After XP, Windows focused on adding crap to their aid that use unnecessary resources for crap things. I remember the Aqua look on Vista that sucked the life out of computers. Let’s not talk about Windows Me. Then 8 was a weird interface that no one liked and also not compatible with older machines. So XP is the most stable Windows os that can run on older devices.
XP still had the designed-by-engineers vibe. Since then, Microsoft got completely taken over by dipshits with marketing MBAs.
They now code Windows to impress executives and shareholders with how much they can harvest data and manipulate customers into using their stupid Store and so on. They stopped caring about the experiences of power users, or even casual users.
They don’t want the OS to work for us. They want us to work for them.
Though enshittification was coined, I think, with online services in mind, this is a perfect example of the process as it applies to an OS.
Completely agree. For some reason that word tends to trigger a few gatekeepers on here. But I think it fits.
The enshittification of windows is because of its online services. Copilot AI, “telemetry”, ads, etc.
Very well said.
Do you have any suggestions for people wanting to go back to an XP feeling?
A particular distro of Linux, etc.?
I second the recommendation of giving Linux Mint a shot. I didn’t use XP extensively but Mint is low hassle and gets out of your way.
I’m not sure it has quite the same feel, but closest I can think of that is also approachable coming from Windows. Obviously a lot of other distros also satisfy the “built by engineers” vibe.
Linux Mint is definitely the closest interface- and vibes-wise to XP imo, of the big distros worth considering
I have a lot of respect for Linux and use it here and there, but I am by no means an expert on it. The best thing I’ve done with it so far is running a Pi Hole at home.
Unfortunately, my job involves using MS Windows. A lot. After I retire…soonish…I hope to take some time and learn Linux better.
For my day-to-day Windows misery, I find that ShutUp10 does a great job of toggling off the bullshit you don’t want running. And it’s easy to toggle things back on if you ever need to. It’s a free program you can download and run. I send them a little money every year out of gratitude, but donations are completely optional.
Some FUD mongers will tell you that ShutUp10 ‘breaks’ Windows. That’s simply not true. It puts all the Windows settings you can change yourself in one easy-to-find place. Things that are normally scattered all over the UX and the registry.
While you could mess some things up using it if you’re not careful, it’s very good about color coding and letting you know which toggles are best to turn off, which ones are a little questionable, and which ones you should leave turned on (unless you know what you’re doing and can take the risk). I have used it for years now, on multiple PCs, with zero problems. It doesn’t make Windows 10/11 GOOD but it makes them less horrible.
Mint is the usual recommendation for transitioning from windows to Linux.
I’ll second this. Start with Mint or Pop!_OS
Zorin OS is a linux distro designed partly to feel like Windows
Any distro and a theme. Mate and XFCE work well for that style. Mint and LXQT maybe too.
I know you said Linux, but for anyone else here wanting to still use what at its core is still Windows, but with tons of garbage and bloat removed… as long as you have a valid serial / key… I would recommend AtlasOS.
I did a clean install of it on my own old ancient desktop i7-2600K recently, and it actually still runs really well.
Don’t take my word for it though. Here’s a video talking about it. Also here’s the YouTube link if you prefer.
Britec09 from the video there is quite skeptical - sounds like he prefers ShutUp10. With Atlas, he worries about large security impacts for small FPS gains.
Good watch, thank you!
To be fair, vista and 7 had a lot of QOL improvements too.
I dont see the point of 10+ though, they pretty much just added fluff.
They had QOL but I remember my machines running significantly slower. And that was not worth the extra QOL.
XP was a pretty good running OS with plenty of software and games. I held out till 10 was out for a bit and there were programs I wanted to run that required it.
WinME was that OS I ripped off a brand new laptop and replaced with 98SE so it would function correctly. When it crashes and hangs right out of the box…
Haha. Same here my new computer BSOD’d right out of the box with Me. Freaking HP Pavilion.
ME came before XP
Less funny when you realize it’s mostly banks, government agencies, and militaries still using it.
I’d say more likely it’s labs, hospitals, and other scientific stuff where you have to deal with old instruments cause lack of money. I’m fairly certain the military uses some other OS, I believe NATO uses Solaris for example.
Also that machine only works under very specific circumstances, so you fear changing anything in case your entire protocol breaks and you have to start from scratch.
