Agreed. Windows Server 2000 through Windows 7 were peak Microsoft operating system.
By Windows 2000 Server, they finally had the architecture right, and had flushed out most of the 16 bit legacy.
The big win with Windows 7 was that they finally figured out how to make it stop crashing. There were two big fixes. First, the Static Driver Verifier. This verified that kernel drivers couldn't crash the rest of the kernel. First large scale application of proof of correctness technology. Drivers could still fail, but not overwrite other parts of the kernel. This put a huge dent into driver-induced crashes.
Second was a dump classifier. Early machine learning. When the system crashed, a dump was sent to Microsoft. The classifier tried to bring similar dumps together, so one developer got a big collection of similar crashes. When you have hundreds of dumps of the same bug, locating the bug gets much easier.
Between both of those, the Blue Screen of Death mostly disappeared.
ryao 13 hours ago [-]
Drivers can crash the rest of the kernel in Windows 7. People playing games during the Windows 7 days should remember plenty of blue screens citing either graphics drivers (mainly for ATI/AMD graphics) or their kernel anticheat software. Second, a “proof of correctness” has never been made for any kernel. Even the seL4 guys do not call their proof a proof of correctness.
Driver Verifier is a tool that developers can choose to use for testing and debugging purposes.
It's not used on production machines and it does nothing to prevent a badly written driver from crashing the kernel.
ycombinatrix 7 hours ago [-]
They didn't "prove the kernel is correct", they built a tool to prove that a single driver maintains an invariant throughout execution.
raggi 10 hours ago [-]
I think it ended at the first "ribbon" UI, which was in the 2003 era, but not all products ate the dirt at once.
lproven 42 minutes ago [-]
> I think it ended at the first "ribbon" UI, which was in the 2003 era,
Nah. 2007 era.
Office 2007 introduced the ribbon to the main apps: Word, Excel, I think Powerpoint. The next version it was added to Outlook and Access, IIRC.
I still use Word 2003 because it's the last pre-Ribbon version.
SoftTalker 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah the ribbon drove me to LibreOffice and Google Docs and I haven’t been back.
Windows 2000 Pro was the peak of the Windows UX. They could not leave well enough alone.
IlikeKitties 7 hours ago [-]
I never understood the issue with the ribbon UI. Epecially for Office it was great, so much easier to find stuff.
lproven 36 minutes ago [-]
> I never understood the issue with the ribbon UI. Epecially for Office it was great, so much easier to find stuff.
1. I don't need to find stuff.
I knew where stuff is.
2. I read text. I only need menus. I don't need toolbars etc. and so I turn them all off.
I cannot read icons. I have to guess. It's like searching for 3 things I need in an unfamiliar supermarket.
3. Menus are very space efficient.
Ribbons hog precious vertical space. This is doubly disastrous on widescreens.
4. I am a keyboard user.
I use keys to navigate menus. It's much faster than aiming at targets with the mouse and I don't need to look. The navigation keys don't work any more.
Ribbons help those who don't know what they are doing and do not care about speed and efficiency.
They punish experts who do know, don't search, don't hunt, and customise themselves and their apps for speed and efficient use of time and screen space.
josephg 4 hours ago [-]
My big problem with it is that it’s stateful. A menu or toolbar admits muscle memory - since you get used to where a certain button or option is and you can find it easily. With ribbons you need to know if you’re in the right submenu first.
Though personally, I’m increasingly delighted by the quicksilver - style palette / action tools that vscode and IntelliJ use for infrequently used options. Just hit the hotkey and type, and the option you want appears under the enter key.
wolpoli 5 hours ago [-]
Those of us working in jobs use the same couple of functions in our office products. We don't really go and find features.
eviks 7 hours ago [-]
It's not easily customizable and it takes more space, not much to understand
bruce511 6 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure it takes more space than a menu and toolbar, but regardless, monitors are a LOT larger now than in 2003 so...
Frankly, I'm motivated sure customizing is a win either. I fo a lot of remote support and it's nice to have a consistent interface.
Personally I find it faster than menus, and easier to find things I seldom use.
But I appreciate it's a personal taste thing, and some older folks prefer older interfaces.
eviks 6 hours ago [-]
Just compare and become sure! The larger screen isn't a good excuse to waste space either.
And users are way more important than the tiny group of tech support.
panxyh 6 hours ago [-]
Also those that need tech support will be less likely to customize.
asdajksah2123 8 hours ago [-]
The original ribbon sucked but with the improvements it's hard to say it's generally a bad choice.
The ribbon is a great fit for Office style apps with their large number of buttons and options.
Especially after they added the ability to minimize, expand on hover, or keep expanded (originally this was the only option), the ribbon has been a great addition.
But then they also had to go ahead and dump it in places where it had no reason to be, such as Windows Explorer.
lproven 35 minutes ago [-]
> The original ribbon sucked but with the improvements it's hard to say it's generally a bad choice.
This is also what I hear about GNOME. "OK, yes, GNOME 3.x was bad, but by GNOME 40 it's fine."
No, it's not. None of my core objections have been fixed.
Both ribbons and GNOME are every bit as bad as they were in the first release, nearly 20 years ago.
trinix912 5 hours ago [-]
> The ribbon is a great fit for Office style apps with their large number of buttons and options.
To me this is the exact use case where it fails. I find it way harder to parse as it's visually intense (tons of icons, buttons of various sizes, those little arrows that are sometimes in group corners...).
Office 2003 had menus that were at most 20-25 entries long with icons that were just the right size to hint what the entries are about, yet not get in the way. The ribbon in Office 2007 (Word, for example) has several tabs full of icons stretching the entire window width or even more. Mnemonics were also made impractical as they dynamically bind to the buttons of the currently visible tab instead of the actions themselves.
pjmlp 3 hours ago [-]
I agree with one big exception, the refocus on COM as the main Windows API delivery mechanism.
It is great as idea, pity that Microsoft keeps failing to deliver in developer tooling that actually makes COM fun to use, instead of something we have to endure.
From OLE 1.0 pages long infrastructure in Windows 16 bit, via ActiveX, OCX, MFC, ATL, WTL, .NET (RCW/CCW), WinRT with. NET Native and C++/CX, C++/WinRT, WIL, nano-COM, .NET 5+ COM,....
Not only do they keep rebooting how to approach COM development, in terms of Visual Studio tooling, one is worse than the other, not at the same feature parity, only to be dropped after the team's KPI change focus.
When they made the Hilo demo for Windows Vista and later Windows 7 developers with such great focus on being back on COM, after how Longhorn went down, a better tooling would be expected.
Another often-underappreciated advancement was the UAC added in Vista. People hated it, but viruses and rootkits were a major problem for XP.
trinix912 5 hours ago [-]
People hated it because it was all over the place. Change this or that setting? UAC. Install anything? UAC. Then you'd get a virus in a software installer, confirm the UAC as usual, and it wouldn't stop a thing.
ycombinatrix 7 hours ago [-]
It is more of a warning than an actual security mechanism though. Similar to Mark of the Web.
mubou 4 hours ago [-]
No, in XP you were essentially logged in as root 24/7 (assuming it was your machine), and any program -- including your browser -- was running as root too. I remember watching a talk about how stupidly easy it was to write rootkits for XP. "Drive-by viruses" were a thing, where a website could literally install a rootkit on your machine just by visiting it (usually taking advantage of some exploit in flash, java, or adobe reader). Vista flipped it, by disabling the admin account, so that in order to do something as admin you needed to "sudo" first. That alone put a stop to tons of viruses.
bigfatkitten 23 minutes ago [-]
I used to work in the security team at a financial institution that was still running XP until around 2017.
We got to a point around 2015 where drive-by exploit kit developers just weren't targeting XP and IE8 anymore. Phishing landing pages would roll through all the payloads they had and silently exit.
breadwinner 12 hours ago [-]
> First large scale application of proof of correctness technology.
Curious about this. How does it work? Does it use any methods invented by Leslie Lamport?
Izikiel43 10 hours ago [-]
> This verified that kernel drivers couldn't crash the rest of the kernel.
How did crowdstrike end up crashing windows though?
josheva 10 hours ago [-]
> Static Driver Verifier
Well, the Crowdstrike driver isn't (wasn't?) static. It loaded a file that Crowdstrike changed with an update.
Most drivers pass through rigorous verification on every change. But Crowdstrike is (was?) allowed to change their driver whenever they want by designing it to load a file.
hedora 9 hours ago [-]
The EU forced MS to allow stuff like CrowdStrike as part of an anti-trust settlement.
MS tried to use the incident to get the regulators to waive the requirement.
wpm 8 hours ago [-]
I'm all for anti-trust and anti-monopoly but christ alive an operating system vendor gatekeeping their kernel is literally the whole point of being an operating system vendor. Braindead regulation.
philistine 7 hours ago [-]
> Braindead regulation.
Only because OP didn't give the full story. Microsoft wanted to close direct access to the kernel. AV companies complained to regulators in the EU. The EU asked Microsoft if they were willing to maintain access to replacement functionality and to stick to using that functionality for its own separately sold AV products. Microsoft said no, and instead of fighting, just let Windows wither on the vine with full kernel access for all the bozos. Crowdstrike was inevitable.
immibis 3 hours ago [-]
No, braindead take. The purpose of being an operating system vendor is to sell an operating system. If someone else modifies your operating system after they buy it, they get to keep both pieces. You don't get to stop them from modifying the thing they bought.
