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.
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?
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.
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
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):
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
They're slowly stuffing that shit into updates of Windows 10 too.
and no one seems to care.
I suspect that's largely because of learned helplessness and the bias that search engines and the like seem to have developed. Instead of piles of critical articles about all the worst parts, we get SEO'd sites parroting the same unbearably positive marketing copy about how much "better" Win11 is.
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.
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.
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...
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!
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."
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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?).
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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
> 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.
2020s Microsoft: "Where do we want you to go today?"