With the risk of linking to 4chan; there is a /g/ guide to how to navigate Windows and it recommends exactly this.[0]
However: I do not publicly endorse software piracy, and so do not recommend using this guide; legitimate LTSC licenses are only possible to come by for Businesses with a minimum spend of 5 licenses.[1] :(
FYI, anyone can upload anything to archive.org. Downloading the ISO from archive.org doesn't means the ISO is free from malware so please exercise caution just as you do when downloading ISOs off a torrent site.
Exactly. They don’t make (as much) money off of individuals buying licenses, the real dough is in bulk business licensing. And businesses want to do that in part because of the unparalleled software accessibility. The more people that use Windows, pirated or not, the more demand there is for Windows software, which locks enterprise customers in.
True. Also, people using pirated Windows make anyway a critical mass where legit users can find someone to ask for help. Microsoft doesn't care about piracy as long as regular users know more people that would help them with Windows than for example with Linux. If tomorrow all users of pirated Windows OS and related software would magically migrate to Linux, the monetary loss for Microsoft would be zero, but more legit users might be incentivized to switch away from it because of the sudden raise in Linux knowledge around them. I'm sure Microsoft would be absolutely terrified by such scenario.
And then there's user profiling and advertising, which works also on pirated copies, but that's another story.
Since pretty much nobody here wants to link to it because blah blah blah. Here's the link for a nice clean edition of Windows 10 LTSC that you can even activate right through the same site. Amusing fearfulness in a "hacker" site.
Then sign up for the base level of a MSDN subscription. Get access to any flavor of Windows you want plus their development tools too: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/pricing-details/ Unless they've changed something, the OS license keys don't expire even if you let the subscription lapse. Yeah, it's for development use only but, as a home user, they're not going to audit you unless you do something really egregious.
For better or worse, Windows is a key part of my daily business and life in general, and I don't expect it to be free. I regularly use Windows applications that cost more than $1500 by themselves. If I wanted a free OS, there are other OSes for that, for which I would still have to pay with my time.
$1500 for a clean, advertising- and telemetry-free Windows LTSC license would be a bargain... if only they'd ask.
The $432/user/year Microsoft 365 E3 subscription[1] covers Windows Enterprise LTSC, has no minimum order quantity, and can be purchased online directly from Microsoft without a volume licensing agreement (by clicking "Try free for one month" on the linked page).
Source: my own "enterprise" has two users, a single Microsoft 365 E3 subscription, and no volume licensing agreement.
Interesting, that appears to be brand new (as of December, anyway), and they certainly aren't advertising it widely. Could be worthwhile if you don't mind subscribing to your OS and losing access if anything ever happens to the account.
I wonder if what it really means is that LTSC 11 is now enshittified.
FWIW, the 4chan stuff covers W10 LTSC. As far as I know there isn’t a W11 LTSC yet. Then again, if you’re reading an article about XP you probably don’t care.
LTSC cuts down on the user-hostility but the quality of the OS is still terrible - it doesn't fix features that have intentionally been broken/removed/replaced by a half-assed knockoff. You still have the terrible/broken start menu search, useless mobile-themed control panel (which often doesn't have what you want so you end up falling back to the real control panel anyway), etc.
I recently had the pleasure of migrating a legacy server 2008 app to a brand new server 2022 box.
One of the requirements is a local smtp server for sending mail so I looked up how to do this in windows.
To my shock and horror, smtp service has been deprecated since server 2012, you can still install it but it comes with an extremely old version of IIS as a dependency and it’s broken out of the box.
To get it working you have to dig into some xml files and add parameters.
I really wonder how anyone can take a server OS seriously that doesn’t have out of the box first class functionality for smtp, one of the most ubiquitous protocols on the internet.
why the hell do you think that Microsoft would want you to use your basic SMTP server when they want you to use an exchange server? Of course they deprecated that. If you’re using windows then use their ecosystem.
They shipped it marked as deprecated to support people already using it, but to discourage new use. You can't really complain after ignoring that warning.
I suppose you could've missed this if you moved directly from WS2008 to WS2022, but I don't know any OS that publishes "things we have removed or deprecated in the last three versions", it's usually just "what changed from the previous version to the current one".
As of 2020, chosen-prefix attacks against SHA-1 are practical.[6][8] As such, it is recommended to remove SHA-1 from products as soon as possible and instead use SHA-2 or SHA-3. Replacing SHA-1 is urgent where it is used for digital signatures.
Not to mention that everything that depends on an MS account (like the Store) is broken, and these days even adding a second keyboard layout post-installation requires "downloading features from the store".
I think the point is more that "OS Components" - updates, drivers, optional components-- are an entirely different universe than "third-party and purchasable content", which is what you'd expect the "store" to focus on.
They should not be using basic OS features as a wedge to make sure you open that precious Store icon and log in. Nobody wants that, and the only person who needs it is some mid-manager at Microsoft whose bonus is tied to store numbers.
I'm a hybrid person. I run Linux for my work and dev OS and Windows for gaming and day to day shenanigans. If you're just going to strip Windows down to this weird broken minimal thing tho why not just use Linux full time and get a PS5/Xbox for the AAA games you can't run under Linux.
I dont really get the point of the effort people go through trying to make Microsoft products something they're not.
Windows LTSC isn't broken, or minimal... it's LTS! It's stable and more likely to remain so.
> the point of the effort
Installing LTSC takes exactly as long as installing any other version of Windows 10. Although maybe there are slightly fewer nag screens, and post-install it's much, much easier to support as there are no unnecessary feature upgrades.
> I run Linux for my work
For what it's worth, the Linux:Windows install ratio in the home is something like 2:1, although if we start counting VMs then it's more like 5:1
> why not just use Linux full time and get a PS5/Xbox for the AAA games you can't run under Linux
A PC with Windows 10 LTSC beats PS5/Xbox in terms in game availability and backwards compatibility. It also unsurprisingly still beats Linux + Proton in terms of compability. It is still Windows after all. Console gaming is not comparable to PC gaming at this point.
Using LTSC over regular W10 affords you a more stable system since you forgo any feature updates from Microsoft (only security updates), a more lightweight and snappier system with less background services running at startup, and reduced (but still present) telemetry.
Also, I unironically like the Windows UX over the Linux compositors and countless Desktop Environments that endlessly run into compatability issues and weird bugs. W10 LTSC is comparatively far more stable.
Only where Linux beats modern Windows in gaming is when I wanna play some late 90s or early 00s games which don't work anymore on 10 or 11. For some reason they work flawlessly on Wine or PlayOnLinux
I paid $350 for my Xbox Series X. I then spent another $120 for 1.5 years of Game Pass Ultimate (there’s an arbitrage method to convert an existing Game Pass Core sub).
For a casual gamer, like myself, I don’t see a point in spending $1500+ on a PC for diminishing returns in performance and game compatibility. It’s also common for new AAA PC releases
to be much worse than their console counterparts.
I can cheaply buy used physical games and still have access the vast majority of the Xbox back catalog. 100% of the Xbox One library, 600+ Xbox 360 games, and 90+ Xbox games.
The official Xbox Live servers for these older games are still up and maintained. It’s seamless for my non-technical friends and I to get into a COD MW2 lobby. On PC there are only community servers, and the cheaters are way more common.
I’m not trying to discourage people from PC gaming (I use my Steamdeck quite a bit too).
I think the trade offs only make sense if you spend a significant amount of time gaming, or can get more value out of the PC by using it for productivity.
> I don’t see a point in spending $1500+ on a PC for diminishing returns in performance and game compatibility.
You can get a PC that can run modern games for far less than $1500; in fact, slapping a ~$200 GPU into a ~$200 office PC will get you 80% of the way there.
> It’s also common for new AAA PC releases to be much worse than their console counterparts.
The opposite is far more common from what I can tell (console versions are botched and have performance issues, f.e., Cyberpunk).
> I can cheaply buy used physical games and still have access the vast majority of the Xbox back catalog. 100% of the Xbox One library, 600+ Xbox 360 games, and 90+ Xbox games.
I can more cheaply buy digital games on Steam, have access to most of the once-Xbox-exclusive games that were inevitably ported to PC by Microsoft, and also play the thousands of PC-exclusive games. I also have access to emulators, and now, Sony is even porting their PlayStation games to PC. Also, Xbox Game Pass works on PC.
> The official Xbox Live servers for these older games are still up and maintained. It’s seamless for my non-technical friends and I to get into a COD MW2 lobby. On PC there are only community servers, and the cheaters are way more common.
