After XP, Windows focused on adding crap to their aid that use unnecessary resources for crap things. I remember the Aqua look on Vista that sucked the life out of computers. Let’s not talk about Windows Me. Then 8 was a weird interface that no one liked and also not compatible with older machines. So XP is the most stable Windows os that can run on older devices.
XP was a pretty good running OS with plenty of software and games. I held out till 10 was out for a bit and there were programs I wanted to run that required it.
XP still had the designed-by-engineers vibe. Since then, Microsoft got completely taken over by dipshits with marketing MBAs.
They now code Windows to impress executives and shareholders with how much they can harvest data and manipulate customers into using their stupid Store and so on. They stopped caring about the experiences of power users, or even casual users.
They don’t want the OS to work for us. They want us to work for them.
I know you said Linux, but for anyone else here wanting to still use what at its core is still Windows, but with tons of garbage and bloat removed… as long as you have a valid serial / key… I would recommend AtlasOS.
I did a clean install of it on my own old ancient desktop i7-2600K recently, and it actually still runs really well.
Don’t take my word for it though. Here’s a video talking about it. Also here’s the YouTube link if you prefer.
Britec09 from the video there is quite skeptical - sounds like he prefers ShutUp10. With Atlas, he worries about large security impacts for small FPS gains.
I second the recommendation of giving Linux Mint a shot. I didn’t use XP extensively but Mint is low hassle and gets out of your way.
I’m not sure it has quite the same feel, but closest I can think of that is also approachable coming from Windows. Obviously a lot of other distros also satisfy the “built by engineers” vibe.
I have a lot of respect for Linux and use it here and there, but I am by no means an expert on it. The best thing I’ve done with it so far is running a Pi Hole at home.
Unfortunately, my job involves using MS Windows. A lot. After I retire…soonish…I hope to take some time and learn Linux better.
For my day-to-day Windows misery, I find that ShutUp10 does a great job of toggling off the bullshit you don’t want running. And it’s easy to toggle things back on if you ever need to. It’s a free program you can download and run. I send them a little money every year out of gratitude, but donations are completely optional.
Some FUD mongers will tell you that ShutUp10 ‘breaks’ Windows. That’s simply not true. It puts all the Windows settings you can change yourself in one easy-to-find place. Things that are normally scattered all over the UX and the registry.
While you could mess some things up using it if you’re not careful, it’s very good about color coding and letting you know which toggles are best to turn off, which ones are a little questionable, and which ones you should leave turned on (unless you know what you’re doing and can take the risk). I have used it for years now, on multiple PCs, with zero problems. It doesn’t make Windows 10/11 GOOD but it makes them less horrible.
As usual I think that sentiment was retroactive, certainly once Vista came out. At launch, people hated the Fisher-Price look of the Luna default UI. Like, a lot. The switch to the NT based kernel for the home version of Windows also caused a shitton of people’s hardware and peripherals not to work anymore because they needed new drivers and the manufacturers of said gadgets – if they were still in business – could not be arsed. Some of this could be alleviated by bullying that hardware’s Windows 2000 drivers into working with XP. Some of it could not.
Not as prevalent these days, but a lot of EMR/EHR was built on XP. Some of those companies went out of business and the clinics using the software never upgraded because they couldn’t get the data out into another system.
Newest versions of windows 11 make it incredibly hard to find the screen that shows all your network adapters. It is now easier to use device manager to disable and reenable an adapter.
How do I know? Because all the shit tier screens and tools that offer to help you with a network issue didn’t work. ONLY reenabling the NIC did.
You can also just search “network” and the screen they want is either the first or second result. I rarely ever go into any kinds of settings menus anymore, i just search on the start menu.
Because windows 11 is an updated version of windows 19 and windows 10 is an updated version of windows 7/8.1.
Each one of them has had holdovers of previous versions of windows. And each one has tried to bring in a new standard to bring them all together but they’ve always moved on to the next standard before finishing it. Windows 11 has actually came the closest but we’re not there yet and because it’s actively replaced old methods of doing things in this process it feels more fractured than before because we’re not used to looking in the new places for them.
I feel like making important changes was easiest with XP. It feels like they’re trying to obscure administrative functions behind layers of abstraction.
It’s definitely looking like a possibility. I do my work on Linux machines but only use win for games. If I can play my main community games it might be time to make the switch for good
Learn the ways of the run prompt: ncpa.cpl launches you right to the classic network adapter control panel screen. I have to get in there so often that I’ve taught myself plenty of those little shortcuts because MS can’t leave shit where it was.
…And it all has to be there for legacy compatibility, because some Fortune 500 company somewhere has some rickety piece of shit in-house “enterprise” software that relies on some obscure aspect or another of a past Windows version.
I am sort of partial to those rickity old systems that force them to keep legacy software compatibility.
I can still load up and use a program that was written 20 years ago for windows XP.
It also gives third parties like classic shell or startallback the ability to restore all the functionality that the newest start menu disaster tries to push.
Did you use cmd with elevated admin privileges? Try right click cmd and run as admin if you don’t know what I’m talking about. Windoze stopped running cmd with elevated privileges sometime around Win7. From a security perspective it makes a lot of sense to do that as default, even though it can be a bit of a pain for home users that expect to have admin for everything they do.
To be fair, whomever decided to use an apostrophe to indicate possession AND abbreviation clearly didn’t think through all the possible conflicts before going ahead and making it a thing. Should have made a separate symbol for one of them.
