By Windows 2000 Server, they finally had the architecture right, and had flushed out most of the 16 bit legacy.
The big win with Windows 7 was that they finally figured out how to make it stop crashing. There were two big fixes. First, the Static Driver Verifier. This verified that kernel drivers couldn't crash the rest of the kernel. First large scale application of proof of correctness technology. Drivers could still fail, but not overwrite other parts of the kernel. This put a huge dent into driver-induced crashes.
Second was a dump classifier. Early machine learning. When the system crashed, a dump was sent to Microsoft. The classifier tried to bring similar dumps together, so one developer got a big collection of similar crashes. When you have hundreds of dumps of the same bug, locating the bug gets much easier.
Between both of those, the Blue Screen of Death mostly disappeared.
It is great as idea, pity that Microsoft keeps failing to deliver in developer tooling that actually makes COM fun to use, instead of something we have to endure.
From OLE 1.0 pages long infrastructure in Windows 16 bit, via ActiveX, OCX, MFC, ATL, WTL, .NET (RCW/CCW), WinRT with. NET Native and C++/CX, C++/WinRT, WIL, nano-COM, .NET 5+ COM,....
Not only do they keep rebooting how to approach COM development, in terms of Visual Studio tooling, one is worse than the other, not at the same feature parity, only to be dropped after the team's KPI change focus.
When they made the Hilo demo for Windows Vista and later Windows 7 developers with such great focus on being back on COM, after how Longhorn went down, a better tooling would be expected.
It's not used on production machines and it does nothing to prevent a badly written driver from crashing the kernel.
In any case, running the certification tests does not provide runtime protection for drivers running in kernel mode, as demonstrated by CrowdStrike. Only Windows 10 started introducing hardware virtualization-based isolation of kernel components (to provide isolation of security subsystems, not runtime checks to prevent crashes): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...
"Driver Verifier is not normally used on machines used in productive work. It can cause ... blue screen fatal system errors."
Windows 2000 Pro was the peak of the Windows UX. They could not leave well enough alone.
The ribbon is a great fit for Office style apps with their large number of buttons and options.
Especially after they added the ability to minimize, expand on hover, or keep expanded (originally this was the only option), the ribbon has been a great addition.
But then they also had to go ahead and dump it in places where it had no reason to be, such as Windows Explorer.
I think that says something about it.
--
1. And not just "grumble, grumble... get off my lawn..." Many of its controls are at best obscure. It hides many of them away. It makes them awkward to reach.
Many new users seem as clueless, or even more so, than pre-existing customers who experienced the rug pull. At least pre-ribbon users knew there was certain functionality that they just wanted to find.
(And I still remember how MS concurrently f-cked with Excel shortcut keys. Or seemed to have, when I next picked Excel up after a couple year hiatus from being a power user.)
To me this is the exact use case where it fails. I find it way harder to parse as it's visually intense (tons of icons, buttons of various sizes, those little arrows that are sometimes in group corners...).
Office 2003 had menus that were at most 20-25 entries long with icons that were just the right size to hint what the entries are about, yet not get in the way. The ribbon in Office 2007 (Word, for example) has several tabs full of icons stretching the entire window width or even more. Mnemonics were also made impractical as they dynamically bind to the buttons of the currently visible tab instead of the actions themselves.
This is also what I hear about GNOME. "OK, yes, GNOME 3.x was bad, but by GNOME 40 it's fine."
No, it's not. None of my core objections have been fixed.
Both ribbons and GNOME are every bit as bad as they were in the first release, nearly 20 years ago.
Being a power users is difficult, I think the best way to do software is to make it APL complicated and only educate one guy in it. The way power users in Excel/Emacs/Accounting software out perform user friendly stuff is amazing. But somethings are meant for the masses, e.g. opening a file.
Dumbing down or magification of interfaces was needed for many other reasons. Gnome and Ribbon were necessary changes IMO, what we had was never going to improve. Of course I wish there was elements that could be reused elsewhere, but that is a pipedream of Smalltalk proportions.
I am now stuck with windows at work, and it is a horrible experience. Everything is so needlessly complicated. In the same way Linux is. I do believe Gnome did manage to improve things, at least when I look at children using Mac, Linux and Windows as power users. My view is that the complexity of Linux is still a little bit easier to understand, but that is just because of a long history and easy abstractions.
I think core objections are often not compatible with products that need to fit and be produced for many people. I do software that is used once by many this has changed my view if GUIs for ever, especially in regards to desktops.
It is a terrible choice. Always have to search for items.