Do you like nanny states? How about nanny corporations?
yankcrime 15 hours ago [-]
A modern reimagining of Windows 2000's UI - professional, simple, uncluttered, focused, no cheapening of the whole experience with adverts in a thinly-veiled attempt to funnel you into Bing - with modern underpinnings and features such as WSL2 would have me running back towards Microsoft with open arms and cheque book in hand.
PaulDavisThe1st 13 hours ago [-]
There are Linux distros that meet your description (no need for WSL2 either!). I am guessing you're not running towards them with open arms and cheque book in hand ... or maybe you already ran to Linux and are just nostalgic about going back to Microsoft ... ?
zwaps 6 hours ago [-]
Linux UIs can’t even align fonts correctly within the elements.
It is miles away from the original and you can immediately see its Linux because things don’t quite line up. Huge difference in quality, attention to detail, and the entire interface becomes unpleasant to look at.
Also, Linux power management and lack of hibernation means its useless on laptops
bigfatkitten 18 minutes ago [-]
> Also, Linux power management and lack of hibernation means its useless on laptops
I gotten better battery life under Linux than on Windows on every Thinkpad I've owned in the last 15 years or so.
That's not to say everything is smooth sailing. Audio is a battle I'll still be fighting on my deathbed in ~40 years.
Liftyee 5 hours ago [-]
Out of curiosity, when was the last time you used Linux on a laptop platform? Anecdotally, it's come a long way since 5 years ago - daily driving Ubuntu 24.04 on my Thinkpad, and I can get 8 hours of use (engineering workload) in a day. It's not ARM level of performance, but far from "useless".
trinix912 5 hours ago [-]
That's "It works on my machine". Especially with ThinkPads, Dell XPS, and other laptops usually used by the Linux folks. Try it on a random cheap HP and you might not even have sound working (I've gone through this a few months ago). You can sometimes easily fix it through the terminal, but then we get into the debate of whether a normal user would be able to do that.
guenthert 3 hours ago [-]
Well, how many "it works on my machine" does it take to make it a general statement? It works on all of my machines, from dirt-cheap lenovo EDU series ThinkPad to portable workstation Dell M6800 and Pixel Chromebook in between.
It generally doesn't work for people buying computers from vendors who use hardware were the manufacturer doesn't disclose the documentation. Just don't give money to those who seek to prevent free software.
josephg 15 minutes ago [-]
I mean, yeah? But it’s far from the seamless experience of macOS or windows. On my desktop pc:
- My wireless card isn’t detected
- I’m using Linux mint, which means I’m still on X11. Some software doesn’t support X as well as wayland. Some only supports X I guess?
- I use Davinci resolve - which has a native Linux install. But I need to use some weird tool to convert it to a dpkg to install and run it. It doesn’t have a window bar - so the only way I can change the size of the window is by right clicking in the task bar
- My two monitors have different DPI - so I need to use window scaling. This confuses IntelliJ - which made all the text super tiny for some reason. I have a DPI override for that in a weird Java config file.
- I want consistent copy / paste shortcuts. I can’t use ctrl+C in terminal because that’s SIGINT. So I have it set to meta+C. But I can’t bind meta+C in IntelliJ because of Java limitations. So my copy/paste shortcut is just different in different apps now.
- Smooth scrolling is still an inconsistent mess between different programs. Particularly Firefox.
I’ve also been running into problems where my second monitor won’t turn on after I resume the computer from sleep. But apparently that’s a bug that affects windows as well when using recent nvidia drivers, so that isn’t Linux’s fault.
I’m not saying it’s bad. It mostly works great! I love my workstation, and I’m enjoying distancing myself from Apple’s increasingly buggy software stack. But it’s far from perfect.
I’m happy enough to use Linux despite all its warts. But when my parents ask for a new computer, I recommend macOS or windows.
zamadatix 10 hours ago [-]
Plenty of distros/skins get it 99% of the way there for a similar looking screenshot but only 25% of the way there for the actual user interface experience. ReactOS is probably the closest (in terms of going down a holistic user interface approach) but saying it's 25% the way there to being a finished solution would be generous.
p_ing 13 hours ago [-]
While DEs often emulate the look of macOS or Windows, they always get the feel wrong. You can put a global menu bar, Dock, etc into KDE, but ultimately it still acts like KDE and nothing like macOS.
skydhash 12 hours ago [-]
It's not like macOS or Windows is the pinnacle of UI. I'm on Fedora Silverblue, and it's so relaxing to not deal with the usual ['Yes', 'Not Now'] prompt on notifications. Or have your computer became suddenly unresponsive because of random scans you can't disable.
wruza 8 hours ago [-]
It's not like kde is either. In windows I have never thought about carefully moving the cursor through start menu. In kde it's one wrong move and you're in a different section, cause in 25 or how many years they didn't figure out hover activation delay.
p_ing 12 hours ago [-]
The GP is talking about the Windows 2000 UI.
Gud 3 hours ago [-]
Sounds like you are describing XFCE.
I made the switch to a *nix OS with XFCE 20 years ago. Couldn’t be happier.
trinix912 4 hours ago [-]
Windows Whistler (XP Beta) had an interesting theme that was like a bit modernized Windows 2000. Small non-rounded title bars, non-obnoxious taskbar, etc. Too bad they never finished it and offered a stable version for Windows XP users.
mixmastamyk 14 hours ago [-]
Not an obligation, but ReactOS exists and needs help:
Surprisingly close. I recently tried its package manager and installed a recent Python! So better than the original XP-era Windows in some respects.
stego-tech 8 hours ago [-]
As someone who built an IT career on Microsoft’s entire suite, only to recently (past six years or so) migrate wholesale to macOS (endpoint) and Linux (server), I can definitely say MS’ best days are behind it. 2000 was rock solid, Server 2003 had some growing pains (mainly the transition to x64 and multi-core processors), and 2008 fully embraced the long march into irrelevance even as it tried to shake up the hypervisor space. Now the company is so obsessed with arbitrary and unnecessary feature creep and telemetry-as-surveillance that I’m loathe to recommend it when I don’t have to.
Honest to god, if an IdP like Okta made an Active Directory replacement that ran via container instead of a full-fat VM or appliance template, I’d gladly toss ADDS out the window with all its stupid CALs. Basic directory functionality in 2025 shouldn’t require a bloated ADDS/LDAPS virtual machine to run, especially with the move to cloud providers for identity. If you make it easier to do identity without ADDS, you remove Microsof’s major trojan horse into the enterprise - and M365’s as well.
breadwinner 11 hours ago [-]
Here are my gripes with the modern Windows experience:
- Runs Windows update and reboots without my permission
- Keeps trying to make me switch to Bing
- Keeps trying to make me use Microsoft Account vs. local account
- Does a crappy job of reopening windows on reboot. Miserable copy of macOS.
- Fan spinning on my laptop with no easy way to figure out what process is consuming CPU
- Flat UI
- No built-in way to view markdown files
- No tool to graphically show where my diskspace went; allowing me to find and delete large files
- Printers keep getting disconnected; it is easier to print from iPhone thanks to bonjour
- No dictionary app (macOS has it)
- Can't airdrop to iPhone (3rd party apps can do it)
- No screenshot tool that allows you to type text (in addition to circling and highlighting and arrows)
- No command-line zip / unzip
- No instant search (macOS has had it for how many years now?)
esprehn 11 hours ago [-]
Command line zip/unzip is available in PowerShell:
I agree with a bunch of your criticism, but modern PowerShell is pretty decent and has a lot of tools.
breadwinner 10 hours ago [-]
Markdown should have a UI viewer
rqtwteye 10 hours ago [-]
My main gripe for work laptop is that Windows 11 is dog slow. I think they have rewritten Explorer but not for the better. Word is also driving me nuts. The formatting does a ton of weird stuff that's totally unpredictable. Outlook has this weird flat UI where it's hard to tell what is a button and what isn't. Search has been broken for a long time.
wpm 8 hours ago [-]
Both Windows 11 and modern macOS are slow as shit now. The other day I clicked the Notifications settings in the outhouse they call a Settings app on my Mac and it took a solid 3 seconds to render the UI.
And behind me, was a G4 Cube that could open the System Preferences app off of a spinning hard drive in less time.
What happened to us?
ronbenton 10 hours ago [-]
But besides those things, it's great!
Seriously though I think Microsoft has mostly given up on the B2C market. They have good capture of B2B with hardware and software. Why make great products when you can make mediocre products that people have no choice but to use?
jayd16 8 hours ago [-]
I don't really agree with half the list as those are just apps you can get but...
> Does a crappy job of reopening windows on reboot. Miserable copy of macOS.
Please! Can windows figure this out and can Macs figure out how to restore window to monitor configuration as well as Windows.