I don't play Call of Duty so don't know much about that, but for most games, you will generally always have more server options and legacy game revival projects on PC.
I think the trade off makes sense if you like options. If you just want to play mainstream games like COD, consoles probably make more sense. Frankly, I'm happy that a game I bought on Steam in 2008 still works on my PC in 2024. I'm not happy that I can't play a PS3 game I bought in 2008 on my PS5.
The only way to get a W10 LTSC license for a single user is through illegitimate channels. If you look on Reddit, you can usually find out how to obtain it. The ISO itself can officially be downloaded from Microsoft servers.
When you’re able to get a decent first-pass response on the prompt “AI, make me a specialized film restoration application and make it F/OSS”, will that be enough to tip the scales?
If you're trying to suss-out if I'm some kind of Windows fanboy in disguise, then trust me when I say I'm not. I have one beefy Windows machine for this hobby. Everything else in the house is some flavor of BSD or GNU/Linux.
Now, if you're asking if I'll pursue competitors (AI written or not) offering the best-in-class tools for what I wish to accomplish, then of course I will, regardless of any potential ideological sacrifices I have to make to get it running.
I respect your cutting through to uncover the question behind the question.
There was a little bit of sussing you out as a Windows fanboy, but more I was projecting to understand the future power of AI for people like us who use the most effective tools even if they live on Windows.
I actually kind of doubt that companies will go through the back catalog of excellent tools and remake them (people are quite attached to quirks and there’s typically a small market) so is there a tipping point where we muddle through the inconvenience of “No, not quite like that AI, like this” to finally get the same functionality in a way where we are totally independent of Windows? Or will we possibly never reach that point and instead wait however long it takes for AI to handle all the functionality of all the effective tools? It’s a question in the back of my mind.
Windows 10 LTSC is still regular Windows and AFAIK all software, games included, work just fine on it. The MS Store is missing out of the box, but you can add it with 'wsreset -i' in Powershell.
Using LTSC arguably takes less effort than the "normal" versions, where you need to deal with all the bloat. In the end, though, they're not that different at all.
1) It’s neither broken nor weird. It’s just that same windows without preinstalled crapware, think XP times. I’m using it since 2018 and never met any version-related issue.
There are still many things that could only run on Windows. That people need to use for their job. Otherwise I can see a lot more people switching to Linux.
I haven't heard that, I'm just listing the software I would miss on Linux*
*I have been using Linux and Wine for over 10 years and while one can technically install whatever Windows software, even if it's on a Windows VM inside of Linux... the experience is lackluster.
This, plus - there use to be a program Microsoft had for PC manufacturers that certified the manufacturer (like Dell) hadn't install bloat on it either before selling it to you.
I can't recall the name of that Windows version, but it was hugely appealing for the technical minded while it lasted - because it was basically like getting LTSC from Dell/HP/Lenovo (without you having to do the install yourself).
I think you can remove most of the bloatware with autoattend.xml installation:
reg delete HKU\default\software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run /v OneDriveSetup /f
It's not as great as it used to be. Yes it doesn't randomly reboot for updates and it doesn't come with all the crap. But it still enforces the same telemetry choices (a lot or a bit less). It even tried to make me use a Microsoft account just like regular windows :(
It's alright but not amazing like the old LTSB was in the days of Windows 7.
This is great to know. I'm forced to do some development that's Windows specific but I just need core OS and none of the apps/bloat.
In some ways MS still impresses me (WSL, VSCode) but in so many other ways I'm in awe of how bad the Windows experience is. Case in point: try to do some sort of OS config change and get an opaque hex error code. That's it. Google it and pray.
it lacks a bunch of multimedia stuff. Works fine for a terminal or workstation with a simple handful of apps, but not much chop for the multimedia rich world we live in.
Yeah you can install the same Nvidia driver and it runs the same. It's particularly non-problematic if you stay on the latest LTSC, in which case you're only ever about 2-3 years out from bleeding edge anyways. Beyond that it's usually non-problematic with the caveat the features your OS supports may not remain aligned with the latest features the driver supports. Nothing that should impact AI acceleration (that I've noticed) but just something to keep in mind.
Whenever I set up a new computer for older family members, despite it being windows 11, I always install open shell[1] and retro bar[2]. Between the two, I've made the operating system look very close to Windows XP visually, and they always appreciate it.
My grandpa in particular is very technologically savvy but his real expertise stops around 1999. He uses windows 11 but detests it and frequently encounters issues that no one else on the internet have. One time while visiting, I set up windows 3.1 in a virtual box VM and he lit up like a candle. He was very excited about getting his old pascal programs running again.
I hate it when visual oriented products make it difficult or impossible to see a screenshot of how they look like. Both of those products' github pages don't have screenshot, the first does have a website but no screenshots or links to them there either.
Do you have to install a tool that modifies the internals of your OS in order to see how it could look like? Imagine if you had to set up a painting on your wall before you could even see what it's a painting of.
Open shell could definitely benefit from some screenshots.
For retrobar, at least, there is a screenshot on the first line of the readme (it really does just look like the windows XP, windows 98, etc. taskbar nothing special going on).
I haven’t gone looking yet but is there a tool to make sure you have all tracking, bing, IE, and anything else like that turned off, uninstalled, or disabled? I usually just go through it as I see things that annoy me but I’m probably missing some privacy and default overrides.
I'm still on Win10, but I use WindowBlinds to skin it to look like Win2K. Eventually, when I upgrade my CPU, I'm going to need Win11 to get the Intel Thread Director, so I know I'm going to need to either buy a new version of WindowBlinds and Start11. Would be nice to run a FOSS alternative.
I don't understand why people like XP so much. Windows 2000 was the ultimate OS: lean, fast, focused, and absolutely zero crapware installed. No stupid internet accounts needed to run your local OS and it did what it was supposed to do.
XP was likely the first memorable intro to windows for many developers in the home context. It was designed to be appealing to look at and a fresh coat of paint.
By comparison, you’d be hard pressed to find a non-enthusiast who really remembers the differences between 95/98/ME/2000 because they largely looked similar.
Unlike 2000, it was also aimed at home use. The prior home use system was ME which was also not very well received at the time. XP unified the business and home segments.
Add to that, the immense PR failure that was Vista, and a very long life for XP, it’s not surprising that it has the most fondness in people’s psyche.
> 95/98/ME/2000 because they largely looked similar.
That was a feature, for me it was 95, 98, NT4, Windows 2000 then it all started falling apart and Linux and MacOSX because the more attractive alternatives.
For those who don't remember, we used to call the Windows XP UI the "Fisher Price" UI. It was the first dumbed down Windows UI.
I'd agree, the nostalgia for Windows XP is misplaced, when the version before that was the more attractive option. Overall the quality of Windows 2000 just felt like it was way above Windows XP. All the Windows UI inconsistencies started showing up in Windows XP.
In the "Windows XP 2024" video I think it's interesting that that the two worst features, the Windows XP UI and the online account activation, have both been preserved.
> Windows 2000 wasn’t the version before Windows XP for most people though.
That's probably a fair observation. Windows 2000 came out before Windows ME, so it you had just a slight interest in computers, you'd try it out and after that Windows 98 and even ME felt like a downgrade, so you'd stay on 2000. I remember getting an beta release of Windows 2000 in late December 1999 and that was basically it, every other version of Windows since then, even XP was a downgrade.
It’s not even the relative timing: 2000 couldn’t run many games because (being a descendant of the NT line) it didn’t support all the 9x graphics APIs. Very few home users had it. I tried running games on it back in the day, and some didn’t work.
XP was the first Windows that had BOTH support for all “home windows” APIs AND the multi-user NT kernel (windows 95/98/me didn’t truly have a concept of user ownership of files outside the context of network file shares, for example)
While I've heard that Win2k didn't run games well back in the day I never actually had any problems. DirectX worked fine. Perhaps the caveat pertained to DOS games where NTVDM is lacking compared to running more or less directly in DOS.
> 2000 couldn’t run many games because (being a descendant of the NT line) it didn’t support all the 9x graphics APIs.
I don't dispute that Microsoft used DirectX support to push XP sales, but I played at least Quake and Half-Life on NT4, and Unreal Tournament and StarCraft on W2k.
Yeah though that was also the period before wide spread internet use, and when operating systems cost significant money to upgrade to . 2000 was $319, or over $500 today. That’s more than the cost of a full console or even some PCs.
So you’d REALLY have to be into the OS scene to look it up, or care enough to buy it.
Sneakernet and your local friendly CD burner owner with a huge catalog were readily available here in NL. Internet made it a little easier, sure, but not much. At least for software.