1. I don't need to find stuff.
I knew where stuff is.
2. I read text. I only need menus. I don't need toolbars etc. and so I turn them all off.
I cannot read icons. I have to guess. It's like searching for 3 things I need in an unfamiliar supermarket.
3. Menus are very space efficient.
Ribbons hog precious vertical space. This is doubly disastrous on widescreens.
4. I am a keyboard user.
I use keys to navigate menus. It's much faster than aiming at targets with the mouse and I don't need to look. The navigation keys don't work any more.
Ribbons help those who don't know what they are doing and do not care about speed and efficiency.
They punish experts who do know, don't search, don't hunt, and customise themselves and their apps for speed and efficient use of time and screen space.
The problem is, most users are utterly braindead, they barely manage to type at speed instead of pecking at single keys. The astonishment I've gotten in some places for literally nothing more than Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V is more than enough proof.
That's also IMHO a large portion of why Linux never really took off on desktop. UX/UI people are rare enough to begin with, most of them don't work on FOSS in their free time, and so development is primarily done by nerds for nerds. That's great if you already know something about the application - but usually the learning curve is so steep that most users frustratedly give up. And documentation is either not existing, incomplete or horribly outdated, and StackOverflow etc. are even worse.
The exception is Blender. They got some serious money IIRC, cleaned up their act, and now there's a headline of some movie or game using Blender every few weeks.
The sad thing is that Windows has a great keyboard UI and it's superbly accessible for people with visual and motor disabilities.
Who have reduced earning opportunities because they are disabled, so FOSS should be great for them, but it isn't, because the nerds don't know CUA and don't know the keyboard UI. They spend their time mastering a couple of ancient apps like Vi and Emacs and ignore the fiery furnace of UI R&D that followed for the next 20Y after those early efforts.
Learn Windows' keyboard UI and you can drive the whole OS and all its apps with the speed of a genius Vim user with 20 years' practice. It makes Emacs look like a wet paper pad and a burned stick compared to a Moleskine notebook and a top quality fountain pen.
Xfce comes close and implements maybe 75% of the UI but once you are in an app all bets are off.
Do you have a reference for this? I've often needed to control Windows using only a keyboard and failed to do so. I'm aware of most shortcuts in this list[1] but these are for a few very specific things. (As an aside, I also remember controlling the mouse with the numpad using the Mouse Keys accessibility setting but this is worse than both keyboard shortcuts and the mouse.)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_keyboard_shortcuts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
There are dozens of them out there.
Random example:
https://www.system-overload.org/windows-shortcuts.html
General guide...
Activate menu bar with Alt. Alt + the underlined letter opens that menu or submenu.
Alt+Space opens the control menu for that window. In MDI apps, alt+hyphen opens the document's window control menu.
Then...
Alt+space, x = maXimise Alt+space, n = miNimise Alt+space, s = reSize followed by cursor key to select which edge, then cursors to change.
Hotkeys are Ctrl+letter and do that action now.
Ctrl+... p = print s = save o = open f = find c = copy x = cut (looks like scissors) v = paste (looks like an arrow: paste _V_ HERE )
Shift modifies or reverses many commands, and selects while moving.
In dialogs and forms, Tab moves forwards; Shift+Tab backwards
Ctrl+PgDown = next tab Ctrl+PgUp = previous tab Ctrl+Enter = save and close form
Ctrl+left/right = move by word instead of character Shift+home/end = select to start/end of line
Esc = cancel
Ctrl+Esc = open start menu
Then tab, and you're tabbing through the taskbar, which is a sort of dialog box.
Ctrl+Shift+Esc = open task manager
Maybe this should be on a wiki somewhere so it can be documented collaboratively...
Look for underlined single letters in menus. With apps that use the "classic" style menus instead of ribbons or plain Electron crap, the single letters are the key.
For example, I would like to set options that are a few menus/button clicks deep in the Windows control panel (either the "classic" or new variant) using keyboard shortcuts/navigation. Or navigate the Windows registry editor. I'm not aware of a way to do this.
No, it's not in all OSes. I wish it were.
No, it's not in all native apps. KDE reinvents its own set of keystrokes, for instance, and half the KDE apps have no menu bars any more... And there's no global way to force them either.
Yes, the control panel and RegEdit are totally keyboard controllable.
You can literally just unplug the mouse from a Windows desktop and it remains totally 100% operable.
Some apps may not, because the developers didn't do their jobs right, but the OS is.
How else could blind people use PCs?
