[ryandvm]

Wild to me that a company can work on a product for twenty years, have multiple releases, and not have made any significant improvements to it beyond updated hardware support.

Like, y'all could just do a 25th Anniversary Edition of Windows 2000 and people would go ape shit for it.

[jodrellblank]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_XP

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_10

???

[STRML]

Arguably, especially in the 8/10/11 era, few of these features are things that meaningfully enhance the user experience. Incredibly, we're still running NTFS and dealing with hacks on hacks on hacks. In the 8 era, a huge number of massive projects were started, promoted, and mothballed.

[Arainach]

You say "still" as if NTFS hasn't evolved in that time. It still has a far more capable permissions model than any Linux filesystem.

Raymond called it 21 years ago: when you change the insides, no one notices. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040525-00/?p=39...

[M95D]

> It still has a far more capable permissions model than any Linux filesystem.

And every time I format a new NTFS, the first thing I do before puting any files on it is set the drive root permissions Everyone = Full control + Replace child permissions with inheritable permissions.

Because I absolutely hate being denied access to my own files.

[Arainach]

That is absolute madness. I assume you also recursively chmod 777 everything on your Linux systems?

It's incredibly valuable to not allow anything which runs on your machine to immediately read and write anything, even on a single user system.

You can change permissions later...

[gruez]

>Incredibly, we're still running NTFS

So? Linux is still mostly on ext4, and even though there's theoretically zfs/btrfs, most people are still using ext4. Debian installer still only supports ext4. ext4 might be "newer" than NTFS (2006 vs 1993), but that's a purely naming thing. If you map ext2 and ext3 as NTFS versions[1], they have similar age. Moreover from a feature set perspective they're mostly equivalent. Both support journaling and various features like sparse files and resource forks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS#History

[Cumpiler69]

>Incredibly, we're still running NTFS and dealing with hacks on hacks on hacks.

It's the painful cost of maintaining backwards compatibility.

For context, I can still install and use Winamp 2.5 from 1999 on Windows 11. That's over 25 years of backwards compatibility. Not something most people need on a daily basis but still very cool.

[cosmotic]

Even more impressive: binary backward compatibility

[hulitu]

> Windows 10 reintroduced the start menu

A great feature. They dumbed it down though.

> Unlike in previous versions of Windows NT, the Win32 console windows can now be resized without any restrictions.

Truly a great achievement. It took MS 2 decades.

> It can be made to cover the full screen by pressing the Alt+↵ Enter combination on keyboard.

Maybe i'm too old, but this was always working.

And the cherry on the cake: > The modern Settings app from Windows 8 continues to evolve in Windows 10,

I mean, taking a man, cutting his limbs and stuffing his mouth, hardly can be called "evolution".

[cosmotic]

Reintroducing a previously removed feature, like the start menu, doesnt count as a new feature

[M95D]

>> Unlike in previous versions of Windows NT, the Win32 console windows can now be resized without any restrictions.

>Truly a great achievement. It took MS 2 decades.

It could be resized since Win2000 I think, but not by dragging the window edges, there's a Properties dialog box accessible from the top-left icon menu. You can set the window size there. There's also a Defaults dialog that sets the properties of all future console windows.

[jodrellblank]

Yes all those Wikipedia articles only mention three things. Three things is all Microsoft did in twenty years. And they are all bad therefore Microsoft bad.

[ryandvm]

Yeah, as far as my experience is concerned, all that most of those releases did was fragment configuration, introduce the concepts of ads in your operating system, and innovate some in-fucking-scrutable technology that require me to continuously uninstall Candy Crush.

[Cumpiler69]

HN will never let facts stand in the way of good FUD.

[ffsm8]

It's Snarkiness, not FUD. Neither fear, uncertainty nor doubt involved here.

And I think everyone knew from context that the claim was strongly tongue in cheek.

[xmodem]

I think it's more looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses, and forgetting that some of the things that have improved over the past decades wern't always that way.

I too have nostalgia for the days when my start menu didn't phone home to microsoft, and focused on making my computer useful rather than trying to sell me stuff. Would I give up things like hi-dpi support to get that back? Hell no.

[jodrellblank]

It is the rise of anti-intellectualism. It's the lack of good-faith. It's the promulgation of lies instead of truths, without even caring they are lies as long as they attack the right people. It's the idea "it takes a lot of work to make it look easy" being replaced with "if it looks easy you must not be working".

Windows 10 you can go through a couple of clicks of a Wizard and reboot, and Windows will install Hyper-V type 1 hypervisor, seamlessly virtualise the host OS and not even look or feel different. It will integrate with Windows patching, with PowerShell Hyper-V cmdlets, with subsystems like WSL2, with Volume Shadow Copy. It's localised into different languages, documented, and supported. It's got virtual switch and networking support layered into the Windows network subsystem. And you can go through a couple of clicks of a Wizard and reboot, and Windows will seamlessly un-virtualise the OS, and that's all just gone. On almost any random hardware it's not limited to Dell servers with qualified drivers, you can do it on a desktop or laptop with the right CPU instructions and Windows license level.

How much human programmer effort, planning, design and time does the parent poster think that took? And that happened alongside all the other changes to internals, process isolation, memory compression, UAC, networking stack, and along with merging tablet PC Windows and Xbox Windows and Windows Server into one unified codebase.

No all that goes into "I didn't use it, I didn't see it, I hate it, so it counts as doing nothing".

Repeat for all the features. "Oh they just added new hardware support" - Bluetooth support is more than a driver, it's a whole front end for discovery, sharing, there's APIs into the Metro apps and WinRT for apps to send files and data over Bluetooth, there's Bluetooth audio stack, Windows telephony subsystem integration for answering calls.

Multiple monitors? High DPI screens? Multiple desktops? Fractional display scaling?

You can run Windows 2000 in a browser here: https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=win2k.cfg&mem=192&gr...

It's pretty, it's classic, it's coherent, it's responsive. People would go ape-shit over this? Really?

(Is it a coincidence that Windows and Mac users look at it and think it's a nice retro legacy toy from 25 years ago, and Linux users look at it and think it's a futuristic utopia?)

[Cumpiler69]

>It's Snarkiness, not FUD.

Making confident but incorrect statements is not snarkyness. That's like me saying climate change isn't happening.

[Kenji]

A lack of improvements I could stomach. What bothers me are the regressions! It's getting worse with every update!

[fcq]

Not honoring previous settings, reverting back to whatever is more convenient for Microsoft or trying to push down of our throats Copilot on every single corner might be the most infuriating thing....