Is it really the same? Or more like `rm -rf /usr` ? Was this folder always required to maintain the integrity of the system, or is this a more recent thing?
It's actually quite similar; it used to be that all the "system" binaries were in /bin and /sbin and the "other stuff" was in /usr/bin and /usr/sbin but that has not been true for quite a while on many distributions.
"back in the time", /usr could be on a network drive, and /bin had to contain just enough stuff to boot the system, set up networking and mount the /usr
Interestingly I actually did manage to make my /usr partition unmountable a few years ago on a system where I had changed the shell for the root user from /bin/sh to /usr/local/bin/bash and ever since then I have kept the default shell for the root user on my systems unmodified :)
Back in PDP-11 days (Unix v.6) my boss managed to do a "rm -fr *" not in his personal bin (as he believed ATM) but in the system bin. Oooooops. (but Armando S was ready with functioning backups.)
I've been in a similar state - I had a shell running but lost /bin/ls among other things; but I could use "echo *" and redirection to recreate an /etc/mtab.
That's interesting that it started reverting into Windows 10.
It makes you wonder how the thing is built. Like rather than modifying the code, Windows 11 is like a service that run on top of 10 and modifies a few UI things near the end of the startup process. Was that just some kind of hack due to time constraints? Or is the Windows codebase really that much of a delicate ecosystem when it comes to not breaking legacy software so they couldn't even modify the taskbar or file explorer without wrecking something?
Recently, I was required to use a PC that had Windows 11 on it. I tried to set it up like the rest of my computers, which involves moving the task bar from the bottom of the screen to the side, which I've done for years in Windows.
Yeah, W11 doesn't support that. If you do some digging you'll find MS claiming it's a large technical lift that they have no current plans to do.
What does this mean with regards to your question? Not much. But that regression in functionality, in an area that every other OS I use supports and has supported for years, definitely suggests the thing is a hack. In my humble uninformed opinion.
The location of the Windows 11 taskbar cannot be set through any UI options. They do not officially support changing the location of the taskbar according to available documentation. The upgrade message inside Windows 10 explicitly calls out this deficiency along with other before continuing. There are registry hacks that change the location, but this is unsupported.
In other words, it seems they removed the UI to change it but left the underlying code alone, presumably because it's an easier change and they want to judge how much people would complain first (before, possibly, later re-enabling the UI to do it and praising themselves for how much better they've made things.)
I just looked into this like...last week, and couldn't find anything, and if it's possible without third-party add-ons, I'd be extremely surprised. But I won't consider that to be the case until I see a link with instructions that work.
Isn't it pretty well known that every other version of Windows is a badly-done flop?
98/2000 were great, ME wasn't, XP was great, Vista was awful, 7 was great, 8 was really awful, 10 is excellent, 11 is therefore almost certainly one to skip.
I'm kind of surprised so many people are installing Windows 11, given the history (and the fact that it doesn't support common CPUs like the Intel i5). I'll just wait for W12.
Not sure if true, but it’s always felt like the flops were just a new GUI skin on top of the previous good OS. Mostly in weird ways because they end up trying to redesign some things they already got right.
Vista was pretty good on decent hardware especially after it's SP1. Most of the troubles came from OEMs putting it on hardware it should not have been on and MS allowing that. It's other source of troubles was changing up the driver model in big ways and companies like Nvidia not being ready in the beginning. I built my first PC after Windows 7 came out. However some peice of hardware in there caused W7 to blue screen after about 5 minutes use every time. Vista though was rock solid and I honestly ended up liking it's desktop more than W7, only thing I missed was window snapping.
Windows 11 also supports i5s...It just doesn't support i5s from 6 years ago, nor i7s from then.
But if you're referring to lack of official support for 9th gen and older CPUs, then it is indeed a pain in the butt. Plenty of valid computers losing official support because reasons is a travesty, but at least W10 is still getting updates for a while I guess? FWIW I have a PC with an i7-7700 and no TPM running W11 for the heck of it, and it runs fine, but it wasn't happy about it. This is just the TV PC, so nothing critical; I wouldn't do this on anything even remotely important.
Yeah, I'm certain it'd run just fine if I force-installed it despite the warning. The only ways I can think of that they could possibly screw it up so badly that it wouldn't work would surely have also been noticed by people with newer CPUs.
But it's a good enough reason not to jump to an 'off' release. Why bother going to all the trouble of installing something you don't even want, when it gives you the easy out of claiming it's incapable of running?
Still annoying that they blacklisted perfectly serviceable hardware that has years of life left. I'm not a fan of the "everything's disposable, programmed obsolescence" stuff. And I know these CPUs are still being sold and used (because they are still plenty usable and can meet almost everyone's needs).
> Isn't it pretty well known that every other version of Windows is a badly-done flop?
