Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by whatevertrevor 295 days ago
My hot take is all OSes are kinda bad for daily driving.

Apple has no qualms breaking backwards compatibility for core functions like bluetooth connectivity in MacOS. Windows has backwards compatibility, but increasingly worsening UX, throwing ads and subscriptions in your face before you can even log in, and a bad security/process isolation model. Desktop Linux is a case of "how many hours before I find out a critical part of my workflow is unsupported/bad/broken/unconfigurable/pain-to-configure in this particular distro/desktop environment".
1 comments
jama211 295 days ago
I think they’re pretty amazing considering how hard a problem it is. Also, we forget how bad os’s used to be. They’re absolutely rock solid compared to the past.
link
genewitch 295 days ago
Aside: I bought my first battery backup because the only thing that ruined my uptime on Windows NT 4 was power outages. I would have kept on using NT 4 as my desktop OS, but MS wanted to sell more licenses so newer directX was unsupported on NT4. I moved to Windows 2000, then eventually to XP x64 Edition.

I installed and fixed a lot of 95, 98[se], ME, and XP OSes for other people, though. Thousands. I never bothered with any of those OSes on my own machines, though. The first "consumer" OS i used was win 7 Ultimate Edition (signed by Ballmer, natch). I use 11, now, and i'm fine with it. I think it's because i am "grandfathered" in to win11 without a microsoft login; i just mentioned last night that if i had to reinstall windows on this machine, i probably wouldn't, due to that requirement now.

Anyhow all this is to say, hogwash. Windows has been perfect in the past. Time marches on, fruit flies like a banana, and all that.

link
whatevertrevor 295 days ago
I'm not trying to diminish the complexity of a desktop OS of course, but sometimes it's hard not to feel the priorities are all over the place. Don't get me wrong, I'm not nostalgic about Windows XP, I actually remember how many freezes and crashes I used to have back then.

My frustration is more born out of the OS rough edges constantly getting in the way of tasks I actually want to focus on and accomplish, which doesn't play well with my ADHD.

link