Uhhrrr 8 hours ago [-]
And that's just the user experience! For developers:
- multiple heap allocators
- have to install runtimes, even for C
- all useful permissions are off by default
- entire GUI is permeated by "Not Invented Here" mistakes
- msi is opaque and crusty
moron4hire 11 hours ago [-]
> No command-line zip / unzip
Yes it does. It's just called Compress-Archive/Expand-Archive.
breadwinner 10 hours ago [-]
So much easier to use tar -z
p_ing 9 hours ago [-]
I laugh when I see responses like this. tar is so discoverable and easy, you can install WSLv2 if you want to use it.
breadwinner 7 hours ago [-]
I laughed at your response too, because tar is part of Windows 11. See C:\Windows\System32\tar.exe
hcarvalhoalves 15 hours ago [-]
The fact Windows 2000 was peak Microsoft and OS X 10.5 was peak Apple is proof that the golden age of software is way behind us, unfortunately.
SoleilAbsolu 11 hours ago [-]
That's not true, next year has been and always will be the year of desktop Linux, I'm sure of it!
ivell 6 hours ago [-]
You jest, but with Android desktop mode support it might actually turn out to be true!
sylens 13 hours ago [-]
They really did offer a lot of features that really helped productivity. Snapping windows, jump lists, having libraries act as a virtual folder for many folders, etc.
ok_computer 11 hours ago [-]
Libraries confuse me to this day. Just give me a path!
TMWNN 15 hours ago [-]
I thought 10.6 Snow Leopard is peak OS X?
wruza 8 hours ago [-]
Imagine coming into the mac world with a 10.5 cd and upgrading to the current 10.6 and then watching it deteriorate through years into 10.10. Yeah that's me. Peeking at a glimpse of perfection only for it to flash and fade.
WillAdams 13 hours ago [-]
10.6.8
Still kicking myself for not getting an Axiotron Modbook running Snow Leopard.
justicz 13 hours ago [-]
God, I wanted one of those so badly!
WillAdams 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah, my current plan is to just get a Mac Mini and a Wacom Movink 13 (or ideally, some higher-resolution successor).
pimeys 13 hours ago [-]
Fedora Kinoite with KDE Plasma 6 is pretty good. And will not get worse in the future either. Just need to look outside of the commercial offerings...
2809 21 hours ago [-]
2K 100% was the best Windows. The NT benefits with none of the XP downsides.
audunw 3 hours ago [-]
It was the best for its time. But one of the reason why XP was "better" is that it had built-in support for WiFi. That ended up being a dealbreaker for 2k.
That's the issue.. every new OS has brought some features or stability improvements that are huge upgrades over the older OS.
WSL 2 is a must-have for me now, so Windows 10/11 is much better than anything that came before in that way. I may be alone in this, but I actually think Windows 11 has the best design of any Windows so far. The problem as usual, is that they haven't made the entire OS consistent. I wouldn't mind the new control panel if you could actually change every setting in windows in that one control panel.. and not have to dig through to find control panels that still date back to Win2k. And the new/old context menu in explorer is an absolute disaster. Then new design is fine.. but how the hell did they manage to not make it support all the options of the old context menu?
wing-_-nuts 19 hours ago [-]
Hard agree. The windows 2000 UI was peak UX and each step since has been a downgrade, (with a possible exception of windows 7)
ThrowawayB7 19 hours ago [-]
Windows Server 2003 was the best Windows by far. All of the good parts of NT/2000 with any parts of XP available when you needed them.
amlib 19 hours ago [-]
Except that AFAIK 2003 kernel was different enough that a few apps and specially games refused to run, properly or at all, compared to XP.
icedchai 13 hours ago [-]
I agree here. I ran server 2003 on my early 2000's desktop for a while.
tomwheeler 18 hours ago [-]
Perfectly stated. It was more stable and had better UX than NT4, but didn't have all the unwanted anti-features that came in later versions of Windows. It was the last version of Windows that didn't get in my way.
aforty 10 hours ago [-]
I loved Windows 2000 so much. I was a beta tester back then and they sent me a copy in the end. Was very cool for me as a broke high school student.
nocoiner 9 hours ago [-]
I bought it from my college computer store for like $5 for the CD and an endlessly reusable license key. Truly the good old days.
yelling_cat 19 hours ago [-]
Definitely. If 2K supported ClearType I would have stuck with it on my personal machines for another half a decade.
mixmastamyk 20 hours ago [-]
I preferred XP/2003 in classic UI mode. Lots of little improvements.
If you could get winterm on it and recent Firefox it’d be quite usable. Perhaps ReactOS one day.
antod 15 hours ago [-]
yeah while 2K was their best ever single breakthrough improvement, it was a v1 and XP/2003 in classic mode was a more refined 2K eg more drivers and better plug and play, more graphics compatibility. And 2003 Active Directory had a number of quality of life improvements.
mixmastamyk 14 hours ago [-]
NT3.5 was perhaps the most stable version I ever used. NT4 brought the new UI, making NT5 aka 2k not the first version of the 95+ UI.
gjvc 19 hours ago [-]
and 64-bit (x86_64 not IA64), which no version Windows 2000 was AFAIK
Windows 7 with classic UI is probably the most-recent decent version.
jimt1234 19 hours ago [-]
Agree. My company ran a bunch of web servers on Windows 2K and Apache web server, because management was afraid of Linux (general FUD and Microsoft's lawsuit threats) and the engineering staff was afraid of Microsoft's IIS web server (security dumpster fire at the time). It was actually a pretty good system, super easy to maintain.
cantrecallmypwd 11 hours ago [-]
2K was so much better than XP. The UI rendering thread was decoupled in a way that XP's wasn't.
drewcoo 13 hours ago [-]
WinXP was also NT family. It wasn't from that married-in Win9x gene pool.
dep_b 2 hours ago [-]
I’ve been running Windows 2000 Pro as my main machine from I think the second beta until it was completely dropped from support.
It ran all of my games, stable as hell, quite light with none of the bullshit added later, none of the graphical bullshit added by XP but still classic Chicago.
The only thing that could make it better were the UI rendering engine introduced with Vista and its enhanced driver and security model.
pmdr 56 minutes ago [-]
I see a vast majority of comments here agreeing that UIs were significantly better and faster twenty years ago or more. Assuming HN is representative for the software community, how is it that slow, inferior and dumbed-down interfaces have prevailed in the end? And this hasn't been happening just to popular consumer products.
Gud 48 minutes ago [-]
The answer is, HN is not representative.
There will be a much, much higher prevalence of computer enthusiasts on this board, not just people looking for a paycheck
pmdr 31 minutes ago [-]
That makes sense.
Borg3 3 hours ago [-]
As someone who still runs Win2003 R2 (32bit) on my desktop I can confirm. It was peak MS. System is very stable, UI (classic) is great. It is quick, snappy and good looking. For basic POSIX I have cygwin. For other stuff I use VMs. I have all tools needed to handle some mainmentance (compilers, DDK, docs, ...).
But there is problem.. HW.. The pool of old HW is shrinking, and one day I will not be able to run it anymore.. I guess I will move to Linux. There are few nice and lightweight distros...
PaulHoule 22 hours ago [-]
You can't say WDDM wasn't a step forward... Being able to crash your video drivers and reboot them without crashing and rebooting your whole machines made Windows a lot more stable.
bgirard 19 hours ago [-]
Peak doesn't mean that it's a monotonic decline without any steps forward.
tbyehl 10 hours ago [-]
One of the innovations in NT 4.0 was adding the ability for video drivers to crash the kernel. They went full circle.
zamadatix 14 hours ago [-]
For folks that pick Windows 2000 Server, why not Server 2003? Is it just because by then NT had XP out as the "Windows for Home Users" and people didn't use Server 2003 as much or were there changes about it folks hated for some reason? To me it always seemed to bring so many more features/capabilities without trashing the classic UI.
Spooky23 13 hours ago [-]
Remember that it also introduced Active Directory. I helped build out a global enterprise network that was consistent and supported the same way, with like a quarter million users and tbh, it pretty much worked flawlessly.
Of course that innocence was lost with Welchia and other issues, but Windows 2000 made the year 1999 feel like ancient history in 2001.
zamadatix 11 hours ago [-]
Sure, Windows 2000 was definitely great in a lot of ways, but Server 2003/R2 either extended on all of those (e.g. greatly improving AD and its management) or added on it's own big firsts such as x64 support - all without really introducing any of the types of downfall people hate the more modern versions for.
jmward01 14 hours ago [-]
I'm just surprised that it feels like very little deep innovation in the OS world has happened since windows 2k. 3.11 brought networking in. 95 brought true multitasking to the masses and 2k brought multi-processing/multi-user (yes, NT3.1 had it, but 2k is where most normal users jumped in). And, yes, I know these things existed in other OSes out there but I think of these as the mass market kick offs for them. In general I just don't see anything but evolutionary improvements (and back-sliding) in the OS world beyond this time. I had really hoped that true cloud OSes would have become the norm by now (I really want my whole house connected as a seamless collection of stuff) or other major advances like killing filesystems (I think of these as backdoor undocumented APIs). Have we really figured out what an OS is supposed to be or are we just stuck in a rut?
[edit] 3.1 should have been windows for worgkroups 3.11
p_ing 12 hours ago [-]
"Normal users" did not jump into Windows 2000 Workstation. That was still an 'enterprise only' OS. Normal users either suffered with WinMe shipping on their desktop computer or jumped from 98SE to XP, given their computer could handle it (aka they bought a new computer).
jayd16 8 hours ago [-]
I think the major change has been that computers are very stable and secure these days. It's night and day compared to the 2000s.
flomo 11 hours ago [-]
> 2k brought multi-processing/multi-user
Sorta. It was real pain-in-the-ass to run 2000 as a regular (non-administrator) user. Assuming your software worked at all that way, as even Office 2000 had some issues. UAC was necessary.
