None of Microsoft's operating systems were as good as Windows XP and at least one (8) was a complete disaster, the shock waves from that catastrophe still rumbling around.
By failing to reproduce that success, Microsoft has ceded most of the moral market share to Apple. Though, as a Linux user, every time I see a Mac desktop I can't resist noticing how often would it lock up and display that rotating "busy" mouse cursor in place of what the proud Mac owner actually wanted to do at that moment.
95 was trash, 98 was gold. XP was great, Vista was trash. 7 was great, 8 was trash. 10 was gold, 11 is trash.
Seems Microsoft has to squeeze in at least one bad version between good ones.
But never has a new Windows version been made available where people didn't initially hate them at first, XP, 7, and 10 included. It's not until the version after gets released when people really start appreciating what once was.
You have missed Windows ME between XP and 98, which was so awful people don't remember it anymore. For a revolutionary product, Windows 95 wasn't that bad.
95 Good, 98 Bad, 98 SE Good, ME Bad, XP Good, Vista Bad, 7 Good, 8 Bad, 10 Good.
Counting 98 SE as a separate release does seem like cherry-picking in order to make the pattern work. Then again, you could also say the cycle started with Windows 98 (putting the whole of that release into the good pile), and you'd still have a remarkably consistent pattern across two decades and seven versions of Windows. Honestly makes you wonder if there's some deeper cause related to Microsoft's organizational structure or something.
For all the rightful hate 11 gets for ads and tracking crap, once you turn it off it feels... fine. I even don't mind the UI look and really like the new window management, but I don't use windows for anything serious anymore, only gaming so maybe there are other issues.
>And then there's 11 which doesn't really feel like a new version at all to me.
That's because it isn't, Windows 10 and 11 both identify internally as NT10.0.
For some context: Windows Vista, 7, 8, and 8.1 identified as NT6.0, 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3 respectively; Windows 2000 and XP identified as NT5.0 and 5.1 respectively.
If you're breaking out 98 into two releases, then you should probably break out XP into pre-service-packs and post. IME it wasn't until SP3 that XP really felt solid, depending on what hardware you were running.
It was the first stable Windows OS that could run all the latest games and desktop applications without constantly crashing or needing a periodic reinstall. It was their best desktop OS at the time. XP was just 2000 with an ugly default theme and added bloat.
I would personally argue that Windows 2000 wasn't bad, it was just painful in the beginning. It was the transition point from the 9x kernel/setup to the NT kernel/setup and some manufacturers navigated that change better than others in the beginning.
I had the one PC in that era that WinME was smooth sailing on. It was a Packard Bell with a 200mhz Pentium 1 (96 mb of ram at the time, i think). For whatever reason, and combination of hardware, ME had no issues running. I had less blue screens on it, and overall found it to be enjoyable and much more stable than 98 and 95c was on that machine.
Some things about Win95 are lost to nostalgia, as well. Like broken drivers, esp. in concert with up-to-date office, which came with issues of its own, like broken export formats. (It took more than a year for serious support for Postscript printers, etc.) Win95 became only somewhat functional with Windows 95B. (This one, however, started the IE integration.)
Some people claim this was mostly due to bad 3rd party drivers and not the OS itself. But even if that's true, from the user perspective it's very hard to tell the difference.
95's stellar reception in particular is probably still unmatched to this day.
The only shift in user experience that I can equate it to is maybe the jump from candy bar and flip phones to the iPhone and Android. In addition to the UI, it brought real multitasking to a consumer OS.
Windows 11 cranked up the [user-unwanted] telemetry, mandated TPM 2.0, and eliminated hardware support for certain CPU's for no other reason than 'because security' (overridable with a registry hack at least for the moment).
Instability aside, Windows 98 marked the point where Internet Explorer leeched itself into the operating system to the point of no return (only to be finally reversed in the past year). The complaints of social media apps being "preinstalled" with Windows 11 seem to echo the channel bar, Active Desktop and everything else that arrived with IE4. I believe that the notion that Windows 98 was good came when IE5 were released and pulled back on some of those integrations, which happened to coincide with the timing of 98 Second Edition. In any case it was by no means great, but it was good enough.
If you think 10 is "gold" and 11 is "trash" I assume you're suffering from some sort of stockholm syndrome from using 10 too long and haven't actually tried 11 yet because it's just a reskinned 10 (and visually, it looks a lot better).
> I assume you’re suffering from some sort of Stockholm syndrome
Periodic reminder that “Stockholm Syndrome” was a complete fabrication based on no clinical evidence invented on the spot to discredit an ex-hostage who was making legitimate criticism of an unnecessarily violent police intervention by one of the architects of that intervention, because they had no rational defense.
Its invocations in debates are also typically as an attempt at a thought-terminating trope to evoke an emotional response that covers the lack of actual argument, which fits the history of the term well.
haven't actually tried 11 yet because it's just a reskinned 10 (and visually, it looks a lot better).
I've been on 11 since it was released and I find it to be objectively a worse experience. On Win 10, I could game on one screen and stream a video in a browser on the other. On Win 11, I get stuttering on the streamed video.
It's also failed to update twice now. I invested hours into debugging the issue the first time. This time it's been days and I'm about to just do a fresh Win 10 install over this nightmare.
> It's also failed to update twice now. I invested hours into debugging the issue the first time. This time it's been days and I'm about to just do a fresh Win 10 install over this nightmare.
My current 11 install has never failed to update, but I have experienced various update failures before on 10. This sort of issue is present in both versions, it's just random whether you'll experience it or not, and I wouldn't be surprised if the stuttering issue is just some random driver incompatibility too.
This sort of issue is present in both versions, it's just random whether you'll experience it or not,
No, it's not random, which I know because I stumbled upon the solution. The problem was that it was using an old 100MB partition as the EFI boot partition. Nowhere in any of the system logs did it mention this. No error message said anything about it. Ridiculous.
and I wouldn't be surprised if the stuttering issue is just some random driver incompatibility too.
Why? My system is the same hardware after the update. In fact, the only thing that's changed (and this happened awhile after the Win 11 'upgrade') was a video card that's 3 - 5x faster than the old one.
I don't think that's true. Vista was so hated, that 7 was pretty much universally heralded as a big improvement, even if half of that was the ecosystem getting used to the new driver model introduced by Vista.
And as others have observed, 2000 was an immediate hit with everyone who tried it.
For me, the big change came with Windows 2000. It had user benefits from 9x in a stable package. That was the first version that I can play games on and also leave it running for months, just like a Linux box.
Windows NT before 2000 had problems with games and such, 2000 worked well because most games were now working to target XP ( and 2k had better compatibility with 98 anyway).
I did not use NT at home, but I occasionally used it at school. For me at that time, the ability to play games had been as strong a requirement as the ability to be stable and run word processing, email clients and VC++. So I would use Win95 and curse its (in)stability and reboot several times per day, but not switch to NT. Also, NT cost an arm and a leg for a student.
Win2k was a huge improvement in every respect. My 2c.
> When it debuts in February, Windows 2000 Professional will sell for an estimated retail price of $319, the same as its predecessor, Windows NT 4 Workstation.
Thank you for the info! As I said, I definitely remember Win2k, but not how I got it. My guess is OEM CD to be most likely, then bootleg, then full retail.
Another option was student bookstore. Microsoft sold its wares at universities at steep discounts.
Edit: a sister comment jogged my memory. I bet it was either a giveaway by an EECS dept or a heavily discounted disc from the university bookstore. Which is why I do not remember paying a noticeable sum for it.
They had actually planned one but withdrew this at the last moment, replacing it by ME which was a hastily scrambled version of 98 with a 2000 look on it. And extremely unstable, at least at launch.
I still wonder how they would have thought this was better in any kind of way. A windows 2000 home release could not possibly have had as many problems as ME.
I was in a computer science program and the department literally just gave Windows 2000 keys away. They had a booklet with sheets of stickers and just said take whatever you want. It was easy to give to your friends.
When Windows XP came out, Microsoft unfortunately made them report every key given out, and the free ride was over.
I remember attempting to run Windows NT 4, but it lacked a lot of hardware support. Windows 2000 Professional fixed a lot of that. I consider Windows 2000 to be the first stable AND usable (for a desktop) version of Windows.
The funny thing though is that Windows 2000 was never meant for consumers playing games.
They would have to put up with Windows ME, at least in Microsoft's eyes. Which was the first version you could play games on and leave it running for hours between crashes, lol.
I also used Win 2k Pro and it was an amazing leap coming from 98, yes. My laptop came with ME but it sucked so bad I changed it after a week.
I’ve been using MacOS as my daily desktop for over a decade, switching from Linux. Seeing the busy cursor is so rare I can’t recall the last time. And I have tons of things open all the time.
Maybe it's related to some cloud service? (However, MS Word used to give you a fair amount of exposure to the beach ball. But I'm not familiar with any of the later versions.)
My thoughts exactly! Except I wouldn't call it bling, I'd call it a hideous Fisher Price aesthetic.
I stuck with 2000 as long as I could before gaming (and maybe.. a certain version of Visual Studio?) eventually forced a switch to XP (with the "classic" theme).
I've been working professionally using a Mac for 4ish years now. Can count on a single hand the amount of times the cursor is stuck spinning / loading.
This is not even a radical viewpoint, which is why the downvotes seem irrational. I have seen "normies" pontificating on how Windows XP was perfect for them and how they have seen no benefit going forward.
If I am being maximally charitable, the benefits that come afterwards are drivers, gaming-related (DirectX) or security-related (which is not a user-facing feature). All of them are nice, but not at the cost that the end user perceives; a slow, painful experience, with an OS that crashes randomly and has weird inconsistencies everywhere.