Kind of, yes, but also kind of no.
> 98/2000 were great, ME wasn't, XP was great, Vista was awful, 7 was great, 8 was really awful, 10 is excellent, 11 is therefore almost certainly one to skip.
Actually, AFAICS under the top-layer gloss of the shell W2K, XP, Vista, and W7 were all pretty much NT4. As long as you set "Use Windows 2000 UI" or whatever the option may have been called in the Control Panel, you were golden...
Except that some UI-tweaking options were beginning to disappear from Vista or W7 onwards. You could still set your Window Border Width to 0 (in stead of the GUI control minimum of 1) in the Registry, for example -- but if you then changed some other UI element setting in the GUI control, the width got reset to 1, so you had to reapply your Registry hack after each change.
That kind of comports with how the UI in windows has behaved from 98>XP>7>8>10. In 10, you get the windows 10 UI on most of your top-level interfaces, but once you dive into a sub-menu you get some legacy UI and if you dig down deep enough you get UI from what feels like windows 98.
Weirdly enough, that's one of the things that originally made me want to explore options outside windows.
The mobile ecosystem kept changing and taking you into new experiences (even before smartphones). Meanwhile, a Windows desktop never felt like something new. Just a layer of paint over the old creaky house.
I even remember a 'smartphone' of sorts I had before android was a thing, which run windows phone: They literally shoved the desktop version there, I remember not being able to click buttons even with a stylus because the ui was so small for the device. The most popular app was some weird dragon themed overlay that, lo and behold, gave it finger-sized buttons.
It wasn't "Windows Phone", it was Windows Mobile or Pocket PC 2000. All the releases of Windows Phone definitely didn't have a UI like the regular desktop version of Windows and only existed after the release of Android.
> Meanwhile, a Windows desktop never felt like something new.
Well. There was plenty of "new" UI enhancements over the years which I resisted as much as possible. Imagine a meme of Garth from Wayne's World, "We fear change..."
I always hated the more smooth and colorful Windows XP theme. Computers back then were resource constrained enough that you'd notice the fact that it wasn't "free". It wasn't until Windows 10 that I stopped trying to make the shell look as much like Win2k as possible. The extra UI eye candy on modern systems is as near as matters "free" now, as long as you have plenty of RAM.
Now I am just trying to make Windows 11 look as much like Windows 10 as possible.
The extra UI eye candy on modern systems is as near as matters "free" now, as long as you have plenty of RAM.
I'm not sure there's much "eye candy" in modern UI anymore, given the regression to completely flat, sometimes even borderless UI elements starting in Win8.
An 'old' settings dialog in Windows is usually to support old drivers who still want/need to extend that dialog with driver specific options. You will probably still see it in the network settings too if you dig deep enough
Yes, it was the direct successor of NT 4.0. Windows 2000 was still an OS aimed at the "professional" market, though. XP was the first consumer/mainstream oriented OS based on NT.
I used win2k for like 10 years and continued to play games it as well. I was able to ride on the XP coat tails because between the two, there were only a handful of win32 APIs that were not implemented in 2000. I ended up having to patch a few DLLs to ignore these missing endpoints, but it meant I could use legitimately the best windows there ever was for a few more years. Eventually I "upgraded" to windows 7 to get reasonable driver support because manufacturers finally stopped shipping 2k compatible drivers.. what a sad day that was.
PC Magazine had the weird idea of shipping a CD-ROM of the Beta release. Having an obsession to try anything I decided to replace win98 with this thing (I had no idea what NT was).
It was so lean, fast and stable that I never used anything else until the day XP had some drivers that were absolutely necessary to use my desktop. 99% of low level crashes would just pop up a notification and nothing more, it was insane.
Windows 2000 was an NT release, but Windows Millenium Edition (Me) was the last generally released DOS-based desktop OS released by Microsoft. Windows Me was released after Windows 2000 by a few months.
MS-DOS has never been used in Windows NT and its descendant operation systems to support booting.
Prior to Windows Vista the real mode code in the MBR loads NTLDR[0] which switches to protected mode and runs osloader.exe to boot the kernel. Post-Vista this is handled by the BOOTMGR[1] bootloader.
That's only true of the lineage commonly known as "9x" that actually started at Windows/386 and ended with Windows Me. Those OSs are actually hypervisors that "hyperjack" MS-DOS when booted and then run DOS and the "user mode" of Windows in VMs. The NT line has always been distinct from that and is a traditional OS architecture.