EvanAnderson 9 hours ago [-]
It required attention to detail, from a sysadmin / desktop admin perspective, but it was definitely possible and paid dividends in users being unable to completely destroy machines like they could on the DOS-based Windows versions. I put out a ton of Windows NT Workstation 4.0 and Windows 2000 Pro w/ least-privilege users. It was so convenient to be able to blow away a user's profile and start w/ a clean slate, for the user, w/o having to reload the machine.
flomo 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, I ran that way on principle, and you could mostly make it work. But not really OOB. Registry ACL templates and etc, qualify for a real PITA.
UAC and the other magic on Vista/7 mollified that by a lot.
RiverCrochet 12 hours ago [-]
There's a lot working against fundamental change of PC desktop OSes that corporations use, therefore OSes that Microsoft can make money from.
- Big software vendors (Autodesk, Adobe, etc.) making it difficult for Microsoft to deprecate or evolve APIs and/or design approaches to the OS.
- Cybersecurity/IT security groups strongly discouraging anything new as potentially dangerous (which is not incorrect).
- Non-tech people generally not caring about desktop PCs anymore - phones have that crown now.
- Non-tech people caring much more about interface than the actual underpinnings that make things work.
Outside of the PC there's some innovation happening, at least with the OS itself and not user interfaces. Check out Fuschia sometime.
jmward01 14 hours ago [-]
Looks like there is some negative feelings towards this comment. So if we aren't in a rut, what are the big revolutionary OS advancements that have happened since this time?
Lammy 13 hours ago [-]
This is a forum populated almost entirely by people whose day-to-day existence depends upon building the new stuff that sucks :) (mine too!)
mappu 12 hours ago [-]
Android (all apps sandboxed). Desktop OSes are still barely catching up to this one.
p_ing 13 hours ago [-]
Virtualization. FDE. Hot patching. Io Ring (io_uring), etc.
voidspark 6 hours ago [-]
Virtualization is old. I used VMWare on Windows 2000.
charcircuit 11 hours ago [-]
Windows 2k already had an io_uring equivalent. That's more of an example of Linux being out of date due to being based off UNIX.
p_ing 8 hours ago [-]
IOCP, which originated in NT 3.1, is not a circular buffer like io_uring, but both are completion-oriented.
Microsoft introduced I/O Rings, more or less a 1:1 copy of io_uring, in Windows 21H1.
Desktops have been in a rut for a decade. Windows has sucked post Win7 in ways that are either conspiracy or the most stinging indictment of managerial incompetence possible. Osx is good except it's key bindings are alien and the hardware is closed and apple hasn't improved it really at all in ten years and it has loads of inconsistencies with Linux cli. Linux has been in a huge rewrite of the desktop and graphics lift for no real end user benefit and flubbing the opportunity to make ground on windows while it tried to commit market share suicide.
3d compositing, ssds, mega displays, massive multi core, all completely wasted.
You know what I should be able to do? Hot execute windows and Linux and Osx on the same desktop without containerization that leaves 3d as an afterthought or worse a never thought.
codr7 13 hours ago [-]
Definitely stuck. We found a pretty strong optimum that no one has been willing to venture outside, strong enough to keep selling and that seems to be all that matters these days.
timewizard 10 hours ago [-]
It was during an era where there was actual competition over Operating Systems. OS/2 definitely pushed Microsoft hard. BeOS woke everyone up even if it wasn't on popular hardware. Bell labs was still experimenting with plan9. There were several commercial Unix vendors.
Monopolies. They ruin markets. Destroy products. Reduce wages. Induce nostalgia.
dehrmann 19 hours ago [-]
It's a shame ReactOS never got mature enough to be a serious competitor. If it had modern app and hidpi support but was suck in a 2000-era UI and didn't have feature bloat, it could be a great daily driver.
snvzz 14 hours ago [-]
ReactOS is not dead though. They just made a release.
And it has the 2000-era UI and the modern app support.
It's just dragging on other things, such as SMP and 64bit. But development focus seems to actually be focused on precisely these two.
nubinetwork 2 hours ago [-]
Can it run Firefox yet? The last time I tried reactOS, it BSODed just trying to launch Firefox... and don't even try using Windows drivers on it, it'll either hardlock, BSOD immediately, or during startup, regardless of whether you're in safe mode or not...
snvzz 57 minutes ago [-]
I have not tested it myself, but I hear that the latest release can run Firefox 52, whereas the previous one would, at most, run Firefox 48.
nubinetwork 2 hours ago [-]
Let's be real, Windows Server hasn't changed much since W2K... they may have slapped the 7/Vista UI onto it, but at its core, nothing has changed.
It still operates just fine for AD, DHCP, DNS, SMB, etc etc... the only thing they could drop without the majority freaking out is IIS.
kasabali 2 hours ago [-]
They 've then slapped Windows 8 UI into it, after that, Windows 10 UI, and lastly they've slapped the Windows 11 UI. The reason should be obvious.
synack 12 hours ago [-]
The desktop UX was good, but nearly every network service on Windows 2000 had a critical vulnerability at some point. The Code Red worm (MS01-033) comes to mind as particularly impactful. This was the golden age of stack smashing.
wolpoli 19 hours ago [-]
In the 90s, Windows was simple enough that I was able to read tech articles and understand a lot of what is going on inside, up to the point of Windows 2000, and to a certain extend, Windows XP. That completely changed with Vista/7 where I can no longer recognize the name of many processes that are running or understand what actions/situations make my computer lag.
Nowasdays, even through I don't worry anymore as Windows 11 is happy as long as you give it a quadcore cpu, ram, and an SSD, sometimes I still wonder why it writes 40GB to the SSD everyday.
tonyedgecombe 19 hours ago [-]
I don't know whether Windows is for corporate desktops, enterprise servers, PC manufacturers, Azure, home users or advertisers. It certainly doesn't feel like it is the right product for me anymore.
asjo 2 hours ago [-]
That's kinda mean. Surely Windows ME was peak Microsoft.
1970-01-01 14 hours ago [-]
If MS stripped *ALL* ads and bloatware (telemetry for calc??) out of Win 11 and restored the traditional UI of start menu + desktop, it would be fairly good overall. Certainly within their top 5. They really are close to peak yet again but cannot realize they are striving to make it worse.
Spooky23 13 hours ago [-]
11 is mostly a solution looking for a problem. I don’t do windows day to day anymore, but the folks I work with who do aren’t excited anymore.
drewcoo 13 hours ago [-]
"A computer on every desktop and Windows on every computer" was the company's goal. Ever since they claimed success on that one (glossing over the ubiquity of Linux everywhere else) they've been sorta directionless.
jayd16 8 hours ago [-]
For all I know, windows server 2025 is amazing, but have you priced it out? There's no way to justify it.
I actually like Windows despite their aversion to committing to a UI redesign but do I really need to pay $1100 (per core!?) for the hope (but not the promise) of no ads?
1970-01-01 15 hours ago [-]
Are we just doing OSes or are we doing the entire conglomerate?
#1 Windows 7
#2 DOS 5.0
#3 Office 2003
#4 Windows 95
Honorable mentions: IntelliMouse Optical and XBOX (2001)
msintellimsftw 11 hours ago [-]
[dead]
supportengineer 13 hours ago [-]
Windows 7 was my all-time favorite. I remember you could not use it straight out of the box, there was a whole bunch of UI tweaks that I would make right away. After that, it was perfect.
atlgator 9 hours ago [-]
Microsoft stopped being the innovator. Now they duplicate or appropriate the innovations of others.
bcoates 13 hours ago [-]
For me it's windows 7, if nothing else for being the first and last major Windows where Universal Search worked well.
The Windows 8.x line gets some credit for having the strongest pen interface integration, which regressed significantly in the 10 line, but the overall shell in Windows 8 was rough, and a lot of features were broken in the rushed out and mostly failed attempt to Appify windows and redesign much of the UI at the same time.
dfedbeef 12 hours ago [-]
People just like the Windows they used when they were younger. It's the same with movies, cars, whatever.
card_zero 12 hours ago [-]
Governments, diseases, weather.
markus_zhang 22 hours ago [-]
TBF XP and 7 are both decent. Everything went down after those, including the Ads, the update, etc.
I didn't upgrade to 10 until I purchased a used Dell laptop (which includes 10 prof) a few years ago, and I never used 11 and hopefully never needs to use it.
cosmic_cheese 20 hours ago [-]
I love 2000 and XP but 7 has a special spot for me because it’s a “modern” Windows (supporting proper alpha blending in its theme drawing and such) without the various problems that 8 and newer bring. I have an old laptop with it installed and booting it up is honestly refreshing. Its visual style is a little dated feeling but not that much.
vintagedave 19 hours ago [-]
I like it for the same reasons. I just wish it supported high DPI. It, and Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion era OSX, at high res would be peak desktop usability.
kevinpacheco 17 hours ago [-]
If you intend to stick with Windows for the long haul, you will have to upgrade eventually. I hung on to 7 for a while, but several apps stopped getting updates: iTunes, the Spotify desktop client, Google Chrome, and even Firefox dropped support. I was using iTunes to download podcasts, which after a while became impossible with some feeds because I would get an SSL error each time on that old version. For 10, the ESU period ends one year after 10/14/25 for consumers and three years for organizations. It's possible that apps will continue to receive updates during that time.
markus_zhang 15 hours ago [-]
Thanks, yeah, I figured. Maybe I can move to Linux in 5 years. I'm already using Linux for my dev laptop.