I have mostly stuck to Ubuntu for desktops (since 8.04) and MacOS for laptops (since Snow Leopard).
(Unrelated, I also notice the busy cursor, which is why I went back to Ubuntu once I was able to get a desktop)
My daily driver computing timeline is something like Win3.1, 95, 98, ME, XP, OSX 10.4-10.11, then some combo of Ubuntu/Pop_OS.
I think Windows peaked with XP and macOS with Snow Leopard, with the caveats that Spotlight-like searching in both was primitive/nonexistent at that time and would have been a great improvement, and XP didn't have virtual desktops.
That 2001-2006 era featured systems that had learned a bunch of lessons from 10-20 years of mainstream GUI computing, but hadn't been consumed by feature bloat and a bunch of Internet connectivity and convergence stuff that I'm not interested in.
XP's design was apparently polarizing but I loved it. I was in a modding phase at that point and loved making my own themes.
I still use XP 90% of the time when I just need a quick VM to run some odd Windows utility or other. It's lightweight, it's not filled with the intrusive privacy issues of 10 or 11, and a surprising amount of software is still compatible.
Same. I have WinXP on VirtualBox for all my Windows work. I do have a Win7 image on hand, but I've only had to use it twice over the past several years.
"My belief is that computer security is highly overrated. [...] This can actually be quantifiable. [...] In 2021 Project Zero registered 10 0-days that concerned Windows. [...] None affected Windows XP."
Clever! Security by running an OS which none of the exploit authors are targeting anymore.
From my experience, there is a lot of software that will not build for platform older than 7/2008 due to missing APIs. Visual studio stopped support for xp compilation awhile ago. You still can use clang or such for simple programs today, but chromium is probably too complicated to port at this point.
I thought I saw it in Visual Studio 2019 but I'm misremembering - Visual Studio 2017 was the last to support building for Windows XP by the looks of it.
Does it matter? An attacker has to know about a vulnerability to use it. Unless there's some reason that security researchers would be more focused on vulnerabilities in new systems than attackers are, or something like that.
I would assume that security researchers and most attackers go after what the general public has. But I wonder, are there still a bunch of old industrial/medical machines running XP?
Now I have the mental image of some intelligence guy working on a “get into our geopolitical rivals’ grid in case there’s a war and we need to cause a blackout” discovering the author of the post.
Maybe he will meet up with some friends in “assorted fraud” industry at the local after work watering hole and they can nostalgically steal the post author’s bitcoins together. Hacking an XP machine might trigger a midlife crisis though.
I'd be amazed if there aren't still a number of Win2k or older machines in industrial settings. Until a few weeks ago I was using an Imagesetter at work which had a Windows Server 2003 machine running its RIP software. (Apparently it's just about possible to massage the custom PCI card's driver into working on Windows 7 - but it's easier just to use the intended OS.)
Just the other day I found myself capturing a Vista machine into a VM just to preserve some perpetually-licensed software that we can't ever install again because the activation server's gone away
This totally ignores the concept of "zero-days", vulnerabilities discovered that are only known by bad actors or known but not patched yet.
This is very common, and these vulnerabilities are sold for a lot of money and the buyers make sure to protect their investment as long as possible. Of course that also means they go exclusively for high-value targets which means end users are most likely fine (see Pegasus as an example). But that's not the same as being actually secure.
> This totally ignores the concept of "zero-days", vulnerabilities discovered that are only known by bad actors or known but not patched yet.
I'm not ignoring them, I'm just assuming that vulnerabilities discovered by bad actors will follow more or less the same distribution as those found by security researchers.
Either Windows XP has no vulnerabilities left and we should all immediately start using it or it has lingering vulnerabilities and they simply aren't noticed by more recent projects like Google Project Zero.
There is a good chance that all or most of the exploits found in modern windows actually work on Windows XP, but the reporters did not test for it as no one uses XP.
Someone looking to hack the last remaining XP machines would just scroll down the list of new exploits and test them out.
sure in the tech industry we all know the best practices and more or less try to follow them, but in general I've found that I often have hardware that keeps working long past the desire of the corporate overlords to support it:
- a windows 2000 laptop that I only stopped using (a while) after win2k stopped getting security updates, and the linux i put on it didn't work very well.
- a flip phone that was gloriously good at doing the only two things it knew how to do (calls and sms) that I had to stop using because it literally stopped having compatible towers to talk to.
- a 2013 macbook with a keyboard that still works, but it can't get the latest OS updates anymore, much like OP's XP machine.
I feel like there's a willful blindness -- it's very profitable for companies to keep everyone upgrading all the time, but it creates a lot of trash and there's really no need. There's a huge swath of the population who doesn't mind having 20 year old appliances or cars, and who views their digital tools as just another appliance to be replaced as infrequently as possible.
Those of us in tech need to consider the moral prerogative of slowing the trash cycle and the frugality enabled by letting things work for decades. And to stop pretending there isn't a user base out there who will insist on using things for decades even if we tell them it's not advisable.
> a flip phone that was gloriously good at doing the only two things it knew how to do (calls and sms) that I had to stop using because it stopped having compatible towers to talk to.
That was the situation that finally prompted me to buy an iPhone.
Windows XP on it's own, behind Windows Firewall and a router firewall not doing anything too controversial may be fine. Where the risks become higher is when you have many machines across the network. That one host would lower the overall security of everything else around limiting the ability to disable weak protocols.
Backwards compatibility with Windows/AD has always caused issues with Active Directory becoming such a juicy target in the way system-to-systems interacted.
>My belief is that computer security is highly overrated. With a decent firewall, which every router has these days, only your own activity can expose you to attack from hostile actors. All internet browsers also help you by warning when you are about to do something stupid like executing code from a remote source.
This is a ridiculous thing to say. The reason that there are so few misleading ads, so few zero days being exploited, and in general a much less tricky landscape today is because the unyielding and unrelenting efforts of people improving computer security.
I can open youtube on my phone right now and find an ad saying "everyone who clicks here will get $1000", misleading ads are still everywhere even if they might not be malware. And I doubt ads exploiting browser 0-days were actually that common back in the day, ads in general weren't nearly as common.
I actually RTFA and was thinking, "this dude should upgrade and run Win7 like me," - and was pleasantly surprised to find he is.
The only issue I've had was a few months ago Google Chrome now gives a small nag-bar on startup - supposedly dismissisable with a -flag, but the flag itself is either no longer functioning for some smirk sanctimonious reason, or more likely, hilariously not tested, and has since ironically regressed.
The only gripe from XP->Vista->7 is the respective mediocre, to amazing, to abysmal local search functionality.
Regarding 0-days: back when I had virtual valuables and wasn't a complete random, I had been specifically targeted and smitten with a TeamViewer 0-day. But, like the author notes, that would had happened regardless of my subscription to any one of the myriad of dubious AV products of the era.
win7, with its incredible native and specific backward compatibility mode, supports more apps than any other
virtual ecosystem. 25+ years of great software - some of which runs smoother than their great descendent counterpart. Shame to not at least have a box sitting around for the occasional sporadic encounter with an inane, archaic file type, needing to be fandangled into a newer format.
Steam just announced[0] their client will no longer work on Windows 7 come Jan 1st 2024. I figured this would happen as soon as I noticed they adopted Chromium Embedded Framework, guaranteeing that Google's supported OSes become Steam's supported OSes. I'm not exactly sure how I'm supposed to play Steam games from 2004 (or whatever) on the OS they were designed for, when Steam won't even run on that OS anymore. I guess I can hope that compatibility layers work well enough in newer Windows versions? Just kidding, my Windows gaming PC will now be a Linux gaming PC :)
Ah sick, but will they actually launch? IIRC the DRM requires that you sign in at least once a month (or something) to refresh the activation stuff so you can actually launch the game(s).
If only filename search is needed the Everything would be enough, free.
But, surprisingly, most of the time I find what I need with built-in search in the Win10 Start Menu. Although I had to slap her hands not to show me web results.
That was the era when my systems felt “most stable.”
Ok, I was also slipstreaming my installation CD-Rs and really putting time into it. Yet. The things that used the most memory and power were probably flash player and counterstrike. Those were not bad times!
I seriously never got malware, and always wondered what everyone else was doing differently than I.
I wonder if he would've been happy running ReactOS or something like Haiku or SerenityOS.
It seems that the major reason why XP worked for him was how dead simple it was. The fact is that there's no modern "simple" OS. I know. I've looked. The point-and-click simplicity of the 90s is quite plainly no longer out there. Even macOS, championed for its supposed simplicity, has grown a large amount of extraneous features and an outright hostility to those who try to use it in a nonstandard way.
Coming to think of it, it wouldn't even matter. All of the OSes I've suggested struggle with the same issue as WinXP, which is that there's no modern browser support. SerenityOS seems to be the only one which is making any actual strides to fixing that with its Ladybug browser (which theoretically could be ported to the other OSes), but even that is a work-in-progress.
But at the end of the days they're just not good enough reasons.
This author doesn't believe that security is important because their crypto currency hasn't been stolen yet.
I don't know how one could possibly do a better job of conveying that they don't care and are just coming up with nonsense reasons to justify their bad computing habits.
They're free to do whatever they want, just like us all.. but I still cringe at the idea that somebody who doesn't know better could read this article and think running Windows 7 now is a good idea.
It’s my humble opinion that a setup like this is only “not hacked” from a combination of dumb luck and low value. Maybe that’s enough for most people. IDK
No disrespect, if I was still a windows user I would be on win7 too, however I can’t help but think about how naive this was with regard to security while I read it. I personally don’t know how XP could make a person more productive, but I really can’t understand throwing all caution to the wind and doing mental gymnastics to rationalize it.
