I feel Microsoft is in for a huge surprise when they end support for all versions of Windows except one that requires you to throw out your old hardware. At the same time, Linux is better than it’s ever been and is almost, if not just as easy to use as Windows. Not to mention, most work is done from a browser these days.
There was official support for Windows 7?
Only the embedded variety meant to run on machines like ATMs, POS systems and other long term support machines.
What you mean ended? It was just released the other day…
salute
Windows has been alternating between good and crap for decades. ME, crap. XP, good. Vista, crap. 7, good. 8/8.1, crap. 10, good…ish. 11, steaming feces. 12 will probably be at least half decent.
I doubt that will be true anymore. 12 will probably have even more spyware and ads than 11.
I really ought to switch my main pc to Linux.
11 made me make that switch. My main gaming / media machine is still on W10 and will be until it dies. Then I’ll finally invest in figuring out gaming on Linux.
But for day to day browsing and development. Ubuntu has been excellent and is much more snappy than windows. I also picked up a cheap ancient MacBook pro for interviews and it’s a solid machine as well.
No regrets so far.
Fedora on kde is nice.
Fake news. MS said that Win 10 was the last one they were going to make so all of those others you mentioned are obviously fake.
I’ve had the opposite experience - 10 sucked, but I have no complaints about 11… Though it might make a difference that my experience with 10 was after my old (win7 vintage) laptop took the free update, while my 11 experience is based on a new laptop that came with it preinstalled…
OK guys, guess it’s time to upgrade to Windows 8. I bet it’ll be great!
could give Linux a try. Its come along way, even if you’re a gamer.
OK guys, time to upgrade to Redhat 6 from 1999. I bet it’ll be great! It has Kernel 2.2, and I’m hearing good things about the upgrade to ipchains from ipfwadm!
I thought those last two were Dopm cheat codes for a hot minute.
idkfa idbeholds
Goodbye, sweet prince
*Good night
There’s a pretty good amount of people still using it, it seems.
I feel pretty comfortable saying that was the last good one, perhaps the best one, and it’s been downhill ever since.
Yep, I’ve said this before.
Windows 7 was the last great OS by microsoft.
It was light enough to not be a bother on even used hardware.
It was exceedingly stable and didnt need regular reformat and reinstalls like all previous windows OS’s.
Didnt need to be constantly rebooted every time you exited a big task like previous Windows.
and you were able to do pretty much anything on it easily and without much fuss.
and, outside of like driver installs, the OS pretty much stayed out of your way.
It was brilliant. It was the best.
It was the peak of the curve. 3.11/95/98/ME/NT/XP all built up to 7, and 8/10/11 are all falling further and further away from 7.
The only reason to get rid of windows 7 is that there was no further way to monetize it since it had pretty good market saturation. If it wasnt for that Win7 would probably be the default OS for another 10+ years.
3.11/95/98/ME/NT/XP
How badly did Vista hurt you?
Yes
It hasn’t been steadily downhill. There was a plunge downwards with Windows 8, then 8.1 recovered a little and 10 more, before Windows 11 undid the gains.
Windows 7 recovered from the disaster of Vista. Windows XP recovered from Me. It has been a bumpy ride for a long time.
Windows 7 was just vista with dipping sauce.
By the time 7 came out Vista was fine. Vista was the usual bugs of a new OS, plus the new drivers which most manufactures decided to not do properly so they made Vista look much worse than it actually was. The much higher system requirements really didn’t help.
If you bought a new machine with hardware that came out post Vista’s launch you probably had a good experience with Vista. I personally had 0 issues with my machine in 2008.
Vista paved the way for Win7 by highlighting the abysmal driver and support issues. Which got significant work done on it so by the time Win 7 acme out things were in a good state.
Vista was, much like ME, was a decent OS hampered by its time and hardware, but have been meme’d into festering shitpiles.
And it was the OS that introduced UAC. Vista took a bullet for 7.
Vista shows how important the initial reputation is. Everybody had made up their mind to hate it, even if the hate wasn’t fully justified. There wasn’t much Microsoft could do about it, other than releasing Windows 7.
Windows 8 on the other hand was genuinely bad.
Except ME was part of the DOS line, while XP extended Win2k which is NT.
But I take your point, just that Win2k was (largely) the end of MS producing DOS-based operating systems (with XP being the final nail in that coffin).