SirMaster 21 hours ago [-]
If you think 11 is bad, I bet 12 will be even worse. When 10 is unsupported and 12 is out, you will probably be reaching for 11 by then...
markus_zhang 20 hours ago [-]
I'm already moving into Linux for one of my laptops. If the drivers and desktop experiences are good enough (or bad enough in Windows) I might move 100% to Linux in a few years.
specproc 20 hours ago [-]
I made the jump a few years ago and the experience has been largely great. Lots of learning, which has been half the fun, and no goddamn ads in my start menu.
Totally usable as a daily driver, provided you don't need Windows only software. The year of linux on the desktop was probably about 2020.
wing-_-nuts 19 hours ago [-]
Steam's proton has made gaming on linux astoundingly good. The only thing that still needs improvement is mod support, as mod managers, game downgraders, bin patchers, some more involved mods involve little utilities written for windows that are not easily runnable on linux.
It is slowly improving though. The steam deck has moved things forward in leaps and bounds.
SirMaster 15 hours ago [-]
It seems like basically all the games I play aren't supported on this unfortunately and it feels like they never will be.
DrillShopper 19 hours ago [-]
Even then, a VM can get you really far.
If you need direct hardware access (like for gaming) then you can run a passthrough VM. You can do that even on a single video card system.
Teever 15 hours ago [-]
> You can do that even on a single video card system.
Fair enough! I am probably just projecting my own probable fate haha.
Alupis 13 hours ago [-]
Come try out Fedora, or whatever flavor of Linux you want.
It's surprisingly fantastic for almost all modern computing tasks. Yes, it's true, some software won't work, such as Adobe Photoshop, but most people aren't using software like that anyway. For gaming, I'd say we're close to 99% of games supporting Linux out of the box on Steam. The few left that still don't choose not to via kernel-level anti-cheat or forgetting to toggle a checkbox for Linux support (EasyAntiCheat and friends).
The point is, it "Just Works" for darn near everything these days and is a very pleasant experience. Try it out!
supportengineer 13 hours ago [-]
The best Linux I have ever seen is Linux Mint. I tried it out because I needed to do something with firewire, but all of the other Linux kernels had dropped firewire, and it was the only one left that still supported it. I found it to be intuitive and friendly and everything just worked.
Alupis 13 hours ago [-]
Mint leans towards the "ultra-stable" side of Linux Distros. Fedora leans towards the "bleeding-edge". Both are great in their own ways. If you want the latest and greatest of everything, Fedora is a great pick. If you just want long-term stability, Mint is a great pick. With both, you can choose the Desktop Environment you prefer (I like KDE personally, but many like Gnome, MATE, Cinnamon, etc).
That's not to say Fedora is unstable - it's just that it iterates fast to keep pace with packages as they release new versions. There's a new major Fedora release every year, for example.
There really isn't a wrong choice here.
1970-01-01 13 hours ago [-]
Eh, this is going to sound like a I'm a stick in the mud, but I've tried Linux about a dozen times now, and every time has eventually led to 'a Linux evening' that disenchants me from the fantasy and back to reality. It's fantastic as a server OS, however.
Alupis 12 hours ago [-]
Try it again if you haven't recently. I'm unsure what specific issues you encountered, but anecdotally I can say I've been driving Fedora full-time on my home workstation for nearly 2 years now. I love it. I drove Fedora full-time on my laptop off-and-on for nearly a decade as well before that.
For me, gaming was what kept me away. But, besides a few titles, it's been a non-issue. It was very pleasantly surprising.
My desktop runs Fedora Kinoite[1] - an immutable version of Fedora. It poses a set of unique challenges for a development workstation (my primary use), but has resulted in rock-solid stability through several major OS upgrades, and a lot of development-related hackery.
I don't see myself going back to Windows anytime in the future. Every time I'm at the office an on my Win11 machine, I remember why I switched in the first place. Just my experience though.
Often Linux is great, until
You update some esoteric dependency that breaks a bunch of stuff, and fixing it is just a little past your experience level …
Melatonic 15 hours ago [-]
Windows 10 LTSC IOT has all the bloat and spyware stripped out and will get security updates for years. It's super lean.
Will third party apps keep installing updates ? Hard to say. The adobe suite already refuses to install the latest version on any LTSC (for no reason other than they don't want to support it - it works great) so who knows.
Suspect my next OS will be Windows 12 LTSC if I can hold out long enough - every other Windows version alway seems to be experimental crap going all the way back to ME (millennium edition)
jiggawatts 14 hours ago [-]
I tell customers that they should use LTSC for things like virtual desktops. You need stability, such as it not randomly deciding to install a 4 GB game like Minecraft for every user as a “critical update”.
Microsoft joined a meeting and told the customer that they don’t agree with my recommendations because they want to make sure all users get the “latest experiences”.
There’s your problem right there: pushing your own KPIs instead of what’s best for the customers.
Clubber 21 hours ago [-]
I believe XP was when Windows Activation started, so that's a pretty big negative for me. Other than that, XP, 7 and 10 were pretty good, although 10 introduced advertisements if I'm not mistaken.
milesvp 21 hours ago [-]
XP also inexplicably required at least twice the ram as 2000. when XP came out that was a significant cost, and I personally was able to salvage many laptops at the time by downgrading them from XP. Eventually XP became the default for me because ram got a lot cheaper and the service packs and driver support made it more viable.
But then, tangentially, I started using ubuntu at work, in a sort of misguided belief it would make me a better sysadmin, and it was only a matter of time before I couldn’t stand windows at home as well.
I thought win7 was pretty solid, though I didn’t upgrade until well after win8 was shipping. But lucky for me, proton finally got really good, and that allowed me to basically skip win10+. Now it’s only for the rare tool that I even boot into my windows partitions anymore. When I do, being bombarded by random attention grabbers is completely jarring and I want flee as fast as I can.
DeathArrow 19 hours ago [-]
I think I am not the only one who memorized this: FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8
SirFatty 19 hours ago [-]
Raises hand: I always remembered the first series of numbers as f*ck GW (as in Bush).
Lammy 14 hours ago [-]
I always heard it as FuCK GateWay (the PC maker)
netsharc 9 hours ago [-]
That's XP though, not Windows 2000...
jmclnx 15 hours ago [-]
I only used Windows at work and I was very happy with NT, when XP came out I was able to go to Linux (RHEL) for my workstation at work.
I never had Windows 2000, but lots of people said it worked great compared to the other Windows systems.
But really for me, the best M/S setup was DOS with Desqview.
turtlebits 14 hours ago [-]
This brings back a lot of nostalgia and I wholeheartedly agree. Back then I ran Windows 2000 server beta 2 on a dual proc system with P2-300s. It was rock solid.
sitzkrieg 19 hours ago [-]
the point of an OS is to be out of the way, w2k was both the best and last windows to do so
keyringlight 15 hours ago [-]
The way I see it (and similarly with browsers now) is that the OS is a venue providing a stage for others to perform on, they provide the facilities so every act doesn't need to build their own venue. Most of the time people don't visit/use a venue for the sake of it.
boxedemp 7 hours ago [-]
Hard agree. 2000 was capable and never felt bloated.
deafpolygon 2 hours ago [-]
Didn't expect to see this-but after Windows 95/98, I went to Windows 2000 for a long time, didn't switch to Windows until 10/11. After Win2k, I went to Linux because I wasn't a fan of XP/7. (I know this is an unpopular take.
gigel82 19 hours ago [-]
Nostalgically, yes, Windows 2000 was amazing. At the time of launch, on period hardware, it was the fastest and most lightweight OS released by Microsoft. And looking back, I always appreciate that I can look in Task Manager and immediately recognize all of the processes by name.
Windows 7 (except for the last few updates that introduced telemetry and ads) comes in as a close second. But everything after is just bloated crapware.
dlachausse 19 hours ago [-]
The only bad things I remember about Windows 2000 are that some software written for Windows 3.x and 9x had compatibility issues and it took an eternity to boot up. It was go take a coffee break as soon as you turn your computer on for the day bad.
sjsdaiuasgdia 19 hours ago [-]
IIRC, Win2K would wait for most / all service startups to complete before showing the login prompt. XP and later would allow login to occur while many services were still starting up.