I admit it’s possible that being on XP has some obscurity benefit, just like if you only used DOS. Having a firewall is de rigueur as noted in TFA, but far from foolproof. No single layer of security is airtight.
Probably the OP has heard of defense in depth, maybe not. Security of any system is porous. It’s like layers of Swiss cheese and so long as all the holes don’t line up, you don’t get owned. Being that windows exploits often affect versions all the way back to 3.11, XP might be more holes than cheese.
This is not a sensible or technically sound thing to do. It is purely irrational. Win7 is already stuck on Chrome 110/111(?).
You are not gaining much by doing this, and are assuming significant risk. Even if specific portions can be quantified away, it's the unknown unknowns that should scare you.
Try a Linux distro again maybe? With some non-default themes and Wine, it really should make a better WinXP than WinXP.
Or at least use something like https://github.com/kirb/LegacyUpdate or the pirated ISOs that get updates from the Windows Embedded POSReady channel -- Win7 POSReady is supported until late 2024, and XP was until 2019.
There are safe ways to do this, but I worry the author may not be aware of them.
The extended update programs are/were only available for corporate users as it's a pay-to-subsidize-availability program that costs more per year than the original OS license. While you may disagree if that's good or not jumping straight to labeling it psychopathic behavior seems more like an argument which came from a conclusion than the other way around.
Writing security updates costs money-and as the software gets older, the cost generally goes up too. Is it wrong for them to decide, after a reasonable period, to stop spending that money on outdated versions? What happens then when a small subset of customers says “we need those updates so much, we’ll pay extra for them?” Is it wrong to take their money and spend it on writing the updates they request, with a reasonable margin on top? But once you are selling updates to that small subset of customers, if you start giving the very same updates away for free to everyone else, those customers are going to ask for their money back. I don’t see any “psychopathy” here, just rational business decisions.
This doesn’t just happen for operating systems. Many vendors of on-promise proprietary software do the same-databases, middleware, ERP suites, etc-most of them have a special program for customers who want to stay on really old versions, in which they pay extra $$$ for updates compared to customers willing to move to a more current one. If you accept proprietary software as ethical, I can’t see how this practice can reasonably be accused of being unethical.
The problem with the newer options is that they are not paid strictly with money anymore. Windows 10/11 use a ton of telemetry you can't turn off.
I use them anyway but only for gaming to limit my exposure.
> Many vendors of on-promise proprietary software do the same-databases, middleware, ERP suites, etc-most of them have a special program for customers who want to stay on really old versions
You can't really compare enterprise class software with something that is sold directly to consumers.
> The problem with the newer options is that they are not paid strictly with money anymore. Windows 10/11 use a ton of telemetry you can't turn off.
Enterprise, Server and Education licenses support "Diagnostic Data Off" telemetry level. I think they'll sell Server to anyone, and even though Enterprise is only sold to "businesses", it doesn't cost much to set up a corporation, and now you are a business customer.
Not saying I'm a fan of Microsoft's telemetry policies–but it is not like people are forced to buy Windows, especially nowadays, there are other options: macOS, Linux, Chromebooks. Don't have to worry about telemetry on my Linux box, and Apple is a much more privacy-friendly company than Microsoft. If people don't like Microsoft's policies, they can vote with their feet.
> You can't really compare enterprise class software with something that is sold directly to consumers.
Microsoft no longer supports Windows 7 for consumers, only for certain enterprise use cases. So in the context in which it is still supported, it is enterprise class software, and other enterprise class software is a valid comparison.
> Apple is a much more privacy-friendly company than Microsoft.
I'm not in agreement here. Apple likes to paint themselves as more privacy-friendly, yes. Whether they actually are is another story.
They have a lot better PR that prevents them from doing stupid skullduggery like unwanted news and "special offers" and "payment plans" in edge. But a Mac calls home a lot even when you are turning telemetry "off".
I'll try the enterprise version (I have MDSN) but last time I checked it I am pretty sure it gave the same options.
I used to work for Oracle. I'm still friends with people who I worked with at Oracle. Many of my current colleagues used to work for Oracle. My current manager, and his manager too, used to work for Oracle.
Did we always agree with the decisions of Oracle executive management? Nope. Of course, so long as you work there, you can't say that publicly. But, even though there's quite a few things that Oracle did while I was there that I strongly disagreed with – I can't see the problem with charging extra for supporting really old versions. It is just common sense, and it is part of the package the customer signed up to at the start – the collateral given to the customer as part of every deal explained it. Many other vendors do it too. A consumer might legitimately claim they didn't understand what they'd signed up to, but that's not believable when a billion dollar company signs a million dollar deal.
Oracle has over 100,000 employees today. I have no idea how many ex-employees there are – I've met so many over the years, we are everywhere – but I guess it must be well over 1 million by now.
You are deliberately putting in extra effort to make your own product less secure. Often with consequences that will primarily be felt by people far down the impact chain, who probably didn't even know that the choice was being made.
I think a lot of companies agree with you more or less — well, companies don’t have personalities or psychologies, so psychopathy is not really possible. But charging for security updates is too much of a reputation risk.
Of course because they are profit driven entities and they can’t charge for security patches, they just stop writing them.
Companies are not unaccountable entities. They're headed by people who make and carry out these decisions. And withholding security updates as a means of planned obsolescence is absolutely a consciously directed strategy. In many ways companies act as too much of a shield for bad behavior. When a "company" does something awful, it's not the company - but the executive leadership doing that.
The author said that their experiences with Linux was slow (Debian and Lubuntu were examples) and had no intention of using Linux because of these experiences.
Personally, I don't know what they're talking about, but I've always had a smoother/faster (albeit a bit clunky/glitchy sometimes) with Linux than Windows. Even when I dual booted Win7 and Ubuntu, Linux was always faster. Currently, I'm using XFCE w/ Arch on a 6 year old laptop. Programs open very fast, I get regular sw updates, and I've been running it for work for four years.
I mean, we're talking about a fourteen year old computer. With a couple commandline options you can be supported on a modern, updated OS, which is more than you can say for any other major OS.
You can either have a system where somebody else is deciding on your behalf how your system is going to be configured, or you can have a system where it's up to you to opt-in to the stuff you want. You can't have both.
Do we need this comment parroted every single time someone mentions Linux on this forum? I get it, it's too complicated for you, can we move on instead of rehashing this point over and over again?
The past week we have had two major Linux discussions and in each thread there is a semi flame war that starts because some had to voice yet another "this is why Linux is so hard for nan to use", as if it was a novel or constructive observation. It's not.
> Do we need this comment parroted every single time someone mentions Linux on this forum? I get it, it's too complicated for you, can we move on instead of rehashing this point over and over again?
Yes, if it is a reply to a problem where someone "Tried linux and it was slow, so didn't use". If system configuration debugging were in their taste, they would have done so. So it's the "Just configure parameters <x>" which is the pointless rehashing.
I don't think that this sort of attitude will result in an environment that's encouraging for more people to use Linux distros. A better approach might be going straight into suggesting whatever information helped you in the past.
Not all of those are always up to date, though, so some digging around might be needed. Many will just give up or not even try, if they're faced with a dismissive attitude. Dialogue around what is the most helpful, accurate and up to date guide would be better!
> I don't think that this sort of attitude will result in an environment that's encouraging for more people to use Linux distros.
Linux crowd, seems have not made their mind on what they want to reach as a product for end user. Or even do they want to have end user, not another cool kid to hang on with in IRC and dig inside OS. Some say - I wanna Linux be used by everyone! Other say - works for me and I don't care on the rest [of the loosers who cannot read hex dumps, ha ha ha]. Somehow the success of Chromebooks being ignored and not learnt from.
Thus, without clear goal, mission, product vision and focused team of product managers it's kept being amorphous [as I see it]. Definitely something to learn from WSL project made by Microsoft. They found the need - they did it. You may even see it as cathedral vs bazaar issue.
The only distant focused effort I'm aware about is Canonical/Ubuntu here ( I'm not sure on RH/Suse efforts ) - they are working on MDM with Intune, they have at least some telemetry ( not totally blind on real user cases ), they have Pro edition and even cooperated to be the first WSL distro, naturally paying back in brand awareness, common approaches and so on.
Amen. I bought a printer and trying to make it work with Ubuntu is just hell.
Ubuntu is great, but it would be nice if there was some Ubuntu+ addon subscription service where I could pay to make the bullshit go away. I've got other stuff to do than still trying to get peripherals to work, in 2023.
The problem with Linux is that people buy random hardware without any research and expect it to support Linux. Try installing MacOS on a random laptop or Windows on M1 Mac and get the same result.
There should be official compatibility list for laptops of all price ranges and whoever buys something not from the list needs to deal with issues themselves.
The problem with this argument is that the exact same crowd of people is saying
"just use linux instead of windows!"
at the same time as
"you can't expect linux to work on everything! do your research!"
So which one is it? Is Linux an OS that you can just replace Windows with straight away, or is it not? Most people don't care about the underlying reasoning why their printer doesn't work on linux - they just know it would have worked on windows fine.
Are you sure it's the exact same crowd? There are many Linux users who are quite fine with suggesting it as an option, while proposing a more rational approach to transitioning. Heck, part of the reason for live media is to ensure that everything works before taking the dive.
We're talking about a 21 year old OS as alternative. Back then, Windows would also require significant manual configuration to get it running. Windows may have become more "automagic" these days, but at least in the Windows XP era a common part of installing Windows was going to the local library to look at guides and manuals for setting up less common hardware.