“Windows for Submarines”
It’s XP for Vanguard subs. I really hope none of them provide any telemetry for these stats though.
doubt they’re connected to the internet. In fact I’d wager 99% of shit running windows XP is not connected to the internet (and shouldn’t be)
if it’s not connected to the Internet, it won’t show up in the stats
You know there’s other ways to do these kinds of estimates, right?
As a former banker I can tell you that most ATMs run Windows NT 4.0.
However since the network is completely clamped down and the OS boots via network as well (no hard drives in ATMs), they are pretty secure.
I’ve also indeed seen some Windows XP terminals in use just lately - one in fact in a hospital my current company collaborates with - but it’s isolated and used to run some sequencer that was never ported to a 64 bit architecture, and apparently doesn’t run in compatibility mode either.
Also Cobol mainframes.
And hospitals. Don’t forget those.
I’ve seen Citrix used a lot in hospitals to host apps. Xp isn’t used any longer since it’s not supported.
I highly doubt it. I work for a large bank, and it’s all W10/11 due to the need for continuous security patches/currency updates. Large banks don’t mess around with EOL software that has a risk of vulnerabilities
Large banks don’t mess around with EOL software that has a risk of vulnerabilities
Well, more complex modern software has an higher risk of (yet unknown) vulnerabilities.
Why do you think it’s less funny this way?
Mainstream support ended 15 years ago. Extended security support ended 10 years ago. The last version to have any kind of update at all was their embedded OS version for things like cash registers, with the last security update 5 years ago.
So it’s wildly insecure against any new attacks targeting an OS that’s largely used by major corporations, governments, and medical facilities that are juicy targets for theft and ransomware attacks.
There is a service called 0patch that offers live microcode updates for XP. They’ve even won bounties for a few things they caught before Microsoft.
I pay about $30 a year to live micropatch my WIn7 gaming partition and have had no issues despite also being a bit less than diligent when it comes to digital buccaneering on that machine.
More funny in my book.
Might not be so funny when you’re slowly dying of radiation sickness.
What? First time I hear XP gives radiation sickness.
Because they stick with what works.
I guinely hate windows as a product. But man XP was a banger for it’s time
As usual I think that sentiment was retroactive, certainly once Vista came out. At launch, people hated the Fisher-Price look of the Luna default UI. Like, a lot. The switch to the NT based kernel for the home version of Windows also caused a shitton of people’s hardware and peripherals not to work anymore because they needed new drivers and the manufacturers of said gadgets – if they were still in business – could not be arsed. Some of this could be alleviated by bullying that hardware’s Windows 2000 drivers into working with XP. Some of it could not.
They should’ve just used the Silver theme instead of blue luna. Unless it didn’t exist on launch.
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Windows has its ups.
The only problem people should have with it is that it’s on 70% of ALL desktops which is about half a billion too many.
A fair competition should be there. Linux, Mac and Windows should have around 33% market share in an ideal world.
You may count whatever Google is doing or Samsung/Huawei can do as separate in a dream world.
XP’s stability was a wonder at the time. Not many people remember how unstable Windows 2000, ME, and ALL the predecessors were.
Win98 meant rebooting a minimum of four times a day.
Why in the world are you being downvoted for that comment?
apparently I picked up a few comment stalkers earlier, frankly I didn’t even know downvoting was an option here.
Vista was underrated though.
No. It was a crash test dummy for windows 7.
It was a beta that wasn’t stable.
.
A lot of public infrastructure in the US (powerplants, waste management, etc.) runs off XP or older.
i have several clients with xp systems (or even older), still, mostly for CNC applications, bulk trailer and tanker loaders, and similar. i keep recommending upgrading the systems, they keep balking at the high prices from their vendors.
That seems to be the same decision our company has made on some stuff. In a way the old licensing model really hurt some businesses. They got so used to spending once and holding onto stuff for so long they basically cut the budget for maintaining and upgrading the same systems. Now it’s all considered profit and there’s no way will they let that money be purposed for something that, in their eyes, still works.
I supported a production line as recently as 2015 that had an industrial paint mixer that still ran on NT4 Workstation
Not as prevalent these days, but a lot of EMR/EHR was built on XP. Some of those companies went out of business and the clinics using the software never upgraded because they couldn’t get the data out into another system.
its
Monty Python’s Flying Circus!
To be fair, whomever decided to use an apostrophe to indicate possession AND abbreviation clearly didn’t think through all the possible conflicts before going ahead and making it a thing. Should have made a separate symbol for one of them.
