[slt2021]

For the love of god just get off of thece ancient systems pls, or run the only in airgapped and isolated network segments with application whitelisting and manual data ingress/egress controls, and everything will be fine without these silly updates.

Just bury the body already, let winxp rest in peace, please

[Lammy]

The site does agree with you in the Disclaimer at the bottom of the page:

“The existence of this site shouldn’t be taken as an endorsement to continue using unsupported OSes. You should stick to a supported OS such as Windows 10 or 11 (or, try Linux?!). However, this service exists anyway in recognition that using these OSes is sometimes necessary to run legacy hardware/software, or just interesting to play around with.”

Presumably they knew they would get a lot of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfUEb_neu3U

[i386]

Yeah until some IT moron running a hospital installs this on their aging fleet for budgetary concerns.

[zamadatix]

I mean that poor IT guy knows it’s shit either way, at least they are trying to do something other than throw their hands in the air and give up completely.

In all honesty though they’ll probably have some old version of WSUS still running on prem anyways. Well that and a large collection of devices they aren’t allowed to update or secure at all.

[kirb]

"Lemonade?" "Please!"

Indeed, I knew it was an important resource many people would need, but also that I had to make clear that getting fully patched up on XP or 7 is of course nowhere near the same as running a current OS with 10-20 more years of security innovation baked in. Although I do try to assume most of the target audience have this level of understanding about security already.

[causality0]

Give me a new Windows that isn't dripping with contempt for the user.

[userbinator]

1990s Microsoft: "Where do you want to go today?"

2020s Microsoft: "Where do we want you to go today?"

[accrual]

I miss the all the research that went into developing 95's UI. So much effort went into making computers usable and discoverable for the lay person. The user was the focus of the OS. Seems a little less so now, especially with some of the usability that went away with 11.

[causality0]

Can you fucking imagine telling a 90s Windows developer who just built an amazing multi-tasking multi-window UI that a 2022 innovation was taking away the ability to label the windows on the taskbar?

[coretx]

Literally more or less all UI research from that era came from elsewhere and MS still screwed it up. Probably on purpose to sell new versions at a later date. Even the MAC UI R&I from that era comes straight from systems such as NEXT and the Amiga. Jobs was no creative genius, but he indeed was focusing on the user. Today, only free software seems to do so. Something the previous is built upon, and developed further.

[coretx]

1990s Microsoft: "Where do you want to go today?"

2000s Microsoft: "Where do you want to try to go today?"

2010s Microsoft: "Where did you go today ?"

2020s Microsoft: "Where do we want you to go today?"

/completed that for you

[int_19h]

"We will tell you where to go today" was the running joke in the late 90s already.

[cpuguy83]

That's what they said about XP when it came out.

[throwaway0x7E6]

really? who, when?

I have actually lived through that era, and I can't remember there being negative sentiment about XP. I don't know about the dark corners of the internet, but the people in my circles were neutral about XP, hated Vista, loved 7, hated 8, hated 10 and hate 11

to this day, the only criticism of XP I saw is about the UI, which doesn't make sense to me - switching it was a matter of 3 clicks

[badsectoracula]

Pretty much everyone i remember hated XP's "Fisher Price" look.

Also there was a ton of compatibility issues, at the time Microsoft saw Win98 as the biggest competitor to XP and it wasn't until SP2 that XP was seen as good.

Funny enough, a quick search for "windows xp fisher price" has this Ars Technica article about exactly that topic (people hating Windows XP when it first came out):

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/memor...

[userbinator]

One of the first things I did was always revert to the Windows Classic theme, because it was very easy to do so. There were also plenty of other custom themes should you want something different.

Starting with Windows 8, they removed that option completely.

[highwaylights]

Windows 8 was genuinely the only one I felt was objectively a step backwards.

Even Vista had its goals in the right place (it was a broken mess, but it meant well).

Windows 8 had so many improvements to the core O/S (even Task Manager was a massive leap forward in 8!) that were just utterly undermined by that horrific metro UI. It must have been so frustrating to have worked there at that time then have some idiot force a touch screen interface on to it that didn’t make any sense.

Windows 10 resolved most of this, and Windows 11 fixed a lot of the fundamental issues with the security model that have plagued Windows for decades.

[narag]

I must be the only person in the world who really loved that theme. It always cheered me up. The default wallpaper not so much, but I never let the default one anyway.

