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Comment by userbinator

16 hours ago

"again"? What they did in the past seems absolutely neighbourly compared to what they're doing now.

Get a VM of Windows 9x/2k/XP to experience what "good Microsoft" was like.

The other day I installed Windows 7 on a VM for fun.. it was not fun at all. I got weird wave of nostalgic sadness, like being teleported back in time, I felt/remembered how things were back in ~2010, the culture, my university life, how things were with an ex gf, ALL of it. The OS is engrained in my mind and it was gorgeous seeing those aero effects and hearing the startup sounds again. It is so simple and easy. It felt good so see & use it again.

With Windows 11, although I mostly like the UI (rounded corners on a high dpi tablet also with rounded screen is amazing), it feels absolutely gross, in the corporate soulless sense. It feels mentally heavy top operate. I constantly had to battle it to get it to work the way I want it.

These days all my devices are running Fedora with KDE, which is just the best. You basically set it up once the way you like it, and it won't change by itself for months. It is a buttery smooth experience and have had zero need to go back to Windows yet.

If anyone want the same level one-ness with your computer like back in Windows XP & Windows 7 days, give KDE a try. Fedora is pretty simple distro to get used to if you want a good starting point.

  • > It feels mentally heavy

    I mentioned to a friend recently that W11 is so difficult to use compared to Linux like Mint nowadays. He didn't understand it, though he tried Mint a decade ago but kept using Windows 10, upgraded to 11, continues to have driver problems with his laptop, some weeks network card stops working some weeks his sound card drops out completely. He uses usb dongles intermittently, it reminds me how I used on laptop Linux 20 something years ago and even then it wasn't that bad. I feel preaching Linux is almost counter-effective, but I'm tired of being asked to solve his hw problems caused by bad W11 drivers.

  • nostalgia is pretty powerful.

    I get the same feelings whenever I am near an interface that looks anything like NT4.0.

> "again"? What they did in the past seems absolutely neighbourly compared to what they're doing now.

As someone who lived through Microsoft’s actions in the 90s, I really don’t agree with your sentiment there.

There’s a reason many of us old greybeards still refuse to use anything MS even 30 years later.

  • The abomination that was IE6 - it poisoned the internet at the time with developers designing specifically for it and its random bullshit bugs. The number of admin tools (e.g. SAN interface) that specifically required IE6 to run ActiveX or some monstrosity.

    • This is the kind of opinion you can only hold if you never had to develop for Netscape.