I'm sure you can give me some hints, because Microsoft, can't.
Windows also has a great help system, online. /s
Back in the days when application developers stuck to the Windows-provided widgets instead of doing their own UI, it was wonderful. Symbols were consistent across applications, as were color schemes (IIRC, if you wrote your CSS correctly, Internet Explorer would pass these on to websites!) and behavior.
I miss these days.
Or the documentation is very complete, but only useful if you read and comprehend it in its entirety. Open source devs need to understand that not everyone using their software wants to become an expert in it. They just want to get a task done and the software is facilitating completing that task. That is something totally normal and those users should not be thought of as less important than the power users.
Yeah, that's Microsoft's idea. All user are idiots. That's why they are not able to fix bugs but only change the UI.
I have been using Word since version 4 on DOS and version 5 on Classic MacOS. On Windows, I used WinWord 1, 2, 6, 95, 97, 2000, XP and 2003... then 4 years later MS ripped out the UI I knew backwards and had known for about 16 years, since 1991, and replaced it with one inferior in every way for me.
I'm not denying it might be better for others but for me it's now a waste of disk space.
The old versions do all I need, so I keep them. For everything except Word, there is LibreOffice.
But LibreOffice Writer has no outline mode, and I am a writer: that is THE killer function of Word for me.
So, Word 97 under WINE on Linux and Word 2003 when I have to use Win10 or -- shudder -- Win11.
Though personally, I’m increasingly delighted by the quicksilver - style palette / action tools that vscode and IntelliJ use for infrequently used options. Just hit the hotkey and type, and the option you want appears under the enter key.
Frankly, I'm motivated sure customizing is a win either. I fo a lot of remote support and it's nice to have a consistent interface.
Personally I find it faster than menus, and easier to find things I seldom use.
But I appreciate it's a personal taste thing, and some older folks prefer older interfaces.
The slightly larger screen real estate (if any) is more than wasted by very inefficient "modern UIs" where you won't find paddings smaller than 16px, with three buttons where there used to be enough space for 9.
Nah. 2007 era.
Office 2007 introduced the ribbon to the main apps: Word, Excel, I think Powerpoint. The next version it was added to Outlook and Access, IIRC.
I still use Word 2003 because it's the last pre-Ribbon version.
We got to a point around 2015 where drive-by exploit kit developers just weren't targeting XP and IE8 anymore. Phishing landing pages would roll through all the payloads they had and silently exit.
It's both a warning and an actual security mechanism.
Obviously its most visible form is triggered when an application tries to write to system-level settings or important parts of the filesystem, and also when various heuristics decide that the application is likely to want to do so (IIRC "setup.exe" and "install.exe" at the root of a removable disk are assumed to need elevation).
Because Microsoft knew that a lot of older software wrote to system areas just because it predated Windows being a multi-user system UAC also provided a partial sandboxing mechanism where writes to these areas could be redirected to user-specific folders.
The warning was also a tool in itself, because the fact that it annoyed users finally provided the right kick in the ass to lazy software developers who had no need to be writing to privileged areas of the system and could easily run under a limited user but hadn't bothered to because most non-corporate NT users were owners and thus admins and most corporate environments would just accept "make users local admin". A portion of the reason we saw UAC prompts a lot less in later versions of Windows is because Microsoft tweaked some things to make certain settings per-user and to reorganize certain dialogs so unprivileged settings could be accessed without escalation, but a lot of it is because applications that had been doing it wrong for as long as NT had existed finally got around to changing their default paths.
Changing the default system setting so the system automatically rebooted itself (instead of displaying the BSOD until manually rebooted) was the reason users no longer saw the BSOD.
How did crowdstrike end up crashing windows though?
Well, the Crowdstrike driver isn't (wasn't?) static. It loaded a file that Crowdstrike changed with an update.
Most drivers pass through rigorous verification on every change. But Crowdstrike is (was?) allowed to change their driver whenever they want by designing it to load a file.
MS tried to use the incident to get the regulators to waive the requirement.
Only because OP didn't give the full story. Microsoft wanted to close direct access to the kernel. AV companies complained to regulators in the EU. The EU asked Microsoft if they were willing to maintain access to replacement functionality and to stick to using that functionality for its own separately sold AV products. Microsoft said no, and instead of fighting, just let Windows wither on the vine with full kernel access for all the bozos. Crowdstrike was inevitable.
Do you like nanny states? How about nanny corporations?
So, it’s more like “you don’t get to improve your product if doing so would also stop random companies from forcing your customers to break the stuff you sold to them”
Microsoft has no right to prevent its customers from having full access to the things they bought.