No, for music Napster was really what showed what the internet could offer but CD burners couldn't.
My point around internet availability wasn’t around how you could download stuff but how you could find information.
At the time, the way operating systems were advertised was in trade/enthusiast publications or the occasional tech article within a news publication or campaigns within stores. There weren’t prompts in the OS to upgrade, and most people didn’t think about their OS beyond what came factory installed. Each of the above required people to go out of their way to even know new OS versions were out unless they were enthusiasts.
I was 15 doing local tech support and network admin for small businesses. Windows ME was a pile of memory leaking trash, constant BSODs, reboots multiple times a day, it was an unbelievably hostile OS with piss poor performance. 98se was so much better than ME it's a joke. 2000 was what I ran personally until XP stopped sucking (which if memory serves was with service pack 2.)
Being from that era of IE 5.5 and 6 I still don't understand how a person could ever trust Micro$oft, or use their tooling with anything but reluctance, their corporate culture hasn't changed a bit as far as I can tell. The poster child for mundane corporatist evil.
They’ve invested a lot in making people forget and improve their image. GitHub, VSCode, WSL, typescript… I feel old remembering a time when Microsoft was openly evil (“Linux is cancer”) and I’m not even 40. I think the new generation only knows the “nice” MS, Xbox, etc. Not the underhanded greedy corp even though they’re still trying to shove a subpar browser and OS down our throats. It’s just less obvious nowadays.
Weird, I still remember the much older Windows 3.11 for Workgroups already having some networking support (using ethernet 10 Mbps or so I guess). Or... was "for workgroups" a misnomer?
> we used to call the Windows XP UI the "Fisher Price" UI.
I've always called it Windows Duplo. :)
> It was the first dumbed down Windows UI.
Only if you ignore Windows ME.
UI/UX-wise, Windows 2000 was the best version of Windows to date. The UI was largely unified, W2k widgets were an incremental improvement in look AND FUNCTIONALITY over NT. Keyboard navigation was lightyears ahead of any version prior or post.
2000 isn't remembered as much as XP because it was never marketed to end-users but as an upgrade to NT4 and a workstation os. Home computers at the time came pre-installed with Windows Me, that was barely usable. When XP came out, it was so much better than Me that people loved it fondly, but in fact it was mostly Windows 2000 with a shitty Telletubbies theme.
1. Windows 2000 was visually like the 9x series. XP introduced a whole new and very memorable look, subjective opinions aside. Even if you used Windows 2000 in your workplace, it was visually non-distinct from the Windows 98 you’d have at home.
2. Windows 2000 was for business use. Windows XP unified the segments.
That's true, windows ME was as terrible as Windows 2000 was great.
The story goes that they wanted to launch with Windows 2000 Home just like they did with XP, but ran into some issues and decided at the last minute to ship a pimped up version of Windows 98. That was absolutely terrible.
> and decided at the last minute to ship a pimped up version of Windows 98
That's more or less false. Releasing 2000 for home usage was planned, but it was realized early on that there's not enough time for that. It's not possible to develop on a short notice, ME contained some notable improvements (mostly ports from 2000).
> XP was likely the first memorable intro to windows for many developers in the home context.
(emphasis mine)
IIRC, there were two separate lineages of Windows. There was the "home" lineage which went 3.1, 95, 98, ME, XP, and the "business" lineage which went NT 3.1, NT 4, 2000, XP; for those using Windows in the home context, it's likely they jumped from 9x to XP (possibly with a stop at ME in between, but IIRC Windows ME was somewhat disliked).
Exactly. You posted coincidentally just as I edited my post to add that distinction as well, because I saw other comments missing that path distinction. (Just in case anyone later thinks you’re just reiterating my comment)
Most people under 45 wouldn’t have experienced 2000 for that reason.
Because most people who used windows prior to windows XP used one of the 9x line (95, 98, 98se, Me), which were shal we say sub par to say the least, windows 2000 was part of the NT line which the masses didn't really get to use until XP.
then after XP came Vista which suffered from security pop up fatigue. and bad drivers. 7 was stable but microsoft had learned their lesson had tried to cut its life cycle short (not releasing service packs pushing os updates etc...) rather than let it it go one for decades like XP costing them licenses revenue. Ever since we have instead we have starting with widows 8 been given an unending pile of shitty os's that get worse with each forced update.
I loved w2k, it was the last good windows imho and it’s around the time when I dropped windows for more open alternatives.
AFAIK, win2000 didn’t do games very well. I think I remember it not supporting d3d or OpenGL, or something along these lines. It’s problematic when most of the value in windows for home users is the gaming library.
XP was 2001, aka 2000 with a few extra features. You could turn off the Fischer-price and turn on extensions with a few clicks. SP3 brought a decent, necessary firewall. Firefox supported it for years afterward.
Windows Server 2003 was a great desktop OS. I ran it as a daily driver on a laptop many years ago. You got all the XP kernel improvements but it was more minimalist than XP.
Ya know, I've never had a Linux box that had any of the problems listed about modern windows. Also all the advantages listed about Windows XP are also present in Linux... But I've never paid Microsoft for an OS that showed me ads against my will in my Start Menu, so maybe I just don't know what I'm missing.
> "all the advantages listed about Windows XP are also present in Linux"
You mean, are present in Linux TODAY.
Installing Linux 22-years ago, when XP shipped, was hugely painful and only the most technical would attempt it.
Windows XP marked the begin of an era when corporations replaced analog processes with digital.
It sounds so foreign now, but in the late 90s - it was still common for corporations to send printed memo to employees as the predominate form of internal communication.
So there's a lot of nostalgia for XP, because it was the first OS used by the masses.
> Installing Linux 22-years ago, when XP shipped, was hugely painful
There was a weird sweet spot for Linux around 2000-2004, very short, where most things just worked. Sure, there was very little gaming, but you could get by just fine and installations was reasonably simple, Redhat, Slackware, Debian, SuSE, Mandrake, Caldera, they all just worked. Sure you had to be a little selective regarding hardware, but it wasn't a massive issue.
Interaction with Windows mostly worked without issues, but as Windows XP became more dominate, and especially as Internet Explorer and newer versions of Office took over, things got worse. Still for a few short years, those of us who got into Linux in that tiny windows of time, didn't actually struggle as much as people think. We could do online shopping, word processing, online banking and a little casual gaming. Come 2005 and that was all gone.
> Installing Linux 22-years ago, when XP shipped, was hugely painful and only the most technical would attempt it.
That’s still the case with Linux now. I did two recent Linux installs (different distros) and it’s still a nightmare of finding drivers, scripts, etc. to get everything setup. On one of my devices it still doesn’t recognise all the USB ports attached to the motherboard (but does recognise some), I just got tired of trying to discover why. It’s still often the case that BIOS changes are required, etc.
Linux is not accessible to the average non-technical user at all. The moment one thing goes wrong, they’re done.
Windows is going in the wrong direction for sure, but still when it comes to everything “just working”, it’s hard to beat.
I've tried installing Windows 10 to my old ("old" as in Ryzen 2000 series) HP laptop so that I can give it out, and it took forever to install all the updates. Windows Update sucks even when you give permission to do whatever it wants; super slow, doesn't know what to prioritise, and unable to just jump to the newest release. And even then it missed some drivers, especially the fingerprint sensor, so to this day Windows Hello still doesn't work. Remember this device originally shipped with Windows.
I can install Fedora Linux on my Surface Go with my eyes closed, barely touching the keyboard. Everything that is supported works out of the box and it doesn't take a day and a half.
That's not exactly fair. hp flops on its face with the software realm (drivers, firmware) and deploying windows to any is a nightmare of missing drivers.
The surface is more constrained to specific hardware so I think any operating system would be easy to kick to it much like a Thinkpad.
No, it's not. There's a known bug where the Surface will not turn on/off the IR camera during the login process, resulting in either a "can't turn on camera, please enter PIN" message or worse: leaving the IR camera on after login significantly reducing its lifetime (it gets hot to the touch) and doing god knows what to your eyes.
Of course, everyone is quick to blame the manufacturer when it comes to drivers, even when the MS supposedly vets these drivers and even when the manufacturer is MS itself.
You can also find hardware on which Linux will install just fine. We should blame to OS for driver issues or not, either way, but we can’t have a double standard.
Well, if you're using an old Windows 10 installer (my assumption), yeah, that's just how it goes. Like, if you're starting at Win 10 1909, that's like upgrading Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04. Start with an updated installer and you'll have a better time.