I developed windows during the Windows 10 timeframe. Although I left before windows 11 was conceived, it's painfully obvious that it is just a UI reskin on top of 10. This was preordained by certain organizational choices made during my time there; namely, that the "Shell" team responsible for the start menu, desktop, and other UI tidbits[0] was completely divorced from the rest of windows development, with their own business priorities and so on. This was the team responsible for Windows 8/.1, so as you can imagine they were somewhat sidelined during Windows 10 development. It appears they have their revenge, first and foremost from the promised-never-to-happen rebranding (whereby they jettisoned the Windows 10 brand which was an embarrassment for that team and that team only). That the result is only a reskinned 10 is the natural result because that is the only part of the product they have the authority or ability to change.
The Shell team was trying to push this same new UI during my whole time at Msft, with at least three cancelled attempts that I was aware of even from an IC perspective. By the end the embarrassment was contagious.
[0] Plus Edge, as part of the same vestigial business unit. This explains the central position of advertising in the reskin, because Edge in all of its forms was always meant to drive ad revenue. That is the distinct business priority I mentioned earlier, which sets this organization apart from Windows (NT,win32,etc.) development proper, which was shifted to Azure.
> Windows (NT,win32,etc.) development proper, which was shifted to Azure.
In what sense?
From what I've seen, there's been virtually no development of Windows for Azure. Most of its features are simply being dropped on the floor and are being replaced wholesale by things that aren't that integrated.
My Surface go 3 came with W11 looking like W10 (except the start menu/task bar). That confused me a lot (old right click, old settings). It came win W11 Home so I did a fresh W11 Pro installation (which for some reason accepts the built in key and is activated) and everything looked like W11.
It is a pretty big hack. I seem to recall in 11 (at least around RTM time, maybe not now) that if explorer.exe died then all the windows lost their rounded corners. There was definitely a dev build where if the start menu crashed (also explorer.exe I think) the windows 10 one would reappear, although that might’ve just been because during development they shipped both start menus.
It's also how our brains work. Existing parts of the brain remain, they just get overridden here and there by new layers added on. Sometimes the original rat brain takes over. If you've ever gone into a blind rage, for example, that's the rat brain asserting itself.
The Windows 11 GUI was originally meant for a version of Windows called "Windows 10X", which was intended for low-powered devices that would compete with Chromebooks (hence the simplified, touch-centric design of the UI). Windows 10X was supposed to be a "legacy-free" OS that only ran UWP programs natively. Rather than using GDI, Win32, Explorer, etc. it used a brand new UI stack built on DirectX. This means that it required a compatibility layer to run Win32 programs, which were isolated from the OS. In mid-2021, Microsoft announced that they were cancelling Windows 10X in favor of bringing some of its features to regular Windows.
This is speculation but I would guess that MS didn't want to waste all of the design work that went into Windows 10X, so they ported the new UI over to Windows 10 and used the opportunity to bump up the OS minimum requirements and drop 32-bit support. This would explain why Windows 11 feels like a bunch of junk built on top of Windows 10.
The new (and IMHO horrible) context menu in Explorer is exactly that.
You can even see the old one show up for a fraction of a second before the new one takes its place, and as further evidence, the trick to revert to the old one is to prevent the COM object of the new one from loading and replacing it:
(For some inexplicable reason, many of the sites that show you how to revert it say the new one is an "improved experience". If it was, why would people be reading articles about how to revert it?)
In high school my friends and I had a basement drinking game called "System 32 Roulette." We had a fresh Windows 98 machine and you had to pick a file inside c:/windows/system32/ by random and forcibly delete it then reboot the machine. If the computer booted up and you could successfully get back to that folder, everyone else had to take a drink. If not, you had to finish your drink and then reinstall Windows.
It was mostly a side attraction while we played Smash Bros or whatnot. But the best part is watching a super drunk person trying to install windows. It was hilarious.
Was this off of CD-ROM or a stack of floppies? I think 3.11 was the last of the floppies, but memory is hazy around what 95 install media was. Pretty sure 98 was CD, but that could be a fun "bonus round" to force an install from floppy.
It was a CD, but a really low quality burned CD that we eventually scratched the label side on, which stripped the data side off with it. So it was eventually hung from the ceiling with dental floss. We crossed out "98" with marker and wrote in "95", but to be honest, it didn't install anything by then.
I know I've installed Win95 off of floppies. Don't recall the exact number, but believe it was around 40-50 3.5" floppies. It came in a box about the length of a shoe box.
I have somehow never gotten around to throwing away the box of ancient floppies I've got in a closet from ages ago, and the Windows 95b (OSR2) installation disks I made were still in it, complete with custom color printed labels I splurged on.
The media I copied from took up 28x 3.5" HD floppy disks. It's possible they were copied from what was originally a CD-ROM. I don't remember clearly anymore.
Note: I'm not trying to refute or correct your 13-disk figure, which was clearly a different installation set, and likely original Windows 95 rather than my OSR2, which came out around 1997.
