What y’all talking about?
Not really
Windows 7 was pretty, it was customisable, it was stable. And microshaft had yet to start fucking about with ads everywhere and invasive “features”. Peak windows right there.
XP was also pretty good for its time. At that point Linux and OSX had caught up and surpassed it in many ways, but it did what it had to without getting in the way.
95 was an innovator if anything, ahead of pretty much anything else on desktop at the time, even if it DID fart and die whenever someone looked at it funny.
It was always a proprietary creation by an anticompetitive tech megacorp, and therefore bad from THAT angle, but it didn’t start being truly shite from a pure user experience angle until like. 8.
Win 7 was ok but remember, it still came with three control panels, a fucking registry and 8bit palette drwatson icon in system32 along with gigabytes of absolutely useless shit.
It was good for a windows, but it was still windows.
Nothing wrong with the Registry
It’s a different way of handling things compared to how Linux (and most unixes) does it with 18391823 text files
But it’s a perfectly functional and sensible solution for storing system configurations.
The registery is much easier to break, much harder to debug and much harder to fix, UNIX config is more human-friendly, I’ll never mess with the registery again
In theory having a database of configuration settings isn’t a horrible idea.
But the execution was terrible.
The technology behind the registry is fine (which is what I think @VinesNFluff meant)
But it’s execution in Windows was ass
In theory, a configuration manager with DB-like abilities (to maintain relationships, schematic integrity, and to abstract the file storage details), isn’t a bad idea
But the registry as it is today is pure pain
A centralized place to store settings (e.g. the registery) isn’t a bad idea in and of itself.
That.
I’ll add that a lot of the issues people have with the registry have less to do with the registry itself (it’s just – A database of settings. Nothing shocking about that) and a lot to do with Windows’ philosophy and the problems that creates.
Like yes, the registry of a computer that has been running windows for a few years is a bloated mess which creates a bunch of problems of its own – But that’s not in and of itself because the registry is a centralised binary database.
Rather it is because – Well. Microsoft. Tech corporations in general. Want computers to behave like magic boxes. Not machines you have to learn to operate. This means that whenever you install something or modify something on windows, you are left in the dark as to a lot of the stuff going on under the hood. Windows error messages are very obscure and nonspecific. When you install something, do you know what it has added to your registry? What dlls it has dropped around your machine? And with so many third party programmes and utilities dropping into the system, that shit builds up, and not even an experienced user will fully know what has built up unless they’ve been making a deliberate effort to keep track.
Compare that to Linux, which is made by nerds FOR nerds… And so everything is thoroughly documented. With the general unspoken understanding that a. You will sooner or later go under the hood and mess about in there; and b. If something fucks up, whether it is directly your fault or not, you’re the one who will have to fix it, so here’s ALL the receipts on how shit works so you CAN do that.
XP was also pretty good for its time.
Pretty good at collecting every virus under the sun and beginning the anti consumer practices.
95 was an innovator if anything, ahead of pretty much anything else on desktop at the time
Huh? Coming from an Amiga it really didn’t seem innovative. Or OS2 or BeOS (which ran circles around Win 95) or Macs. Windows 95 was still just another dos program on top of a shell.
Windows 95 was still just another dos program on top of a shell.
That’s just straight up misinformation. Even 3.1 wasn’t really like that anymore (though, it was closer). Windows 9x uses DOS as a bootloader, and retains the original DOS components for backwards compatibility, but loads into a fully 32-bit kernel with preemptive multitasking and many features DOS couldn’t dream of touching. It is built atop the original 16-bit DOS, and inherits a lot of jank from that, which is why eventually they ditched it to use the developed-from-the-ground-up NT kernel everywhere instead (and broke compatibility with a lot of old hardware and software because of it, much to the chagrin of the users–)
Huh? Coming from an Amiga it really didn’t seem innovative. Or OS2 or BeOS (which ran circles around Win 95) or Macs.
OS/2 and Windows are siblings, with most of OS/2 being written by the same people within Microsoft. Windows NT is what happened when Microsoft decided to backstab IBM (again) to increase their profit margin (as I myself have said, Microsoft has always been bad from the ‘evil megacorp’ angle).
