For some of us the last sane Windows was XP, so we’re well over it. XP was the end of the era when geeks ran Microsoft.
I’d say Windows 7 was last that was relatively normal, even though I was all in for Linux even then. It had fairly coherent UI, wasn’t crazy about adverts, it didn’t feel like 10 layers glued on top of an old OS so that it could make impression that it’s contemporary. It also didn’t try to be anything but desktop OS
Praising windows 10 is just wild. (From someone who experienced 95 onward). I mean, it was alright. I think 7 was my favorite.
Mine too, it had a good looking UI and the addition of combined tabs changed everything.
I’ve used everything from XP to 11. Win 7 was definitely, and by far, the most comfortable for me to use. 8 was hot garbage, 10 was tolerable, and 11 made me switch to Linux a week in.
8 was pretty solid under the hood, but they really pushed that Metro interface, and even if you managed to disable it with something like Start8, it was still crippled by the tablet-first design on an OS that had like 2 tablets. And even with the tablets it sucked because lots of settings were still in the old control panel that required a mouse and keyboard.
If we’d had a Service Pack that just gave us the Win7 UI and the Win8 backend it could have been great.
I vaguely remember they might’ve done that later on? Maybe that was for the business version only. It was at least interesting that Microsoft was trying to directly compete with Apple for a while in having a whole ecosystem. I was waiting for more hardware because I liked metro on the phone, but then that all collapsed.
Really the worst part of 8 onward was the fragmenting of the settings, Vista you could at least fallback to the old stuff but they started removing old functionality. I get that they wanted to “update” from the control panel. But that it’s taken them 20 years, and they’re not done, and now neither the new system or the old system is feature complete, is fucking bonkers.
Someday digital archaeologists will search for Windows 9, the legendary Lost OS, said to give its users unlimited power.
I made the mistake of starting on 95, now I can’t stand anything fancier than XFCE.
Windows 10 already had a ton of forced telemetry and more UI clutter than ever. It was a huge downgrade from Windows 7.
I’d rather use a Mac these days and I hate apple products.
I never liked windows, windows 7 was the most tolerated one
I use arch, btw.
Is that with or without the malware?
./jk
When news hit I actually uninstalls all 5 packages from the AUR that I had, it was really frustrating to manually install a device driver to replace the package without a guide but on the upside it turns out there was a more official repo for OBS which worked better than the one from the AUR.
Found out an hour ago that I’m running with the malware :/
Same, btw
Same, btw
Sanity died with $(windows_version_i_grew_up_with)
I grew up with 95/98, and still think 7 was the best one and it went downhill after real quick.
Naw. I grew up with all the Windows, 7 was the last sane one.
Have to agree. Windows 10 LTSC was tolerable, but it still was pretty batshit with how they designed the settings menus. So many things were now tucked away and hidden, with the real settings you often needed being in Windows 7 settings windows that carried over, but virtually always hidden as normal hypertext links below a much larger windows 10 button that didn’t actually do the thing you needed. The only real advantage of 10 was the inclusion of many drivers out of the box, updating a bit faster, and being able to swap the SSD between completely different computers without it freaking out and bluescreening.
Windows 7 was just an advanced Windows XP/2000, and for the most part was still very intuitive to use, with logically laid out settings menus.
Nowadays Linux has far surpassed Windows in ease of use and UX for normal settings with the mainstream desktop enviornments.
And what was up with 3 different styles of settings pages? There was the old MSC style, the more UI friendly pages and then the full-page, here’s your phone on Windows, you need to reboot to get back to the desktop version where you have 2 buttons for all your network settings. Fucking infuriating.
It’s just heinous now. I don’t know how people handle it, I get fucking mad within 5 minutes of having to do anything technical on Windows now.
And what was up with 3 different styles of settings pages?
And from a company that used to scaremonger about Linux being inconsistent and therefore wasting time & money…
You handle it because your boss says so…
Windows 10 only exists because of how much Windows 8 sucked.