Hrmm. Seems you're right and my memory is way fuzzier than I thought. Raymond Chen also says 13 [0]. Maybe it was just my existential dread of one of the floppies having gone bad that makes me think it was more.
OS/2 Warp was 40 or so floppies, and sold at such a discount that buying a copy was the cheapest way I knew to get high quality floppies when I was in college
Unless this was in northern VA in the late 1990s, I suspect more it’s just that there’s a certain kind of person who is disproportionately represented on HN who spent high school doing certain kinds of things. Did you take apart CRTs to make lifters too: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jrfBrrDfdEA? :D
Contrary to the sibling comment I absolutely adore this idea! I am definitely doing this sometime with my friends next time I can get them to come over to my place!
It's 2022 but macOS still somehow takes ages to install updates, even on the most powerful laptop Apple currently sells. Windows 98 installation takes considerably less time on a single core of that same CPU in an emulator.
macOS updates are awful. In the same amount of time as some updates I have completely installed Ubuntu and set up all my programs. A 0.1 or 0.0.1 update should not take 30-40 minutes.
I wonder about the random part.. How did you achieve this ? Dice or something ? Be cause even with basic knowledge of the system it would have been easy (for a while) to delete only useless files.. It's à very original drinking game !
Windows 98 had that SFC (system file checker) feature which was supposed to restore bad or missing system files from the installation cab's. Of course, provided the sfc had its own .dlls still intact and the system could at least boot to prompt.
So potentially such drinking game could last longer than booze on hands.
To be fair, that's a standard way of debugging a problem. Cut away pieces of the program and see if the problem remains. Continue until you've isolated the fault.
I actually did something similar with the family computer and Windows 95. I didn't know anything about how computers work so I started deleting files and seeing if they were needed. I actually learned a little bit about the operating system from doing this.
Can I use this thread about Windows to vent a bit? I don't use Windows but what a gigantic clusterfuck of a turd. Mother in law now wants "two monitors instead of one". Whatever... I took a PC with Windows 8.1, bought a DisplayPort-to-HDMI adapter (GPU has got two output but her monitors are only HDMI) and it's kinda ok but then "Windows 8.1 support expires on 2023-jan-10". OK, let's buy Windows 11. I try to install Windows 11, had to create a boot disk or something (because why not) using Ventoy in wich I put the Windows .iso (just dd'ing the .iso as with Linux won't be sufficient apparently) and I happily launch the install. Hardware not supported by Windows 11.
OK, I'll give my mom in law my AMD 3700X and install Windows 11 on that one instead (and I'll buy myself a 7700X). Same thing: "Hardware not supported by Windows 11'. WTF. That 3700X is a recent machine. And the error message it totaly uninformative: it just says "hardware not supported".
Well, good thing a few years ago I made her switch her SME to Google Workspace / GSuite only. She and her employees are doing everything from the paid version of GSuite (something like 50 EUR / employee per year).
Guess what's installing atm on that 3700X for my mother in law? Ubuntu.
I dd'ed the .iso and the install starts just fine.
It's insane: you want to give 145 EUR to Microsoft for their ad-ridden and keylogger infested spyware of an OS but they don't let you. Unhelpful error message. Instead of saying what is not supported, they just say: "Hardware not supported".
So now it's going to be Ubuntu everywhere at her little SME and OS X laptops for when they're on the go.
All the rest of your complains boil down to being upset that Microsoft doesn’t support old stuff forever… guess how long old versions of Ubuntu are supported? (Hint it’s not forever)
Also I could be wrong but pretty sure windows 8 still gets a free upgrade to Windows 10/11. They don’t advertise it, but the licensing server still accepts old licenses.
Also if you want you basically can do the iso onto a usb…
The secret to Windows is that you skip every other version. Microsoft knows people know this, so Windows 11 is kind of one of those things that only new computers and super fans install. The weird TPM requirement seals the deal for many enthusiasts.
I have no idea what you do if you're on Windows 8 though. That was one of the ones you were supposed to skip ;)
People were complaing about how upgrade to 10 happened without consent. So 11 requires TPM, if you disable it, they definitely probably won't upgrade you to 11 when you close the notification.
Forced TPM is the single-most asinine decision Microsoft has made in the last few years.
Consumers DO NOT want this, maybe your business does, but slapping a Win11 install on my nan's fucking toaster shouldn't be blocked because I can't cryptographically sign my left nut to Microsoft.
It also doesn't support very common CPUs like the Intel i5 that are still being sold today and included in new PCs.
Maybe not state-of-the-art top-of-the-line PCs, but PCs that people are buying today. PCs people will be getting for Christmas. That's not a question of 'supporting old stuff forever'.