Even something as simple as setting up a sound card with recent drivers required going to weird, slow-loading taiwanese websites with no english text to get the current drivers right from the manufacturer of the sound chip.
Even worse, with XP you had no GPU accelerated desktop at all. Sure, lower latency, but the PC noticeably struggled even moving windows if something happened in the background.
I never once went to the library or struggled to install XP, nor have I ever encountered anyone who did. It quite literally pretty much just worked. Maybe it comes down to hardware choice?
Then you pretty much only saw the tail end of XP, at the beginning it was very much a struggle. Especially with old network adapters and SCSI devices being problematic, as well as many old 9x drivers not running on XP anymore (after all, XP was the first consumer Windows on NT).
I was using XP prior to public release, and used every version of it, including Media Center edition. Like I said, and like you stated in a very roundabout way whilst dismissing what I had to say, it comes down to choice of hardware. For the average Joe, there weren't problems, they were building machines with current-gen hardware and eschewing yesteryear hardware too. Anybody who had problems just bought new hardware, they didn't muck around at the library. Perhaps libraries where you are provide better information, but libraries in the UK at the time were pretty much the last place you would go for technical documentation.
> Anybody who had problems just bought new hardware
And if you do so, Linux works just fine as well. But you were comparing Windows XP to people trying to install linux on old, specialty hardware bought for use with Windows, so we’ll have to keep the same circumstances as well.
Once I tried to use a newish nvidia GPU on an old cpu. It was the pandemic and parts were hard to come by.
The minute windows update would automatically load the Nvidia driver in the background, the screen would go fully black with no going around.
Searching online, the combination was unsupported by Nvidia and there was nothing you could do.
Linux with nouveau worked flawlessly. No kernel parameter, just boot using a live usb and everything works.
Yes, sometimes you can hit a weird hardware issue and need to revert a firmware blob or add a kernel parameter to disable something. These are rare occurrences, not the norm.
Every platform has its quirks. It's just not true that windows or macos is perfect, you are simply used to all the weird quirks.
Just seen this one on my ancient Thinkpad. Mesa-21.3.5 is fine, mesa-23.0.1 fails to pick up the graphics card and drops to llvmpipe software rendering.
It has to be said that llvmpipe seems usable even with Firefox, but not as good as reverting to mesa-21.3.5 so accelerated graphics actually works.
(17 years is a good run and I have my eye on a nice clean X201)
How old is old? I use Debian on an 11-year old cheap laptop, and it runs fine. No GNOME, of course (it's the performance equivalent of Windows on pretty much any hardware).
I think he's talking about perceived UI speed. Things like moving the mouse, starting an application or dragging a window respond fast on Windows because of how the system is set up (mouse cursor practically has top priority and graphics are hardware accelerated). This is especially noticeable on slower hardware and can cause a machine to feel 'snappier'.
> This is not a sensible or technically sound thing to do. It is purely irrational.
It is not purely irrational, in fact it is spelled right out in the article why the author does so: he finds the Windows XP interface much better as a user than any other OS.
I can't say i fully agree personally, but the core of the problem and really the reason i don't see any of this as irrational is that people do get used to the interfaces of the OSes and programs they use and updates pretty much always tend to come with changes to those interfaces that are seen as degradation.
Though i do disagree with his assessment of Linux: while perhaps whatever he tried was slower than Windows XP (i remember reading that Lubuntu doesn't focus on low end systems anymore), Linux can be much faster. And also it is the only mainstream OS where you can have the latest and greatest underlying kernel and libraries without being forced to change your desktop interface (though depending on your choices, some DE can take more works than others).
From the mainstream stuff, XFCE might be close after some configuration (especially if you install some of the more Windows-like themes) but MATE/GNOME2 isn't really that XP-like. Trinity (KDE 3.x fork) would be closer though.
As mentioned in another reply IceWM would also be very close - at least compared to classic Windows - but that only gives you the taskbar and window themes.
This is a perfect example of modern day superstitions, in no way different from superstitions of stereotypical hairy cavemen sitting around the fire. You react to a program release that is mere three months old with a perfectly capable layout engine that has gathered enormous amount of functionality over who knows how many man-centuries across itself and its library dependencies as if you were told to drive an ox-cart. The talk about “safety” has long become a creed repeated thoughtlessly again and again. There's an evident manipulation in making people fear hackers and viruses so much when those who make the most money on controlling users' systems are in fact the ones who offer “better safety”.
Updates for the sake of updates is not a passive, neutral status quo. It benefits certain participants (both the ones on top of the power hierarchy capable of rotating the hamster wheel faster and faster, and the ones on the bottom, who, in accordance with this or that fashion, slap together something that is not supposed to work at all unless you update everything) while others pay the price. And it's the path of least resistance that people choose.
In the end, it's just marketing. If you can add a couple of commas here and there to make the whole thing crumble, which allows you to announce “newer better version with support for new technology, etc.”, it's way easier than explaining what you change, and why, to the inquiring public. The IT public, as we can see, is pathetically neutered, and acts like careless kids in the free-for-all amusement park.
Also, the author can totally get Linux with the leanest DE he can still stomach, and have all the fresh software. Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of memory is still a decent system, especially with an SSD. However, his problem is NOT the software, his problem is that the websites he uses stop working.
I honestly have no idea whether you are supporting what was said with that link, or objecting to it.
Anyway, I was talking about being inquiring. When you look at that list, surely, some questions do rise. “Why should I worry about all of that to read three paragraphs of text on some webpage?” “Which actions have made it so?” “What should be done to fix it?” Right?
I am objecting to what you are saying. It's terrible advice and an obtuse vision of the complexity of software nowadays, especially web browser.
Yes, a 3 months old release of chrome is not suited to use day to day. I link all the known and published CVE on chrome, but if you want to nickpick you could "just" check those which start with 2023-*.
OK. Shouldn't we ask questions about real or perceived “complexity of software nowadays”?
Why does displaying a piece of information that would fit onto a single 80×25 text mode screen absolutely require exposing to a third party a potentially (and, as mentioned, effectively) vulnerable WebHID functionality (which is non-standard, and seemingly only exists to make ChromeOS less mediocre operating system), various WebGL libraries and wrappers, ever-growing Javascript and CSS engines, and thousands of other entities? Someone who grants the whole internet access to local service ports by not using a firewall is considered a fool, but at the same time “non-foolish” “security conscious” people start their browsers, and see no problem in all the services embedded in them.
Isn't relying on a constant (and never ending) stream of updates from white knights in the holy castle in the manner you describe just a subscription model without a defined price?
Who controls the Web? Is controlling the web client enough for that? What benefits the endless rat race might give to them?
How come there's a hidden dependence on corporate products and their support cycles even in the process of using seemingly “open” technologies, say, for government sites and services? Is “I have no idea, my code absolutely requires latest libraries” a valid excuse?
Can mindless acceptance and circular finger-pointing between web developers, library authors, browser developers, and users solve these problems? What needs to be done?
My assumption is they like the UX of Windows XP better than later versions of Windows. I sympathize, because I think that flat software UI design has made computers less fun to use, but I just use theming software at the expense of the stability of my explorer.exe
Loved XP once the Fischer Price theme was turned off. Loved the now small footprint.
But, it's hard to give up the real terminal, now that you've used it, isn't it? Modern Firefox, Python, tons of software just doesn't support it any longer.
A shame really. I'd love a modern Windows 2000. ReactOS not quite there yet.
Corporations like Microsoft have successfully hammered this idea into people's heads that the evil hacker known as Anonymous will hack into your fridge and make it explode and burn your house down if you forget to update it for two weeks.
Almost nobody who makes a big deal out of this has ever actually been affected by it, they're just parroting what they're told.
>Almost nobody who makes a big deal out of this has ever actually been affected by it, they're just parroting what they're told.
Either that or they're paid to come and clean up the mess after a company has been hacked due to one or two random servers not being updated in the last few years.
Servers (especially corporate ones) are an entirely different matter. This post is specifically about personal devices that probably aren't running any server software and are almost definitely behind a firewall.
I mean, I used to say that updating was important when updates were painless and worked. Now that we've successfully convinced everyone to always update, corporations use it to push fresh malware/ads.
Your point may or may not be true, but it doesn't follow from your logic.
I've had more e-ink devices fail by being knocked into the river while fishing than I have from any other cause of accident, does that mean fishing is the most common cause of e-ink device death because it's my personal anecdotal experience? I doubt it.
That's a bad analogy. It would be more applicable if there were a nebulous group of people dedicated to killing the largest number of e-ink devices by any means necessary so they focus on the most popular ones because it is easier to do so.
From a personal end user standpoint, most people will never be the direct target of a attack (and if you are, you are probably in a situation where being 100% up to date won't save you). If they get owned, it will be by a drive-by exploit or because they directly executed malware.
Drive-by exploits tend to target the most popular systems.
Windows, and more generally Microsoft, updates regularly break things. Each time I see the update notification I kind of shudder. A notable one from 2018 was literally deleting user files. [1] Whenever there's an update for e.g. Visual Studio, I think most have learned that it's smart to wait for the update to the update. And see if there's an update for the update to the update, before finally risking going through with it. And I'm talking about the release channel!
It gets even better there as well, until somewhat recently after Microsoft would release a Visual Studio update, older versions would be removed from their site, and there was no way to roll back. So if you chose to update, and it broke stuff, then you were in a fun spot. Fortunately that is no longer the case, but ugh - bad memories. This is one of the big reasons I'd like to move over to Linux, but games + work make it difficult to pack up and move. For all my bitching about Microsoft's practices in general, I don't see myself moving away from Visual Studio any time soon, and it's Windows only.