It's a tradeoff. A Win2K system was pretty responsive when you log in after a reboot/startup, but you've got to wait for that experience. In the days of spinning disks and single core CPUs, you had to fight those still-starting services for resources, making the first several minutes of XP usage painful.
olyjohn 18 hours ago [-]
Win2k also had the smoothest mouse movements that I had ever seen. If you had a PS/2 Mouse, you could turn up the sample rate up to the max. Dragging windows looked incredible. Even my Mac to this day with a fancy brand new 4k display can't match it. My mouse still looks blurry as it moves across the screen.
keyringlight 15 hours ago [-]
I remember using the BootVis tool (IIRC was an early part of what would be the performance toolkit) to profile the startup process, and then you could it to optimize the location of data loaded from HDDs to reduce the seeking required. Also back when PATA was still in use depending on your motherboard I seem to remember making sure windows wouldn't try to autodetect link speed on unused attachments as that could take ages trying to find something that wasn't there.
antod 15 hours ago [-]
I used the NT 5 betas for a while, and loved alerts not stealing focus. But that came back in the released W2K, and I remember being slightly annoyed by it.
mixmastamyk 14 hours ago [-]
It was anything but lightweight on a Pentium 90 or Pro, or whatever was common at the time. Really needed to upgrade to 16MB of RAM (lol) which was expensive at the time. Why only business and not normal folks used it.
appointment 11 hours ago [-]
You are confusing 2k with NT 3.1. Win2k was not happy with anything less than 128 MB RAM.
edit: changed to 128 MB. It was XP that needed 256 MB to be any good.
mixmastamyk 10 hours ago [-]
Must have been NT4 I was thinking about, only used 3.51 at work.
andromaton 13 hours ago [-]
It felt solid.
dangus 8 hours ago [-]
The glasses are rose-tinted. There were a number of little bits missing from Windows 2000 that were helpful to have in XP, and you could change the theme to make it look just like Windows 2000.
And I really don't know how Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 doesn't win this battle.
voidspark 6 hours ago [-]
Context. We upgraded from Windows 98 to Windows 2000. That was a major upgrade. First stable NT platform that we could use for everything, including games.
nubinetwork 2 hours ago [-]
To be fair, driver support sucked ass for NT3/4, and I don't think 4 even had DirectX support...
ryao 13 hours ago [-]
Microsoft never should have dropped Xenix to invent its own OS.
RiverCrochet 12 hours ago [-]
One cool thing Microsoft did with Windows NT was the whole local security model and a filesystem that supported them (NTFS), which was definitely richer than UNIX. I don't really know if other UNIXes at the time had anything more than the 16-bit uid and gid and mode bits on everything the filesystem. I wonder how it would have looked if Microsoft kept Xenix as the base and added ACLs on top of it, for example.
drewcoo 13 hours ago [-]
Microsoft bought Dave Cutler so that he could reinvent his OS (VMS), which became the NT line.
p_ing 13 hours ago [-]
Why would anyone pay for Yet Another UNIX?
Plus Dave Cutler hated UNIX.
Dwedit 12 hours ago [-]
You wouldn't want to connect a fresh installation of Windows 2000 to the internet today. "Net Send" and default-on Administrative Shares are some brain-dead design decisions that made sense on a trusted LAN, but not the Internet.
graycat 11 hours ago [-]
Okay, mostly use Windows 7 Professional (with 100+ "updates") for general purpose and software development but for such usage and/or a Web server what to get now? Windows 2xxx?
DeathArrow 19 hours ago [-]
There are software and scripts to decrapify Windows 11. After uninstalling and stopping everything that's not needed and making start menu and the bar behave like in Windows 7, it's quite decent.
This adds maybe 20 more minutes to install time but it's worth.
psyclobe 13 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately all that crap eventually comes back. Microsoft likes to reset settings… I’m pretty sure I must’ve spent the majority of my youth setting the same explorer settings over and over and over again … And it never ends with any custom setup you do; given enough time it reverts.
bigstrat2003 15 hours ago [-]
I don't think anyone doubts that you can do this. It's more that I refuse to pay for an OS which needs to be de-crapped in the first place. If Microsoft can't make something which prioritizes my needs above their corporate metrics, then they don't get my money.
Melatonic 15 hours ago [-]
LTSC is likely what you want then (needs to be purchased through a VAR but it's not hard to find a smaller one that will sell single copies)
glaucon 12 hours ago [-]
Can you just expand on the significance of LTSC for a personal user ? MS says it's for "Medical Devices, Kiosks ..." but I presume the reason the you mention it is that it's a version of Windows 10 that is expected to receive security updates for X years into the future ?
Is it also de-crappified ? No games, requests for Microsoft accounts etc ?
abhiyerra 14 hours ago [-]
My company has access to these licenses to resell through our distributor Pax8. Contact me (profile) if interested.
debian3 20 hours ago [-]
I don’t know why they always alternate a good with a bad release. Technically Windows 12 should be good.
SirMaster 15 hours ago [-]
It feels like Windows 12 will be riddled with AI stuff nobody wants and ads, and forced to be online and connected to Microsoft in some way.
dlachausse 20 hours ago [-]
People always say that, but it’s not really been completely true.
< 3.1 Bad
3.1 Good
3.11 WfW Good
NT 3.5 Okay
95 Good
NT 4.0 Good
98 Good
Me Bad
2000 Good
XP Good
Vista Bad
7 Good
8 Bad
8.1 Okay
10 Good
11 Bad
There just really isn’t a pattern to it.
nobleach 19 hours ago [-]
XP was the last that I really REALLY used. I've had Windows 7 (on my work machine that I didn't use) and I have a Windows 10 machine that I boot from time to time when I want to mess with recording gear. But I kinda fell into "they're all bad, I was just used to them".
I'll give my prime example. I used to know Device Manager/Control Panel SO well. I could just get things done. Now I have to hunt around forever to do any sort of hardware related task. In their attempt to make it "so easy, even your grandma could use it" they've alienated power users. My grandma still has to call me to help her attach a printer... but now I have to say, "I dunno... let me watch a YouTube video and pray that it matches the sub-version that you're using".
mhitza 11 hours ago [-]
I don't know how good Windows 95 was in practice, but in our country where 99.9% of internet cafes didn't have licenses, or service pack updates (if they even had any for the 95 variant), it was a pretty easy Windows to DoS via the netbios vulnerability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinNuke
acheron 20 hours ago [-]
Windows 3.0 was good. 3.1 was a minor improvement.
NikkiA 20 hours ago [-]
The only 'bad' thing about Vista was it's change (and thus deprecation of many drivers) of driver model. Once tweaked and with good native drivers it was the first good 64bit windows - far more reliable than XP64. At least until 7 came out.
karmakaze 19 hours ago [-]
NT 3.51 Best
These are also mixing two separate streams: Win3.x/9x/ME and NT+
tonyedgecombe 19 hours ago [-]
>95 Good
That's arguable, I thought it was poor at the time.
dlachausse 19 hours ago [-]
On well supported hardware 95 was a major upgrade. The Start menu, long file names, preemptive multitasking, plug and play hardware, and Direct X gaming support. In many ways it even surpassed MacOS at the time.
TheOtherHobbes 19 hours ago [-]
Windows users have low expectations. I still have PTSD from all the problems 9x caused me.
hyperman1 19 hours ago [-]
When Win10 started, it was clearly Bad. No good reason for updates, invasive privacy-breaking telemetry, updates at random moments of the day, and everything was a little different but nothing was better. People flat out refused to upgrade when it was given for free. Microsoft had to force it trough windows update, and did multiple rounds of breaking software people explicitly installed to block the upgrade.
When did it become good? WSL and DirectX 12 were real changes, but all in all, my impression is that the user has been frog boiled over the years, with 2K,XP and 7 becoming distant memories.
supportengineer 13 hours ago [-]
I remember that too. Microsoft was more aggressive and hostile towards the user than ever before.
NikkiA 20 hours ago [-]
Win 11 and Vista have been unfairly maligned, with some minor tweaks (and start11) both are solid performant windows releases.
bigstrat2003 15 hours ago [-]
Vista was indeed fine. I used it for many years and had nary a problem with it. The problem with 11 isn't the core (everyone seems to agree that is fine), it's that Microsoft insists on putting ads and other user-hostile BS in.
Modified3019 14 hours ago [-]
I basically skipped windows XP entirely, only seeing it on other people’s computers.
I staying on a thinkpad R31 with win2k until I got a R61 (4gb ram) with vista on it several months after vista’s release. At that point it seemed like driver and other early teething had been worked out, so my experience was pretty positive.
When I eventually moved to win7 I didn’t notice any real difference.
dlachausse 19 hours ago [-]
Windows 11 is the only version of Windows I’ve used where the taskbar routinely crashes on login and refuses to load.
mystified5016 19 hours ago [-]
I think the vista hate is well earned. Remember when Microsoft had to trick users into trying it by calling it 'Mojave' instead?
olyjohn 19 hours ago [-]
Also the unending and relentless UAC prompts.
tomwheeler 18 hours ago [-]
It felt like malicious compliance. Oh, you want security? OK, here you go, hope you choke on it.
znpy 20 hours ago [-]
Windows Vista was essentially unusable on release unless you had very high-end hardware.
A couple of weeks after release the first step after getting a new computer was changed from "downloading firefox" to "downgrade to windows xp". Unironically, many people did that.
NikkiA 20 hours ago [-]
And that unusuability was mostly due to the driver model change, once native Vista drivers appeared it performed better than XP/XP64 unless you were running old video hardware that couldn't handle aero - in which case you were still better off running Vista with the classic UI, although that did entail forgoing the Luna styling.
ack_complete 10 hours ago [-]
Even with native WDDM drivers it performed poorly in desktop graphics, because Vista also removed all GDI hardware acceleration support. This caused many 2D graphics operations to execute in software, or worse, an even slower mix of hardware and software rendering. Windows 7 improved on this by re-adding hardware acceleration for some GDI primitives and adding aperture windows to reduce DWM memory footprint.
ruined 20 hours ago [-]
they should’ve just skipped 11 like they skipped 9
omoikane 19 hours ago [-]
The story I heard[1] was that Microsoft skipped 9 because people used to check for "Windows 9" prefix string to identify 95 and 98:
It's the Register and therefore too worthless to get worked up about, but their naming a server version of Windows as peak anything is an indication that they probably just polled a few drunks at a bar.
