What y’all talking about?
Doesn’t the prefix “en” in enshittification mean “more of”/“increasing”?
Because “Windows is even more shit” makes perfect sense to me.
98SE, 2000, XP (Service Pack 3) and 7 were Windows at their peak.
Windows 8 and 8.1 were screwed by Microsoft’s insistence at creating a more mobile-friendly OS, when the Metro menu was just bad for the desktop user experience. A lot of disgruntled 8/8.1 users did flock to 10 because having the Start menu back was seen as a compromise to having forced telemetry tracking in your OS.
As for Windows 11, it’s getting super shit. Recall AI is being baked into the OS, which will effectively allow Microsoft to snoop and capture data on your computer activity. They claim to not capture sensitive info like bank details or credit card numbers, but I think that’s been proven wrong.
Also, 11 is hardly an upgrade feature-wise, yet requires a significantly beefier PC, and was released at a time when the world was still going through a significant semiconductor shortage.
The only real hurdle for widespread Linux adoption is anti-cheat support. That, and either getting Linux versions of industry standard software (Microsoft 365, Adobe CS, 3DS Max, etc) or decent support through Wine/Proton.
That, and either getting Linux versions of industry standard software (Microsoft 365, Adobe CS, 3DS Max, etc) or decent support through Wine/Proton.
You won’t. Industry doesn’t want to waste money to port such enormous legacy codebases to Linux, when most people still run Windows.
Windows has to become a minority OS first.
And anti-cheat - I don’t like it, but it seems there will be working kernel-level anticheats for Linux.
You forgot hardware support, nice that it seems not an issue for some people today, but Linux hardware support is still not there. Drivers for Windows are made by manufacturers, drivers for Linux are often made by Linux developers.
I honestly liked 8.1 quite a bit - once I installed Classic Shell to not have to deal with the new UI. A first year usability student could have foreseen the massive issues trying to weld a touch screen UI and a traditional desktop metaphor would raise, but Microsoft for some reason were completely pig headed about making it work. It didn’t. It can’t. You can not staple two completely different UI paradigms together and have it work smoothly. Other than that, 8.1 was remarkably good experience for me. It felt really snappy under the hood. Good OS brought down by hubris. Well, good for a Windows release, at least. Use Linux.
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.
3.11 was pretty good. After that it’s been a mixed bag. A bag of shit, but mixed.
The moment they removed hotdog theme was the moment it started to fail
It was better than Linux up until windows 7, and it was objectively more compatible with games until Steam Deck.
Isn’t windows more compatible with most games? Very few are Linux native, and most games require a bit of compatibility troubleshooting to get working properly in my experience.
“Down” was awesome.
3.11? Which couldn’t even network properly?
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.
But it’s a perfectly functional and sensible solution for storing system configurations.
No. It was not. The concept was OK, but the execution was not. Even Microsoft didn’t know what was in there. The design was horrific. They could have used keywords, they could have had a data dictionary, they could have standardized it. They could have made it not get corrupted by glancing at it.
But they didn’t, at least not for a long time. And it still sucks, just a little less.
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.
Also add that registry exponantionally growing over time bad documented and not easy way to clean it up and thus as time going windows start booting up longer and longer
Anyone who saw Mac at the time would know what pretty was for interfaces. Windows has never been pretty.
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.
I’d want a registry that was compartmentalized meaning each app gets an area to store its own configuration and the apps can only modify their own settings (without root permissions).
Apps should never be expected to modify system settings directly but only through system calls.
Some Linux packages achieve this kind of behavior by adding an additional user which owns their configuration directories. That always felt hacky to me.
I have an old rig for old games and I still have Win7 SP1 installed on that. It never gets updates as it’s not connected to the internet. I know everything works there and thus it is now a time capsule. Never change a running system lol
You’ve perfectly summarized my own feelings toward the best versions of Windows. Thank you. I feel more centered seeing it summarized so well in writing.
I’ll add that I found Vista cool and interesting on a technical level, even while the practical outcome was pretty awful.
I always get pooped on when I say this, but I didn’t like 7. it brought the confusing libraries, ugly glass theme, and all computers I used it on, explorer (file manager, taskbar) crashed a lot and had to do win+r -> explorer.exe to get it going again.
I liked vista, but I only used it on my very first pc and for not much else but web browsing. I also liked 8.1, just needed to tweak it a bit, like replace that horrible start menu. I had instructions for myself for all kinds of registry stuff that needed to be done to a fresh install.
hated 10 from the beginning because it immediately seemed like it fights back too much, forcing microshit down your throat, and all that spying crap.
and finally when I saw 11…well, I’ve used mint for about two years now.