Yes, thousands of years of established language development is wrong … not the individual who is unable to learn what millions of others have been able to.
Yes, thousands of years of established language development is wrong
Yes, it is. Island has an ‘s’ in it as a stylistic choice to Latinize a word that has no Latin root. Literally is now defined as “not literally” which is absurd. That’s established language development.
If people keep using “it’s” as possessive then it will become possessive, and nothing will be lost.
Language sticklers are an interesting phenomenon to me. Language has always evolved with its users. The only rule is that we understand each other when we use it, and that rule allows massive flexibility. Watching it evolve in real-time is more fun than trying to police someone for using an apostrophe.
Language sticklers are an interesting phenomenon to me
It’s weird if you think about it. They’re basically saying “English was exactly correct at an arbitrary moment in time that I chose.” Anything different before that (such as ‘iland’) is wrong, but any new changes are an abomination.
That’s totally not fair. Some things are more wrong than others. And the “everything is correct even” language people are just as insufferable as the “there is exactly one correct usage” people.
Using it’s instead of its is not slang, or an evolving use or alternative spelling. It’s simply wrong.
I don’t disagree that it’s wrong, but I had no difficulty understanding the sentence so I don’t care. The correction is just a distraction.
Windows XP outliving two of it is successors.
Newest versions of windows 11 make it incredibly hard to find the screen that shows all your network adapters. It is now easier to use device manager to disable and reenable an adapter.
How do I know? Because all the shit tier screens and tools that offer to help you with a network issue didn’t work. ONLY reenabling the NIC did.
Had to do it on my whole network
Learn the ways of the run prompt: ncpa.cpl launches you right to the classic network adapter control panel screen. I have to get in there so often that I’ve taught myself plenty of those little shortcuts because MS can’t leave shit where it was.
How do I give lemmy gold?
…And it all has to be there for legacy compatibility, because some Fortune 500 company somewhere has some rickety piece of shit in-house “enterprise” software that relies on some obscure aspect or another of a past Windows version.
I am sort of partial to those rickity old systems that force them to keep legacy software compatibility.
I can still load up and use a program that was written 20 years ago for windows XP.
It also gives third parties like classic shell or startallback the ability to restore all the functionality that the newest start menu disaster tries to push.
IT person here: this is absolutely correct. I know of two buildings in a ridiculously expensive zip code known for international trade that their entire HVAC system is run by a grey case XP box that MUST always have internet connection.
It was considered a cost saving method at the time as opposed to real building services control panels and the company that wrote and sold the software to the local companies went out of business in 2001. There are more businesses in this position just these are the only two I’ve personally been called to service.
In both cases neither machine had been allowed to reboot for more than a decade because of the legitimate fear that the hard drive bearings would fail if they were allowed to spin down.
And neither were interested in replacing it
Ooh thanks
JSYK they are planning to drop .cpl support in a future w11 update. I know it sounds like crazytown to anyone who has worked in IT but here we are.
They hate control panel now and I cannot figure out for the life of me why.
Why don’t you just use control panel?
I never use the windows settings menu unless I absolutely have to because, like you insinuated, it’s really not that great.
Control panel on the other hand is still there and will get you exactly where you need much quicker.
i find the best solution to this problem is to install linux
Yeah, my primary is Kubuntu. I have windows on the side for the few games I have that I need it for.
It’s definitely looking like a possibility. I do my work on Linux machines but only use win for games. If I can play my main community games it might be time to make the switch for good
if you dont play games that use anticheat you’re probs okay.
most everything else either works with proton out the box or with some small tweaks.
protondb is the best resource for linux gaming imo
You can also just search “network” and the screen they want is either the first or second result. I rarely ever go into any kinds of settings nearby anymore, i just search on the start menu.
Why are the settings for a single device spread across multiple sections of the OS though?
ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew
In cmd stop working?
If I wanted to use the terminal, I’d use Linux
Disabling and enabling a network adapter using a GUI is trivial on most Linux desktops. So not helping Microsoft’s case.
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Microsoft terminal and wsl are fantastic. Not a replacement for Linux, but they’re great.
Even easier in powershell:
Get-NetAdapter
Disable-NetAdapter
Enable-NetAdapter
XP was great but for me 7 was the sweet spot.
That Frutiger Aero aesthetic they had going on there felt so futuristic.
It still looks good on modern resolutions tbh.
I still use 7 in most of my home VM setups.