Must human arms be braced at birth so they can only point level, lest someone try to point any object at their own foot?
In fact, I pay taxes to the police and they generally handle this sort of thing pretty well.
Curious about this. How does it work? Does it use any methods invented by Leslie Lamport?
Surprisingly close. I recently tried its package manager and installed a recent Python! So better than the original XP-era Windows in some respects.
It is miles away from the original and you can immediately see its Linux because things don’t quite line up. Huge difference in quality, attention to detail, and the entire interface becomes unpleasant to look at.
Also, Linux power management and lack of hibernation means its useless on laptops
I have never seen it, but it may exist, because there are many kinds of Linux UI that I do not use, e.g. Gnome.
That said, I have seen many Linux GUI applications that are ugly, at least by default, but many of them can be reconfigured to be beautiful enough.
I have never been content with the default appearance of any Linux distribution, but the good ones can be customized to look completely different and better than Windows, especially if you replace all default fonts with some high-quality fonts.
[1] Based on the original comment. If you personally are not willing to spend money, your reply doesn't fit the conversation.
It generally doesn't work for people buying computers from vendors who use hardware were the manufacturer doesn't disclose the documentation. Just don't give money to those who seek to prevent free software.
- My wireless card isn’t detected
- I’m using Linux mint, which means I’m still on X11. Some software doesn’t support X as well as wayland. Some only supports X I guess?
- I use Davinci resolve - which has a native Linux install. But I need to use some weird tool to convert it to a dpkg to install and run it. It doesn’t have a window bar - so the only way I can change the size of the window is by right clicking in the task bar
- My two monitors have different DPI - so I need to use window scaling. This confuses IntelliJ - which made all the text super tiny for some reason. I have a DPI override for that in a weird Java config file.
- I want consistent copy / paste shortcuts. I can’t use ctrl+C in terminal because that’s SIGINT. So I have it set to meta+C. But I can’t bind meta+C in IntelliJ because of Java limitations. So my copy/paste shortcut is just different in different apps now.
- Smooth scrolling is still an inconsistent mess between different programs. Particularly Firefox.
I’ve also been running into problems where my second monitor won’t turn on after I resume the computer from sleep. But apparently that’s a bug that affects windows as well when using recent nvidia drivers, so that isn’t Linux’s fault.
I’m not saying it’s bad. It mostly works great! I love my workstation, and I’m enjoying distancing myself from Apple’s increasingly buggy software stack. But it’s far from perfect.
I’m happy enough to use Linux despite all its warts. But when my parents ask for a new computer, I recommend macOS or windows.
I really miss Sun keyboards, with dedicated copy and paste keys.
The skinny Enter key, not so much... anyone else ever set SUNKEYBOARDHACK in zsh?
I hear this trope for two decades now.
my Thinkpad
Are you even surprised that I'm not?
I gotten better battery life under Linux than on Windows on every Thinkpad I've owned in the last 15 years or so.
That's not to say everything is smooth sailing. Audio is a battle I'll still be fighting on my deathbed in ~40 years.
Overcomplicated and hard to configure, the only way it even got measurably usable is because of distro's putting in the sweat here.
However, pipewire is really great. Audio on Linux has been a lot better since pipewire became increasingly the default.
Well, Windows 11 got rid of start menu. To get to it you have to click an obscure button. In Windows, you have to carefully think how you move the cursor at the edges of the window because Some Idiot thought is a good idea to make the window border 1 pixel wide. Even on (Q)UHD monitors.
Windows surely has its quirks in dumb places. But what linux desktop achieved in the last 10-15 years is being driven by a bunch that simply shits on its users and doesn't care for years after. I left back to windows at xfce 4.6 which broke all my effing menus and told me to gfm. Kept trying biannually and seen it getting worse and worse, at the stupidest places. Like, they have to be from really special demographics to do some of that.
I made the switch to a *nix OS with XFCE 20 years ago. Couldn’t be happier.
- Runs Windows update and reboots without my permission
- Keeps trying to make me switch to Bing
- Keeps trying to make me use Microsoft Account vs. local account
- Does a crappy job of reopening windows on reboot. Miserable copy of macOS.