They would also be overwhelmed by the average Windows install if they had to perform it themselves. However, these days you can get laptops with Linux preinstalled, even from mainstream OEMs like Dell or HP.
I dunno, installing Windows from scratch is still pretty slick. You don't normally end up having to do extra work to get basic things like Bluetooth working, or whatever.
Pre-installed Linux laptops is great - and is clearly the way to get someone less techy on-the-way. But, for most, if they're sick of Windows and they want to move (dual boot their machine) then god help them.
Linux is much better than it was, for sure, and I think the community is much better at answering questions than it was - it's less patronising than it used to be (like this guy [1]) - but I when I think of most people who I know who use Windows (non techy users), and whether I think they could survive in a Linux environment - I have to say no, still, which is a shame.
> I dunno, installing Windows from scratch is still pretty slick. You don't normally end up having to do extra work to get basic things like Bluetooth working, or whatever.
I have to wonder what hardware and distros you're using, as the most dominant vendors (Intel, Realtek) work out of the box on the major distros. Or are you recalling experiences from 15 years ago with ndiswrapper and older Broadcom devices still?
The difficulty of dual boot is to do with something being already there. Already Ubuntu etc. have installers that will do repartitioning for you intelligently. Windows by comparison will just pave over whats there if you let it do the happy path and if you want to set up dual boot, requires as much knowledge about resizing partitions.
> installing Windows from scratch is still pretty slick
Non-technical folks might be able to click their way through the installation but in the process every anti-privacy setting you can think of will be turned on by default because you have to really go out of your way and click dark-pattern-enabled links to opt into a few settings that help protect your limited privacy when using Windows.
In some cases you have to either disconnect your internet or purposely fail logging into a MS cloud account multiple times before you're allowed to login to your personal computer with a local account.
> installing Windows from scratch is still pretty slick. You don't normally end up having to do extra work to get basic things like Bluetooth working, or whatever.
Did it... get a lot better recently? Last time I installed Windows on a laptop I had "fun" getting it the drivers so it could use the Wi-Fi card so it could pull the rest of itself down.
I guess I’ve always been lucky with Windows, it has always resolved all my devices automagically. The only thing I need to manually install is the drivers for my UAD Octo card.
The last but one Linux Mint install I did didn’t even recognise the mouse and keyboard I had plugged in, haha! (The installer recognised them, but not the OS post install!) It turned out I needed a slightly different flavour of mint, but yeah, the average user might even throw in the towel at that point.
"My OS makes it easier to do X" is generally an illusion because you learned what arcane nonsense your OS requires in order to do that ten years ago and now it takes two seconds, but the other OS requires you to learn some different arcane nonsense which would also take two seconds if you already knew what it was.
> "Seems like an excuse to hide what you did and claim your problems to be universal"
He literally tried to imply incompetence. That is a personal attack. When the entire point of this thread was to empathise with non-techy people installing and setting up a Linux distro. It's not about me, I'm able to resolve issues that come up with the myriad operating-systems I've used in the four decades of using and programming computers.
Instead this commenter got into one of those "my operating system is better than your operating system" childish positions and trying to question my competence rather than deal with the point.
Really, I was trying to state that Linux (all distros) still have some ways to go before the average human would be comfortable with it - especially once you fall off the happy path. The things that make Linux strong for the power user (myriad choices for everything, open-source, CLI driven) are not at all what normal humans want - they don't want a million options, they don't want to run scripts, they couldn't care less about the open-sourciness (other than it's free), etc. The motivations and incentives are different.
And for sure, Windows and OSX have their own problems, but mostly you stay on the happy path because they always have the drivers made for them, which means it's rare that a device or something doesn't work. And if something does go wrong then there's usually either the vendor (who sold them the device) or a single place on the internet to go to find out how to resolve.
This whole thread from my original comment down shows exactly how far away from the average user the Linux community still is. The default answer when someone has problems is "well, stop being so shit, be better - it's your fault". Or, "I've never had that issue, you're an idiot".
Of course those are sweeping generalisations, and I've made the point elsewhere that the Linux community has made great strides - but if we're ever going to have the year of the Linux desktop (I mean real Windows-denting momentum, not just the odd Linux laptop) then more needs to be done, and some of the shitty attitudes need to change.
Well, I was talking about last two comments of yours. You did
have a point ellsewhere.
> Really, I was trying to state that Linux (all distros) still have some ways to go before the average human would be comfortable with it - especially once you fall off the happy path.
This is just not true. Average humans buy preinstalled. If it's preinstalled, it doesn't matter whether it's Windows or Linux.
Ubuntu mostly, and I have plenty of experience with Linux distros since Slackware 2.0 in 1995, so no need for the typical answer that I am holding it wrong, once upon a time I jumped across distros on regular basis.
If you have hardware that has linux support then everything should work at install time or after install. Ubuntu also has a dedicated program to show you the available proprietary drivers you might want to use.
Unless you your hardware is so new that it requires the very latest kernel then you should be golden.
The thing is, usually you just have hardware (a given) and want to (re) install an os on it that works. Each time i installed a Linux on a machine there were some issues like for example hibernate not working, my usb drive not working when connecting to a hub, the boot manager not showing, the laptop keyboard not working, etc.
> If you have hardware that has linux support then everything should work at install time or after install.
So, if you buy something that works, it will work, and if you buy something that doesn't work, it won't. Wow, what insight. It really does boggle the mind why people don't just buy things that work. Am I right!?!
If you have hardware that is not supported no amount of complaining or forum searching will help.
So either you just like to complain about unfixable things or you are unaware that once you discover your hardware is not supported you should stop wasting time on forums and go back to your working Windows environment
The issue is that discovering whether or not it is incompatible is unclear.
It's never "this doesn't work on Linux".
It's "This SMBus driver is only supported by version 10.1 of arcane library. It will work but first you have to swap out this shim for another one and configure dpkg to never upgrade it. However, this requires that your kernel needs to be compiled with flags foo, bar, and baz. Oh btw, your CPU doesn't support those instructions lol."
I'm being hyperbolic, but it's usually that after some banging your head against the wall you find that, yeah, it could work, but I'm not compiling custom shit to get my function key light working.
Oh, there is “wrong” windows: aside from the fact you usually dont install it yourself so your edition is chosen.
For example Server versions are rarely what you want, or business versions, or IoT versions
“Why do I require an online account” (pro? business? enterprise?), “why does this game not work (windows media player being unavailable means certain videos in game engines like Unreal can never play ;))”, “why cant I keep using Windows 7? the new one has a weird taskbar and hid stuff again!”
I get that theres fewer choice and its made for you, but if it hadn't been made for you its actually much more difficult to get it right as a non-tech
Yeah, that's not what I'm talking about and I don't share the same experience. I have 20+ years of experience with Windows and Linux.
I've installed Windows 7-11 on entire fleets. I've run multiple corporate-wide Windows upgrade projects for multiple companies and environments. I've built gold images and templates for Citrix and VDI environments. There really is no hardware configuration needed at all.
I've never had any problems running games or any software in Windows due to drivers or configuration issues. In fact, I run all my creative software specifically in Windows because there's nothing to think about at all.
The only time I've had any kind of hardware or driver issues is with external hardware like testing apparatuses or machinery. I haven't had to mess with drivers in Windows in probably 10 years or more.
I have also run windows and linux for a long time, server contexts and otherwise (hence why I am aware of that Windows Media bug btw).
My personal experience with Linux has been plug and play ever since NDISwrapper wasnt needed for wifi anymore, and aside from some extra repos needed in Fedora for Nvidia.
Windows on the other hand had no official public ISO image and we resorted to sharing it around inside Ubisoft because it was annoying to get a new copy of, we had a blessed version which had the issue of not coming with directX, so we had to copy it from someones desktop windows to get our gameservers running.
Glad you had a good experience, but mine was better in a professional setting with Linux than windows: and I knew more about what I was doing than most.
However: we are mostly talking about desktops, and i was mainly pointing out that most windows users don't have to go to MSDN and get an ISO for their machine or drivers: so safe choices are already made. That doesn’t mean it would be easier given the same non-installed circumstances for the common user.
What time period? That must be pre Windows 7? Or do you mean like a pre activated or volume licensed version? I'm not sure what you mean by official ISO. As far as I'm aware, since 7, you could just download it. Licensing was obviously as separate issue though.
Was running 2012R2 on the server, there were copies available online of the evaluation edition if you submitted your details, but they wouldn't join a KMS server unless you manually intervened to change the “edition” from evaluation - Joining the domain didnt fix it.