If it was an old Core2 Duo, discontinued in 2012, it kinda makes sense that they might not bother to support that past Win10. But a PC can easily last 10 years, and still work fine if you've got enough RAM and drive space. So there are new PCs being bought today that may be stuck on Windows 10 for the next decade or more (unless 12 fixes that).
Which model of i5 would that be and when was it released? Intel has been releasing processors under the i5 moniker since 2009, obviously not all of them are supported.
Mine is an i5-6500, which was a hot new thing in 2016 when I built the PC, and still works excellently. Typical utilization with tons of windows open and running is 20% or less (usually much less). It never breaks a sweat playing games or doing anything that normal people would do. It's maybe 7 years old at most, not archaic tech at all.
I know back in the 90s, when we were going from 8088s to 486s to pentiums, things were rapidly changing with noticeable improvements every year. But that era is long past. Even a rinky-dink CPU by today's standards is way more than enough for normal use and will never get close to stressed unless you're doing experiments with CPU-heavy algorithms or something. And they've been that way for a long time now.
They can fill their purpose perfectly well for a decade or more. In fact, my previous PC had a 2006 CPU which still handled everything just fine in 2016, the upgrade was only needed due to RAM (which required a new motherboard and thus a new CPU). To consider a CPU 'not good enough' just because it's a few years old makes no sense now. I would understand if they didn't support that 2006 Core-2 Duo any more. But to not support a 2016 i5-6500 in 2022? That does not make sense.
Lots of things break if you move "C:\Program Files" to a different drive (and make it a mountpoint), updates try to RENAME from a temporary directory into it, but fails because it's a different filesystem instance. IIS used to also kernel panic in this case.
Continuing the model of "Distrust us every other release, we'll be good to you on the next one" Microsoft operating system model is getting insanely old.
You can have continued progress without choosing the off-release to fist your consumers.
At least with linux there's ways where you could fix that. I personally probably wouldn't as it's a hassle and my home folder is on a separate partition anyways, so a clean install doesn't lose me much.
For those interested in the how anyway: You'd boot into a liveCD, Chroot into the installs root folder, and apt-get python2.7. If removing python breaks apt there's probably some flag to apt-get to get it to poke at a not-root folder you could use. Worst case you copy the python install from the liveCD, reboot, and then fix python from the booted system using a now-working apt.
I've been battling with Microsoft for control over my machine for decades and I don't use any of its OSes later than Windows 7, and then only to a limited extent since sufficient Linux and Android apps have been available to replace once-essential Windows ones.
First, my requirements: what I need of an OS is a file launcher for my apps and a means of access to my files and not much else. I even consider networking and TCP etc. additional to my basic requirements—yes, I require them, but they ought to take the form of a separate installable application which I should be able to select from a range of similar products. I have no control over developers who develop apps for Win32/64 APIs so if I want to use their applications then I'm usually obliged to use MS Windows—and that's the problem—I'm forced to hack Windows as Microsoft puts hundreds of roadblocks in my way and makes it almost impossible for me to both achieve a minimum system optimized for my requirements and to stop the company spying on me or selling my personal data.
I've never been happy with just Administrator rights as it's too restrictive, to hack Windows properly I want superuser rights, and to achieve at least some aspects of it, I'll sometimes go to the trouble of deleting unnecessary Windows features holus-bolus and or nuking or mutilating Microsoft's constant and increasing roadblocks that attempt me from doing so. Sometimes my efforts are very successful, other times not.
The trouble is, for me an operating system is only a means to an end (I've little interest in the workings of Microsoft's proprietary code as its forever changing and I've too few resources to be fully proficient and constantly up-to-date year after year). This poses a dilemma, as (a) I often need a hack in a hurry, (b) I don't have the time or sufficient knowledge to spend ages reverse engineering/disassembling the code, and (c), as there is usually precious little really useful information about what I'm trying to achieve available on the internet, my attempts to achieve them are often by brute force and brutal (BTW, I'm never worried about crashing the OS as I can stream it from a backup in minutes and no data is lost as anything of importance is stored on separate drives).
This is a huge subject of which not much appears on the Web, that's why this story's video is important even though it's very superficial and tells us very little of what we actually need to know to do the job properly. It seems to me that much of what I'm about to mention doesn't get mentioned because either websites are either scared of publishing stuff that's highly likely to end up producing an irreversible crash or BSOD and or that those who discover truly powerful ways of taming Windows deliberately do not tell others (knowledge is power after all).
What follows is just a very short bullet list of ideas and things I do to give the flavor and it's far from complete (my notes on how I modify Windows for my own use extends to many hundreds of pages). Moreover, what I mention here does not extend to every Windows installation I do (they all have different uses and the need for integrity, security etc. varies with each installation). If anyone has any ideas, links to hack sites etc. then I'd be most grateful to hear from you.