The coloured "rubber" gadgets were very nice. Those haters surely dislike Comic Sans too!

[highwaylights]

Exactly!

Comic Sans for when I’m happy, Papyrus for when I’m in a mood. Easy peasy.

[highwaylights]

You gotta stick the Silver theme on that puppy.

It went from a Toys R Us to a slick Lamborghini dealership.

Or how about some of that Olive Green action? Get you the muted natural look, you know what’s up.

[causality0]

Nah, nah man. The Zune theme is where it's at. Orange and black.

[Koshkin]

> there being negative sentiment about XP

I, on the other hand, clearly remember a huge wave of disgust and resentment towards XP right after it came out. Slow and bloated, with hideous, gimmicky visuals, it had been an object of all kinds of ridicule and criticisms by "sophisticated" computer users.

[iso1631]

I think people were happy with NT4, 2000, Windows 95, and possibly Windows 98 as it had a fair number of technical improvements over Vanilla 95 (OSR2 brought in support for >2G drives for example but it wasn't until 98 you could use it properly)

From memory XP was the first "phone home" windows version which required some form of online registration. I stopped using windows at home or admining it around then.

[vbezhenar]

You can't be happy with 95 or 98. They were terrible. NT4 was nice though.

[cpuguy83]

The general sentiment for a very long time in my circles was along the lines of "Windows 2000 is the best Windows".

[grishka]

Everyone around me used XP for a very long time and remembers it very well, but 2000 is largely forgotten.

[cpuguy83]

Yeah, 2000 was not a consumer OS.

[bitwize]

XP was the first Windows with phone-home DRM.

[mostlysimilar]

Better to have at-install license key check than all of the hostile telemetry and ads in Windows 11.

[bitwize]

Yeah, but that shit was a big deal back then. We were used to having software work for us and not anyone else, so monetizing your eyeballs or attempting to profile you and enforce copyright through the internet was weird and creepy. People lost their shit when they found out Bonzi Buddy and Comet Cursor had spyware. Today's Bonzi Buddy/Comet Cursor is called... well, Windows 11, and no one seems to care.

[coretx]

Some NT versions did that too.

[throwaway0x7E6]

guess they were right then that it was a sign of things to come

[causality0]

As did I. I was excited for everything until 8. I even liked Vista, since I was installing it on a real computer and not a 256MB shitbox. Still miss Vista's ability to dock My Computer as a desktop toolbar.

[andirk]

Incorrect. Nor you or anyone else liked Vista. There's a video of one of the lead engineers describing how they use the "fail fast" mantra. They sure did.

[accrual]

After some of the newer anti-telemetry tools like O&O ShutUp and WDP, I find Windows 10 to have similar parity with Windows 7 in terms of snappiness and simplicity. Yes, it takes work that one shouldn't have to do, but at least all the usual Windows features (like moving the taskbar) are present, patches are frequent, and there are no longer any major breaking changes with updates. So for now at least I'm happy on 10, and not looking forward to 11...

[noAnswer]

It had online activation and online updates. People freaked out. There was a Software called XP-AntiSpy. It was so popular that it was soled in stores on physical media!

[danogentili]

What about switching to Linux? :)

If you're running legacy OSes, you're most definitely not playing recent games with DRM or doing anything that can't be done on a recent Linux system.

[causality0]

Un-fucking Windows 10 is still easier than Linux where the answers to half of my problems are "You fool, if you wanted to use more than two mouse buttons you should have used Slippery Weasel 7. Trash your install and start over with a better distro. By the way Slippery Weasel 7 doesn't support changing your screen brightness."

[kroltan]

I have a 16-button mouse (one of those gaming ones with basically a numpad near the thumb), works out of the box. Same with a variety of dodgy Bluetooth chinesium junk, a drawing tablet, a VR headset... Maybe 10 years ago I had an issue with a 3G modem?

Put short, I cannot corroborate your experience at all.

(I have been on and off Linux the last 10 years due to gaming, but it seems I will be able to stay this time, Proton often performs better than natively Windows)

[justsomehnguy]

> Put short, I cannot corroborate your experience at all.

Put short, you transpose your success to the whole universe.

[kroltan]

Cool, I solved Life!

Now, in retrospect, my tone was inappropriate, I'm sorry. The very fact we have such different impressions of Linux demonstrates it's still a bit messier than it could be.