I mean, 2014 was 10 years ago and 2012 just EoL'd. I agree that era wasn't as easy. But Windows 10 (other than Home) in its maturity, is and has been pretty rock solid, imo. Windows Server is a different topic entirely.
Yeah, you are right, but I don't get to deploy many thousands of physical windows machines often because I make sane choices.
Has there been significant progress in this area in a decade? last time I installed a windows (11 pro) it was significantly worse than Ubuntu. Both in downloading it and installing it.
I mean, when your users need to use software that's only available on Windows and consume the entire M365 stack, Windows is the only sane choice.
That being said, those environments are generally going to EoL Windows 10 as there's just no reason to move to 11 if things are working. I have 0 experience with Windows 11 yet for that reason.
As far as a consumer goes, if you're starting from a Windows 10 machine, creating the installation media is as easy as downloading the Windows installation media creation tool, point it to your USB, and off you go. Licensing is generally tied to the hardware at this point, so if your device is newish, there's no activation or license keys.
Install takes maybe 15 minutes and is hands off other than username, time zone, pick your wifi SSID etc. Unless you have special hardware, you shouldn't need to install any other drivers. It just goes.
Sure, Windows has no issues. It's why no one actually works supporting Windows.
I seriously doubt you've ever even seen a large scale Windows deployment and spend all your time on your "creative software". Is that Powerpoint by any chance?
I've worked with and managed global Windows deployments. I've built domains and AD environments from the ground up and have worked on workgroup->domain migrations and everything that goes along with that. But I'm not here to measure dicks.
Creative software being Audacity, Fruityloops, ProTools, Logic, Reaper, various tracker, etc for sound engineering/recording and the Adobe suite for photography and graphics. Ie, my hobbies. I've never had to fiddle with drivers with any of these, just software settings, which is to be expected.
My point is that installing Windows applications, even at scale, generally does not require poking or reconfiguring the OS itself.
> But getting everything right is still an hour or better process, post-install, in 2024…
… for someone who knows what they’re doing. Anyone non-technical would be terrified of the steps needed to get a Linux install into a good state for their machine. It could easily take them days to get a setup that's sound (depending on the level of driver support for their hardware).
To be fair, one of the installs I did was Raspberry PI OS (funnily enough for a Raspberry PI!) - and that was the smoothest Linux install I’ve ever had.
So having a distro tuned to the hardware really does go a long way!
> But getting everything right is still an hour or better process, post-install, in 2024.
If you mean Linux, "a week or better" is a more realistic, yet still optimistic estimate to get "everything right". Until the next odd regressions come in during a follow-up update.
Whenever I read stuff like this it always sounds made up. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve installed Linux and I’ve literally never had these issues.
> still a nightmare of finding drivers, scripts, etc. to get everything setup
It reads like the prototypical "I tried Linux a decade ago and keep repeating the experience as if it represents reality today". Hell, 10 years ago was when I met my ex and I can't remember any time during that period that I actually "struggled" with anything other than Nvidia+Wayland before I stopped giving Nvidia money.
"finding drivers"? really? For what? I can't remember the last time I've even heard of anyone mentioning compiling a module manually. Running random scripts from the Internet haphazardly trying to "fix" stuff? Yeah, okay, I'm getting a mental image.
I can't name the last thing or feature that required any amount of fiddling to get working in Linux. Premium webcams, audio equipment, Chromebooks, Lenovos, ASUS gaming laptops, brand new laptops, 3 USB-C hubs, complicated docked, multi-monitor scenarios. It all has just worked out of box with Linux and NixOS, and requires less maintenance and hand holding than my single Windows dual-boot install.
But the next time you decide to be a patronising asshole to someone you’ve never met and who very likely has significantly more experience than you, maybe remember this meme [1]
Because it describes you completely.
The point, in case you completely missed it, is to empathise with the average user. Not me, I’m able to resolve the issues that arise in Linux land (or know when to stop), the average user can very quickly drown.
> But the next time you decide to be a patronising asshole to someone you’ve never met and who very likely has significantly more experience than you, maybe remember this meme
Well, I touched a nerve, but apparently not the nerve that would've caused you to substantiate your point with any specifics or details whatsoever, thereby re-confirming my suspicion.
> ho very likely has significantly more experience than you
Shrug, I can give detailed examples of things I have experience with; especially things that I'm publicly saying don't work well. Furthermore, you have zero basis on which to make this statement, other than emotions.
> The point, in case you completely missed it, is to empathise with the average user. Not me, I’m able to resolve the issues that arise in Linux land (or know when to stop), the average user can very quickly drown.
And you still haven't given a single freaking example. As I stated, I worked with extensive piles of commodity consumer hardware and have NEVER EVER HAD to compile a kernel module in the past 10-15 years. I haven't had to do anything that couldn't just be done in Plasma/Gnome. Go on, give an example. Any example.
> The only "just working" OSes are Android and iOS/iPadOS.
Ha! Try installing a newer version of one of these than the last one the device OEM supported.
"Doing this is so difficult that you should abandon all hope and give up immediately" is the same as "just works" in the same way that a car crusher is a good way to secure a computer.
It may have been a pain 2001, but it certainly was much better than Windows XP to install around 2006 or 2007, I remember.
I had an IBM R51 (many years old at that point), which used to take 2 hours+ to install Windows XP, and it was always very slow to use. I installed a bunch of different Linuxes over the years and it extended the life of the laptop significantly. Most Linux installers already had a good GUI installer on the Live CD at that point.
> Most Linux installers already had a good GUI installer on the Live CD at that point.
Yes, I think between the end of Windows XP and start of Windows Vista era is interesting because it is by that era when Linux installers got really good (they're full graphical and would be really easy, most times just pressing Next->Next->Finish) while Windows still had its ugly TUI installer.
Also, Windows at that time didn't ship with as many drivers as today, and also we didn't have as fast internet and Windows Update still did a poor job for installing drivers from random devices, so most of time after installing Windows you had a pretty poor installation with broken internet/audio/graphics and also possibly weirdly slow (because missing chipset drivers would make the system slow depending on the hardware). While Linux if you had reasonably supported hardware it would just work.
Not that this really matters. Installation of a new OS is something that was and still is mostly done by knowledge people, and generally those people can install either Windows or Linux regardless.
Hmm. XP was just one of many NT releases. The first to be marketed into the retail PC segment. Otherwise not really any more or less important than the others. It didn't mean anything as far as the broad landscape of corporate workflow.
I'm coming off of an entire weekend spent trying to get acceptable latency for audio recording in Linux. Just a midi controller to play a simple 3x oscillator VST with better than 250ms latency was my test case.
I tried different versions of Ubuntu, Debian, different kernels, different window managers, different graphics drivers, stripping things out of the system etc.
After going down the rabbit hole, I finally ripped out pulseaudio and replaced with ALSA.
In Windows or MacOS I would have been up and running immediately.
Now I'm completely burnt out and the creative urge is long gone.
Linux is my daily driver and I love it, but my god, some things are still way more fucking difficult than they need to be.
It reminds me of screwing around 20 years ago with wifi ndiswrapper stuff or multimonitor xrandr incantations.
With both OS you eventually have problems and if you are willing to solve them you can put a lot of time and effort into doing so. The only difference is the openness of the system. With Linux, you can easily go much deeper (for many reasons: community, available source code, multiple implementations for different system components, custom kernels). But don't get me wrong: More options aren't necessarily better, because it can take a lot longer until you run out of options.
> In Windows or MacOS I would have been up and running immediately.
Over the years, I have thought so too sometimes, but every time that I tried, I had to tinker with Windows too (not necessarily to solve the same issue, but then something else)...
Yeah I definitely hear you. For me, the tinkering was just in application settings, never the actual Windows OS settings or configuration. Out of the box, worked good enough. After getting into a full project and trying to monitor and record multi channels, etc, then yeah, there is some deep diving to be done.
Look the Audio stack on linux is broken but, and I am an audio engineer by study and trade, windows has it's own collection of hell when it comes to audio.
"Just use asio"? Had a borked driver cause blue screens on bootup for a piece of hardware, talking 5 digit price tag hardware... Same driver randomly doesn't present an Asio device.
Want to stick to "windows default audio engines" well, wasapi is what you should use now right? KS has the best latency ( wasapi should be calling that under the hood ), how about the other 3 options?
When it "just works" it's great. When it doesn't you cannot "dig in and find you need to go directly to ALSA(the KS alternative for linux)" because the driver you have loaded may not even present a KS interface, if your DAW even allows you to use something which isn't ASIO...