In Ubuntu, there is a setting to have all security updates happen automatically every day in the background without ever having to bother the user. And its been that way for over a decade. You don't have to be alerted, wait, and restart your whole computer for every little thing. I'm surprised how Mac/Windows still never bothered to catch up. The user should not be bothered by trivial maintenance tasks that the OS should handle.
Hell, I'd do this for all updates if Firefox didn't require an immediate browser restart every time its upgraded.
My daily driver is FreeBSD and it doesn't have this, but even still it's not much of a bother at all. I just reboot when there is a need to and am back running in 5 minutes.
Of course Linux has this live patching thing to the kernel which is pretty cool. But I thought you needed an Ubuntu One subscription to access that on Ubuntu?
> You don't have to be alerted, wait, and restart your whole computer for every little thing. I'm surprised how Mac/Windows still never bothered to catch up.
Cannot comment anything on Mac, have no experience.
On Windows side, your statement is simply waaay overestimated and honestly speaking is not true. Using your words - Hell, it's even can update video/networking drivers _online_, without restart, not even mentioning smaller things like Defender definitions updates.
Those apps installed from Store, do autoupdate without requiring restart as well.
Firefox, shows a tip on update is available and patiently waits, nothing "require an immediate browser restart".
Heck, you can even configure to use devices in your local network to act like caching of downloaded data and to not redownload the same stuff from internet to each workstatation in your network.
You either stuck in the past of WinXP era or producing defamation on purpose.
Coming back to Ubuntu, question regarding
> In Ubuntu, there is a setting to have all security updates happen automatically every day in the background
will it honor you are on metered connection like WiFi hotspot shared from phone?
Apple has also long decided to hide the scrollbar. And they also change stuff around constantly. This is one of the reasons I moved away from Mac.
Not saying your point isn't valid but it goes for Apple too.
I'm on FreeBSD now myself (with KDE, which has a ton of options so I can finally set things up the way I like again).
Apple was actually pretty much aligned with how I liked things, but in the past years things have become much worse. I hated the flat redesign, I hated mission control and its multiple desktops in a row instead of a grid, and many more changes that were forced on me without having a choice.
Once upon a time updates were something I'd get excited for. Now it's a dread of what will break next, what new advertising will assault my eyeballs and waste my attention, and what telemetry will subvert my privacy or deteriorate my control over my device.
This is why I've "just said no" to Windows ≥ 10. I really want it, but these anti-features need a reliable off switch.
To be fair, most of those are uniquely Windows problems. If you pick a halfway decent Linux distribution, you will never see advertising, telemetry, or lack of control, and updates are a mostly positive experience. I switched from Windows 7 to Linux around 10 years ago and it's been an improvement in ~99% of my use cases. The only thing Windows really does better is games and the occasional (rare) piece of software which doesn't have a good equivalent for Linux. In those 10 years I've only found myself running a Windows VM a handful of times to get at some critical functionality I needed from Windows-only software. Switching was one of the best IT decisions I ever made.
I do still like the 95/98/XP paradigm best in terms of, start button, non-grouped buttons for the different windows, and some quick launch icons. luckily because I run linux I can have my pick of the litter, cinnamon, MATE, even KDE with some heavy configuring will do it. I wonder what the author didn't like about linux, seems like it's perfect for someone who's stuck in the past like me, if it's not a software compat problem (which from the sound of the article it isn't)
Exactly! I have run this setup forever; for years and years in Xfce, these days in KDE. Recently I found a couple of screenshots, 1996 and 97, from my Windows days. I was surprised - and maybe slightly concerned - to see how precisely they matched my current layout, right down to ridiculous details. Way back then, I needed a third party utility tweak the clock in the lower right corner to my liking. These days the tweaking is integral, but damn it, the clock looks the same.
I can feel this. My main work computer was/is a late 2008 MacPro, running OS X 10.9.5 (the latest MacOS you can run officially on this). After one and half years, I've still not transitioned fully to a shiny, yellow M1 iMac standing next to it. The usability and productivity on the MacPro, its OS and the apps on it are much better, and, on top of it, it's all software that I own.
The real dealbreaker is evergreen browsers and websites updating from whatever is available on Github, making up-to-date browsers a requirement. The newest browser you can run on this is Firefox 78.15.0esr, which, funny enough, tells you that it's up to date.
I also second that security by out-of-date obscurity may be a concept. (The vectors available just don't scale, if you're not a target prominent enough to make this a sensible investment. Moreover, old hardware gives you things like ECC memory, which is also immune to rowhammer attacks, as it's slow and not that tightly integrated. Having no privileged network connections to any cloud services may help, as well.)
(However, I'm writing this on a rather fresh Apple Silicon MBA, because, well, the Web…)
> The newest browser you can run on this is Firefox 78.15.0esr
This made me wonder if there are still working dev kits/tools with browser components available in such a way as to provide a fairly simple pathway from basic dev skills (or just "web browser example" code) --> up-to-date browser engine, running on 10.9.5?
Thinking of somewhat more obscure dev tools too, e.g. PureBasic, etc.
This would have been a viable path, when WebKit was still "a thing" and enjoyed some integration. I guess, with WebKit2, things became more complicated and resource heavy. Given the rapid development cycles and feature releases, I doubt an integrated web-view would be able to keep up, nowadays. Esp., if nothing short of 100% compatibility to current Chrome will do.
(That said, Firefox 78.15.0esr works still fine in most cases, but I doubt that this will be the case much longer, mostly because of CSS feature adoption.)
If I could, I’d still be running Windows NT 4.0 just for the simplicity and GUI. It was the best OS to come out if Redmond. I wish they had stuck with their “workstation” strategy, but unfortunately not.
OP spent next to no time exploring Linux, which is a shame. running modern Debian on a Core 2 Duo is barely a better option than running a modern version of Windows. Alpine would likely run far better.
> But I store some crypto currency on my computer and I make crypto transactions from time to time. If my computer had been compromised by an invisible attacker I figure that attacker would have had an interest in crypto assets.
Well that's an interesting idea for detecting certain classes of hackers.
I have a Windows 7 Professional system with my startup's software in some boxes and, since now my office is functional enough, am about to get that system powered up and running again.
So, here's a piece of information relevant to security and versions of Windows, I'd like to give exact and really clear references instead of working just from memory, but for such references just now I'd have to do a lot of digging.
From memory, I discovered that one of the security updates to Windows 7 Professional, as I recall, the last one,
was the same as for a version of Windows Server.
So I guess: Since that version of Windows Server was intended for some of the most serious business computing on the planet, that security update should be pretty good, maybe good enough to be pretty good now!
I've been intending to use Windows 7 Professional as my server for my startup, but ... I'm also considering some version of Windows Server. I do notice that it appears that the versions of Windows Server go much longer, years longer, before "end of life" or "end of support" than the versions of Windows not Windows Server.
So, I'm considering getting a version of Windows Server 2019. I've done the shopping and am intending to buy.
Also I'm thinking of using my computer with Windows 7 Professional as my general purpose and software development computer (it is where I wrote the 100,000 lines of code for my startup) and plug together a new computer for the server for the Web site, etc. That computer would run Windows Server 2019.
I would like to know more about Windows Server, e.g., version 2019, as in
The author obviously likes security updates. He isnt running zero day windows xp (which is a hoot to expose to the internet btw) he is running fully patched windows xp.
The issue he says is productivity. With maybe some amount of trying to squeeze more time out of old computers. I can empathise with the first point but not the second.
Productivity isnt a function of just the OS, its also hardware and user skill related. I feel like he could be just as productive on either flavour of 22H2 as Windows 7.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadBy failing to reproduce that success, Microsoft has ceded most of the moral market share to Apple. Though, as a Linux user, every time I see a Mac desktop I can't resist noticing how often would it lock up and display that rotating "busy" mouse cursor in place of what the proud Mac owner actually wanted to do at that moment.
Seems Microsoft has to squeeze in at least one bad version between good ones.
But never has a new Windows version been made available where people didn't initially hate them at first, XP, 7, and 10 included. It's not until the version after gets released when people really start appreciating what once was.
95 Good, 98 Bad, 98 SE Good, ME Bad, XP Good, Vista Bad, 7 Good, 8 Bad, 10 Good.
Counting 98 SE as a separate release does seem like cherry-picking in order to make the pattern work. Then again, you could also say the cycle started with Windows 98 (putting the whole of that release into the good pile), and you'd still have a remarkably consistent pattern across two decades and seven versions of Windows. Honestly makes you wonder if there's some deeper cause related to Microsoft's organizational structure or something.
I use 10 at work and 11 at home and after changing the taskbar settings to put the start button back on the left I don't even notice switching.
Same here by the way, I don't use it for anything but gaming and work for the tracking reason.
That's because it isn't, Windows 10 and 11 both identify internally as NT10.0.
For some context: Windows Vista, 7, 8, and 8.1 identified as NT6.0, 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3 respectively; Windows 2000 and XP identified as NT5.0 and 5.1 respectively.
Windows 2000 was no-nonsense, but all good stuff. The good bones that Windows XP got came straight from Win2k.
The only real problem it had was a narrower hardware compatibility profile, but it still wasn’t that bad.
What made XP great was how reliable it was compared to previous Windows versions.
Some people claim this was mostly due to bad 3rd party drivers and not the OS itself. But even if that's true, from the user perspective it's very hard to tell the difference.
11 has all the same problems 10 has, but brings many significant improvements both in the backend and frontend. Hardly trash.
>never has a new Windows version been made available where people didn't initially hate them at first
Windows 95 and 98 were both received to applause and fanfare, 95's stellar reception in particular is probably still unmatched to this day.