- Fan spinning on my laptop with no easy way to figure out what process is consuming CPU
- Flat UI
- No built-in way to view markdown files
- No tool to graphically show where my diskspace went; allowing me to find and delete large files
- Printers keep getting disconnected; it is easier to print from iPhone thanks to bonjour
- No dictionary app (macOS has it)
- Can't airdrop to iPhone (3rd party apps can do it)
- No screenshot tool that allows you to type text (in addition to circling and highlighting and arrows)
- No command-line zip / unzip
- No instant search (macOS has had it for how many years now?)
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...
Markdown rendering is also available:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...
I agree with a bunch of your criticism, but modern PowerShell is pretty decent and has a lot of tools.
Everything can give you instant search, and with a PowerToys plugin you can integrate it into PowerToys Run, which gives you an Alfred Style search bar
WizTree works for visual inspection of Storage
Screenshots apps, Markdown Viewers, are common enough, won't comment further on those
On the printer disconnections: I've had some weird experiences, recently, a technician showed to me that, using the default windows update driver, my work printer regularly disconnected, but using the manufacturers driver, the setup has so far worked without a problem
And behind me, was a G4 Cube that could open the System Preferences app off of a spinning hard drive in less time.
What happened to us?
Seriously though I think Microsoft has mostly given up on the B2C market. They have good capture of B2B with hardware and software. Why make great products when you can make mediocre products that people have no choice but to use?
This might be an unpopular opinion but I'm actually glad they do this by default now (you can turn it off). My understanding is that MS was continually getting blamed for users getting viruses because they would never update their system, so in the best interest of the users they decided to force it.
I know a lot of people will still disagree with me, but I think if you were in their situation and you were getting tired of not only end-users but also world governments blaming you for things your users did (or did not do)... you'd probably want to control that a little more too, for both your sakes.
In the end it will hurt MS's reputation for being a broken mess even if it's 100% the users' fault for not updating, so I absolutely get it. And yes I know there's plenty of other things you can blame them for, I'm not saying this is their only issue.
> - No instant search (macOS has had it for how many years now?) Everything search somehow does instant search across the entire file system. It is the first thing I install when I get a new computer, cannot stress enough how much time this has saved me: https://www.voidtools.com/
> - No tool to graphically show where my diskspace went; allowing me to find and delete large files
This one takes a while to scan but produces an excellent visualization: http://www.steffengerlach.de/freeware/ (Scanner)
Yes it does. It's just called Compress-Archive/Expand-Archive.
We don't usually browse System32 to see what programs Microsoft decided it should be part of the OS. Especially when Microsoft is not sure which Paint is the best.
Snipping tool works for all of this
> Does a crappy job of reopening windows on reboot. Miserable copy of macOS.
Please! Can windows figure this out and can Macs figure out how to restore window to monitor configuration as well as Windows.
- multiple heap allocators
- have to install runtimes, even for C
- all useful permissions are off by default
- entire GUI is permeated by "Not Invented Here" mistakes
- msi is opaque and crusty
Huh? Ctrl+Shift+Escape will bring up task manager. Is that not enough?
Honest to god, if an IdP like Okta made an Active Directory replacement that ran via container instead of a full-fat VM or appliance template, I’d gladly toss ADDS out the window with all its stupid CALs. Basic directory functionality in 2025 shouldn’t require a bloated ADDS/LDAPS virtual machine to run, especially with the move to cloud providers for identity. If you make it easier to do identity without ADDS, you remove Microsof’s major trojan horse into the enterprise - and M365’s as well.
https://goauthentik.io/ can run in docker. It can be paired in with openldap containers, too.
Identity Admins don’t let Identity Admins buy into Okta.
Ideally though, it’d be like Okta in that its core directory is in the cloud, but also like ADDS/LDAP in that local servers/objects can join to a domain via local containers posing as domain controllers.
Yes, I know modern device management and cloud-based IdP means the need for a directory is decreasing by the day, but Enterprises still want it for ease of user and computer management via a centralized database of sorts. Having someone, anyone offer me a leaner way of achieving this without a crusty LDAP deployment or expensive Windows Server + CALs, would be hugely appreciated.
An on-prem AD DS is going to be difficult to move away from. From a management cost perspective, it is still cheaper than every other LDAP + Kerb + endpoint policy solution out there. And since a CAL is provided with every copy of Windows Enterprise, thinking about CALs for clients is a non-issue.
If I can have my PDC in the cloud IdP, and rely on containers for replicating at local sites or network segments as needed, then I can ditch ADDS, CALs, and M365 wholesale in favor of other products. It removes Microsoft’s trojan horse product from the enterprise and shakes up a lot of attached markets in the process.