1. First, although the Dark Web is likely to have much more sophisticated solutions that I'd really like to know about I don't go there for answers—certainly not so in recent years—for all the obvious reasons.
2. One thing that's obvious from the video is that the later versions of Windows 10 and 11 are much more solid operating systems than earlier ones, a BSOD on say Windows 10 is much less likely than on Windows 7. The video shows us that and it's also my own experience (whilst I only use Win 7 I've spent time attempting to hack later ones including Win 10 (but not 11) to the extent that I would consider them s...
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] threadFreeBSD does another approach, where user-installed packages go to /usr/local and don't get intermixed with the base operating system.
It makes you wonder how the thing is built. Like rather than modifying the code, Windows 11 is like a service that run on top of 10 and modifies a few UI things near the end of the startup process. Was that just some kind of hack due to time constraints? Or is the Windows codebase really that much of a delicate ecosystem when it comes to not breaking legacy software so they couldn't even modify the taskbar or file explorer without wrecking something?
Yeah, W11 doesn't support that. If you do some digging you'll find MS claiming it's a large technical lift that they have no current plans to do.
What does this mean with regards to your question? Not much. But that regression in functionality, in an area that every other OS I use supports and has supported for years, definitely suggests the thing is a hack. In my humble uninformed opinion.
Docs: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/how-to-use-the-t...
I am imagining the dire warning next to this prompt. Don't rewire the position of the taskbar or your computer just might catch a virus.
98/2000 were great, ME wasn't, XP was great, Vista was awful, 7 was great, 8 was really awful, 10 is excellent, 11 is therefore almost certainly one to skip.
I'm kind of surprised so many people are installing Windows 11, given the history (and the fact that it doesn't support common CPUs like the Intel i5). I'll just wait for W12.
Windows 11 also supports i5s...It just doesn't support i5s from 6 years ago, nor i7s from then.
But if you're referring to lack of official support for 9th gen and older CPUs, then it is indeed a pain in the butt. Plenty of valid computers losing official support because reasons is a travesty, but at least W10 is still getting updates for a while I guess? FWIW I have a PC with an i7-7700 and no TPM running W11 for the heck of it, and it runs fine, but it wasn't happy about it. This is just the TV PC, so nothing critical; I wouldn't do this on anything even remotely important.
But it's a good enough reason not to jump to an 'off' release. Why bother going to all the trouble of installing something you don't even want, when it gives you the easy out of claiming it's incapable of running?
Still annoying that they blacklisted perfectly serviceable hardware that has years of life left. I'm not a fan of the "everything's disposable, programmed obsolescence" stuff. And I know these CPUs are still being sold and used (because they are still plenty usable and can meet almost everyone's needs).
Kind of, yes, but also kind of no.
> 98/2000 were great, ME wasn't, XP was great, Vista was awful, 7 was great, 8 was really awful, 10 is excellent, 11 is therefore almost certainly one to skip.
Actually, AFAICS under the top-layer gloss of the shell W2K, XP, Vista, and W7 were all pretty much NT4. As long as you set "Use Windows 2000 UI" or whatever the option may have been called in the Control Panel, you were golden...
Except that some UI-tweaking options were beginning to disappear from Vista or W7 onwards. You could still set your Window Border Width to 0 (in stead of the GUI control minimum of 1) in the Registry, for example -- but if you then changed some other UI element setting in the GUI control, the width got reset to 1, so you had to reapply your Registry hack after each change.
The mobile ecosystem kept changing and taking you into new experiences (even before smartphones). Meanwhile, a Windows desktop never felt like something new. Just a layer of paint over the old creaky house.
I even remember a 'smartphone' of sorts I had before android was a thing, which run windows phone: They literally shoved the desktop version there, I remember not being able to click buttons even with a stylus because the ui was so small for the device. The most popular app was some weird dragon themed overlay that, lo and behold, gave it finger-sized buttons.
Well. There was plenty of "new" UI enhancements over the years which I resisted as much as possible. Imagine a meme of Garth from Wayne's World, "We fear change..."
I always hated the more smooth and colorful Windows XP theme. Computers back then were resource constrained enough that you'd notice the fact that it wasn't "free". It wasn't until Windows 10 that I stopped trying to make the shell look as much like Win2k as possible. The extra UI eye candy on modern systems is as near as matters "free" now, as long as you have plenty of RAM.
Now I am just trying to make Windows 11 look as much like Windows 10 as possible.
Same. Start11 goes a long way, but still lots of annoying stuff in W11.
I'm not sure there's much "eye candy" in modern UI anymore, given the regression to completely flat, sometimes even borderless UI elements starting in Win8.
https://imgur.com/XOmCyEG
I am not surprised - I feel like I was marveling over some similar ODBC dialog back in 2009.
It was pretty late in the game. I suppose 2 service packs and a couple of generations of hardware improvements helped.