Windows 7 also only exists because of how much Windows Vista sucked lol.
XP and 7 was Microsoft at their best. They’ll never reach those heights ever again.
Windows 7 was the peak. everything since has been a decline.
Windows 7 was the first Windows OS that didnt require constant reboots, didnt require regular reformat/reinstalls to fix random over time slowdowns/degredation/crashes/etc.
Windows 7 had a relatively light weight, and very easy to use interface.
Windows 7 was the last Windows OS that you actually owned when you bought it.
Every OS after Windows 7 was centered on taking control and usability away from the owner/user.
iirc microsoft began going heavy on telemetry (and consequently cutting their QA and testing budget) at some point during Windows 7. That’s why it went downhill after that (Windows 8 and after)
They had QA before?
Yeah, that was towards the end of windows life, after win10s release… and it was added as a windows update package, and as a result was easily uninstallable.
and every news article i saw informing people about the telemetry update, also told people how to uninstall it
Even Vista was ok, it was just pre-installed on computers that could barely run it and UAC was overtuned but it was solid with the later service packs.
Pre-installed with the craziest bloatware too. I had multiple come to me thinking there computers were hacked they had so much trash from the factory on them
Yea, vista was the ME problem all over again.
People running it on old hardware and old software wasn’t written to use UAC yet.
ME had its own problems outside of hardware support.
Coming out at almost the same time as Windows 2000 certainly didn’t help either.
Well, sort of, but it was SOLD on hardware that couldn’t run it
Tbf, latest update Vista and 7 are barely different aside from their aesthetics. They just decided to repackage the next update into a different operating system because the well was already poisoned with Vista. Which makes me question why they aren’t doing the same business strategy with Windows 11 now that its failing. Oh well, I want everyone to switch to Linux anyway so 🤷♂️
The same could be said about 8/8.1.
It was not ultimately a different OS compared to 10. The major difference was a start button and a baked in telemetry. Other than that, under the hood these used to be the same OSes.
Was just an ugly version of NT/2000 that’s the last windows machine I bought/built.
I did have an XP box for a while that I picked up on a curb on trash day. It still had the wedding photos of the previous owners when I plugged it in.
The only thing that sucked about windows 8 was their decision to force mobile friendly UI on everyone. Seems to be reoccurring issue.
Nah they screwed up the performance eith telemetry and took a dump on the NT kernel and Win32 with PWA.
My disk usage went from 20% idle in 7 to 100% usage in 8, which made running on HDDs painful to use.
Win11 has been fine for me at home and for the laptops I managed at my last job. Start your machine, skip through the install questions, reboot to USB with a MS ISO, install, done without all the factory bullshit.
Yes, that’s a minor pain, but it’s a tradeoff against post-install configuration with Linux. Either way, it’s hella better than the old days of struggling with pre and post install.
This might surprise you, but I don’t think anyone here is complaining about ease of installation… The “factory bullshit” is built right in to Windows now, and trying to remove it goes way beyond “post-install configuration”.
Also, as someone who’s done server deployments… doing automated linux installs is trivial.
Windows 10, the last “sane” Windows. Bruh, this is where the bullshit started.
“last sane windows left”
And the bullshit started a long time before that. I think people were complaining about win95 phoning home to MS.
No XP was where the bullshit started. I quit windows then.
2000 was the last sane (and maybe only) windows.
Why did did it start at XP? I’m too young to remember.
A few things that people seem to have forgotten over the years:
The “Fisher-Price” visual style fiasco. (People claiming XP’s UI design choices were too unprofessional)
Extremely unstable on base release, with things only getting better after Service Pack 1.
Activation servers required to install the OS.
The start of Window’s Customer Experience Improvement Program telemetry.
Integration of Windows Update into the OS, which re-enabled Microsoft defaults like Internet Explorer, after patches were complete.