That is when I have converted all my computers, desktops and laptops, from dual-booting Windows and Linux, to Linux-only. For some servers I have continued to use FreeBSD and I have continued to use Microsoft Office Professional, but on Linux with CrossOver, where it worked much better than on Windows XP (!).
I agree that installing and configuring in the right way Linux remains a job for someone with decent computer management skills.
However, I have also installed Windows professionally, and on less common hardware, like embedded computers, I have encountered far more problems and far more difficult to solve than when installing Linux on the same hardware. Moreover, the solution for most Windows installation problems was not using some menu in a graphic tool, but using some obscure Windows command in a CLI window, with some very cryptic and undocumented command-line options, which I typically found by searching Internet forums where Windows users complained about the same problem.
Therefore the only real reason why Windows is more user-friendly is because it comes pre-installed on most computers, after professionals have solved any compatibility problems.
For whomever has a friend or relative that is knowledgeable about Linux, Linux can be more "user-friendly" than Windows.
My parents, older than 80 years, have been using Linux (Gentoo!) on their desktops for many years, without any problems, for reading/writing documents, Internet browsing, movie watching, music listening, TV watching, e-mail using, and so on, despite the fact that they do not even know what is "Linux".
That's the issue.. every new OS has brought some features or stability improvements that are huge upgrades over the older OS.
WSL 2 is a must-have for me now, so Windows 10/11 is much better than anything that came before in that way. I may be alone in this, but I actually think Windows 11 has the best design of any Windows so far. The problem as usual, is that they haven't made the entire OS consistent. I wouldn't mind the new control panel if you could actually change every setting in windows in that one control panel.. and not have to dig through to find control panels that still date back to Win2k. And the new/old context menu in explorer is an absolute disaster. Then new design is fine.. but how the hell did they manage to not make it support all the options of the old context menu?
There’s a way to remove it, of course, by running some obtuse console command. But normal people have no idea how to do stuff like that.
If you could get winterm on it and recent Firefox it’d be quite usable. Perhaps ReactOS one day.
Windows 7 with classic UI is probably the most-recent decent version.
Windows 7 (except for the last few updates that introduced telemetry and ads) comes in as a close second. But everything after is just bloated crapware.
It's a tradeoff. A Win2K system was pretty responsive when you log in after a reboot/startup, but you've got to wait for that experience. In the days of spinning disks and single core CPUs, you had to fight those still-starting services for resources, making the first several minutes of XP usage painful.
edit: changed to 128 MB. It was XP that needed 256 MB to be any good.
And it has the 2000-era UI and the modern app support.
It's just dragging on other things, such as SMP and 64bit. But development focus seems to actually be focused on precisely these two.
But there is problem.. HW.. The pool of old HW is shrinking, and one day I will not be able to run it anymore.. I guess I will move to Linux. There are few nice and lightweight distros...
Of course that innocence was lost with Welchia and other issues, but Windows 2000 made the year 1999 feel like ancient history in 2001.
[edit] 3.1 should have been windows for worgkroups 3.11
- Big software vendors (Autodesk, Adobe, etc.) making it difficult for Microsoft to deprecate or evolve APIs and/or design approaches to the OS.
- Cybersecurity/IT security groups strongly discouraging anything new as potentially dangerous (which is not incorrect).
- Non-tech people generally not caring about desktop PCs anymore - phones have that crown now.
- Non-tech people caring much more about interface than the actual underpinnings that make things work.
Outside of the PC there's some innovation happening, at least with the OS itself and not user interfaces. Check out Fuschia sometime.
Sorta. It was real pain-in-the-ass to run 2000 as a regular (non-administrator) user. Assuming your software worked at all that way, as even Office 2000 had some issues. UAC was necessary.
UAC and the other magic on Vista/7 mollified that by a lot.
3d compositing, ssds, mega displays, massive multi core, all completely wasted.
You know what I should be able to do? Hot execute windows and Linux and Osx on the same desktop without containerization that leaves 3d as an afterthought or worse a never thought.
IBM pioneered hardware virtualization for isolation on their System/370 mainframes with VM/370 in 1972.
VMWare ESX hypervisor brought virtualization to x86 servers (2001).
Xen hypervisor introduced open-source virtualization for x86 (2003).
By the time VBS showed up, the concepts were already several decades old.
VBS uses a hypervisor and hardware virtualization to isolate processes for security. These concepts trace back to systems like the IBM VM/370.
Conceptually it's essentially the same thing. The difference with VBS is the scope and purpose of what's being virtualized.