The only shift in user experience that I can equate it to is maybe the jump from candy bar and flip phones to the iPhone and Android. In addition to the UI, it brought real multitasking to a consumer OS.
If you think 10 is "gold" and 11 is "trash" I assume you're suffering from some sort of stockholm syndrome from using 10 too long and haven't actually tried 11 yet because it's just a reskinned 10 (and visually, it looks a lot better).
Periodic reminder that “Stockholm Syndrome” was a complete fabrication based on no clinical evidence invented on the spot to discredit an ex-hostage who was making legitimate criticism of an unnecessarily violent police intervention by one of the architects of that intervention, because they had no rational defense.
Its invocations in debates are also typically as an attempt at a thought-terminating trope to evoke an emotional response that covers the lack of actual argument, which fits the history of the term well.
I've been on 11 since it was released and I find it to be objectively a worse experience. On Win 10, I could game on one screen and stream a video in a browser on the other. On Win 11, I get stuttering on the streamed video.
It's also failed to update twice now. I invested hours into debugging the issue the first time. This time it's been days and I'm about to just do a fresh Win 10 install over this nightmare.
My current 11 install has never failed to update, but I have experienced various update failures before on 10. This sort of issue is present in both versions, it's just random whether you'll experience it or not, and I wouldn't be surprised if the stuttering issue is just some random driver incompatibility too.
No, it's not random, which I know because I stumbled upon the solution. The problem was that it was using an old 100MB partition as the EFI boot partition. Nowhere in any of the system logs did it mention this. No error message said anything about it. Ridiculous.
and I wouldn't be surprised if the stuttering issue is just some random driver incompatibility too.
Why? My system is the same hardware after the update. In fact, the only thing that's changed (and this happened awhile after the Win 11 'upgrade') was a video card that's 3 - 5x faster than the old one.
And as others have observed, 2000 was an immediate hit with everyone who tried it.
Yes, you read that right: DirectX 3.0a.
Windows 2000 by contrast supported DirectX all the way through DirectX 9.0c, same as Windows XP, 98, and ME.
This is why Windows 2000 could run games properly.
Win2k was a huge improvement in every respect. My 2c.
(1) Win2k Home was much cheaper than Win2k Pro. Possibly an upgrade version was cheaper still.
(2) I had a bootleg version
(3) I started working for real money in 1999 so didn't care that much
(4) An OEM CD came with the computer hardware kit.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/microsoft-outlines-w...
> When it debuts in February, Windows 2000 Professional will sell for an estimated retail price of $319, the same as its predecessor, Windows NT 4 Workstation.
Note that there was no "home" edition of Windows 2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2000
So it's one of 2, 3, or 4.
Another option was student bookstore. Microsoft sold its wares at universities at steep discounts.
Edit: a sister comment jogged my memory. I bet it was either a giveaway by an EECS dept or a heavily discounted disc from the university bookstore. Which is why I do not remember paying a noticeable sum for it.
I still wonder how they would have thought this was better in any kind of way. A windows 2000 home release could not possibly have had as many problems as ME.
When Windows XP came out, Microsoft unfortunately made them report every key given out, and the free ride was over.
They would have to put up with Windows ME, at least in Microsoft's eyes. Which was the first version you could play games on and leave it running for hours between crashes, lol.
I also used Win 2k Pro and it was an amazing leap coming from 98, yes. My laptop came with ME but it sucked so bad I changed it after a week.
It depended on the definition of "hours" but sometimes the "hours" were very short.
Huh? XP added nothing to 2000 except useless bling.
I remember being gifted Shattered Horizon (a DX10 launch title) and thinking "it really doesn't look that great"
Halo 2 for Vista also required DX10 even though the original Xbox was hardware DX 8.1 only
I stuck with 2000 as long as I could before gaming (and maybe.. a certain version of Visual Studio?) eventually forced a switch to XP (with the "classic" theme).
I have had my fair share of crashes though.
If I am being maximally charitable, the benefits that come afterwards are drivers, gaming-related (DirectX) or security-related (which is not a user-facing feature). All of them are nice, but not at the cost that the end user perceives; a slow, painful experience, with an OS that crashes randomly and has weird inconsistencies everywhere.
I have mostly stuck to Ubuntu for desktops (since 8.04) and MacOS for laptops (since Snow Leopard).
(Unrelated, I also notice the busy cursor, which is why I went back to Ubuntu once I was able to get a desktop)
I think Windows peaked with XP and macOS with Snow Leopard, with the caveats that Spotlight-like searching in both was primitive/nonexistent at that time and would have been a great improvement, and XP didn't have virtual desktops.
That 2001-2006 era featured systems that had learned a bunch of lessons from 10-20 years of mainstream GUI computing, but hadn't been consumed by feature bloat and a bunch of Internet connectivity and convergence stuff that I'm not interested in.
XP's design was apparently polarizing but I loved it. I was in a modding phase at that point and loved making my own themes.
Clever! Security by running an OS which none of the exploit authors are targeting anymore.
Now I have the mental image of some intelligence guy working on a “get into our geopolitical rivals’ grid in case there’s a war and we need to cause a blackout” discovering the author of the post.
Maybe he will meet up with some friends in “assorted fraud” industry at the local after work watering hole and they can nostalgically steal the post author’s bitcoins together. Hacking an XP machine might trigger a midlife crisis though.
Just the other day I found myself capturing a Vista machine into a VM just to preserve some perpetually-licensed software that we can't ever install again because the activation server's gone away
This is very common, and these vulnerabilities are sold for a lot of money and the buyers make sure to protect their investment as long as possible. Of course that also means they go exclusively for high-value targets which means end users are most likely fine (see Pegasus as an example). But that's not the same as being actually secure.
I'm not ignoring them, I'm just assuming that vulnerabilities discovered by bad actors will follow more or less the same distribution as those found by security researchers.
If we're talking zero-days, then XP offers no more or less protection than any other version of Windows on that front.
Someone looking to hack the last remaining XP machines would just scroll down the list of new exploits and test them out.
The hacker does, GPZ does not need to know.
- a windows 2000 laptop that I only stopped using (a while) after win2k stopped getting security updates, and the linux i put on it didn't work very well.
- a flip phone that was gloriously good at doing the only two things it knew how to do (calls and sms) that I had to stop using because it literally stopped having compatible towers to talk to.
- a 2013 macbook with a keyboard that still works, but it can't get the latest OS updates anymore, much like OP's XP machine.
I feel like there's a willful blindness -- it's very profitable for companies to keep everyone upgrading all the time, but it creates a lot of trash and there's really no need. There's a huge swath of the population who doesn't mind having 20 year old appliances or cars, and who views their digital tools as just another appliance to be replaced as infrequently as possible.
Those of us in tech need to consider the moral prerogative of slowing the trash cycle and the frugality enabled by letting things work for decades. And to stop pretending there isn't a user base out there who will insist on using things for decades even if we tell them it's not advisable.
If a lack of web browsers is the problem: https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy
That was the situation that finally prompted me to buy an iPhone.
My understanding is project zero is about finding new zero days, not cataloging known vulnerabilities.
Backwards compatibility with Windows/AD has always caused issues with Active Directory becoming such a juicy target in the way system-to-systems interacted.
This is a ridiculous thing to say. The reason that there are so few misleading ads, so few zero days being exploited, and in general a much less tricky landscape today is because the unyielding and unrelenting efforts of people improving computer security.
I can open youtube on my phone right now and find an ad saying "everyone who clicks here will get $1000", misleading ads are still everywhere even if they might not be malware. And I doubt ads exploiting browser 0-days were actually that common back in the day, ads in general weren't nearly as common.
The only issue I've had was a few months ago Google Chrome now gives a small nag-bar on startup - supposedly dismissisable with a -flag, but the flag itself is either no longer functioning for some smirk sanctimonious reason, or more likely, hilariously not tested, and has since ironically regressed.
The only gripe from XP->Vista->7 is the respective mediocre, to amazing, to abysmal local search functionality.
Regarding 0-days: back when I had virtual valuables and wasn't a complete random, I had been specifically targeted and smitten with a TeamViewer 0-day. But, like the author notes, that would had happened regardless of my subscription to any one of the myriad of dubious AV products of the era.
win7, with its incredible native and specific backward compatibility mode, supports more apps than any other virtual ecosystem. 25+ years of great software - some of which runs smoother than their great descendent counterpart. Shame to not at least have a box sitting around for the occasional sporadic encounter with an inane, archaic file type, needing to be fandangled into a newer format.
[0] https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4784-4F2B-1321-80...
Grab a copy of FileLocator Pro and wire it up to Ctrl+F in Explorer. It's fantastic.
But, surprisingly, most of the time I find what I need with built-in search in the Win10 Start Menu. Although I had to slap her hands not to show me web results.
[0] https://www.voidtools.com/
Ok, I was also slipstreaming my installation CD-Rs and really putting time into it. Yet. The things that used the most memory and power were probably flash player and counterstrike. Those were not bad times!
I seriously never got malware, and always wondered what everyone else was doing differently than I.
You do you, you’ll be fine until you aren’t.. I feel bad for anyone you convince that this is okay.
It seems that the major reason why XP worked for him was how dead simple it was. The fact is that there's no modern "simple" OS. I know. I've looked. The point-and-click simplicity of the 90s is quite plainly no longer out there. Even macOS, championed for its supposed simplicity, has grown a large amount of extraneous features and an outright hostility to those who try to use it in a nonstandard way.
Coming to think of it, it wouldn't even matter. All of the OSes I've suggested struggle with the same issue as WinXP, which is that there's no modern browser support. SerenityOS seems to be the only one which is making any actual strides to fixing that with its Ladybug browser (which theoretically could be ported to the other OSes), but even that is a work-in-progress.