People who don’t like Glass Themes can’t be my friends. Frutiger Aero looks like happiness and a better time when technology was exciting instead of alarming.
You are otherwise entitled to your opinion (fwiw I never used those libraries and still don’t know what they were FOR) and I entirely believe your experience of having instability. Windows just be like that sometimes. No pooping here.
I totally forgot about explorer just s****ing the bed randomly in 7 lmao.
XP was bloated to hell and back, and yeah 10 was okay overall but the “kiddie gloves” hostility towards users sucked, especially hiding away control panel and trying to get rid of it altogether in 11 is what pushed me to Linux.
It still does shit the bed regularly for me (at least, at work), on win 11; address bar in file explorer just randomly stops accepting input, new tabs get stuck showing whatever was on the previous tab, etc
Oh god I’m so sorry. I haven’t willingly touched my Win11 boot in probably close to a year so I didn’t realize things were that bad.
explorer (file manager, taskbar) crashed a lot and had to do win+r -> explorer.exe to get it going again.
This still happens on up-to-date Win10 occasionally. I’ve seen it on multiple machines, hardware tests good. A variant I’ve seen is that the Start button responds to click (changes color) but does not open the menu.
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.
@VinesNFluff @westyvw but win9x still using dos drivers, so it is dos application. 32 bit dos application running on untouched dos system. Yes, it implements full 32 bit OS
It isn’t. It has its own Driver model. DOS drivers are installable and can be called up for backwards compatibility, but windows drivers are different and incompatible.
@westyvw > Pretty good at collecting every virus under the sun
Not really.
It did have some fails security-wise but 99% of exploits happened on non-updated machines which also had firewall disabled.
98 was far worse in that regard.
95 can suck eggs… The GUI was largely items they had co-developed with IBM for the next release of OS/2 that they instead split last minute due to contractual arguments since Microsoft wanted a larger cut of profits. There’s more depth of course but tldr version.
It’s a large part of why 95 was so crashy until osr2.5… it was largely 32 bit GUI stuck onto rushed 16 bit DOS with some quick protected mode hooks.
That said, XP was the first version I could stand.
7 was actually pretty good.
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.
com/com 😂
It’s been less shit at running games than Linux for… Well, always?
Downvote all you want, I’ve seen what makes you cheer.
So long as the game in question doesn’t block you for running linux (fortnight, for instance), then no, you are absolutely wrong. I get much better game performance on Arch Linux cachyos kernel than i do on windows 10. Every single time.
spasms due to rage
At least the future is looking good with Valve supporting the cause
Cry all you want. Gaming performance on Linux is usually better.
7 from start to finish was the most polished and stable imo. Early 10, I would put right up there with it. 8.1 wasnt as awful as many claimed, despite gui changes. Xp took FOREVER to get to a good place, 95 was jank city.
XP was fine after sp2 but to claim it was good is to give it too much credit.
WinXPSP3 was a mainstay for so long. Vista wasn’t going to take that crown.
3.11 was solid. No frills, just basic Windows. Limited in use.
Bells and whistles may have been available depending on your own personal hardware and software limitations.
Windows 8 was when MS were trying to break into the phone OS market to complete with Android and iOS. They wanted to have the “same OS” across phone, tablet, and desktop, which isn’t a terrible idea except for the fact you need to betray your entire desktop customer base to get there.
That, and they confused “Window Manager” and OS. There were third-party apps to make Win8 look like Win7, don’t tell me they couldn’t have included the option in the OS.
Windows started life as a window manager that you installed on top of MS-DOS. It has since grown to be much more, and I don’t think you can criticise it for that.
Also, changing the visual theme is their prerogative. They are not required to supply a “classic” theme, even though they did do that a bunch of times.
I get Lemmy is the bird around here, but if you’re going to bad mouth Windows, at least do it for the many legitimate problems it has.
I don’t have a problem with them changing the theme. I have a huge problem with them not allowing me to change it back, especially when it serves no practical purpose (other than, “sign up for our Windows <insert version here> certification!”). Now, I have no right to require them to do it, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t a shitty move on their part, and don’t pretend it isn’t.
I wish Windows Media Center and TV tuners would have stuck around for a bit longer, I also wish IR blasters in phones would have stuck around longer
It’s subjective, but I clearly remember saying Windows couldn’t get any worse around the time that (Microsoft was claiming that) Internet Explorer was irrevocably integrated with Windows 98.
Never believe it when someone says such-and-such can’t get any worse. Somehow it always can.
Naw, Windows 2000 was legit. Everything after that was shit.