Microsoft introduced I/O Rings, more or less a 1:1 copy of io_uring, in Windows 21H1.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/ioringap...
https://windows-internals.com/i-o-rings-when-one-i-o-operati...
https://windows-internals.com/ioring-vs-io_uring-a-compariso...
Windows 8/2012 R2 did introduce Registered I/O for WinSock which is very similar to I/O Rings and io_uring.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...
Win11 does have something similar: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/ioringap...
Also a big degradation is the whole "hidden" %appdata% folder that grows and grows in size with no tools to deal with it.
As for appdata... There's many faults to find in modern Windows changes, but I'm not willing to pin this on MS. Microsoft stuff tends to use %appdata% fairly sensibly, in most cases. On the other hand, the behavior of third-party developers has been really frustrating. What was initially intended as a universal storage location for some program data has become some kind of program container. Now, whenever you download some giant 300-500mb Electron app or whatever, you can be sure that it will force its entirety into appdata with no way to change the location. Every one of these developers has decided that their program is so valuable and Important that it's inconceivable that the user might want to install it on anything but the system drive. No, our program is unique and deserves nothing but the best!
Monopolies. They ruin markets. Destroy products. Reduce wages. Induce nostalgia.
Nowasdays, even through I don't worry anymore as Windows 11 is happy as long as you give it a quadcore cpu, ram, and an SSD, sometimes I still wonder why it writes 40GB to the SSD everyday.
It ran all of my games, stable as hell, quite light with none of the bullshit added later, none of the graphical bullshit added by XP but still classic Chicago.
The only thing that could make it better were the UI rendering engine introduced with Vista and its enhanced driver and security model.
You make more money selling software for phones and it is cheaper to use one stack to build all so you build things for the web first.
2008R2 snowballed it's own "revolution" when it introduced PowerShell 2.0, which was pivotal for many future things to come.
Out of the more modern ones, 2012R2 was "peak".
I would guess we will still see 2012R2 installations well into the future. Still running bits and pieces of critical infra, even if it has been EOLed long ago, but that's the way of the Server I guess. Can't wait for the 5000+ uptime day screenshots of ancient 2012R2's.
My guess is the next "long LTS" will be Win2025. Just because it's introducing the NTLMv2 deprecation path and working solutions to replace it.
#1 Windows 7
#2 DOS 5.0
#3 Office 2003
#4 Windows 95
Honorable mentions: IntelliMouse Optical and XBOX (2001)
I didn't upgrade to 10 until I purchased a used Dell laptop (which includes 10 prof) a few years ago, and I never used 11 and hopefully never needs to use it.
But then, tangentially, I started using ubuntu at work, in a sort of misguided belief it would make me a better sysadmin, and it was only a matter of time before I couldn’t stand windows at home as well.
I thought win7 was pretty solid, though I didn’t upgrade until well after win8 was shipping. But lucky for me, proton finally got really good, and that allowed me to basically skip win10+. Now it’s only for the rare tool that I even boot into my windows partitions anymore. When I do, being bombarded by random attention grabbers is completely jarring and I want flee as fast as I can.
Totally usable as a daily driver, provided you don't need Windows only software. The year of linux on the desktop was probably about 2020.
It is slowly improving though. The steam deck has moved things forward in leaps and bounds.
I play Battlefield 2042, Call of Duty Warzone, Apex Legends, PUBG, Rainbow 6 Siege, and Fortnite all somewhat regularly and none of these as far as I know work.
The only games that I do play regularly that work are Counter Strike 2 and DotA. Though I can't use Faceit for CS2 which would be ideal.
If you need direct hardware access (like for gaming) then you can run a passthrough VM. You can do that even on a single video card system.
Like with consumer video cards? Tell me more.
I don't believe you have to VBIOS patch anymore
It's surprisingly fantastic for almost all modern computing tasks. Yes, it's true, some software won't work, such as Adobe Photoshop, but most people aren't using software like that anyway. For gaming, I'd say we're close to 99% of games supporting Linux out of the box on Steam. The few left that still don't choose not to via kernel-level anti-cheat or forgetting to toggle a checkbox for Linux support (EasyAntiCheat and friends).
The point is, it "Just Works" for darn near everything these days and is a very pleasant experience. Try it out!
That's not to say Fedora is unstable - it's just that it iterates fast to keep pace with packages as they release new versions. There's a new major Fedora release every year, for example.
There really isn't a wrong choice here.
For me, gaming was what kept me away. But, besides a few titles, it's been a non-issue. It was very pleasantly surprising.
