This is great! Even though I skipped the whole Windows XP era by being primarily a Linux user all that time, and know it's all fake, the slight panic at what happens when you try to launch a program is real.
Darn I wish I'd come across Linux before. I was starting university and my Amiga A1200 was just too incompatible with everything. I spent ages weighing up a powerbook with the shiny new OSX or a Thinkpad T40 with XP. In the end I was most impressed with the reliability of the ThinkPad, but those years spent fighting XP when I could have been using Linux - I regret! When I discovered Ubuntu 9.04, I felt like my love of computing had returned.
Linux and OSX weren't that great in the early years.
And XP was one of the best Windows, minus a few glaring holes. Some of which could be patched over with third-party apps and some completely missing, like a modern terminal.
Bottom line, XP was about the best there was just after the turn of the century, assuming you were safe behind a NAT and smart enough to use the new Firefox rather than IE in the coming years.
In those days, the basis of comparison for Linux was established Unixes, first and foremost Solaris. As a free hobby version it was already very desirable, and it was in the process of acquiring the performance and reliability that ultimately made it displace all the existing Unixes. So in that respect it was definitely great.
Where Windows won out at the time is that no end of essential proprietary software ran only on it (or perhaps also on Mac OS) and Linux was locked out. For example, if you wanted to use Garmin mapping software to download from your GPS, or use most printers, scanners, webcams. And of course a lot of web sites only worked on IE6 which looked poised to take over the way Chrome has now.
How times have changed. Most gadgets "just work" in Linux now too, the desktop environment is great (and here I refer to Mate, not the ongoing experiment that is Gnome 3), and the whole thing mostly just serves as a device driver for a web browser anyway.
In my personal opinion, too, the high point of Windows was Windows 7 since it first came with all the common device drivers so stuff would "just work" without the driver hunt dance. Windows 10 works pretty well - I have it on my work machine. But my mom was recently given a Windows 10 machine, and I set it to be as scrimpy with data as I could ("metered connection" and the last aggressive updates). Where, with her limited habits, she used to use around 500MB of data per month (email and very light browsing) she now comes in at 2.5-3GB, forcing a higher tier of mobile data (she's on an LTE gateway - lives in the countryside). Not great. Here Linux wins again in an old school way - it took some serious tweaking under the hood to get it to not consume data constantly i.e. not only not auto update, but not even download the updates and not even constantly download the index of available updates. Opinions vary on the wisdom of this, but it is of course behind a NAT firewall with all unnecessary services turned off. And using zero bytes per month that weren't asked for.
Back to the Windows XP topic. Her Windows XP machine is in the process of giving up the ghost after all these years and while I had her half converted to Linux/Mate, the Windows 10 machine is just more convenient, mostly because it is faster than my leftover laptops.
In the early days linux was great as a hobby if you liked tweaking things and learning (and also as a server) but Windows XP really was the best desktop at the time.
It might be a fun day to fire up Windows XP in a VM and see how well it can do with a modern browser and 4K screen.
Yes, and that was my assessment at the time. XP wasn't bad, but it got so bloated with, I think, SP2. I got frustrated that things would go wrong with it, and I could never find a definitive explanation online to fix it. There were usually webpages with 10 random things you could try in an attempt to resolve it, and weirdly I discovered that same community was still present for Win10. For years using XP I felt I never personally advanced in my ability to use a computer, whereas I feel my time on Linux has been a journey. But you're right, things may not have panned out of I'd either gone for OSX early on or Linux might have been not quite ready for me at that time.
A complex Linux setup - I run a 3-seat multiuser setup on a massive old gaming box that uses too much power constantly to be worth running otherwise - can certainly deliver bang-your-head-against-the-wall frustration. Such as when the binary Brother scanner driver installs without any missing dependencies, and only much googling finds that you need to install some 32 bit libraries that it doesn't mention not being able to open. Or when the multiseat setup that I use is casually broken by update to the gdm greeter, with no plans to fix it again (luckily lightdm works). Or if you try to use a Bluetooth headset...
However, I have not encountered the following, which has so far twice happened in Windows 10: Some hexadecimal error number that IT doesn't know about, Microsoft denies would ever happen, and the anecdotal discussions on the internet offer 10 different kinds of voodoo that will fix it for sure, except that none of them do (you can tell just from the number of different things they tell you to try). At least with Linux the rabbit hole goes all the way down; if all else fails you can dig in the source code.
Yes, I don't know whether it was the Windows community or the unhelpful error messages that resulted in the "10 ways you can try to fix x, but probably fail". For me it was an early update that was causing hanging on Win10 machines at a random time point 1-10 minutes after booting. Was a nightmare to troubleshoot.
Old Amiga user here - There's something about GNU/Linux that felt instantly familiar for me - it instantly clicked. I too lost too many years on Windows...
BTW as an Amiga fan, let me take you back to Kickstart 1.3 and a few demos:
When I discovered Linux, I bought a few Linux magazines - and realised that Linux Format (a monthly in the UK) seemed to carry over much of the same staff from Amiga Format. I had a weird sense of losing the party for a while and somehow chancing upon it again. That website is great, and weirdly the Amiga has come up a couple of times this week. One was marcan mentioning an X1000 driver which he's using for his asahilinux project, and another was re-discovering some Amiga games tunes that the author has commented on 25 years later on YouTube.
I remember in the era of Windows XP, I had downloaded a BSOD screensaver. Unfortunately, it never worked, as the few times I tried to preview it, it kept crashing the system.
I kind of wished the tetris game messed with you. Like have some crazy shape or have the score go all over the place. Somehow I think that would get more people that the xp theme itself.
Unfortunately, if you bring your cursor to the top of the screen there's a message (in Firefox) and an X (in Chrome) that inform the user that they are in a full screen webpage.
Well, with the JS PC emulator from Bellard (or the Risc-V one), you could run Windows XP in the web the same way you can with Windows 2000.
https://bellard.org/jslinux/
And it still triggered the "... oh F---!" response.
Very, very well done.
I've not seen it in decades, but there was a great little site in a similar vein years ago that would detect your OS (Windows or Linux) and be an "animated GIF" of a remote exploit of some sort or another, the usual "run exploit, grab root, run id to prove you're root" thing (the Windows version was similar). Except, it was dynamic based on your public IP. So most people didn't get it. And sysadmin types, who usually did know their public IP, had to restart their heart.
Cute, but it it failed on click #2. "Show Desktop" indeed miminizes all windows. But clicking it again should restore them to where they were when "Show Desktop" was last clicked. It instead does nothing.
This just made me realize how great Tetris could be to build up muscle memory for vim keys: I recently arranged my directional key like that on a separate layer (just got an ergodox).
I love how responsive it is when you drag the windows across the screen. Also, I missed encountering the blue screen of death; it's been so long since I experienced one myself.
this is cute but modern web sites won't work in the embedded Internet Explorer - I kept getting an error "Firefox won't display this page in an embedded page - click here to open in new tab"