I have my faie share of pain with audio on windows, I wouldn't trade that pain for audio on linux granted but honestly, never had a single issue on macOS...
You had audio latency issues and instead of googling "Linux audio latency", you spent several hours installing distributions, kernels, graphics drivers (?), and UIs (??). You could have avoided this by doing what any windows user would have done in your situation.
>This article describes how to configure your system for recording, mixing and playing back audio as well as using it to synthesize and generate sounds. Those activities are subsumed under the term professional audio (pro audio) and typically require low latency performance.
I then I noticed screen tearing in my browser (fresh install of Ubuntu 22.04).
Oh ok, well maybe I've got the wrong drivers and it's eating CPU.
Run all the tests to ensure I have the right Nvidia drivers. All checks out.
Then I find something about hybrid graphics mode. Sure enough, I needed to set my graphics to discreet mode in the BIOS. Screen tearing is now gone.
Well now that I'm on it, why don't I move to LXDE from Gnome? Can't hurt right?
No dice.
I look up my laptop. Find that only 20.04 is "officially" supported by Lenovo. Ok, well I need to install that now to rule that out.
While I'm waiting for that to install, I stumble upon real time kernels, apparently popular for audio stuff.
Try that, marginally better but latency is now unstable. Switch kernels again.
Now I dig into Reaper settings. There are tons of things that can improve latency (that I'm also familiar with). Bitrates, buffers, sample rates, etc.
This is all to say I didn't think I'd have to change whatever the hell pulseaudio is to ALSA. Why should I have to do anything? I don't in Windows.
This whole thing was a project to get myself off of Windows and my point is it shouldn't be this hard. I've used various DAWs in Windows over the last 20 years and it was never difficult.
If you're sticking with linux for audio, go ahead and crib a little from AVLinux[1] or UbuntuStudio[2]. I feel like with all the modern "conveniences", things that were simpler two decades ago have gotten a lot harder!
I did Ubuntu Studio in the beginning and had the same problem with JACK not working so bailed on it as I'm not familiar and didn't want all the bloat. That's where I got the idea to try a different kernel.
> trying to get acceptable latency for audio recording
> In Windows or MacOS I would have been up and running immediately.
I watched a couple of videos yesterday by musicians using Ableton on their new Apple M3 Max laptops with latest MacOS, talking about how it was dropping audio frames audibly during live performances
I don't think it's safe to assume MacOS would reliably solve your audio latency problem. You may have to experiment.
For a single basic VST? Yes it would. I'm not talking about full projects. I'm familiar with the things you need to tweak to get optimum performance, but Windows and MacOS can handle 1 instrument out of the box. Almost 500ms latency in 2024 without poking around is absurd.
I only ask because I too had audio issues with Ubuntu LTS and Debian (both stable and unstable in hopes to get newer packages) in the past. I never got past the problems I had so I reverted back to Windows but if I go down that rabbit hole again I'd likely try Arch just to see what happens.
This is whats stupid about linux. Every time someone raises a specific issue , someone invariably suggests X or Y distro, which may fix that one thing, but break other 5. It seems I'd need to n install 5 different distros in my Dell Latitude to have Bluetooth, Sleep, Webcam, hibernation and fingerprint all working correctly. And somehow use one or the other depending of what breakage can I stand at the time.
I did years ago over a weekend and had a laptop running it for a while. Something went wrong and I ended up breaking it. Just way more familiar with Debian and friends.
In that vein, I ended up looking into Linux from scratch this weekend. I'd love to have a laptop that runs reaper and that's it.
Someday, but for now, a minimal Ubuntu install is doing the trick for what I need.
I'd recommend jack audio connection kit if that's your use case. You can generally get the best latency performance that your card has to offer, and the jack connection graph is superlative, in my opinion.
This is mostly a non-issue now - I'm playing Baldur's Gate 3, Dota 2, Warcraft III and everything else on Ubuntu 22.04 now thanks to Steam and Proton. Performance is awesome.
I've been running Linux on a workstation for a year and NVIDIA drivers kill it every other update. I'm seriously considering moving it to the server room and getting something else for my desktop.
So ... all the windows games now run on Linux? That would be news to me. And I was just recently messing with drivers, kernels etc to get a working result, but in the end I still could not play the (officially supported) game on Linux that I wanted (opposed to just works on windows), so good for you that your problems went away, but please note, that other people might have had other experiences.
Yes and this is awesome, but the comment I replied to, seemed to imply that all the problems went away since years and this is just wrong in my experience and can create wrong expectations for people trying out Linux again - just to get disappointed.
Well, Total Warhammer 3 for example did not work for me through official Steam, even though it should. It runs on the same computer on windows without problems. And with much more tinkering I surely could get it to run on Linux as well .. but I want to play games to relax and not get and solve new problems.
Why are people so obsessed with gaming? It's unbelievable how this industry has gotten so many people hooked, to the point of accepting kernel level monitoring
People look down on me for it, but the way I see it: my computing experience is not keeping me prisoner; and I value my time too much to dig about certain issues, you're guaranteed to suffer the "my FPS isn't so good I will investigate" or "this game doesn't run so I will investigate" situations.
Cheats are less common too, so there's less incentive for kernel anti-cheat, and if there was: it would be contained to my "game computer" anyway.
I like to play a game called Overwatch that doesn’t have kernel level anti cheat, afaik, but I’ve never been able to get it running smoothly enough on Linux even with Nvidia closed source drivers.
I don’t think I’m obsessed with gaming but it is a hobby and if I have to boot into Windows to play, so be it.
I don't think this necessarily represents obsession. It just means they care about gaming at least as much "kernel level monitoring". As a baseline, I don't think there are many people who care much about that. I'm not sure what it is.
Transpose this gaming obsession to other facets of life and see how it goes.
Imagine if most cars were modeled after Lamborghinis and people complained about the lack of turbo or carbon seats when hopping on your Honda Civic.
Imagine if most parks were modeled after football fields and people complained about the lack of goals and lines in your backyard.
Imagine if most knifes were modeled after big damascus blades and people complained about your table knifes when they come for dinner for not being cool and sharp enough
No one's complaining about your Linux if that's what you want to use. The issue remains that for my personal wants, which includes gaming, Linux doesn't fulfill them.
If you gave me a dull knife to carve a turkey or fillet a fish, I would definitely complain about it not being sharp enough. Most people probably have a sharper knife than a table knife for cooking, is that a sharpness obsession?
It's about picking the right tool for the job. On my home server, I run Linux; my gaming computer runs Windows. If you wanna keep going with the knife analogy, look at how many types of kitchen knives there are. There is no knife that does everything just as well as all the others. Asking for a bread knife for cutting a loaf isn't an attack on every other knife.
I'm having trouble understanding the metaphor. If someone went to a park for the purpose of playing football, surely the lack of lines would make them prefer other parks.
If someone is trying to set a lap record, a Camry probably isn't a good choice either. Still works well for getting groceries though.
> I've never paid Microsoft for an OS that showed me ads against my will in my Start Menu
Sadly, a lot of us have. Most laptops and assembled PCs you buy come bundled with windows and you can’t return it for a refund even if the first thing you do is ripping it out and installing a better FOSS OS. You’ve still paid MS for their dumpster fire of an OS you didn’t even want.
> There is no Cortana, no AI Co-Pilot, or an extreme amount of unwanted, pre-installed software.
Ok XP came with tons of crap and bloatware from most manufacturers of the time, let's not rewrite history here! Of course, you could just do a fresh install or actually delete the programs you didn't want, looking at you Edge....
Let's not rewrite history here, OEMs shipped a ton of preinstalled bloatware. If you got an image of XP from Microsoft, it was totally clean.
Contrary to today when Microsoft bundles bloatware directly with the OS itself. You can't install a clean copy because a clean copy just doesn't exist.
Now we get Microsoft delivered bloat and unwanted, pre-installed software. They'll even automatically install all the OEM junk when updating a fresh W10/11 install with a clean USB stick made from the MS iso. That didn't happen with a fresh XP install with a non-OEM disc.
One of the biggest challenges modern OS developers face (Apple and Microsoft namely) is how to make the new version of the OS appealing enough for users to move to. There are carrots like a fancy new feature, or sticks like “we’re not supporting this anymore, so if you want your computer to be secure you need to upgrade.”
A lot of people don’t care about the carrots though. Their computer does everything they need it to and does so reliably. In a lot of ways the OS is a solved problem, but the companies who make them still need to pay the bills for all the security work that will always need to be done.
It makes me wonder if Apple (for example) put macOS into a no-new-features mode and just improved security from here-on-out what the long term effects would be for users and the industry.
