Windows 95 was released 13 years prior to the article, roughly the same time span as between Windows 7 release and today. Windows 7 is still installed on a single-digit percentage of computers. It is interesting to see that the reasons outlined in the article could be used almost word-for-word by someone justifying their use of Windows 7.
One difference is the switch from 95/98 to 2000/XP meant all future games and apps would be incompatible with the older OS.
Aside from security patches, I see nothing that prevents 7 from being used today. Subsequent OSes added nothing useful that I noticed, and a lot of negatives.
Ironically, you may actually be more secure today running 95 than 7, since any modern exploit would be incompatible with it.
(obligatory security patches aside) Major OSs are arguably almost exactly the same as they were 20 years ago, with some random nonsense baked in.
Functionally speaking, there's no reason I couldn't be on OSX Tiger or Windows 2000. Linux did get better in terms of hardware support. Freaking NDISWrapper still gives me nightmares.
> Functionally speaking, there's no reason I couldn't be on OSX Tiger or Windows 2000.
On the Mac side I think I'd go up to at least 10.5/10.6 for its native virtual desktop implementation (Spaces) that's actually better than modern Spaces by way of being a 2D grid instead of a single row.
Plus better networking, pulseaudio and a bunch of user level services got a lot better. If anyone remembers what a nightmare HAL was or that there was a time before dbus being used universally
Something tells me that a kernel from 1995 would run on lower-end hardware than a 2023 kernel with "speed improvements" (and an unmentioned million added features)
Sure, it might. But that doesn't mean things like schedulers or I/O handling haven't improved and got better in terms of latency or at handling various workloads.
Other things that may not be noticeable to most people but matter to others may also have improved, such as audio latency; I don't know how e.g. Pipewire or PulseAudio compares to plain ALSA in terms of that, but at least plain ALSA apparently wasn't enough for audio work back then because there was Jack, and I'm also under the impression that latency and responsivity in general have improved a lot on the kernel level as well, and not just in terms of audio.
Open source graphics drivers have also improved a lot over the years. Perhaps the entire graphics stack has, or perhaps overhauls of the stack have facilitated some of the improvements in the drivers themselves, but I don't have enough expertise to judge that.
Improvements (or degradation) in performance are rarely something that happens evenly across the board.
Do you mean what counts as lower-end hardware in 2023?
In that case, I doubt it. You probably couldn't even use all your RAM. Linux back then also supported only a single processor (if it boots at all): symmetric multiprocessing support was added in 1996.
Not necessarily, at least on my M520-based X201 it got slower in media-related workloads with recent kernels (last 1.5 year or so). But both KiCad and FreeCad are faster than in Win7.
>Aside from security patches, I see nothing that prevents 7 from being used today. Subsequent OSes added nothing useful that I noticed, and a lot of negatives.
Steam is EOLing 7 because Chrome dropped support. No modern hardware manufacturer is going to continue churning out drivers with 7 support.
You're right that it works ok now, but that's rapidly changing.
As for whats better? Who knows. The new MS OSes are tremendously painful to use, personally speaking.
>Ironically, you may actually be more secure today running 95 than 7, since any modern exploit would be incompatible with it.
that's an interesting concept. Reminds me of how prepper types have recently been into MS-DOS machines -- but is 95 all that incompatible? I mean, I guess nothing trendy will run, but a good old-fashioned malicious assembly executable? do they no longer exist in the wild?
Agreed, lots of software is dropping 7 support, but that decision (as far as I can tell) is an arbitrary one, not a technical one. Is there a reason the latest chrome can't run on 7 if it didn't check for it?
> Is there a reason the latest chrome can't run on 7 if it didn't check for it?
The reason is precisely because it doesn't check for it.
That is: instead of checking for older Windows releases, and using fallback code paths for them, it simply assumes the presence of newer APIs (or that older buggy APIs now work properly). As time goes by, the cost of maintaining these fallback code paths only increases (and in some cases, having to stay compatible with them prevents important enhancements and cleanups), and since they're less tested (because they're only used when running on older operating system releases), they tend to break. As an example from an unrelated project, before they dropped Windows XP support, the fallback code for panic!() in Rust was broken when running on Windows XP (https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/34538).