I think a lot of it has to do with age. I’m probably younger than the average Lemmy user, and for me Windows 10 is the sweet spot. The older versions just feel outdated. I think it depends on the first version we seriously used and learned on.
I mean… no shit, dude.
When I was working security for a hospital they wanted to send imagery from an MRI (or maybe CAT, I forget) upstairs to be interpreted without allowing any network traffic to be able to reach the host machine because it was running XP. I asked why, and they told me that in order to replace it the vendor was requiring a $7 million replacement of the whole MRI.
That should be illegal and the vendor held accountable for security incidents happening because of this.
I’ve worked in hospitals that still run DOS based programs for certain things. It’s madness.
Same shit is starting to happen with cars. No way to get the new headunits without replacing the whole car. I know Porsche offers electronic upgrade kits, but I can’t think of any others that do.
There’s tons of legacy shit still running XP and there probably will be for at least another decade.
Yea I think most ATMs work on XP.
What worries me more is what eldritch horrors await us in other versions
I liked Vista.
There. I said it.
Vista Service Pack 2 was a solid OS, XP actually needed a few service packs to get fully to the place people remember it being great.
Vista was fine, apart from the performance. I had a fairly beefy machine for the time so I hardly noticed, but on lower spec machines it was an absolute dog.
Kinda felt like an unoptimised prerelease version of Windows 7
Just when you think you know a guy…
Well I also liked Millennium a lot.
Same. I had no issues with Vista at all.
This will be 7 one day
I don’t think so, main reason is XP was still heavily backwards compatible to 95, 98, even DOS based software. Many control software for industry only support to XP, because jump to windows 7 was too heavy. If anything supports windows 7, it is really easy to port to windows 10. Main reason is the driver support, because win 7 having new driver architecture.
Windows 10 will be the next “forever stuck” OS, because end of Internet Explorer on it means that there are tens of thousands of industrial software that require IE, and cannot ever be ported to win 11.
Yup, same reason modern games all get ports but some old ones never will. Everything has the same architecture now so it’s easy to port an Xbone game to W10 and the new Xboxes.
Already was, ain’t it? I think that it was at 2% or something of Steam users until it wasn’t supported as of this year.
You aren’t wrong, I was more saying that when XP finally dies completely 7 will be the oldest man still standing
Oh, totally right. I guess I didn’t even think that 7’s successors are 10/11 as well as 8.
I have a copy, I just need to find an old-ass pc to install it on.
Maybe an ATM.
You can install it on a new-ass PC and it’ll be lightning fast!
$20 says there’s at least one person out there still running Win3.1 daily.
.
More like a critical computer running at the heart of a billion dollar company running software written in a long forgotten language against apis that no longer exist.
Yeah, I have a w3.1 machine and I play with it regularly, but it really lacks as a daily driver. On the other hand, my w98 machine can do basically everything I need for work, except web browsing. It’s fascinating how little have operating systems progressed in the last 25 years, user-facing wise.
I collect vintage and iconic computers as a hobby, and the only reason i bought a win98 machine was so I could play DOS games on the real hardware. But otherwise yeah, it can do most things youd use a modern computer for very well other than it shouldnt connect to the internet.
You can connect it to the internet, just be in the mindset that anything you do on it someone else can see it.
Just please don’t connect it to a network
George RR Martin writes all his books on an old ass computer:
https://www.daskeyboard.com/blog/how-george-r-r-martin-writes-on-an-old-school-dos-computer/
But you are right, if it was his daily driver we’d have more books out by now…
I know of an older couple running 3.11, wife is a writer and she refuses to use anything other than wordperfect.
No internet, and just a printer.
Every time they call me out to service it they treat me like a long lost grandson with food and the occasional knitted gift so I don’t mind despite the fact that just keeping their (no joke) Pentium II (the edge slot version) alive is frankly one of the hardest projects I’ve ever had in my career. And I’ve had to service government software…
Set them up with a VM on a newer machine
I know one
these are mostly enterprise systems right? like terminals/pos stuff where the system is responsible for just running the ui?
Possibly. There is an embedded version of XP that’s meant to be run on kiosks, control panels, thin clients, and such. Its support was finally ended in 2016, but I’m sure there are still machines around someplace still working that have it baked-in. Probably in ROM in some cases.
in the early 00s there were a few companies that made building services panels based on embedded XP kiosk partitions, things like HVAC and lighting.
It has been my genuine hellish curse to have to work on two of them.