[franga2000]

It's really easy to un-fuck windows when it dies in one of the few common ways, but in most other cases no amount of expertise can help you. Whereas with Linux, with enough knowledge and experience, you can fix pretty much anything, but you need a decent amount of it even for basic fixes.

[djbusby]

I have a 12 button gaming mouse working as expected on Gentoo with their binary kernel in XFCE.

It's even easier in any other distro.

[wereallterrrist]

Damn near pure FUD with any remotely, remotely mainstream laptop. The Linux ecosystem is so wildly more consistent and predictable than Win10.

I mean, my laptop doesn't overheat daily in my bag when its booted to Linux, but yeah, Windows is so easy. /s

[ShockedUnicorn]

I'm unsure what you mean with mainstream laptop, but with my Asus zenbook I had these problems:

* Sleeping doesn't work, hibernate sometimes work

* Keyboard buttons for screen brightness doesn't work

* Ambient light sensor doesn't work

* Vsync doesn't work

* Processor always highly clocked, draining battery

I was able to fix some of the issues in Ubuntu by compiling kernel addons of some sort. When I switched to Arch I could with the help of their Wiki fix all of the issues, but there was lot of text config files to edit, and some more compiling of kernel stuff. Even after that I still couldn't get vsync to work properly. Watching youtube while the screen is tearing all the time is very annoying.

If you want to run linux you should get a laptop that is validated to work, like framework or validated dell laptops. At least then you might only need to fix one or two issues.

[wereallterrrist]

Power-profile-daemon, wayland, and running a somewhat recent kernel will likely resolve these except the keyboard shortcuts (though, likely a newer libinput with wayland instead of X will also resolce this).

Which zenbook? Ill try to find one here to validate explicitly.

Its hard to have these conversations sometimes because people use old versions of meh distros and then carry their anecdotes forward for years.

I literally cannot find a Zenbook on the market that has hardware that should have these issues. I'd really, really like to know what custom kernel patches (really?) you were taking to get hardware to work.

[opan]

Have you tried Wayland to fix the tearing?

[froggit]

> I mean, my laptop doesn't overheat daily in my bag when its booted... /s

When you say booting in your bag, are you describing the act of intentionally booting it without removing it from the bag while the bag is open (because taking it out of the bag is a surprising amount of seemingly unnecessary effort) or the "why is my bag warm to the touch oh shit my compy's on" surprise wake from sleep while the bag is closed (because, at least in Windows, there are some events that can wake a compy from S3 sleep at bad times, such as moving it, not moving it, or exposing it to oxygen)?

The latter was quite jarring the first time it happened and so far the only workaround I've found is hibernating the computer before packing it up (which isn't a big deal, but bothers me anyway, because I don't move it often enough to make hibernation my default "lid closed" action).

[wereallterrrist]

I mean there's a serious bug where Windows will not properly realize it needs to /stay asleep/ and will wake itself up in your bag, and sometimes stay on.

Linus did a whole video on it - you have to unplug your laptop, then close it, or risk a serious issue.

Just one example of hoops that Windows users become conditioned to.

[StillBored]

I get your point, but its not quite that bad if your careful about your laptop selection (most desktops its not a problem because you just plug in another mouse/whatever when you discover a compatibility issue). And KDE/etc is still wonderfully configurable with the control panel that ships, and there are loads of actual themes that aren't just someone changing a color and background image like windows. And it supports 3 or 4 start menu styles out of the box, with just a right click properties selection, or putting the task bar on the side of the window, etc, etc, etc.

So, yah linux is still shit, but at this point it might have finally reached the point where its the least shitty if your careful. Largely because the competitors are doing their darnest to destroy their own offerings while chasing features/etc no one actually wants (ads anyone?).

[archontes]

I still believe that linux is unsuitable for the vast majority of people. I virtualize all of my workstations with proxmox, and have the ability to backup and restore snapshots quickly, and without that ability, the number of times a gui recommended kernel update would just kill large portions of my system is too damn high.

Kernel 5.15 still seems to be incompatible with running two monitors on a GTX 1080TI with any of the proprietary nvidia drivers I've tried.

[userbinator]

Linux is suitable for the vast majority of people... in the form of Android. Unfortunately that's just not suitable for any sort of actual work.

[kitsunesoba]

IME Linux is fine generally but still has some prominent rough edges that show up just often enough to make it an impractical choice for their users who encounter them.

