a lot faster than 7 was on equivalent systems. Windows 7 would take minutes to boot.
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The Start Menu integrated search would have been real nice if it worked properly, but unfortunately they decided on some kind of “search” algorithm that can't even do a substring match on items in the Start Menu. I have no clue what the thinking there was, but it drives me to not want to use it.
I think what drives me mad is its nondeterminism. If I hit Winkey and type a string, it should not be the case that I get different results from doing that 6 times in a row because it depends whether some background task which changes the results finishes first.
Start typing a word, see the thing you want, finish the word, it disappears.
And
Start typing, see what you want, stop typing and hit enter, but it changed to something else between when you saw it and when you hit enter.
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Same here, Windows 2000 is peak UI, I never liked the Frutiger Aero aesthetics. My only criticism is that it was, in a sense, too successful and elements like the taskbar and start menu got ossified and the design stagnated. Apple's F3 show all windows, F4 spotlight is far better. Windows didn't even get multiple desktops until Windows 10. I guess I like the design language but I wouldn't be prepared to give back the…
Windows didn't even get multiple desktops until Windows 10. I believe that it has always supported multiple desktops since the introduction of the NT kernel. There just wasn't any UI provided in the OS for switching. I used a Microsoft PowerToy to switch between desktops, I think all the way back to NT 4.0.