The start of confusing SKUs: Home Edition, Professional Edition, Media Center Edition, and Professional x64 Edition which was confusingly a re-badged Server 2003.
I’m sure I am forgetting a lot more. It wasn’t all sunshine and daisies like people seem to remember… but it was a lot better than now.
You got these right, and I wrote basically similar things.
But I had to reply because if you remember all of this, you might also remember seeing how long an XP machine could last on the internet before being patched enough.
It was crazy that you HAD to upgrade it offline, because it would be owned before you could even get it patched. At the time we saw 10 to 15 minutes tops before it was infected.
In any case, yes, XP was the start of all the things we hate today. Its interesting how much more push back there was back then: anti consumer advocates, government intervention, class action lawsuits, even the EU got their own version because they got involved.
Now everything is even worse, and only the consumers seem to be the ones complaining.
Wow, yeah I completely forgot that we used to connect directly to the internet. No gateway to shield us.
I used to get OS alert popup windows from random people connecting to the local Messenger Service with all sorts of scams.
XP ruled idk what they’re on about. Windows 8 really began the death knell of Windows IMO. A new UI people didnt want or like forced down your throat. They started their new hideous and confusing design language, which led to the truly abhorrent Windows 10 half-baked replacement for the control panel. Then the ads. Spyware baked in. Vibe coded start menu that takes 300ms to open. Sigh.
XP ruled idk what they’re on about. Windows 8 really began the death knell of Windows IMO.
Yeah XP was great. I would even say Windows 7 was the pinnacle. The best modern Windows before it started to enshittify.
I like how everyone glosses over Windows ME existing
ME was weird, I never had an issue with ME, and I was dual booting with Ubuntu at the time. Boxes running ME were going up in flames all around me. And yet, I never had problems with it. A surreal time for ME, (pun intended).
Most of the thread just makes me feel old…
WindowsME was what made me switch to Linux… Sure there has been a windows box around here and there for gaming mostly… Now with anything I want to play working on Linux, no need for 11
Windows ME was the cancer of all windows variants. It was slower and less stable then w98, and it was slower and less stable then XP. I don’t know what they were thinking when throwing this abortion-type of os at us.
MELLENIUUUUUUUUUM FEEEEEVVVVEEEERRRR
Better DOS program support?
Windows 8 with its over simplified UI style was to accommodate the fact that corporate users wanted to do RDP over slow connections from laptops made between 2007 and 2012, remember how fucked those things were?
GoToMyPC!
I write about this one a lot, because people have forgotten how bad it was, thinking only today is bad. So let me grab my notes and copy and paste some detials:
They started product activation tied to hardware ID. They created tiers of what you purchased. WGA phoned home to Windows servers, and they ran programs in the background to check on your computer. All of the “validate before you download” started with Windows, IE, Media Player, Defender, and Office here at XP, and expanded every year to today.
They started forcing bundled applications and lied to consumers that they could not be separated (explorer and media player for example). They even offered software that would “remove” these types of packages, but it didn’t, and this was after they said only third party tools could do it.
They began the cut-off dates to force hardware upgrades and windows upgrades.
They bundled messenger into XP and tried to get people to use MS Passport accounts. If you didn’t use passport, you could not download music from the windows store. This was the beginnings of required windows accounts. They used the passport ID’s to tie together users and specific hardware.
They used registration screens to trick users into thinking they had to have a passport just to access the internet. An online privacy organization got involved when they realized just how much data Microsoft was collecting.
MSN explorer was pushed into the start menu, and began microsofts efforts of getting people over to MSN to see ads. There was even a time it would do pop up ads for microsoft dial up, msn messenger, and premium subscription services.
Then there is Active X, tied to Internet Explorer. The EU antitrust investigation was on exactly this: was IE + Active X used specifically to keep people hostage in IE.