Rendered at 11:44:59 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
By Windows 2000 Server, they finally had the architecture right, and had flushed out most of the 16 bit legacy.
The big win with Windows 7 was that they finally figured out how to make it stop crashing. There were two big fixes. First, the Static Driver Verifier. This verified that kernel drivers couldn't crash the rest of the kernel. First large scale application of proof of correctness technology. Drivers could still fail, but not overwrite other parts of the kernel. This put a huge dent into driver-induced crashes.
Second was a dump classifier. Early machine learning. When the system crashed, a dump was sent to Microsoft. The classifier tried to bring similar dumps together, so one developer got a big collection of similar crashes. When you have hundreds of dumps of the same bug, locating the bug gets much easier.
Between both of those, the Blue Screen of Death mostly disappeared.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver_Verifier
It's not used on production machines and it does nothing to prevent a badly written driver from crashing the kernel.
Nah. 2007 era.
Office 2007 introduced the ribbon to the main apps: Word, Excel, I think Powerpoint. The next version it was added to Outlook and Access, IIRC.
I still use Word 2003 because it's the last pre-Ribbon version.
Windows 2000 Pro was the peak of the Windows UX. They could not leave well enough alone.
1. I don't need to find stuff.
I knew where stuff is.
2. I read text. I only need menus. I don't need toolbars etc. and so I turn them all off.
I cannot read icons. I have to guess. It's like searching for 3 things I need in an unfamiliar supermarket.
3. Menus are very space efficient.
Ribbons hog precious vertical space. This is doubly disastrous on widescreens.
4. I am a keyboard user.
I use keys to navigate menus. It's much faster than aiming at targets with the mouse and I don't need to look. The navigation keys don't work any more.
Ribbons help those who don't know what they are doing and do not care about speed and efficiency.
They punish experts who do know, don't search, don't hunt, and customise themselves and their apps for speed and efficient use of time and screen space.
Though personally, I’m increasingly delighted by the quicksilver - style palette / action tools that vscode and IntelliJ use for infrequently used options. Just hit the hotkey and type, and the option you want appears under the enter key.
Frankly, I'm motivated sure customizing is a win either. I fo a lot of remote support and it's nice to have a consistent interface.
Personally I find it faster than menus, and easier to find things I seldom use.
But I appreciate it's a personal taste thing, and some older folks prefer older interfaces.
And users are way more important than the tiny group of tech support.
The ribbon is a great fit for Office style apps with their large number of buttons and options.
Especially after they added the ability to minimize, expand on hover, or keep expanded (originally this was the only option), the ribbon has been a great addition.
But then they also had to go ahead and dump it in places where it had no reason to be, such as Windows Explorer.
This is also what I hear about GNOME. "OK, yes, GNOME 3.x was bad, but by GNOME 40 it's fine."
No, it's not. None of my core objections have been fixed.
Both ribbons and GNOME are every bit as bad as they were in the first release, nearly 20 years ago.
To me this is the exact use case where it fails. I find it way harder to parse as it's visually intense (tons of icons, buttons of various sizes, those little arrows that are sometimes in group corners...).
Office 2003 had menus that were at most 20-25 entries long with icons that were just the right size to hint what the entries are about, yet not get in the way. The ribbon in Office 2007 (Word, for example) has several tabs full of icons stretching the entire window width or even more. Mnemonics were also made impractical as they dynamically bind to the buttons of the currently visible tab instead of the actions themselves.
It is great as idea, pity that Microsoft keeps failing to deliver in developer tooling that actually makes COM fun to use, instead of something we have to endure.
From OLE 1.0 pages long infrastructure in Windows 16 bit, via ActiveX, OCX, MFC, ATL, WTL, .NET (RCW/CCW), WinRT with. NET Native and C++/CX, C++/WinRT, WIL, nano-COM, .NET 5+ COM,....
Not only do they keep rebooting how to approach COM development, in terms of Visual Studio tooling, one is worse than the other, not at the same feature parity, only to be dropped after the team's KPI change focus.
When they made the Hilo demo for Windows Vista and later Windows 7 developers with such great focus on being back on COM, after how Longhorn went down, a better tooling would be expected.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/announcing-hilo/
We got to a point around 2015 where drive-by exploit kit developers just weren't targeting XP and IE8 anymore. Phishing landing pages would roll through all the payloads they had and silently exit.
Curious about this. How does it work? Does it use any methods invented by Leslie Lamport?
How did crowdstrike end up crashing windows though?
Well, the Crowdstrike driver isn't (wasn't?) static. It loaded a file that Crowdstrike changed with an update.
Most drivers pass through rigorous verification on every change. But Crowdstrike is (was?) allowed to change their driver whenever they want by designing it to load a file.
MS tried to use the incident to get the regulators to waive the requirement.
Only because OP didn't give the full story. Microsoft wanted to close direct access to the kernel. AV companies complained to regulators in the EU. The EU asked Microsoft if they were willing to maintain access to replacement functionality and to stick to using that functionality for its own separately sold AV products. Microsoft said no, and instead of fighting, just let Windows wither on the vine with full kernel access for all the bozos. Crowdstrike was inevitable.
Do you like nanny states? How about nanny corporations?
It is miles away from the original and you can immediately see its Linux because things don’t quite line up. Huge difference in quality, attention to detail, and the entire interface becomes unpleasant to look at.
Also, Linux power management and lack of hibernation means its useless on laptops
I gotten better battery life under Linux than on Windows on every Thinkpad I've owned in the last 15 years or so.
That's not to say everything is smooth sailing. Audio is a battle I'll still be fighting on my deathbed in ~40 years.
It generally doesn't work for people buying computers from vendors who use hardware were the manufacturer doesn't disclose the documentation. Just don't give money to those who seek to prevent free software.
- My wireless card isn’t detected
- I’m using Linux mint, which means I’m still on X11. Some software doesn’t support X as well as wayland. Some only supports X I guess?
- I use Davinci resolve - which has a native Linux install. But I need to use some weird tool to convert it to a dpkg to install and run it. It doesn’t have a window bar - so the only way I can change the size of the window is by right clicking in the task bar
- My two monitors have different DPI - so I need to use window scaling. This confuses IntelliJ - which made all the text super tiny for some reason. I have a DPI override for that in a weird Java config file.
- I want consistent copy / paste shortcuts. I can’t use ctrl+C in terminal because that’s SIGINT. So I have it set to meta+C. But I can’t bind meta+C in IntelliJ because of Java limitations. So my copy/paste shortcut is just different in different apps now.
- Smooth scrolling is still an inconsistent mess between different programs. Particularly Firefox.
I’ve also been running into problems where my second monitor won’t turn on after I resume the computer from sleep. But apparently that’s a bug that affects windows as well when using recent nvidia drivers, so that isn’t Linux’s fault.
I’m not saying it’s bad. It mostly works great! I love my workstation, and I’m enjoying distancing myself from Apple’s increasingly buggy software stack. But it’s far from perfect.
I’m happy enough to use Linux despite all its warts. But when my parents ask for a new computer, I recommend macOS or windows.
I made the switch to a *nix OS with XFCE 20 years ago. Couldn’t be happier.
https://reactos.org/donate/
Surprisingly close. I recently tried its package manager and installed a recent Python! So better than the original XP-era Windows in some respects.
Honest to god, if an IdP like Okta made an Active Directory replacement that ran via container instead of a full-fat VM or appliance template, I’d gladly toss ADDS out the window with all its stupid CALs. Basic directory functionality in 2025 shouldn’t require a bloated ADDS/LDAPS virtual machine to run, especially with the move to cloud providers for identity. If you make it easier to do identity without ADDS, you remove Microsof’s major trojan horse into the enterprise - and M365’s as well.
- Runs Windows update and reboots without my permission
- Keeps trying to make me switch to Bing
- Keeps trying to make me use Microsoft Account vs. local account
- Does a crappy job of reopening windows on reboot. Miserable copy of macOS.
- Fan spinning on my laptop with no easy way to figure out what process is consuming CPU
- Flat UI
- No built-in way to view markdown files
- No tool to graphically show where my diskspace went; allowing me to find and delete large files
- Printers keep getting disconnected; it is easier to print from iPhone thanks to bonjour
- No dictionary app (macOS has it)
- Can't airdrop to iPhone (3rd party apps can do it)
- No screenshot tool that allows you to type text (in addition to circling and highlighting and arrows)
- No command-line zip / unzip
- No instant search (macOS has had it for how many years now?)
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...
Markdown rendering is also available:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...
I agree with a bunch of your criticism, but modern PowerShell is pretty decent and has a lot of tools.
And behind me, was a G4 Cube that could open the System Preferences app off of a spinning hard drive in less time.
What happened to us?
Seriously though I think Microsoft has mostly given up on the B2C market. They have good capture of B2B with hardware and software. Why make great products when you can make mediocre products that people have no choice but to use?