Microsoft has already reached the user peak of their market, there cannot be anymore growth just from the OS alone, so the point of the OS isn't to be a good OS anymore, but to be a platform to sell you other things: AI (copilot integration), cloud services (onedrive integration, xbox game pass etc), advertisement (bundled crapware like candy crush that Windows 10 used to automatically install) and so on.
Of course this approach can be the one a company starts with depending on their incentives. That's what Google did with Android, they didn't start with a monopoly and won't have one in the mobile market but their entire purpose in making an OS is to lead people into depending on their services. Android's entire life purpose is for you to have Maps, Gmail, Drive and Chrome preinstalled.
To clarify, that’s just for the newest macOS. Apple does security updates for older versions for several more years beyond that. I personally have a couple decade+ old Macs that continue to work fine.
The OS does not have "appeal." It either works and facilitates my use of my own hardware or it does not.
The only reason to think this way is because you want to turn your paying customers PCs into advertising machines that violate their privacy and turn their hardware against them. There's not amount of "appeal" you can cram into your product that will get me to work against my own interests.
Security work for an otherwise solved problem is finite. It's only infinite if they make it that way by continuing to pile on new (likely unwanted) features. Otherwise the frequency of needing patches will trend towards 0 and eventually there will be none.
> One of the biggest challenges modern OS developers face (Apple and Microsoft namely) is how to make the new version of the OS appealing enough for users to move to.
More fundamentally, how do they convince users to continue spending money?
> A lot of people don’t care about the carrots though. Their computer does everything they need it to and does so reliably. In a lot of ways the OS is a solved problem, but the companies who make them still need to pay the bills for all the security work that will always need to be done.
Exactly. Consumer desktop/laptop operating systems (Linux/MacOS/Windows) have been largely stagnant for years, at least in terms of offering meaningfully better ways to get things done[1]. That's a problem for the commercial offerings: why would anyone buy the new version if it doesn't do anything new/better than its predecessor?
Microsoft's path is pretty clear: the OS is evolving into an internet terminal. Consumers don't pay for the OS: they pay a subscription to do anything, with features increasingly delivered online and, crucially, all their data "managed" (aka controlled by) by Microsoft too. Device sales don't matter first order in that model: it's a dumb terminal. But Microsoft has to keep the device manufacturers sweet: it's imperative consumers use Microsoft's dumb terminal, because it's connected to Microsoft's services. It would be a disaster if HP, Dell et al decided to use some other front end. Microsoft will do whatever it takes to remain the dominant desktop.
Apple has more of a dilemma. It's always been about the integrated experience, and hardware sales are a first-order driver of revenue and profitability. So it needs to keep consumers buying hardware as well as trying to up its rental offerings (iCloud etc). Moving to its own silicon has powered that for the last few years (more supply chain control, better performance, and good marketing on why it's better).
>It makes me wonder if Apple (for example) put macOS into a no-new-features mode and just improved security from here-on-out what the long term effects would be for users and the industry.
That's arguably what MacOS has been for the last few years: security updates plus support for their own silicon.
Beyond the hype, LLMs possibly offer an opportunity for a notable change in desktop interaction (note 'change' not necessarily 'better' - I'm withholding judgement on that). An OS that could respond to users' queries/instructions directly could be better than having to click about semi-randomly to find the right menu option.
[1] which doesn't detract from e.g. security upgrades, different peripheral connection standards, hardware improvements, etc.
I don't know, this feels like the worst parts of Windows XP (Fisher Price UI), with an annoying setup workflow, and a Microsoft account tie in... not exactly what I'd like to have today
Especially since the classic theme was still available. XP with the classic theme wasn't too dissimilar from the proceeding Windows 2000. Much more professional UI.
I'm using Win10 Pro, and I have no ads, no problems with unwanted apps, a sane start menu, and I run almost all non-ms software on top so microsoft's incompetence there is a nonissue. I can also replicate this on win11 but I don't see a reason to upgrade.
Classicshell: Microsoft is never going to make a start menu that doesn't suck again, but others will. http://www.classicshell.net/
Everything search: classicshell comes with a pretty decent windows search replacement, but you should use this instead. It is so, so fast. https://www.voidtools.com/
I wish UI designers understood this simple rule: only animate/add a transition if I would have been waiting for a different reason anyway.
If there's a genuine delay before you can complete showing me something, then sure, animate away. If you can render what I want to see instantly, don't make me suffer through an animation for it.
Funny related observation - 3DMark2000 displays a little transition/animation during setup before it begins copying files. On a modern SSD, the animation takes longer to complete than the actual installation. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples in modern software.
Those were egregiously huge. Part of my rose tinted glasses about past UI systems was the information density. Now everything fetishes “clean” interfaces with minimal controls.
The theming/window manager/basic UI groups at MS seem like they are either incompetent or just Aholes. Largely because they seem to remove features during rewrites and then discover they need them back, a few years later. Ex: windows 3.x could do "dark mode", as well as any number of other things that got ripped out. Yes, having a theming manager as complete as the one in say KDE that can create themes to match most current and historic OSs is "hard" but looking at the code doesn't seem like something professionals paid to maintain the largest desktop OS by market share should be incapable of it.
So, it seems to me that no one should have been allowed to ship a windows theme/WM that couldn't at least support a win95 style theme. AKA you don't get to merge it until it can do these half dozen simple things. Similarly the task bar, ok nice you created a new one, but can it be positioned on the left side of the screen, or have the start menu moved? Then no, it doesn't get merged.
The "Fisher-Price'ing" [1] of the user interface isn't necessarily better in my view. It took the already big and colorful user interface elements and essentially made them bigger. When the video finally gets past the installer there isn't much that wasn't already a part of XP beyond the added, slow UI animations (which is definitely not an improvement, just look at most UI research and anecdotal griping on the web for the last 15 years).
Yearning for XP is something I can relate to. It feels like the last good UI version of Windows. The video is only a nostalgia trip though. Actual improvements on XP's UI would be:
- Removing the hierarchy and modes Microsoft kept piling on since 3.1. These are endemic in the shell. Both the Start menu and Windows Explorer are rife with them.
- Organizing the Control Panel such that it's thematically grouped. All settings involving the display (and thus graphics sub-system) are in a single place, all networking is controlled in one place, etc.
- Reducing the number and complexity of mouse interactions. Context menus should only be needed for the most exceptional cases. Right clicking to accomplish a task should be rare.
- Near elimination of dialogs. Users mostly dismiss them without reading anyway.
- Reduce, to the degree possible, the need to understand the file system, and its hierarchy, to find one's data and make basic use of the system. Watching people try to understand files and the file system hierarchy is pretty painful.
- Reduce the need to manage individual windows, and introduce a way to intelligently place windows across programs such that the user can juxtapose the applications they need to copy/paste between to get work done with minimal effort.
These are just what's top of mind, and I don't fault the creator of the video for making a tribute to XP. I'll add that a lot of these complaints apply to macOS, but often to a lesser degree. Perhaps I'm the old man yelling at the cloud here [2], but this stuff has been eating away at me for years and there doesn't seem to exist the will to address any of it.
All of your UI suggestions are bad UI and shockingly similar to all the BS Windows 10-11 force-feed us.
Hierarchy (organization) is better than search. We all know this because whenever hierarchy is replaced with search, search had to reimplement hierarchy to be usable! E.g., grouping and nesting of pinned Win10+ start menu items.
Control Panel did have groups in Win XP. They suck. I always disable it.
Windows 10 removed a ton of context menus. Windows 11 removed more. They both suck. Stop hiding things from me.
You'll notice I didn't recommend search, or actually anything, as a solution to the problems I mentioned. I think these issues need more research and experimentation before we can arrive at better long term solutions. Also I didn't advocate for hiding things. Instead I think we agree with the idea that less things should be hidden, and the majority of the issues I have with Windows (and macOS/iOS) user interface elements is that they don't do a good enough job of surfacing the things I'm trying to find.
Windows 9x had a decent file search function. It was slow, but reliable. It even included full text search, though I'm not sure how well that worked, I don't think I ever had the patience to use it. I wish modern Gnome had something just like it. I usually use the shell, instead.