Windows boots from some DOS and File I/O BIOS interrupts.
It was so lean, fast and stable that I never used anything else until the day XP had some drivers that were absolutely necessary to use my desktop. 99% of low level crashes would just pop up a notification and nothing more, it was insane.
Prior to Windows Vista the real mode code in the MBR loads NTLDR[0] which switches to protected mode and runs osloader.exe to boot the kernel. Post-Vista this is handled by the BOOTMGR[1] bootloader.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTLDR
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booting_process_of_Windows_NT_...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_API
Games like Doom still run on Windows because of this DOS virtualization.
The Shell team was trying to push this same new UI during my whole time at Msft, with at least three cancelled attempts that I was aware of even from an IC perspective. By the end the embarrassment was contagious.
[0] Plus Edge, as part of the same vestigial business unit. This explains the central position of advertising in the reskin, because Edge in all of its forms was always meant to drive ad revenue. That is the distinct business priority I mentioned earlier, which sets this organization apart from Windows (NT,win32,etc.) development proper, which was shifted to Azure.
In what sense?
From what I've seen, there's been virtually no development of Windows for Azure. Most of its features are simply being dropped on the floor and are being replaced wholesale by things that aren't that integrated.
No one really knows, and Cutler won't say or doesn't know, himself.
It's also how our brains work. Existing parts of the brain remain, they just get overridden here and there by new layers added on. Sometimes the original rat brain takes over. If you've ever gone into a blind rage, for example, that's the rat brain asserting itself.
This is speculation but I would guess that MS didn't want to waste all of the design work that went into Windows 10X, so they ported the new UI over to Windows 10 and used the opportunity to bump up the OS minimum requirements and drop 32-bit support. This would explain why Windows 11 feels like a bunch of junk built on top of Windows 10.
You can even see the old one show up for a fraction of a second before the new one takes its place, and as further evidence, the trick to revert to the old one is to prevent the COM object of the new one from loading and replacing it:
https://pureinfotech.com/bring-back-classic-context-menu-win...
(For some inexplicable reason, many of the sites that show you how to revert it say the new one is an "improved experience". If it was, why would people be reading articles about how to revert it?)
https://i.imgur.com/iVNVleR.jpg
The media I copied from took up 28x 3.5" HD floppy disks. It's possible they were copied from what was originally a CD-ROM. I don't remember clearly anymore.
Note: I'm not trying to refute or correct your 13-disk figure, which was clearly a different installation set, and likely original Windows 95 rather than my OSR2, which came out around 1997.
[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050819-10/?p=34....
Now I know why.
Edit: just checked in Google. Win95 was just 13 floppies. But you had MS Office and other software that was additional floppies to install.
We'll, still is, but in high school too.
Much easier these days with virtualization and COW images.
So potentially such drinking game could last longer than booze on hands.
i installed windows 98 so many times i still remember the pirated serial number k4hvd-q9tj9-6crx9-c9g68-qr2d3
and then cdc's bo2k came out and everything changed!
or something like that :-)
OK, I'll give my mom in law my AMD 3700X and install Windows 11 on that one instead (and I'll buy myself a 7700X). Same thing: "Hardware not supported by Windows 11'. WTF. That 3700X is a recent machine. And the error message it totaly uninformative: it just says "hardware not supported".
Well, good thing a few years ago I made her switch her SME to Google Workspace / GSuite only. She and her employees are doing everything from the paid version of GSuite (something like 50 EUR / employee per year).
Guess what's installing atm on that 3700X for my mother in law? Ubuntu.
I dd'ed the .iso and the install starts just fine.
It's insane: you want to give 145 EUR to Microsoft for their ad-ridden and keylogger infested spyware of an OS but they don't let you. Unhelpful error message. Instead of saying what is not supported, they just say: "Hardware not supported".
So now it's going to be Ubuntu everywhere at her little SME and OS X laptops for when they're on the go.
This is the first result when you google Windows 11 requirements. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-specifica...
All the rest of your complains boil down to being upset that Microsoft doesn’t support old stuff forever… guess how long old versions of Ubuntu are supported? (Hint it’s not forever)
Also I could be wrong but pretty sure windows 8 still gets a free upgrade to Windows 10/11. They don’t advertise it, but the licensing server still accepts old licenses.
Also if you want you basically can do the iso onto a usb…
Also modern version of Ubuntu (and linux distribution in general) have no issues on decade old hardware (I have a couple machines that old).
I have no idea what you do if you're on Windows 8 though. That was one of the ones you were supposed to skip ;)
Consumers DO NOT want this, maybe your business does, but slapping a Win11 install on my nan's fucking toaster shouldn't be blocked because I can't cryptographically sign my left nut to Microsoft.