My desktop runs Fedora Kinoite[1] - an immutable version of Fedora. It poses a set of unique challenges for a development workstation (my primary use), but has resulted in rock-solid stability through several major OS upgrades, and a lot of development-related hackery.
I don't see myself going back to Windows anytime in the future. Every time I'm at the office an on my Win11 machine, I remember why I switched in the first place. Just my experience though.
Takes some getting used to, but has really been a smooth experience
Will third party apps keep installing updates ? Hard to say. The adobe suite already refuses to install the latest version on any LTSC (for no reason other than they don't want to support it - it works great) so who knows.
Suspect my next OS will be Windows 12 LTSC if I can hold out long enough - every other Windows version alway seems to be experimental crap going all the way back to ME (millennium edition)
Microsoft joined a meeting and told the customer that they don’t agree with my recommendations because they want to make sure all users get the “latest experiences”.
There’s your problem right there: pushing your own KPIs instead of what’s best for the customers.
The Windows 8.x line gets some credit for having the strongest pen interface integration, which regressed significantly in the 10 line, but the overall shell in Windows 8 was rough, and a lot of features were broken in the rushed out and mostly failed attempt to Appify windows and redesign much of the UI at the same time.
It still operates just fine for AD, DHCP, DNS, SMB, etc etc... the only thing they could drop without the majority freaking out is IIS.
And I really don't know how Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 doesn't win this battle.
I actually like Windows despite their aversion to committing to a UI redesign but do I really need to pay $1100 (per core!?) for the hope (but not the promise) of no ads?
I never had Windows 2000, but lots of people said it worked great compared to the other Windows systems.
But really for me, the best M/S setup was DOS with Desqview.
This adds maybe 20 more minutes to install time but it's worth.
Is it also de-crappified ? No games, requests for Microsoft accounts etc ?
< 3.1 Bad
3.1 Good
3.11 WfW Good
NT 3.5 Okay
95 Good
NT 4.0 Good
98 Good
Me Bad
2000 Good
XP Good
Vista Bad
7 Good
8 Bad
8.1 Okay
10 Good
11 Bad
There just really isn’t a pattern to it.
I'll give my prime example. I used to know Device Manager/Control Panel SO well. I could just get things done. Now I have to hunt around forever to do any sort of hardware related task. In their attempt to make it "so easy, even your grandma could use it" they've alienated power users. My grandma still has to call me to help her attach a printer... but now I have to say, "I dunno... let me watch a YouTube video and pray that it matches the sub-version that you're using".
That's arguable, I thought it was poor at the time.
3.1 was a substantial improvement in that regard. It also brought major features like TTF fonts, the registry, a usable file manager, audio and video support, and networking in the Workgroups version.
When did it become good? WSL and DirectX 12 were real changes, but all in all, my impression is that the user has been frog boiled over the years, with 2K,XP and 7 becoming distant memories.
I staying on a thinkpad R31 with win2k until I got a R61 (4gb ram) with vista on it several months after vista’s release. At that point it seemed like driver and other early teething had been worked out, so my experience was pretty positive.
When I eventually moved to win7 I didn’t notice any real difference.
A couple of weeks after release the first step after getting a new computer was changed from "downloading firefox" to "downgrade to windows xp". Unironically, many people did that.
if(version.StartsWith("Windows 9"))
{ /* 95 and 98 */
} else {
Microsoft had no reason to support blatantly stupid development practices that no one ever actually did. They were trying to avoid brand confusion with the consumer, because even people who know about versions will still do a mental double take at seeing "Windows 9", expecting another digit. The confusion might not last long, but it still detracts from the brand.
There is an example further down that thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2hwlrk/comment/...
https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/secure/attachment/18777/Platfo...
/** Performs computation and returns the result, or throws some exception. */
public HashSet<String> call() throws Exception {
final String arch = System.getProperty("os.arch");
String name = System.getProperty("os.name").toLowerCase();
String version = System.getProperty("os.version");
if (name.equals("solaris") || name.equals("SunOS")) {
name = "solaris";
} else if (name.startsWith("windows")) {
name = "windows";
if (name.startsWith("windows 9")) {
if (version.startsWith("4.0")) {
version = "95";
} else if (version.startsWith("4.9")) {
version = "me";
} else {
assert version.startsWith("4.1");
version = "98";
}
} else {
...The string check makes a lot of sense when you consider software written in languages like Java or Python rather than something that's coded directly against the OS APIs. In those cases you would get strings back with the OS name which of course is going to lead to many people just doing taking the simplest route of string matching.