My understanding was it used to be windows was decent enough, whilst Linux was an upgrade for those who valued freedom.
Now Linux is quickly going from ‘upgrade’ to ‘only sensible option.’
That’s where I’m at. LMDE is what my desktop will run soon.
Yep and that happened right about when windows XP came out.
XP was hated when it came out, but it wasn’t that bad. Then Vista and 7 happened. Then it got worse.
Kind of, to varying degrees. Posting the ones I’ve actually used enough to have an opinion:
- Win 3 through 3.11 and below: Limited
- Win 9x: unstable
- Win ME: don’t get me started
- Win 2k: Decent, actually. At least after a couple of service packs
- Win XP: Win 2k with teletubbies theme
- Win Vista: “users are too stupid to be allowed to do this just like that”
- Win 7: Decent, actually
- Win 8: worst UI ever
- Win 8.1: sometimes MS actually listens to feedback
EDIT: While I absolutely hated using Vista, I think it’s unfair to complain about its performance compared to that of Win XP. XP was 6-7 years old at the time of Vista release - of course it’s going to demand less of your PC.
Win 10: ‘the final version of Windows’ actually kinda decent
Win 11: “when we said f’inal version of Windows’ we meant it’s the final version that your old ass computer would run. Go buy a new one.”
Win10 was extreme crap, you just feel it was good because Win11 is worse.
This lines up with my own takes on Windows versions. I think 8 was better than people give it credit for. I never minded the UI personally, and it was fast and responsive.
I think it’s unfair to complain about its performance
I disagree. If your software runs like a damn snail on inexpensive current-gen hardware, then it’s not worth using.
Windows 8.1 was amazingly good, simple and fast, if you ignored whole Metro thing. You could also install 3rd party start menu alternative, if you needed it.
Windows 7 was the last good a Windows
People hated on 7 and said the same thing about XP.
Aka enshittification
Slow as all get out though. I ran it in a VM just for fun and lacks the performance improvements of newer Windows.
Yes, but now there is blood in the poop.
And it is a dark red.
Windows 10 was great without the bloatware and telemetry that was slowly added to it. At first it was only a small amount that could easily be removed with a script.
Nah man. Windows 10 was full of telemetry from day 1. It was the first version of Windows that hid away the ability to even use a local-only login, trying to push every user onto a MS account for that sweet tracking and advertising dollar.
They even gave the OS away for free - absolutely unthinkable to 90s/2000s era Microsoft, now why would that have changed?
Pushing the users to their cloud offerings for those that they can tempt, and tracking, profiling, advertising for every user. From conception.
@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.
@shuro you can’t have it all ;) this is the sacrifice. it also means: no cambists in the temple. that also means very little fraud. enjoy it, while it lasts.
@lritter We’ll see how it goes.
I expect Windows becoming less relevant because of web apps and cloud taking off.
It is not necessarily good by the way, for the most people it already means they don’t have to run anything on their machine… or even have anything on their machine… just buy a subscription for movies, photo storage, email, messaging, office apps, isn’t it great? Gaming isn’t there yet but soon. And all these nice cloud-controlled IoT toys! No drivers, no cables, just your Wi-Fi password (and soon it won’t need even that).
TempleOS network edition.
@mittorn I guess everything that hit their trackers and had adblockers good enough to hide the platform :)
@shuro i do not think browser-based statistics is good. Anyone who do not want different from elsewhere will set windows UA and breaks this statistics. just imagine, how may bots may set windows user agent not being running on windows
@mittorn It is just an example.
You can check other sources and the picture is largely the same.
As for enshitification - not everything is about UI. One watershed moment for me was with XP almost never requiring basic drivers. Maybe except audio. Another was about being able to just use Explorer and not needing additional file manager. Yet another was supporting a lot of file formats out of the box.
Suddenly I needed only OS distro CD to make a simple desktop work.
@shuro supporting formats and hardware out of box never was good side of windows. But 12 years ago i used some PC which did not require installing any driver on windows 2000, EVEN TV TUNER worked out-of-box. None of linux live cd was capable to run it’s sound and network card and there are no drivers for tuner and 3d acceleration on this pc. Network and sound required building some kernel modules, disabled by default
@mittorn Well, my experience was clearly the opposite. Notably I worked in refurbished laptop store back then and later in some factory in IT department - and installing XP was the first thing we did. We had 2000 for most workplaces as established standard but it almost always required drivers for everything and it was even worse before with laptops. XP picked up all basic devices most of the time, quite often - all of them including weirder laptop hardware like IR ports and dock stations.