I'd settle for one well-thought-out UI concept, built from the ground up, targeting specific device categories, and running on a modern, legacy-free foundation. That would not be suitable for every user or use case and shouldn't replace a more legacy-oriented Windows, in my opinion, but it'd serve a large contingent of users and OEMs designing target devices better than what feels like a hodgepodge of hardware support and UI philosophies, accumulated over multiple decades. Unfortunately, while modern-day MSFT does extremely well financially[0] with their current strategy, their ability to execute such a major OS project from the ground-up and stick with it to the finish line is doubtful given historical examples[1]. Given that they are doing so well financially, it's fair if they feel that such investments aren't worth their efforts, though I view it as potentially shortsighted, considering the value of continued ownership of a large percentage of the platform market. Even if they become a transformer-model-focused company on top of being business over end-user focused, having future business users familiar with your system and retaining some control over the software that your transformer-model implementations run on is sensible.
If one wants what is described in the article and shown in the attached video, there are solutions out there to get very close to that UI. Combine that with LTSC and I feel that would scratch that particular itch quite well.
Neat effort, but my one complaint is how much whitespace there is between and around various UI elements, especially in item lists such as in the Start menu and the sidebar of various configuration dialogs. Actual Windows XP hails from an era before visual designers all collectively decided that high information density was bad aesthetics.
I really like this concept. I see a lot of negativity in the comments over the “Fisher Price” UI, but honestly, this seems much more familiar and easier to navigate than what Windows has become to the average user. This is something that I can see my parents or less technically-inclined siblings or friends breathing a sigh of relief to use. Simple, colorful, easy workflows. It’s why the iPad has a cult following among the 60 and over crowd.
I don’t recall XP actually being all that easy to use. It had bright colors, but the menus could get a bit maze-like. IMO XP was familiar more than it was simple to use. iOS is legitimately easy to use.
3:27 I wasn't expecting this to include a mandatory registration and sign-in to an online account. I thought the inability to have offline/local accounts was one of the hated points of the new Windows OSes.
IMO I think with the changing dynamics of how people use their computers (most things now are web based whereas before it was always an app you installed on your computer) coupled with the maturity of the Linux desktop, most regular people could probably get away with using Linux these days. Still the biggest barrier to Linux adoption is just getting it setup on your machine.
Yes. I speak as a layperson who wants to. The landmine of UEFI/BIOS, TPM, partitions, etc, and knowing I absolutely cannot fuck anything up. Those are huge hurdles for someone whose job is outside of computing and just needs a few things to just work.
Still not a fan of the Windows XP bubble-gum theme and overcrowded start menu, but definitely a move in the right direction (back towards the peak Windows version Win2k).
I'm old enough to remember when people were skeptical of Windows XP. High resource usage, compatibility problems and the childish look & feel were among the criticisms. There were calls to not upgrade, and to stick to Windows 98.
How it despite all that criticism it has become a cult classic is beyond me.
Maybe I was too young but honestly I didn’t care at all. Was it colorful and super contrasted ? Yes. But it was not, at least to me, ugly.
Sure, coming from gray OSes from the 90’s, it could have appeared as "childish" but I really think this was just because people somehow internalized that "pro = sad gray". And for what its worth, I’m still convinced that we never had something better than the slightly 3D beige controls of Windows XP.
Now, any app is more colored than Windows XP but nothing is coherent anymore, there is no more "OS look" anywhere, it’s just the applications, their colors and their branding. Even Apple is losing this battle update after update.
I think it (metaphorically) says something about how we lost control of our computers.
Windows from an alternate universe where companies care mainly about the user's benefit.
I think Linux would barely be a thing at all if Microsoft had focused on clean and performant experiences that allowed users more control, flexibility, and privacy.
Instead, they put themselves through the pain and expense of pretending to care for OSS. They would have loyal customers due to the trust from a clean Windows experience.
Now Linux is nearer to an actual replacement for Windows.
* Flat box instead of real dialog in the installer
* No box around the close button
* No accents on the next button
* Next button provides no feedback to mouse-over or mouse-click
* List items (the C: partition) has no borders before it's moused-over, it's basically a point-and-click adventure entity where you have to mouse-over everything to see what can be interacted with
Boot screen:
* Flat logo is ugly, should have some accents, original XP logo much better
* busy-bar is weird, it's segmented but the segments do not animate, rather the entire 3 segments slide around.. again, original is much better.
Finishing installation:
* Different type of "window" or container now, still rounded border, missing accents. Inconsistent.
* Items in list again not indicative of being clickable.
* Text-inputs give no feedback on mouse-over or of being selected
* Next button still not giving any feedback
Third installation screen: Stop already. It was annoying in XP too.
Booted:
* UI looks like a bad Macromedia flash parody version of XP.
* And that settings stuff? Oh god why! Bring back the control panel and the dialogues of XP, those were again MUCH nicer.
Okay, this is worse than the orignal in every single way..
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. - Hanlon's razor, but still, it's really hard to believe someone would honestly see these as improvements. Hope for humanity: lost.
What would actually be nice is Windows XP UI, exactly how it was before SP1, but without the bugs and crashes (I _KNOW_ that can be done without messing with the UI) with the ability to run current software on current hardware, with nothing at all changed in the UI.
Indeed. It's a video, they could have shown everything exactly as they like. Yet the decided that it should take a full two seconds from clicking the taskbar icon until Explorer is usable. Are people gaslit into thinking that this is okay or normal that they design their dream software like this? Explorer should (and does) open in an instant on a real system, no loading animations required.
Since this just about GUI appearance, I'd like to mention one of the most beautiful and practical GUI themes for Windows 7, and in my opinion one of the best kept secrets for more than a decade, Shine 2.0:
It's been many years since I used anything Windows, but it was always one of the first things I configured with any new install. Looking at the screenshots now, it hasn't aged a bit since it was published in 2010. And the other concepts and themes that guy published around the same time still look fresh. Imagine if Microsoft had discovered him and put him in charge of style!
I personally love the blended style and I think the goals of what this going for is awesome. Let’s bloat, more focus on core computing features. But I suspect if I were to run XP, I would miss some of those bloat style features. Automatic updates for apps in the background, cloud file providers, better window management tools, etc.
I’m not longer at Microsoft and I am still a bit worried about the future of windows. I was hoping panos would be able to drive things in a more elegant and streamlined direction (to his credit, it does look better imho and many of the rougher visual edges have been filed off in 11, though some still do exist). But he has left the company and Yusuf is taking over.
I think the keypoint here isn't the graphics design, or animations etc as many commented. It is its simplicity.
All Modern software tried to introduce more features, and more ways to access the same features or functions.
I am not sure if such thing exists or anyone have any pointers. Consider 90% of my time on computer are spend within the browser. I wonder what would it be like if the OS had nothing. Just a Desktop and Browser. No Settings, or even File Explorer. If there is a file it lives on Desktop. The only remaining 10% I think would be a video player. I wonder what would the experience be like. Would I be missing anything.
You could install a Linux distro that doesn’t bring a ton along with it (arch will do), install a window manager (not a desktop environment), and go from there.
This is misleading. The demo looks great because of the animated transitions and the large text.
But that would be a pain to use as opposed to viewing in a demo.
I remember when I used XP I switched to the classic start menu because that worked great.
There are still useful things to learn from XP. Depth doesn’t hurt UI/UX. Flatness isn’t the last word in design. Single (or at most dual) lists are better than massive grids of options. We don’t need all the pop ups and promotions. The OS should respond to the user. It shouldn’t keep prompting them.
Gosh, do I hate the constant animations. I guess I'm one of the last 10 people on Earth who hate phones and this version of Windows definitely looks like it took a lot of inspiration from smart phone OS's.
Except this would mean being stuck on classic Win32 with MFC, and not so goodie .NET Framework 2.0.
Unless Windows XP 2024 would also be expect to be similar to macOS and Android, with .NET taking the same role as Swift and Java/Kotlin on those platforms.
Hint, this is still far from it on Windows 11, despite the WinRT, WinUI and WinAppSDK adventures.
I can’t wait for proton to become even more mainstream. We need to put pressure on AAA titles to support Linux. Many anti cheats already do but it’s the games themselves that refuse to allow Linux. The faster I can dump windows the better because the only windows install I have is for a dedicated gaming machine.
What makes Windows XP good relative to modern Windows is what it doesn't have (or doesn't have in comparable amounts): telemetry, advertising, multiple generations of differing UIs with their own styles, a huge installation footprint, online accounts and cloud services tie-ins, dark patterns to trick people into agreeing to the former, tons of bloatware, etc.
A Windows which is a descendant of Windows 8 but is themed like Windows XP is basically worthless and misses the point. It just fetishizes an aesthetic that is in fact only incidentally associated with a less user-hostile era.
No bloat, no ads, no forced or feature updates, optional security patches only, virtually nothing installed by default, and minimal telemetry.