In business, once Win2k was out, we stopped deploying Win9x entirely. Before that, NT was problematic on some hardware and for some software/users. Win2k solved most of that.
Win 11 has as many wins as blunders
Well, I used to be quite positive about Windows 11. The WSL thing is cool, being able to use bash and Linux tools. The hypervisor thing is cool, enabling fast virtual machines. And the styling is all round better than any previous Windows at least since Windows 7. But then I’ve had systems broken by updates more than once recently, everything feels slow, applications hang all the time, the Start menu still doesn’t work, even opening File Explorer leaves me wondering whether it noticed my mouse click, I have to fight it to create a local user account instead of a Microsoft account, fight it to avoid unwanted tracking, fight it to stop the ads popping up in all kinds of corners by running a network-wide DNS filter which reports huge amounts of requests to Microsoft telemetry domains, fight it to make sure file don’t end up in OneDrive, and it still can’t handle USB sticks reliably, it still steals focus constantly from wherever I’m typing, there are far too many services eating up resources, and so on.
It’s just constant low-level frustration that I just don’t have with other operating systems, because Microsoft has cut out QA and spent years prioritizing marketing strategies, gimmicks and cosmetics instead of improving the things that matter to users.
As far as the performance issues go, I’ve experienced a lot of those when I first upgraded from 10 to 11. After reinstalling though, the performance has been amazing.
I hate all of the constant advertising of MS products and services, especially in the case of Edge, because so many of those products are genuinely amazing, and people won’t give them a chance because it’s shoved down their throats.
I agree that it gets bogged down and needs a reinstall sometimes. But after I recently installed it on a new machine that also has Linux, Windows 11 still feels comparatively slow. I get the impression that even out of the box it has too much baggage and unoptimized code. Edge is fast though, and a perfectly good browser. Edge even runs on Linux too, which is surprising.
you use Linux now, right?
I use Windows a lot of the time, because I need to use several pieces of professional Windows software. But yes, I use Linux some of the time too, and I find it more relaxing.
what distro?
As long as recall is a thing I will never move to 11. I’ll move to Linux.
I hate Microsuck for this. I just want to come home from work and have my PC work not have to play IT guy whenever Linux acts up. :(
Windows Pro does “just work”. Configure GP when you setup, and all this garbage isn’t an issue. Even without the more extreme changes I make (beyond GP), most people would be fine.
MS pushes this crap in Windows Home users, because they know those people have no idea what to do with it.
Strangely, that generally is how my Linux boxes have been - way less IT guy than when we had WinXP or Win7. You have to use a stable distro however - which TBH is the problem with Win10 and 11 for a lot of people - finding the “stable” version isn’t available to home users or is complicated - so you have new OS deployments every 6 months. Windows Updates are now forced and still often have problems or bugs.
That all said, I think we’ve just got to get used to unstable / rolling release OSs cause “everyone” is doing it. Even Alma is not as stable as previous enterprise linux rebuilds due to Red Hat not releasing point release security updates anymore.
You know the saying: every second version of Windows is
goodusable.That hasnt been true for a while.
8 was bad, 10 was bad, 11 is bad.
I think they are trying to ensure that no future Windows is ever good again. I mean, it was Win10 that made me frustrated enough to permanently kick the habit of using Windows.
Same! The two straws that broke the camel’s metaphorical back were the stupid functionality of the search bar in the start menu; and the beginning of the removal of local accounts.
“Downhill” in the sense of falling into a gorge.
Windows 10 legit doesn’t work with hard drives. It keeps scanning and scanning endlessly, slowing everything down. If you go down the “disable useless services” rabbit hole you might go too hard and end up with a useless Windows install without being able to remember how you disabled the firewall, for example. It wouldn’t let me run the update without the firewall service running.
I just threw NixOS on it and only booted windows once since
I really don’t see the issue with W11. It works fine. As did 10, and 8.1. I’ve not encountered any ads or many of the other shitty things that are constantly reported on.
If you’re a technical person, or you run Windows Pro instead of Home, you probably won’t see as much crap. But there’s a ton of new telemetry/tracking in Win10 that’s even worse in 11.
As someone who’s been part of OS and software deployment since before WinNT, Win11 is hot garbage unless we do all sorts of preconfig to not make it so.