This author doesn't believe that security is important because their crypto currency hasn't been stolen yet.
I don't know how one could possibly do a better job of conveying that they don't care and are just coming up with nonsense reasons to justify their bad computing habits.
They're free to do whatever they want, just like us all.. but I still cringe at the idea that somebody who doesn't know better could read this article and think running Windows 7 now is a good idea.
No disrespect, if I was still a windows user I would be on win7 too, however I can’t help but think about how naive this was with regard to security while I read it. I personally don’t know how XP could make a person more productive, but I really can’t understand throwing all caution to the wind and doing mental gymnastics to rationalize it.
I admit it’s possible that being on XP has some obscurity benefit, just like if you only used DOS. Having a firewall is de rigueur as noted in TFA, but far from foolproof. No single layer of security is airtight.
Probably the OP has heard of defense in depth, maybe not. Security of any system is porous. It’s like layers of Swiss cheese and so long as all the holes don’t line up, you don’t get owned. Being that windows exploits often affect versions all the way back to 3.11, XP might be more holes than cheese.
You are not gaining much by doing this, and are assuming significant risk. Even if specific portions can be quantified away, it's the unknown unknowns that should scare you.
Try a Linux distro again maybe? With some non-default themes and Wine, it really should make a better WinXP than WinXP.
Or at least use something like https://github.com/kirb/LegacyUpdate or the pirated ISOs that get updates from the Windows Embedded POSReady channel -- Win7 POSReady is supported until late 2024, and XP was until 2019.
There are safe ways to do this, but I worry the author may not be aware of them.
This doesn’t just happen for operating systems. Many vendors of on-promise proprietary software do the same-databases, middleware, ERP suites, etc-most of them have a special program for customers who want to stay on really old versions, in which they pay extra $$$ for updates compared to customers willing to move to a more current one. If you accept proprietary software as ethical, I can’t see how this practice can reasonably be accused of being unethical.
I use them anyway but only for gaming to limit my exposure.
> Many vendors of on-promise proprietary software do the same-databases, middleware, ERP suites, etc-most of them have a special program for customers who want to stay on really old versions
You can't really compare enterprise class software with something that is sold directly to consumers.
Enterprise, Server and Education licenses support "Diagnostic Data Off" telemetry level. I think they'll sell Server to anyone, and even though Enterprise is only sold to "businesses", it doesn't cost much to set up a corporation, and now you are a business customer.
Not saying I'm a fan of Microsoft's telemetry policies–but it is not like people are forced to buy Windows, especially nowadays, there are other options: macOS, Linux, Chromebooks. Don't have to worry about telemetry on my Linux box, and Apple is a much more privacy-friendly company than Microsoft. If people don't like Microsoft's policies, they can vote with their feet.
> You can't really compare enterprise class software with something that is sold directly to consumers.
Microsoft no longer supports Windows 7 for consumers, only for certain enterprise use cases. So in the context in which it is still supported, it is enterprise class software, and other enterprise class software is a valid comparison.
I'm not in agreement here. Apple likes to paint themselves as more privacy-friendly, yes. Whether they actually are is another story.
They have a lot better PR that prevents them from doing stupid skullduggery like unwanted news and "special offers" and "payment plans" in edge. But a Mac calls home a lot even when you are turning telemetry "off".
I'll try the enterprise version (I have MDSN) but last time I checked it I am pretty sure it gave the same options.
That's just a prettier word for the same thing.
And bringing up Oracle as your reference for ethical behaviour is certainly... a take that doesn't really say what you think it says.
Did we always agree with the decisions of Oracle executive management? Nope. Of course, so long as you work there, you can't say that publicly. But, even though there's quite a few things that Oracle did while I was there that I strongly disagreed with – I can't see the problem with charging extra for supporting really old versions. It is just common sense, and it is part of the package the customer signed up to at the start – the collateral given to the customer as part of every deal explained it. Many other vendors do it too. A consumer might legitimately claim they didn't understand what they'd signed up to, but that's not believable when a billion dollar company signs a million dollar deal.
Oracle has over 100,000 employees today. I have no idea how many ex-employees there are – I've met so many over the years, we are everywhere – but I guess it must be well over 1 million by now.
Of course because they are profit driven entities and they can’t charge for security patches, they just stop writing them.
https://0patch.com/pricing.html
Personally, I don't know what they're talking about, but I've always had a smoother/faster (albeit a bit clunky/glitchy sometimes) with Linux than Windows. Even when I dual booted Win7 and Ubuntu, Linux was always faster. Currently, I'm using XFCE w/ Arch on a 6 year old laptop. Programs open very fast, I get regular sw updates, and I've been running it for work for four years.
I am regularly using a 14 year-old MacBook on plain X and it is surprisingly fast.
And that's why Linux will stay in the server for majority of people, not on their desktop.
"You just need to enable something with some parameters and you're all set!"
Seriously?
Seriously.
You can either have a system where somebody else is deciding on your behalf how your system is going to be configured, or you can have a system where it's up to you to opt-in to the stuff you want. You can't have both.
The past week we have had two major Linux discussions and in each thread there is a semi flame war that starts because some had to voice yet another "this is why Linux is so hard for nan to use", as if it was a novel or constructive observation. It's not.
Yes, if it is a reply to a problem where someone "Tried linux and it was slow, so didn't use". If system configuration debugging were in their taste, they would have done so. So it's the "Just configure parameters <x>" which is the pointless rehashing.
If it is too complicated for a HN reader it is going to be too complicated for 99% of people in the world. Get off your high horse.
I know how to enable something with parameters.
if others don't - that's fine. They can learn or they can deal with other operating systems.
I really don't care.
I don't think that this sort of attitude will result in an environment that's encouraging for more people to use Linux distros. A better approach might be going straight into suggesting whatever information helped you in the past.
For example, the Arch Wiki typically has useful information on many topics: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Nouveau
When dealing with other distros, there can be more specific sites too, like: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1032357/how-to-switch-from-n...
Not all of those are always up to date, though, so some digging around might be needed. Many will just give up or not even try, if they're faced with a dismissive attitude. Dialogue around what is the most helpful, accurate and up to date guide would be better!
Linux crowd, seems have not made their mind on what they want to reach as a product for end user. Or even do they want to have end user, not another cool kid to hang on with in IRC and dig inside OS. Some say - I wanna Linux be used by everyone! Other say - works for me and I don't care on the rest [of the loosers who cannot read hex dumps, ha ha ha]. Somehow the success of Chromebooks being ignored and not learnt from.
Thus, without clear goal, mission, product vision and focused team of product managers it's kept being amorphous [as I see it]. Definitely something to learn from WSL project made by Microsoft. They found the need - they did it. You may even see it as cathedral vs bazaar issue.
The only distant focused effort I'm aware about is Canonical/Ubuntu here ( I'm not sure on RH/Suse efforts ) - they are working on MDM with Intune, they have at least some telemetry ( not totally blind on real user cases ), they have Pro edition and even cooperated to be the first WSL distro, naturally paying back in brand awareness, common approaches and so on.
Make your mind, Linux.
Ubuntu is great, but it would be nice if there was some Ubuntu+ addon subscription service where I could pay to make the bullshit go away. I've got other stuff to do than still trying to get peripherals to work, in 2023.
There should be official compatibility list for laptops of all price ranges and whoever buys something not from the list needs to deal with issues themselves.
"just use linux instead of windows!"
at the same time as
"you can't expect linux to work on everything! do your research!"
So which one is it? Is Linux an OS that you can just replace Windows with straight away, or is it not? Most people don't care about the underlying reasoning why their printer doesn't work on linux - they just know it would have worked on windows fine.
Even something as simple as setting up a sound card with recent drivers required going to weird, slow-loading taiwanese websites with no english text to get the current drivers right from the manufacturer of the sound chip.
Even worse, with XP you had no GPU accelerated desktop at all. Sure, lower latency, but the PC noticeably struggled even moving windows if something happened in the background.
And if you do so, Linux works just fine as well. But you were comparing Windows XP to people trying to install linux on old, specialty hardware bought for use with Windows, so we’ll have to keep the same circumstances as well.
The minute windows update would automatically load the Nvidia driver in the background, the screen would go fully black with no going around.
Searching online, the combination was unsupported by Nvidia and there was nothing you could do.
Linux with nouveau worked flawlessly. No kernel parameter, just boot using a live usb and everything works.
Yes, sometimes you can hit a weird hardware issue and need to revert a firmware blob or add a kernel parameter to disable something. These are rare occurrences, not the norm.
Every platform has its quirks. It's just not true that windows or macos is perfect, you are simply used to all the weird quirks.
It has to be said that llvmpipe seems usable even with Firefox, but not as good as reverting to mesa-21.3.5 so accelerated graphics actually works.
(17 years is a good run and I have my eye on a nice clean X201)
The laptop was something like $300 back in 2012.
It is not purely irrational, in fact it is spelled right out in the article why the author does so: he finds the Windows XP interface much better as a user than any other OS.
I can't say i fully agree personally, but the core of the problem and really the reason i don't see any of this as irrational is that people do get used to the interfaces of the OSes and programs they use and updates pretty much always tend to come with changes to those interfaces that are seen as degradation.
Though i do disagree with his assessment of Linux: while perhaps whatever he tried was slower than Windows XP (i remember reading that Lubuntu doesn't focus on low end systems anymore), Linux can be much faster. And also it is the only mainstream OS where you can have the latest and greatest underlying kernel and libraries without being forced to change your desktop interface (though depending on your choices, some DE can take more works than others).
