81–90 of 390 posts
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Windows 2000 or Windows XP - with security updates and modern hardware support - is exactly what I want.
Zone94 is still releasing modern Windows XP distributions and OneCore API brings Windows 10-level app support to Windows XP. https://github.com/shorthorn-project/One-Core-API-Binaries
Curious how MacOSX stacks up over the past 25 years. Tahoe feels like a massive regression on all fronts, from GUI to I/O.
I liked the path windows was going in late 2010s. WSL, power toys, many great utils, great performance. But it has since then stalled and got increasingly worse. Especially with this AI shoving everywhere, not even mentioning getting ads at some point in notifications and start menu. I'm not particularly in love with MacOS either (but have no realistic alternative on my MacBooks). I'm more and more inclined of switch…
Even without the AI, it's replacing native apps with web based ones. Case in point: Notepad. It's slower than WordPad on Win 10... and crashes!
Something like 90% of all new devs today learn only cloud-native backend dev or web frontend dev. The only exceptions tends to be mobile and game developers. Collectively cloud+web, mobile, and games account for like 98% of all new devs it seems. Nobody learns anything else.
The web is going to become the desktop UI in the future for this reason alone. It's going to be slower and much more bloated than almost any other alternative, but it's got the critical mass of adoption behind it and that's what determines core technologies in the industry. Technical merit is a distant second or third.
This is frustrating but it's not surprising to one who has studied biology and evolution. In evolution this is called "path dependence," and it's why we have weird things like a man's testicles hanging in a bag below his body. A previous evolutionary path optimized the sperm production process to run at a lower temperature than the rest of the body, so then evolution's hack for this is to put them in a bag outside the body. Ticket closed with "resolved." The pathways taken through a complex solution space determine the outcome and the outcome is often bizarre and "hacky" for this reason. The key is that it's very hard to back-track. Once a path has been taken, it's very hard to un-take it.
Large industries and markets are essentially "biological," not rationally designed, so you get the same kinds of phenomena.
It could be much worse. If Linux+HTML+JS had not taken over, we might have the Microsoft Enterprise Web(tm) where Visual Basic (not VB.NET, OG Visual Basic) is the main language and each service or site would require an NT license for every node and an IIS license for every web hostname. UIs might be written in ActiveX or desktop ones in Microsoft C/C++ with OLE and similar horrors. It might be just as slow and infinitely uglier and more expensive and less open. Apple would be dead and open source would much more marginalized than it is today. The net would basically be a total MS monopoly. If you didn't live through the 90s: this nearly happened.
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This. It was infuriating to find Notepad got updated to a bloated app with rich text and Copilot. It's so different, it just should have been another program. The whole reason I use Notepad is because it's a simple, dumb, fast, predictable program. If I wanted the rich text, I would use any of the numerous other options! And for the kicker, the update made it forget my font settings.
Re "just another program" - the old Notepad was deliberately designed with minimal dependencies so that even if everything else in the system went to hell you'd still have a working editor to try and fix things.
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> I'm more and more inclined of switching my desktop (my main working machine) to Omarchy Never heard of it and the website and GitHub repo sure aren't doing a great job of describing it's benefits. "Beautiful, Modern & Opinionated" are vague and really aren't adjectives I'd be looking for in an OS.
When anything is described as "opinionated" I just read it as "wilfully inflexible".
Out of the loop: Why is Windows 11 discussion trending over the past few months? It was released 4 years ago, and the most notable changes from the previous edition are a tabbed file browser, and the taskbar icons are now in the middle.
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It sounds weird to say, but Steve Ballmer was probably the best CEO of Microsoft.
Or: Steve Ballmer oversaw the decline of Mircosoft's flagship product, but left before he could be blamed for it. A lot of Windows' current problems can be traced back to the Ballmer era, including the framework schizophrenia, as Microsoft shifted between Win32, UWP, WPF, and god knows what else. This has lead to the current chaotic and disjointed UI experience, and served to confuse and drive away developers. Repeat…
Ah yes, and the solution being presented is Linux, with Xlib, Motif, Qt, GTK, and your choice of 167 different desktop environments. Don't forget the whole Wayland schism.
Mac is no better, shifting SDKs every few years, except Apple goes one step further by breaking all legacy applications so you are forced to upgrade. Can't be schizo when you salt the earth and light a match to everything that came before the Current Thing.
Regarding the video benchmark on the page: what would be fair is testing against the hardware that was available when the operating system was released. Windows 11 is absolutely not meant to run against hard drives, and current notebook and desktop offerings for home and enterprise users reflect that: you can get a 256gb SSD for a pretty decent price nowadays, to the point there's absolutely no reason to put in an HD…
MacOS is a buggy mess, and it's also pretty slow lately. If you need full Office for work, your best bet is probably still Windows.
But then I don’t find macOS to be slow or a buggy mess, so mileage may vary.
I once had to remote into a Windows XP machine somehow running on an older Intel i5 (first or 2nd gen). Still overkill for XP. It was CRAZY fast, over Teamviewer it felt better and faster than my local machine... Sad times.