This isn’t really new, just that much worse in 11. With the previous versions of Windows, we didn’t have to configure as many Group Policies to restrict as much nonsense. And the home versions of 10/11 are so much worse, especially since they don’t support GP, you have to Registry Stamp any changes you want to make to disable all the telemetry garbage - stamps which an update can easily revert. At least GP is reapplied at boot/login.
I don’t let my family buy Home versions of Windows. Pro costs more, because it’s worth it from a support perspective.
I appreciate the insight. Just curious, do you have a link to things I should be disabling in group policy?
Typically I’m not a fan of modifying that much especially registry wise, as I feel this is a cause for many people’s problems, but I’m not uncomfortable making GP changes if they make sense.
I’m currently using W11 Pro activated with massgravel scripts and I’ve got DNS level blocking set up on my network, although I’m not sure how well that does at blocking telemetry. It’s my second line ad block primarily.
Best looking for sure.
8.1 was a gem
Lol, don’t forget to add /s, so people will understand your sarcasm!
8 was horrible, 8.1 was fine. 10 wasn’t great but got better. 11 was and is bad.
https://time.com/12854/microsoft-to-take-windows-xp-off-life-support-despite-its-29-market-share/
XP was a whopping 29% at EOL which is impressive to me that 7 is only 3%. But it makes sense that 10 has such a large market share since it was free and ran on (almost) everything that ran 7.
this is full EOL not like normal user EOL, normal user EOL ended in 2020.
I think a large part of it is how most of the machines that could run 7 can run everything after 7 (maybe just need more RAM), but many many MANY machines running XP couldn’t move forward because the CPU or the integrated graphics just couldn’t take it.
My hard drive couldn’t take all the background shit in 10, it would literally stutter scanning my files. When I tried to disable the anti-virus and it told me “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that”
And XP was 32 bit only, it was really an updated version of Win2k, which was really rock solid.
Which kind of supports your point.
Wish I could upvote you for your username! Haha
There’s nothing stopping you.
I already upvoted for the comment, I’m out of upvotes!
I upvoted them for you.
Windows 7 still has a similar market share to desktop Linux. I suspect that some of those users are holdouts, rejecting the Cortana nonsense but too stubborn or lazy to switch. But I’d also wager that, in the longer term, a decent portion of that 3% ends up on Linux.
But I’d also wager that, in the longer term, a decent portion of that 3% ends up on Linux.
Or they just continue to use their out of date OS. XP still has a 0.6% market share, and I have no idea what remotely modern software works on XP. Browsing the modern web will be a pain with the new encryption standards.
There’s a lot of systems that still uses it, cause it does its work and would be a pain to change. Of course they should avoid any contact with the net.
At least on 10 it is relatively simple to disable Cortana and forget it exists. I can’t believe Microsoft is trying to make Copilot key a thing.
Give me ReactOS or give me … fedora.
Not super catchy…
Wow, that’s an interesting metric.
deleted by creator
Aww, that’s the last version of windows I ever owned.
I don’t think I’ve ever owned any version of Windows.
Technically nobody else has either.
Well, Microsoft has at least.
Peice of shit ready?
Point of Sale Ready… PoS properly describes every single one of those softwares.
Wait, just now?
Then why did I read online that it was insecure as hell to stay in Windows 8.1? (I was setting up an old lap for a mom’s friend, with 4 painful GBs of RAM).
Also, doesn’t Windows 10 support supposedly end next year?
I think I am not getting the kind of support that Windows provides.
Microsoft offers a long-term support version of Windows called LTSC that’s stripped down, only receives security updates, and is supported for 10 years from its release.
It’s only officially available to business clients, but with a little yar har fiddeldy dee, you too can experience extended support!
The extended support updates aren’t available to end consumers but is a paid product for enterprises that need more time to update.
Ah, definitely clearer to me now, thanks, and it sucks.
I have an old ASUS laptop with a 670M on Windows 7, any prayer the jump to Linux for drivers will be smooth? 🤞
I have an i914900KF desktop on windows 11 (I have to use it) and loathe the OS lol. Definitely need there was Lemmy for chopping down Windows 11 spyware crap.
with a 670M
Your GPU doesn’t support latest drivers, and older drivers are a nuisance.
Unironically, the best bet for them is nvidia 540xx drivers on the AUR with an LTS kernel.
Huh. And here I thought, Piece Of Shit Ready required at least Windows 10.