BeOS was, at the time, an operating system only for Be’s own PowerPC based workstations (and workstation != desktop, especially in those days) – Though there were talks to bring at least parts of it to desktop as the basis for MacOS Copland, that didn’t go through (instead Apple vored NeXT and used its nutrients to make OSX). – It didn’t get a public, user-facing, desktop release that a mere mortal could buy until 1997 (on PPC Mac. 98 for the x86 PC version), which in mid-90s tech terms is like a geological epoch later. Are we also going to compare Doom 2 to Half Life and shit on Doom 2 for being behind HL?
MacOS at the time was still using Cooperative Multitasking (which is what Win 3.0 used, and is unreliable af because any crashed program takes out the entire OS with it) and wouldn’t get true Preemptive Multitasking until OSX in '99.
The amiga did get Preemptive Multitasking to the desktop first (in '86, even. Commodore seriously didn’t know what they had, or they would have ruled the roost), but preemptive multitasking wasn’t the only feather in 9x’s hat.
DirectX was so good at doing what it did (acting as a layer of abstraction between gamedevs and hardware, allowing them to just ask the library to draw and play stuff, and it would figure itself out with the hardware) that alternatives like SDL took another 3 years to exist and much longer to catch up – And it was necessary, because the PC space, unlike the likes of the Mac or Amiga, was an industry standard rather than being controlled by one company, and users could have any combination of wacky third party video and soundcards, and DirectX just dealt with it.
And Plug-and-Play, while buggy as fuck to the point that it really only worked when it wanted, was something that hadn’t been done before. Adding new hardware and the OS just figures that shit out, no reboot required? Unheard of.
Edit: BeOS in 97, not 98. Still retains the whole ‘this was a geological epoch by 90s tech standards’ comment though.
Well I appreciated all of that believe it or not. I still stand by windows 95 being basically a hybrid with the bootload from DOS, but I understand your distinction. But because while windows 95 was 32 bit preemptive, it still had 16 bit applications running at the same time that were cooperative multitasking such as User.dll. They pushed processes to User.dll It still was this weird hybrid sitting on top of several 16 bit processes.
As an Amiga user by early 1988, and access to DEC Alphas and Sun workstations, windows 95 seemed very late to the party. But you are right that in hindsight, windows 95 solved a lot of problems for working with generic hardware for the masses.
But also remember that DirectX at launch was not easy to work with. Microsoft had licensed OpenGL from silicon graphics, and later bought the graphics engine for DirectX from Rendermorphics. OpenGL would be at windows 95 launch far better performing, and directx still hard to write for and limited graphic functionality. But they continued to improve it and you are right they supports sound, joysticks, graphics, one stop shop eventually.
Well damn. A person who disagrees with me and is nice and eloquent about it, even teaching me some new information.
Mad respect, stranger.
You are likely not old enough to remember windows 2000. It had the NT kernel and did nothing more than expected. It got out of your way so you could do work.
There have been some improvements over the years, but Microsoft’s goals for windows changed after that, which is when enshitification started.
XP was like 2K, but with fancy plastic appearance and some unneeded things.
I have fond memories of reading Star Wars books in Notepad, in plain text (or RTF containing only text), in some font like Fixedsys, I think, black on white, at night. Ironically my eyesight didn’t get much worse then.
XP was nice enough.
No. Windows 7 was pretty good. Certainly a better desktop experience than Linux at the time (go on, roast me, I’ve got my flame proof undies on). Windows 10 started out pretty decent, until they ramped up the enshittification. I used Windows for over 30 years and never saw any reason to switch, although I’ve worked with Unix before Windows was even a thing. Only in the last couple of years did it really become unbearable. And I wouldn’t even consider ever using Win11 on any personal machine.
@Diplomjodler3 > I’ve worked with Unix before Windows was even a thing. Only in the last couple of years did it really become unbearable.
Same story. Using Linux at home for three or four years. I tried it before and it was just… not very good. And yes, it was Microsoft who gave me the final push with their innovations.
@drq @linuxmemes some noses work better than others
but calling windows shit is unfair. shit can still help plants grow. this is the kind of stuff you lock away in a mine forever and put a sign in front that says this is not a place of honor.
@lritter Yeah, looks like this is what it will take because nothing else works (or everything else is much worse that no amount of enshitification offsets it).
@shuro security-wise, being the less popular one has its advantages.
@lritter Yes, this works like that for everything in life.
However it is also the problem. Criminals go for popular things because they go after people using them. Lesser interest to make viruses and exploits goes together with lesser interest to make software, drivers, hardware… Heck, I remember days when a lot of popular websites didn’t work too well with anything except Internet Explorer - and it was real security nightmare at the same time with very real zero click exploits.