Telemetry began here as well. Product Keys, Hardware Fingerprint, IP address, Bios info, applications installed, usage patterns and configuration. You could stop this in group policies, but who was looking at those in the consumer space? Several class action lawsuits were filed and Microsoft themselves called their daily harvest of data “personally identifiable information”.
tldr; Microsoft began the tactics of telemetry, lock in, restriction of features based on software tied to hardware, and creating a account to use all the features of your computer back in the Win XP days.
Probably they hate XP because it introduced Windows Activation Services for the first time.
That said, XP did suck. Windows 7 and Windows 2000 were the best editions of Windows IMHO.
Vista was OK, once it had its bugs worked out with UAC. XP had tons of security problems. Windows 8 actively hated people who had keyboards and mice for some reason. Windows 10 was shoved full of telemetry, which Windows 11 has taken to the max, plus added AI slop.
I mean Windows ME was shit, but XP and 7 were great. Everything after 7 tho has been shit.
XP was complete garbage for many reasons. Security being the number one. Multi-user being number two (or lack thereof). And boy did it look nasty. I think you have nostalgia.
But my main point is microsoft began everything that people hate about it today in XP. People seem to have forgotten all push back there was at the time.
The only thing I miss about XP was that if it was at a hotel or internet cafe, no matter what they did, you could be admin in about 10 minutes or less. Which was always handy to have.
Eh, this was initially true about XP. By the time SP3 came out, XP was honestly probably the most stable Windows version MS has ever produced.
XP was honestly probably the most stable Windows version MS has ever produced.
That would likely be 10. The mandate in 2017 to break up services and require that no one thing could bring down windows made a big difference. Doing this required using more memory, which is one of the reasons it hadnt been done before.
I think you are still being nostalgic about XP! Even after SP3, we called a USB device plug and pray. There were drivers that could take down the whole system. Huge security flaws that never were resolved. A simple palm pilot plugged in would cause a BSOD fairly often. I seem to remember microsoft themselves saying that it could never be stable, the architecture would never be able to be successfully patched.
That’s fair. You’re probably right. So, what makes Windows 10 the magnum opus?
When I first got windows 10, I hated it. Then time went on and my hate flowered into a deep loathing. When it was time to say goodbye, I thought about all the times I hated that OS.
yup. Windows 10 made me switch to Linux. About twice a year, always a couple times a year, for whatever reason Windows 10 would essentially kill my wifi card on my laptop. reinstalling drivers didn’t work, physically unplugging the card from the mobo and plugging it back in didn’t work. nothing worked. the ONLY thing that would work? reinstalling the entire OS. I had to do this twice a year. they’d release some update and just nuke the wifi card.
So finally I decided to give Linux a go cause I had enough. been using Linux ever since. and the thing with Linux is that it made me fall back in love with using the computer again. with tinkering and customizing and everything. made me fall back in love with my development work because of the sheer ease of doing dev stuff on linux especially with NixOS. playing around with various configs and modules and what have you is fun. maintaining random packages is fun. hell even just maintaining my nixos git repo is fun. It’s a blast.
Praise be to our Lord and Saviour, Linus Torvalds!
i think that’s miku, actually
Have you ever seen Linus and Miku in the same room at the same time? Hmmm
Stockholm syndrome?
deleted by creator
Im loving Bazzite.
Except for the whole “now I have 6TB of SSDs that I can’t figure out how to get rhe data off them without buying new hardware”
I spent like 3 days shuffling stuff off an NTFS partition and into a btrfs one last week. It’s doable but takes a while especially if you don’t have much space to put things temporarily. Should probably mention I did it on cachy for the most part, had to use the mount ntfs-3g command a bit
now I have 6TB of SSDs that I can’t figure out how to get rhe data off them without buying new hardware
Are these drives completely full? If not you can likely split the partition 50% NTFS where your data resides and 50% EXT4 so that Linux distro’s can access them properly.
Move the data from the NTFS partition over to your new partition gradually, expand the EXT4 partition and shrink the NTFS one as you go.