I imagine over time there will be API differences but probably nothing insurmountable.
I suspect the real reason is Microsoft themselves dropping support for W7. Once that happens you can’t really claim Chrome is a “secure browser” because the underlying OS might be exploited and never patched.
The same decision has been made in Python, to use the newer APIs blindly, but fortunately there's a fork: https://github.com/adang1345/PythonWin7 Hope Chromium will get one soon.
If you are looking for a computer that can do quite a bit, but still is reasonably "maintainable" with a soldering iron and parts, you can do much worse than an MS-DOS machine.
And almost by definition everything that was available, was all self-contained, because it was all pre-Internet.
> If you are looking for a computer that can do quite a bit, but still is reasonably "maintainable" with a soldering iron and parts, you can do much worse than an MS-DOS machine.
Some big problems with that idea are: 1) the machine would probably use a lot of power (unless you got some weird unmaintainable MS-DOS palmtop), 2) if the SHTF where are you going to get parts (especially for an obsolete retrocomputer)?
Practically, it would make far more sense to use Rasberry Pi with a DOS emulator. Then put ten more on a shelf as as your "spare parts." But I'm very skeptical of the use of a computer at all in "prepper" scenarios, so it makes even more sense to just not bother.
Yeah, I love how Valve is dropping support for Windows 7 (despite selling and shipping tons of games that are literally designed for Windows 7 or earlier) strictly because Steam is a web page served by Chromium Embedded Framework. Even software vendors don't truly own their own software anymore, do they? :)
> Aside from security patches, I see nothing that prevents 7 from being used today
Security patches for Windows 7 are still released each month, you "just" have to download [1] them manually and convince Windows Update service to apply them [2].
I do think Windows 10 has better support for DPI scaling and PTYs than Windows 7, alongside a laundry list of antifeatures like pervasive telemetry, automatically installing drivers without user consent, Candy Crush in the start menu, clickbait in the taskbar, etc. I think it would be interesting to, instead of forcing apps (eg. anything based on Qt 6) to include fallback paths for missing DPI scaling, instead patch the system APIs to include stub implementations of DPI scaling which always return 96 DPI. (PTYs are a lot more technical and difficult to implement.) Unfortunately, https://github.com/vxiiduu/VxKex didn't work properly the last time I tried installing it on my nostalgia laptop, and I struggled to build and install it myself, and I'm not aware of other programs taking this approach (http://ximonite.com/win32/index.html is Vista 64-bit only).
> Ironically, you may actually be more secure today running 95 than 7, since any modern exploit would be incompatible with it.
I'd guess a lot of malware is opportunistic and not really designed to maximize compatibility, so I imagine you're right but I would be curious to hear from someone who actually studies malware.
In a similar (also ironic vein), the lack of modern HTTPS probably also makes Windows 95 "secure" in that it will be inconvenient to use a Windows 95 machine for anything that needs securing.
Edit: It does make me wonder how fast computer viruses and malware goes "extinct." Probably much faster than biological viruses (if that's the right term) since malware doesn't evolve like viruses do.
Windows NT has had async I/O and named pipes from the beginning. The API isn't identical to what you described but the concepts are similar enough to port higher level primitives.
Except that, when applied to Windows 7, they would actually make sense. There have been no objective improvements since Windows 7 that I can think of. The UI is changed all around for no reason, the system is less responsive, the hardware requirements are higher, and there's a whole lot more built-in malware, but that's it. There's a reason Microsoft had to deploy every dirty trick in the book to make people upgrade.
Windows 95, on the other hand, was barely usable. My installation would go down literally every day. Running DOS programs in emulation on a more recent version of Windows is a vastly better experience than running them on DOS ever was.
> There have been no objective improvements since Windows 7 that I can think of
I think this is pretty rude to the many people who have contributed to Windows in the years gone by. I won't argue that there hasn't been some crappy things added or on the advantages/disadvantages of later Windows versions but there have been plenty of things added since Windows 7. Some I can think off just off the top of my head
* Credential Guard - protection of secrets in the lsass process even from kernel access
* gMSA support - Windows 7 could only use standalone MSA accounts which weren't as useful
* Windows LAPS - now supports encryption and is builtin to the OS
* Schannel improvements - newer cipher suites and TLS protocols (cipher suites in Win 7 are right at the edge of what people might support these days)
* Windows Terminal - including ConPTY support in the underlying APIs
There's plenty more out there but these are pretty important features for me to have on Windows. Granted some only make sense in a more corporate/domain environment but not all of them.