As mentioned in another reply IceWM would also be very close - at least compared to classic Windows - but that only gives you the taskbar and window themes.
Updates for the sake of updates is not a passive, neutral status quo. It benefits certain participants (both the ones on top of the power hierarchy capable of rotating the hamster wheel faster and faster, and the ones on the bottom, who, in accordance with this or that fashion, slap together something that is not supposed to work at all unless you update everything) while others pay the price. And it's the path of least resistance that people choose.
In the end, it's just marketing. If you can add a couple of commas here and there to make the whole thing crumble, which allows you to announce “newer better version with support for new technology, etc.”, it's way easier than explaining what you change, and why, to the inquiring public. The IT public, as we can see, is pathetically neutered, and acts like careless kids in the free-for-all amusement park.
Also, the author can totally get Linux with the leanest DE he can still stomach, and have all the fresh software. Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of memory is still a decent system, especially with an SSD. However, his problem is NOT the software, his problem is that the websites he uses stop working.
Anyway, I was talking about being inquiring. When you look at that list, surely, some questions do rise. “Why should I worry about all of that to read three paragraphs of text on some webpage?” “Which actions have made it so?” “What should be done to fix it?” Right?
Yes, a 3 months old release of chrome is not suited to use day to day. I link all the known and published CVE on chrome, but if you want to nickpick you could "just" check those which start with 2023-*.
Why does displaying a piece of information that would fit onto a single 80×25 text mode screen absolutely require exposing to a third party a potentially (and, as mentioned, effectively) vulnerable WebHID functionality (which is non-standard, and seemingly only exists to make ChromeOS less mediocre operating system), various WebGL libraries and wrappers, ever-growing Javascript and CSS engines, and thousands of other entities? Someone who grants the whole internet access to local service ports by not using a firewall is considered a fool, but at the same time “non-foolish” “security conscious” people start their browsers, and see no problem in all the services embedded in them.
Isn't relying on a constant (and never ending) stream of updates from white knights in the holy castle in the manner you describe just a subscription model without a defined price?
Who controls the Web? Is controlling the web client enough for that? What benefits the endless rat race might give to them?
How come there's a hidden dependence on corporate products and their support cycles even in the process of using seemingly “open” technologies, say, for government sites and services? Is “I have no idea, my code absolutely requires latest libraries” a valid excuse?
Can mindless acceptance and circular finger-pointing between web developers, library authors, browser developers, and users solve these problems? What needs to be done?
My assumption is they like the UX of Windows XP better than later versions of Windows. I sympathize, because I think that flat software UI design has made computers less fun to use, but I just use theming software at the expense of the stability of my explorer.exe
But, it's hard to give up the real terminal, now that you've used it, isn't it? Modern Firefox, Python, tons of software just doesn't support it any longer.
A shame really. I'd love a modern Windows 2000. ReactOS not quite there yet.
Never have I had my personal computer owned by some exploit that resulted in data loss/breach.
Thus, undesired upgrades are a greater risk for personal computing than security. Simple as.
Almost nobody who makes a big deal out of this has ever actually been affected by it, they're just parroting what they're told.
Either that or they're paid to come and clean up the mess after a company has been hacked due to one or two random servers not being updated in the last few years.
Your point may or may not be true, but it doesn't follow from your logic.
I've had more e-ink devices fail by being knocked into the river while fishing than I have from any other cause of accident, does that mean fishing is the most common cause of e-ink device death because it's my personal anecdotal experience? I doubt it.
From a personal end user standpoint, most people will never be the direct target of a attack (and if you are, you are probably in a situation where being 100% up to date won't save you). If they get owned, it will be by a drive-by exploit or because they directly executed malware.
Drive-by exploits tend to target the most popular systems.
In the last 10 years all my updates on Mac and Windows alike have been a matter of clicking OK and waiting 30-60 minutes.
On Linux and BSD I've had some more issues at times but that's been more because of my own messing around.
It gets even better there as well, until somewhat recently after Microsoft would release a Visual Studio update, older versions would be removed from their site, and there was no way to roll back. So if you chose to update, and it broke stuff, then you were in a fun spot. Fortunately that is no longer the case, but ugh - bad memories. This is one of the big reasons I'd like to move over to Linux, but games + work make it difficult to pack up and move. For all my bitching about Microsoft's practices in general, I don't see myself moving away from Visual Studio any time soon, and it's Windows only.
[1] - https://www.howtogeek.com/fyi/bug-in-windows-10s-latest-upda...
I don't like the way VS went from a package to software as a service though :( But Microsoft just love their subscriptions.
Hell, I'd do this for all updates if Firefox didn't require an immediate browser restart every time its upgraded.
Of course Linux has this live patching thing to the kernel which is pretty cool. But I thought you needed an Ubuntu One subscription to access that on Ubuntu?
Cannot comment anything on Mac, have no experience.
On Windows side, your statement is simply waaay overestimated and honestly speaking is not true. Using your words - Hell, it's even can update video/networking drivers _online_, without restart, not even mentioning smaller things like Defender definitions updates.
Those apps installed from Store, do autoupdate without requiring restart as well.
Firefox, shows a tip on update is available and patiently waits, nothing "require an immediate browser restart".
Heck, you can even configure to use devices in your local network to act like caching of downloaded data and to not redownload the same stuff from internet to each workstatation in your network.
You either stuck in the past of WinXP era or producing defamation on purpose.
Coming back to Ubuntu, question regarding
> In Ubuntu, there is a setting to have all security updates happen automatically every day in the background
will it honor you are on metered connection like WiFi hotspot shared from phone?
In the last 10 years my updates on Windows and Android:
- have decided to hide the scrollbar (Windows and Android)
- have decided that i don't need a menu (Windows and Android)
- have decided that they can do whatever they want with the titlebar. (windows)
- Have decided to hide the keyboard cursor (Windows)
- have decided to change the default alarm sound (Android)
- general changing of behavior after updates (Are there people paid to change the UI continously ?) (Windows and Android)
- disabling accesibility settings (fonts, colors chosing) (Windows and Android)
... and so on, and so fort.
Not saying your point isn't valid but it goes for Apple too.
I'm on FreeBSD now myself (with KDE, which has a ton of options so I can finally set things up the way I like again).
Apple was actually pretty much aligned with how I liked things, but in the past years things have become much worse. I hated the flat redesign, I hated mission control and its multiple desktops in a row instead of a grid, and many more changes that were forced on me without having a choice.
Once upon a time updates were something I'd get excited for. Now it's a dread of what will break next, what new advertising will assault my eyeballs and waste my attention, and what telemetry will subvert my privacy or deteriorate my control over my device.
This is why I've "just said no" to Windows ≥ 10. I really want it, but these anti-features need a reliable off switch.
The real dealbreaker is evergreen browsers and websites updating from whatever is available on Github, making up-to-date browsers a requirement. The newest browser you can run on this is Firefox 78.15.0esr, which, funny enough, tells you that it's up to date. I also second that security by out-of-date obscurity may be a concept. (The vectors available just don't scale, if you're not a target prominent enough to make this a sensible investment. Moreover, old hardware gives you things like ECC memory, which is also immune to rowhammer attacks, as it's slow and not that tightly integrated. Having no privileged network connections to any cloud services may help, as well.)
(However, I'm writing this on a rather fresh Apple Silicon MBA, because, well, the Web…)
This made me wonder if there are still working dev kits/tools with browser components available in such a way as to provide a fairly simple pathway from basic dev skills (or just "web browser example" code) --> up-to-date browser engine, running on 10.9.5?
Thinking of somewhat more obscure dev tools too, e.g. PureBasic, etc.
(That said, Firefox 78.15.0esr works still fine in most cases, but I doubt that this will be the case much longer, mostly because of CSS feature adoption.)
I'll guess you'll be happy to see this: https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy :)
https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy
I daily-drive this browser on a 10.9 Mavericks Hackintosh. It's great.
Well that's an interesting idea for detecting certain classes of hackers.
The author is much more likely to be targeted by automated botnets than a dedicated attacker who will actually manually look at his machine.
So, here's a piece of information relevant to security and versions of Windows, I'd like to give exact and really clear references instead of working just from memory, but for such references just now I'd have to do a lot of digging.
From memory, I discovered that one of the security updates to Windows 7 Professional, as I recall, the last one, was the same as for a version of Windows Server.
So I guess: Since that version of Windows Server was intended for some of the most serious business computing on the planet, that security update should be pretty good, maybe good enough to be pretty good now!
I've been intending to use Windows 7 Professional as my server for my startup, but ... I'm also considering some version of Windows Server. I do notice that it appears that the versions of Windows Server go much longer, years longer, before "end of life" or "end of support" than the versions of Windows not Windows Server.
So, I'm considering getting a version of Windows Server 2019. I've done the shopping and am intending to buy.
Also I'm thinking of using my computer with Windows 7 Professional as my general purpose and software development computer (it is where I wrote the 100,000 lines of code for my startup) and plug together a new computer for the server for the Web site, etc. That computer would run Windows Server 2019.
I would like to know more about Windows Server, e.g., version 2019, as in
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35212144
The author obviously likes security updates. He isnt running zero day windows xp (which is a hoot to expose to the internet btw) he is running fully patched windows xp.
The issue he says is productivity. With maybe some amount of trying to squeeze more time out of old computers. I can empathise with the first point but not the second.
Productivity isnt a function of just the OS, its also hardware and user skill related. I feel like he could be just as productive on either flavour of 22H2 as Windows 7.
It remembered me when I installed Ubuntu on my mom's 2009 laptop because Windows 10 was unbearable slow, and it worked much better.
Also the title remembered me the movie The Long Goodbye, what a movie, love Altman.