Yes, thousands of years of established language development is wrong … not the individual who is unable to learn what millions of others have been able to.
Yes, thousands of years of established language development is wrong
Yes, it is. Island has an ‘s’ in it as a stylistic choice to Latinize a word that has no Latin root. Literally is now defined as “not literally” which is absurd. That’s established language development.
If people keep using “it’s” as possessive then it will become possessive, and nothing will be lost.
Language sticklers are an interesting phenomenon to me. Language has always evolved with its users. The only rule is that we understand each other when we use it, and that rule allows massive flexibility. Watching it evolve in real-time is more fun than trying to police someone for using an apostrophe.
Language sticklers are an interesting phenomenon to me
It’s weird if you think about it. They’re basically saying “English was exactly correct at an arbitrary moment in time that I chose.” Anything different before that (such as ‘iland’) is wrong, but any new changes are an abomination.
That’s totally not fair. Some things are more wrong than others. And the “everything is correct even” language people are just as insufferable as the “there is exactly one correct usage” people.
Using it’s instead of its is not slang, or an evolving use or alternative spelling. It’s simply wrong.
When I was working security for a hospital they wanted to send imagery from an MRI (or maybe CAT, I forget) upstairs to be interpreted without allowing any network traffic to be able to reach the host machine because it was running XP. I asked why, and they told me that in order to replace it the vendor was requiring a $7 million replacement of the whole MRI.
Same shit is starting to happen with cars. No way to get the new headunits without replacing the whole car. I know Porsche offers electronic upgrade kits, but I can’t think of any others that do.
I think a lot of it has to do with age. I’m probably younger than the average Lemmy user, and for me Windows 10 is the sweet spot. The older versions just feel outdated. I think it depends on the first version we seriously used and learned on.
“Please watch this advertising video that is relevant to what you were discussing with your wife in the other room this morning before your browser can be launched.”
I don’t even know why people use Windows 10 (or 11) other than momentum.
I haven’t used Windows for years, but my daughter’s new online school required either a Windows 10/11 computer or a Mac and we can’t afford even a new decent Windows notebook, let alone a Mac, so we ended up getting a refurbished Thinkpad running Windows 10 from NewEgg.
Windows 10. Is. Annoying. As. Fuck.
We are constantly getting interrupted by unnecessary popups (or were until I took the time to disable everything I could think of, which was a pain in the ass).
After running updates, it made me go through a bunch of screens turning down paying for things. Twice. And those popups still asked me about paying for things. Motherfucker, I already paid $300 for the computer, I’m not paying you shit.
And wow is stuff counterintuitive in how to do it compared to either any Linux GUI I’ve tried or Mac OS. Just trying to figure out how to get to a File menu is baffling half the time.
I don’t blame anyone for using XP over that shit. Let alone Linux or even a Mac.
Just wait until they start putting ads in the file menu and make you sit through a 30 second commercial every time you want to open an application unless you join windows premium + subscription only 15$ a month
I can see that, but is it really worth running it as an OS other than for that specific use? Because if not, you can just run it in an emulator or on a partition when you need that.
Well I play a lot of HDR games and watch a lot of HDR movies, so for me the use isn’t exactly “specific”. I’m using HDR all the time.
But to be honest, I’d love nothing more than to switch to Linux fulltime. The game support is finally good enough for me, but I need my HDR. Emulation isn’t an option cause HDR doesn’t work that way, and I already dual boot Mint and Win11. But right now my usage is about 90% Windows and 10% *Nix. Can’t wait for the day when I can finally switch those percentages around.
I don’t even know why people use Windows 10 (or 11) other than momentum.
Security updates. That’s it, that’s the only reason I recommend anyone unwilling or unable to switch operating systems all together to move to Windows 10.
Vista was fine, apart from the performance. I had a fairly beefy machine for the time so I hardly noticed, but on lower spec machines it was an absolute dog.
Kinda felt like an unoptimised prerelease version of Windows 7
I don’t think so, main reason is XP was still heavily backwards compatible to 95, 98, even DOS based software. Many control software for industry only support to XP, because jump to windows 7 was too heavy. If anything supports windows 7, it is really easy to port to windows 10. Main reason is the driver support, because win 7 having new driver architecture.
Windows 10 will be the next “forever stuck” OS, because end of Internet Explorer on it means that there are tens of thousands of industrial software that require IE, and cannot ever be ported to win 11.
Yup, same reason modern games all get ports but some old ones never will. Everything has the same architecture now so it’s easy to port an Xbone game to W10 and the new Xboxes.
Possibly. There is an embedded version of XP that’s meant to be run on kiosks, control panels, thin clients, and such. Its support was finally ended in 2016, but I’m sure there are still machines around someplace still working that have it baked-in. Probably in ROM in some cases.
More like a critical computer running at the heart of a billion dollar company running software written in a long forgotten language against apis that no longer exist.
Yeah, I have a w3.1 machine and I play with it regularly, but it really lacks as a daily driver. On the other hand, my w98 machine can do basically everything I need for work, except web browsing. It’s fascinating how little have operating systems progressed in the last 25 years, user-facing wise.
I collect vintage and iconic computers as a hobby, and the only reason i bought a win98 machine was so I could play DOS games on the real hardware. But otherwise yeah, it can do most things youd use a modern computer for very well other than it shouldnt connect to the internet.
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