Wanting Windows 7 back does not mean there should be no further development. By all means update the cipher suites.
I just want the window borders easy to grab on a high resolution and a sensitive mouse, and no latency when I activate a program in the task bar. I want no ads in the start menu and no telemetry. I want an operating system doing work in the background, and not an anonymous entity called "we":
Re-reading your list of improvements it doesn't impress me either for a decade of work. And I don't think people in this thread are particularly 'rude', i.e. they're not expressing what they really think about Windows 10+ ...
Yeah I literally care about zero of those. Plus there's no reason those features couldn't have been shipped as part of Windows 7, without bringing "telemetry" and Start Menu advertisements and coercive updates that wipe people's drives, etc.
The time between 1990 and 2005 saw much more dramatic changes in consumer operating systems than the time between 2005 and 2020 though. Especially Windows has been on a slow usability downward spiral since around Win2k.
Even Windows 2k felt a little frivolous compared to the more somber Windows NT. Windows NT 4 looked alright, but Windows NT 3.51 (or whatever) was rock solid and felt buttery smooth.
Yes, there was some tearing when you played several AVI videos at once on the desktop, but anything else would have been SGI level sourcery and black arts and not expected.
Windows NT 4 felt faster than Windows NT 3, but NT4 felt jittery. NT 3 never slowed down, it was like cream.
Once I saw Windows NT 3 on a trade-show on Alpha CPUs. That felt just like the future arrived, an evil smirking corporate future which laughed at whatever I knew about optimization, 68k assembler, blitter objects and sound chips.
The future was here, and it was here to tell me that none of that arcane juggling mattered anymore. The only thing that matters from now on is raw speed, of the core and the bus.
I still use windows 7 in a vm for a legacy program. Works really well. Is hugely faster than any modern windows. Even in the vm.
I have to run an old version of tortoisesvn. Needless to say the vm is only connected to a local network.
Precisely. Compare your comment with these excerpts from the article:
>Windows 95 is reasonably fast in performance, and is not compromised by the arguably frivolous animation and eye candy features in Windows 98 and newer versions.
>I prefer to have as much native compatibility as possible with DOS applications such as older games I own.
I think Windows 7 was the last version of the OS that wasn't phoning home every time you clicked a button in the Calculator app. That could be a reason.
Horrifying. That's exactly why simplewall [0] is among the first programs I install on Windows. Then I block stuff like compattelrunner.exe, devicecensus.exe, explorer.exe, the various Intel / Nvidia driver-related bullshit background processes the first time they attempt to connect to a remote server.
windows 7 was the peak of a desktop os that is fast, easy to use, out of the way. i miss it.
i really hate this modern trend of every single good desktop os telling you what to do, not allowing you to remove stuff, banners that ignore settings, ads, terrible uis, etc
Yeah, personally I'm just totally done with Windows as a whole. Every new OS install on any machine of mine is now Linux or BSD. I just got a new (used) computer from someone that came with fully licensed Win 10 and Office.. I don't care, wiped instantly, Linux running smoothly and with more freedom than I ever would have experienced with Winblows. Ironically, even the hardware in the machine works better (and has more actively-developed drivers) than what was available in Windows, because the manufacturer had basically abandoned development for that hardware.
My main development machine (of several here) is still on Win7, mainly due to the hassle of having to migrate 10 years of Win dev tools and legacy third party COM licenses to Win10. (the rest of my systems are on Win10)
That said I'm going to have to bite the Win10 bullet soon as several applications are phasing out Win7 support, Chrome being the main one right now. It's disappointing as having grown up with Windows since 3.1 I'm still partical to the compact classic theme (even despite the old grey colour). I still find the Win10 and up UI to be a waste of space.
I know numerous people who still run Win 7. I had one close friend who I helped get set up with a new computer when his current one got destroyed by a colossal power surge. The new machine came with Win 10, and he absolutely hates it and is asking me if I can get Win 7 running on it...