Maybe not state-of-the-art top-of-the-line PCs, but PCs that people are buying today. PCs people will be getting for Christmas. That's not a question of 'supporting old stuff forever'.
If it was an old Core2 Duo, discontinued in 2012, it kinda makes sense that they might not bother to support that past Win10. But a PC can easily last 10 years, and still work fine if you've got enough RAM and drive space. So there are new PCs being bought today that may be stuck on Windows 10 for the next decade or more (unless 12 fixes that).
I know back in the 90s, when we were going from 8088s to 486s to pentiums, things were rapidly changing with noticeable improvements every year. But that era is long past. Even a rinky-dink CPU by today's standards is way more than enough for normal use and will never get close to stressed unless you're doing experiments with CPU-heavy algorithms or something. And they've been that way for a long time now.
They can fill their purpose perfectly well for a decade or more. In fact, my previous PC had a 2006 CPU which still handled everything just fine in 2016, the upgrade was only needed due to RAM (which required a new motherboard and thus a new CPU). To consider a CPU 'not good enough' just because it's a few years old makes no sense now. I would understand if they didn't support that 2006 Core-2 Duo any more. But to not support a 2016 i5-6500 in 2022? That does not make sense.
80286 to 80386 to 80486 to Pentium. 8088 to 80286 was in the 1980s.
The 80386 introduced in the 1980s, IIRC, but became more common in the 1990s.
(And don't forget the 80386SX -- a 386 with the 286's 16-bit interface! :-)
https://github.com/tiagoad/suicide-linux
https://esoteric.codes/blog/suicide-linux
You can have continued progress without choosing the off-release to fist your consumers.
For those interested in the how anyway: You'd boot into a liveCD, Chroot into the installs root folder, and apt-get python2.7. If removing python breaks apt there's probably some flag to apt-get to get it to poke at a not-root folder you could use. Worst case you copy the python install from the liveCD, reboot, and then fix python from the booted system using a now-working apt.
First, my requirements: what I need of an OS is a file launcher for my apps and a means of access to my files and not much else. I even consider networking and TCP etc. additional to my basic requirements—yes, I require them, but they ought to take the form of a separate installable application which I should be able to select from a range of similar products. I have no control over developers who develop apps for Win32/64 APIs so if I want to use their applications then I'm usually obliged to use MS Windows—and that's the problem—I'm forced to hack Windows as Microsoft puts hundreds of roadblocks in my way and makes it almost impossible for me to both achieve a minimum system optimized for my requirements and to stop the company spying on me or selling my personal data.
I've never been happy with just Administrator rights as it's too restrictive, to hack Windows properly I want superuser rights, and to achieve at least some aspects of it, I'll sometimes go to the trouble of deleting unnecessary Windows features holus-bolus and or nuking or mutilating Microsoft's constant and increasing roadblocks that attempt me from doing so. Sometimes my efforts are very successful, other times not.
The trouble is, for me an operating system is only a means to an end (I've little interest in the workings of Microsoft's proprietary code as its forever changing and I've too few resources to be fully proficient and constantly up-to-date year after year). This poses a dilemma, as (a) I often need a hack in a hurry, (b) I don't have the time or sufficient knowledge to spend ages reverse engineering/disassembling the code, and (c), as there is usually precious little really useful information about what I'm trying to achieve available on the internet, my attempts to achieve them are often by brute force and brutal (BTW, I'm never worried about crashing the OS as I can stream it from a backup in minutes and no data is lost as anything of importance is stored on separate drives).
This is a huge subject of which not much appears on the Web, that's why this story's video is important even though it's very superficial and tells us very little of what we actually need to know to do the job properly. It seems to me that much of what I'm about to mention doesn't get mentioned because either websites are either scared of publishing stuff that's highly likely to end up producing an irreversible crash or BSOD and or that those who discover truly powerful ways of taming Windows deliberately do not tell others (knowledge is power after all).
What follows is just a very short bullet list of ideas and things I do to give the flavor and it's far from complete (my notes on how I modify Windows for my own use extends to many hundreds of pages). Moreover, what I mention here does not extend to every Windows installation I do (they all have different uses and the need for integrity, security etc. varies with each installation). If anyone has any ideas, links to hack sites etc. then I'd be most grateful to hear from you.
1. First, although the Dark Web is likely to have much more sophisticated solutions that I'd really like to know about I don't go there for answers—certainly not so in recent years—for all the obvious reasons.
2. One thing that's obvious from the video is that the later versions of Windows 10 and 11 are much more solid operating systems than earlier ones, a BSOD on say Windows 10 is much less likely than on Windows 7. The video shows us that and it's also my own experience (whilst I only use Win 7 I've spent time attempting to hack later ones including Win 10 (but not 11) to the extent that I would consider them s...