> Does a crappy job of reopening windows on reboot. Miserable copy of macOS.
Please! Can windows figure this out and can Macs figure out how to restore window to monitor configuration as well as Windows.
- multiple heap allocators
- have to install runtimes, even for C
- all useful permissions are off by default
- entire GUI is permeated by "Not Invented Here" mistakes
- msi is opaque and crusty
Yes it does. It's just called Compress-Archive/Expand-Archive.
Still kicking myself for not getting an Axiotron Modbook running Snow Leopard.
That's the issue.. every new OS has brought some features or stability improvements that are huge upgrades over the older OS.
WSL 2 is a must-have for me now, so Windows 10/11 is much better than anything that came before in that way. I may be alone in this, but I actually think Windows 11 has the best design of any Windows so far. The problem as usual, is that they haven't made the entire OS consistent. I wouldn't mind the new control panel if you could actually change every setting in windows in that one control panel.. and not have to dig through to find control panels that still date back to Win2k. And the new/old context menu in explorer is an absolute disaster. Then new design is fine.. but how the hell did they manage to not make it support all the options of the old context menu?
If you could get winterm on it and recent Firefox it’d be quite usable. Perhaps ReactOS one day.
Windows 7 with classic UI is probably the most-recent decent version.
It ran all of my games, stable as hell, quite light with none of the bullshit added later, none of the graphical bullshit added by XP but still classic Chicago.
The only thing that could make it better were the UI rendering engine introduced with Vista and its enhanced driver and security model.
There will be a much, much higher prevalence of computer enthusiasts on this board, not just people looking for a paycheck
But there is problem.. HW.. The pool of old HW is shrinking, and one day I will not be able to run it anymore.. I guess I will move to Linux. There are few nice and lightweight distros...
Of course that innocence was lost with Welchia and other issues, but Windows 2000 made the year 1999 feel like ancient history in 2001.
[edit] 3.1 should have been windows for worgkroups 3.11
Sorta. It was real pain-in-the-ass to run 2000 as a regular (non-administrator) user. Assuming your software worked at all that way, as even Office 2000 had some issues. UAC was necessary.
UAC and the other magic on Vista/7 mollified that by a lot.
- Big software vendors (Autodesk, Adobe, etc.) making it difficult for Microsoft to deprecate or evolve APIs and/or design approaches to the OS.
- Cybersecurity/IT security groups strongly discouraging anything new as potentially dangerous (which is not incorrect).
- Non-tech people generally not caring about desktop PCs anymore - phones have that crown now.
- Non-tech people caring much more about interface than the actual underpinnings that make things work.
Outside of the PC there's some innovation happening, at least with the OS itself and not user interfaces. Check out Fuschia sometime.
Microsoft introduced I/O Rings, more or less a 1:1 copy of io_uring, in Windows 21H1.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/ioringap...
https://windows-internals.com/i-o-rings-when-one-i-o-operati...
https://windows-internals.com/ioring-vs-io_uring-a-compariso...
Windows 8/2012 R2 did introduce Registered I/O for WinSock which is very similar to I/O Rings and io_uring.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...
Win11 does have something similar: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/ioringap...
3d compositing, ssds, mega displays, massive multi core, all completely wasted.
You know what I should be able to do? Hot execute windows and Linux and Osx on the same desktop without containerization that leaves 3d as an afterthought or worse a never thought.
Monopolies. They ruin markets. Destroy products. Reduce wages. Induce nostalgia.
And it has the 2000-era UI and the modern app support.
It's just dragging on other things, such as SMP and 64bit. But development focus seems to actually be focused on precisely these two.
It still operates just fine for AD, DHCP, DNS, SMB, etc etc... the only thing they could drop without the majority freaking out is IIS.
Nowasdays, even through I don't worry anymore as Windows 11 is happy as long as you give it a quadcore cpu, ram, and an SSD, sometimes I still wonder why it writes 40GB to the SSD everyday.
I actually like Windows despite their aversion to committing to a UI redesign but do I really need to pay $1100 (per core!?) for the hope (but not the promise) of no ads?
#1 Windows 7
#2 DOS 5.0
#3 Office 2003
#4 Windows 95
Honorable mentions: IntelliMouse Optical and XBOX (2001)
The Windows 8.x line gets some credit for having the strongest pen interface integration, which regressed significantly in the 10 line, but the overall shell in Windows 8 was rough, and a lot of features were broken in the rushed out and mostly failed attempt to Appify windows and redesign much of the UI at the same time.
I didn't upgrade to 10 until I purchased a used Dell laptop (which includes 10 prof) a few years ago, and I never used 11 and hopefully never needs to use it.
Totally usable as a daily driver, provided you don't need Windows only software. The year of linux on the desktop was probably about 2020.
It is slowly improving though. The steam deck has moved things forward in leaps and bounds.
If you need direct hardware access (like for gaming) then you can run a passthrough VM. You can do that even on a single video card system.
Like with consumer video cards? Tell me more.
I don't believe you have to VBIOS patch anymore
It's surprisingly fantastic for almost all modern computing tasks. Yes, it's true, some software won't work, such as Adobe Photoshop, but most people aren't using software like that anyway. For gaming, I'd say we're close to 99% of games supporting Linux out of the box on Steam. The few left that still don't choose not to via kernel-level anti-cheat or forgetting to toggle a checkbox for Linux support (EasyAntiCheat and friends).
The point is, it "Just Works" for darn near everything these days and is a very pleasant experience. Try it out!
That's not to say Fedora is unstable - it's just that it iterates fast to keep pace with packages as they release new versions. There's a new major Fedora release every year, for example.
There really isn't a wrong choice here.
For me, gaming was what kept me away. But, besides a few titles, it's been a non-issue. It was very pleasantly surprising.
My desktop runs Fedora Kinoite[1] - an immutable version of Fedora. It poses a set of unique challenges for a development workstation (my primary use), but has resulted in rock-solid stability through several major OS upgrades, and a lot of development-related hackery.
I don't see myself going back to Windows anytime in the future. Every time I'm at the office an on my Win11 machine, I remember why I switched in the first place. Just my experience though.
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/kinoite/
Will third party apps keep installing updates ? Hard to say. The adobe suite already refuses to install the latest version on any LTSC (for no reason other than they don't want to support it - it works great) so who knows.
Suspect my next OS will be Windows 12 LTSC if I can hold out long enough - every other Windows version alway seems to be experimental crap going all the way back to ME (millennium edition)
Microsoft joined a meeting and told the customer that they don’t agree with my recommendations because they want to make sure all users get the “latest experiences”.
There’s your problem right there: pushing your own KPIs instead of what’s best for the customers.
But then, tangentially, I started using ubuntu at work, in a sort of misguided belief it would make me a better sysadmin, and it was only a matter of time before I couldn’t stand windows at home as well.
I thought win7 was pretty solid, though I didn’t upgrade until well after win8 was shipping. But lucky for me, proton finally got really good, and that allowed me to basically skip win10+. Now it’s only for the rare tool that I even boot into my windows partitions anymore. When I do, being bombarded by random attention grabbers is completely jarring and I want flee as fast as I can.
I never had Windows 2000, but lots of people said it worked great compared to the other Windows systems.
But really for me, the best M/S setup was DOS with Desqview.
Windows 7 (except for the last few updates that introduced telemetry and ads) comes in as a close second. But everything after is just bloated crapware.
It's a tradeoff. A Win2K system was pretty responsive when you log in after a reboot/startup, but you've got to wait for that experience. In the days of spinning disks and single core CPUs, you had to fight those still-starting services for resources, making the first several minutes of XP usage painful.
edit: changed to 128 MB. It was XP that needed 256 MB to be any good.
And I really don't know how Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 doesn't win this battle.
Plus Dave Cutler hated UNIX.
This adds maybe 20 more minutes to install time but it's worth.
Is it also de-crappified ? No games, requests for Microsoft accounts etc ?
< 3.1 Bad
3.1 Good
3.11 WfW Good
NT 3.5 Okay
95 Good
NT 4.0 Good
98 Good
Me Bad
2000 Good
XP Good
Vista Bad
7 Good
8 Bad
8.1 Okay
10 Good
11 Bad
There just really isn’t a pattern to it.
I'll give my prime example. I used to know Device Manager/Control Panel SO well. I could just get things done. Now I have to hunt around forever to do any sort of hardware related task. In their attempt to make it "so easy, even your grandma could use it" they've alienated power users. My grandma still has to call me to help her attach a printer... but now I have to say, "I dunno... let me watch a YouTube video and pray that it matches the sub-version that you're using".
These are also mixing two separate streams: Win3.x/9x/ME and NT+
That's arguable, I thought it was poor at the time.
When did it become good? WSL and DirectX 12 were real changes, but all in all, my impression is that the user has been frog boiled over the years, with 2K,XP and 7 becoming distant memories.
I staying on a thinkpad R31 with win2k until I got a R61 (4gb ram) with vista on it several months after vista’s release. At that point it seemed like driver and other early teething had been worked out, so my experience was pretty positive.
When I eventually moved to win7 I didn’t notice any real difference.
A couple of weeks after release the first step after getting a new computer was changed from "downloading firefox" to "downgrade to windows xp". Unironically, many people did that.