No denying that windows these days isn’t stable. Indeed it is. My biggest issue is all the third party crap I never asked for gets installed with it. Not to mention all the Microsoft services that I don’t want to use, but still manage to be there. Like OneDrive. Sure one can uninstall it. But then see the mess it leaves with the way files are saved in the documents directory.
Even when setting up a Windows 11 VM , I usually have to spend an hour just removing stuff, disabling things and multiple reboots just to trim things down.
yeah, I've used plenty of community made tools to de-bloat windows. But that's not the point. We shouldn't have to do that. Especially when its a paid windows license, I shouldn't have to spend time dealing with Microsoft's effort at further squeezing out more revenue from their OS platform.
It was even worse in the Win95/98 era. I remember reinstalling the entire network stack multiple times in one day just to get TCP/IP working. The operating system was an extremely broken piece of shit and wasted days of my life.
Shoulda this. Shoulda that. This is just the reality of Microsoft that we have to accept, and it will never change. There are tools to deal with it. So I use the tools and move on with my life.
If you set your language to 'English (World)' during the install, none of the crapware is installed.
Or at least it wasn't last year when I installed W11 (I still occasionally need Affinity Photo and Capture One). Microsoft might have realised they're missing out on a few pennies and plugged the gap.
Windows 2000 was the pinnacle of Windows. Rock solid, and that was before they broke the search function (when it actually still actually searched in files rather than an incomplete index - thankfully, grepWin can be installed) or when they dumbed down the Control Panel.
Yes! and even if you search for foo.txt, it will also display foo_something.txt even though you didn't search for a wildcard (foo*.txt).
And then you have that "fantastic" UI that helpfully tells you that the file is in "C:\Users\something\Documents\..." regardless how large you make the window. Who's brilliant decision was it to truncate the locating folder without any way to resize the column and actually see the full path?
Anyway, just giving a shoutout to grepWin again, it's one of the first thing I install on any Windows box while hoping that everyone involved in the Windows Search "experience" steps on a lego brick every day of their lives.
I also wholeheartedly agree: Windows 2000 was the pinnacle of the Windows NT line before Microsoft merged the consumer line (3.1/95/98/Me) with the professional line (NT) beginning with Windows XP, which unfortunately added all sorts of annoyances to Windows. The underpinnings of Windows are fine and are quite a formidable alternative to Unix. WSL has also been a major game changer, allowing me to have a Unix workflow without loading up a separate VM. It’s just a shame the upper layers get in the way, though the Pro and Education versions of Windows are less in-your-face with these annoyances than the home versions. I’d love to have a Windows 2000 UI (with a search bar, introduced in Vista) on top of Windows 11.
I really don't understand where the nostalgia for XP comes from. Well, actually I think I do because a lot of home users probably didn't use NT4 and 2k and went straight from 98/ME to XP. But I remember all the ridicule that XP got for being such a terrible bubblegum OS X imitation, with required activation, and a bunch of stability and driver issues that were eventually ironed out. XP after Service Pack 2 was also rock solid, and probably still the best choice for a retro gaming PC because it's got decent hardware and software support and the activation has been worked around.
But yeah, I used every Windows version since 3.11 full-time, and 2k was perfection - literally can't think of any downside to it.
2k is pretty great, but fully patched XP is too. It’s totally subjective but as much as I loved 2k I’d give an edge to end-state XP mainly for its ability to be customized with third party .msstyle themes, of which there were many that were well made and good looking.
Fully patched 7 is a bit better yet for me though, because its theming engine added support for full depth alpha which really opened up possibilities for theme designers. It was a massive disappointment when Windows 8 came along and gutted the engine, regressing it to being barely more capable than Windows 1.x with all the flat squares.
Imo, it's much more of a proper Linux experience than MacOS. e.g. all the filesystems stuff is there like /proc, you don't have to deal with BSD/Linux differences, zsh/bash compat issues etc.
macOS Unix compatibility is an oversold feature, and it's unlikely for anything made for Linux to work on it unless it's specifically ported.
That being sad, a lot of the dev community own macs, so this support usually exists.
I mean with Hyper-V why even WSL and just run VMs of whatever other OS'es you want? Tinkering with the OS these days is just so much different than it was in the past. Trying to dual boot Win/Linux back in the day was a interesting challenge that might leave your disk corrupt, now it's a question of why do that at all? Hacking smaller platforms like the pi that are cheap seems to get more attention than PCs these days.