NTFS partitions do work on Linux however you’ll experience permission issues and such which is why it’s generally not recommended for day-to-day use, Bazzite is such a beginner-targeted distro that they don’t want the blame put on them if you do something wrong and lose data.
Sorry, why do you need new hardware? Bazzite doesn’t detect them?
They’re NTFS. Bazzite didnt like it when I tried to access them.
Plug them into a non-gaming Linux distro like Fedora. It’ll read them no problem unless they’re Bitlocker encrypted. Then reformat them in Bazzite so you can use them for storage.
Bazzite is Fedora, no?
I daily Bazzite KDE and my NTFS drives are mounting all fine. The only annoyance is that it pops a warning that Bazzite doesn’t like non-Btrfs/ext4 drives every time I access them.
It is, but I suspect they’re trying to mount the NTFS from Steam Big Picture mode. Also, Bazzite is immutable, so there may be something funky there.
Are you sure you mounted the drives correctly?
Except for the whole “now I have 6TB of SSDs that I can’t figure out how to get rhe data off them without buying new hardware”
Do you mean reading the data or deleting the data?
Reading. Then deleting.
Ah okay, is it because of Bitlocker?
You know, I dont think so. I dont remember enabling it
“I love Linux except for <devastating hardware compatibility issue>”
Sounds frustrating, I wonder if anyone’s ever had that kind of problem?
Not a hardware issue; Linux handles NVMe and SATA drives just fine. They probably encrypted everything with BitLocker. Of course Linux can’t access an SSD encrypted using a proprietary Microsoft software with keys that may no longer be accessible.
Luckily there is a new publicly known backdoor so they might be in the clear.
Linux actually can mount Bitlocker drives, even automatically, but you need the key which is usually stored in the TPM which I’m pretty sure you need to boot with secure boot to get working in Linux.
If you still have Windows, it’s way easier to just set a secondary key and use that instead.
On a related note, I would actually recommend weighing the benefit of using LUKS because even with AES-256 hardware acceleration, it can significantly reduce your performance depending on your CPU.
LUKS does reduce performance, but I’d argue that modern midrange or better NVME drives already vastly outclass the needs for normal users. Unless the user is doing massive audio or video encoding or using it for a heavily used database, they probably won’t notice.
Source: Me, and I do the above activities and still think it’s fine.
Not Bazzite, this one doesn’t handle
NVMeNTFS for whatever reason, unless that was changed in the last year. The only distro I’ve seen with that issue, and I’ve used 4 (okay 3 of them were Ubuntu or based on it).Source: had to reformat my data (games) drive. Fortunately, Pop_OS could do that just fine.
Reformatting isn’t going to change how your SSD is electrically connected to your mainboard. Do you actually mean NTFS?
I suppose a distro might ship without NTFS-3g or the ability to install it, although Bazzite should be able to at least read NTFS.
Yes, I meant NTFS
Yeah see I’m pretty sure Bazzite should be able to read the drives. I’ll mess with it when I feel like it
Off topic but I always thought Vista was pretty good. A lot of the stuff people hated was just change. Things like UAC are normal now, can you image how bad it would be if everything still ran as administrator? Vista basically threw itself on the grenade.
I use Linux by the way, don’t lynch me.
I hated vista, because I had to repair and re-install it multiple times on my less-tech sawwy friends PC, since sometimes it would simply kill itself! Lol. I do not miss that garbage pile.
Actually, what happened to win10? like much no updates, if some security hole get discovered, there wont be fix for that, sure, like it never was any extra secure in the first place… so, what changes now?
The end of security patches are a much bigger concern than most people realize. Simply browsing the internet could end up with ransomware on your computer without an up-to-date virus database and using a third party solution often doesn’t cut it these days.
On top of that, new instruction sets for CPUs don’t get updated so newer programs won’t run on it and you might not be able to install nor run it with newer hardware.
People still run windows 7.so nothing changes