[StillBored]

What you give up with linux is the hardware compatibility. The linux bigots would say you get better HW compatibility but that is only true if your HW is old junk the manufacture abandoned years back.

Nvidia tends to be a bit of a no-no when it comes to linux these days because of the wayland fiasco (and others), although it might be getting better with their latest opensource driver efforts. Who knows, but the fact does remain that linux's refusal to have a binary driver ABI fsk's anything that doesn't have an opensource driver, so usually just make sure one exists before even trying the HW.

[dmfdmf]

All signs lead me to conclude that they want to make Window ?? as locked down as your phone, i.e. strickly a content consumption and user tracking device. Windows 11, which is garbage, is just an incremental step along the way to boil the frog.

[matheusmoreira]

Microsoft Linux doesn't exist yet, they just have a cheap imitation running on top of Windows. I recommend switching to the real thing.

[hardware2win]

>The Azure Sphere OS is a custom Linux-based microcontroller operating system created by Microsoft to run on an Azure Sphere-certified chip and to connect to the Azure Sphere Security Service

Also

>CBL-Mariner (in which CBL stands for Common Base Linux)[3] is a free and open-source Linux distribution that Microsoft has developed. It is the base container OS for Microsoft Azure services[4][5] and the graphical component of WSL

[acquacow]

Well, it's ubuntu in a Hyper-V VM. It's a very real linux, and it runs /in/ windows vs on top of it...

[matheusmoreira]

Wasn't it an implementation of Linux system calls on top of NT?

[froggit]

> Wasn't it an implementation of Linux system calls on top of NT?

Windows subsystem for linux has 2 flavors. WSL1 was more of the whole system call on NT thing, kind of. WSL2 is a lightweight hyper-v VM with an MS customized Linux kernel with a bunch of tweaks to do cool shit.

[Blackthorn]

Not running it anymore but these systems like 7 are great. In XP or 7, when you built a computer, you installed the OS direct from Microsoft to avoid all that shovelware that OEMs loved to put on the systems. Now the shovelware comes right from Microsoft as part of the OS, isn't that lovely.

[wnevets]

> For the love of god just get off of thece ancient systems pls,

Is anyone actually writing exploits for these ancient systems? I wouldn't be surprised if it is actually safer from non-targeted attacks.

[Koshkin]

Why, they all have been written already, long ago.

[wnevets]

Wouldn't they also have been patched long ago?

[alar44]

Are you suggesting Microsoft patched every vulnerability?

[wnevets]

I'm asking who is looking for and deploying exploits for an OS no one uses.

[slt2021]

Pre-Vista kernel has different completely unsafe architecture. Direct kernel calls, ring0 rce, you wont even notice how you got pwned.

Remember these OS required quite sophisticated antivirus with up to date dbs. Goog luck installing working antivirus on these systems

[alar44]

Plenty of manufacturing still uses outdated OSs because they have to because they vendor no longer exists, doesn't care, or the machine itself is old and no longer supported. Manufacturing plants are also excellent targets.

[userbinator]

You're welcome to stay on your leash and do as MS says.

[Klonoar]

OP is appealing to modern security needs and general advances in computing. Your comment isn't really necessary or useful.

[throwaway0x7E6]

there are hundreds of multiplayer games that dont work past win7 bro

[hhh]

do you have examples?

[throwaway0x7E6]

windows 10 site:steamcommunity.com

most of the results are related to that

[froggit]

so no actual examples?

[andirk]

I agree. But am I the only one using an Android phone from 2017 that hasn't been able to update its OS for a couple years now? It's also cracked and I lost it yesterday.

[no_identd]

Tell that to my desire for a retro gaming experience.

[RobotToaster]

Doesn't MS still offer paid updates for win7?

[StillBored]

yah for another month. The official paid support is "Extended Security Updates (ESU) through January 2023"

But, it wouldn't surprise me at all if a couple large (or important) customers with some special cases have some kind of incident support contracts which basically dictate that MS fixes exploits or bugs in embedded systems/whatever. Its happened in the past, so no reason to think that some nuke plant tied to windows7 can't get a timezone update or whatever in a couple years after paying $$$$$ for it.

[tr9f0tv]

Windows Embedded POSReady 7

Extended Security Update Year 3 - End Date 2024-10-08

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows...

and you also have 0patch

https://blog.0patch.com/2022/10/two-more-years-of-critical-s...