Comment by IgorPartola
1 day ago
To be fair Microsoft was always shitware. I don’t remember a time when using a Windows machine just worked, didn’t take up gigabytes of space, didn’t crash, and didn’t get messed up by simply using it requiring a yearly or semi-yearly reinstall.
Windows in the 95-XP era wasn't exactly high-quality software, but it was genuine technical innovation, doing what you otherwise couldn't do.
Windows 7 was also incredibly good.
And yeah, there was some pretty neat stuff. Of Linux, macOS and Windows, Windows was the first to get GPU crash recovery, just chugging onward after a stall instead of bringing the entire system down.
The biggest sign for me that Microsoft just doesn't care about Windows (aside from the ads stuffed everywhere after a fresh install) is they stopped caring about its bones. Where is Windows' equivalent of APFS / BTRFS (or even EXT4)..? NTFS is more than 20 years old by now.
> Where is Windows' equivalent of APFS / BTRFS (or even EXT4)..? NTFS is more than 20 years old by now.
There's ReFS, but a lot of NTFS features are basically baked into the filesystem API, so replacing it is hard.
That being said, NTFS works extremely well and reliable. I don't really see a compelling need to replace it (which is always a messy transition unless you're completely backwards-compatible -- but in that case, NTFS has evolved a lot already).
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Nothing since then. Thats a long 30 years.
I remember when Windows didn't take gigabytes of space because there wasn't gigabytes of space, and it was still shitware.
Windows 3.1? It was only 6 3.5” disks.
To be fair, I had stretches of 2K, XP, 7 and 10 working acceptably.
These eras of Windows had their own dark patterns that were incredibly anti-consumer. No one's lives were improved because they installed the Ask Jeeves toolbar, but people were asked to install it millions and millions of times.
> Windows 3.1? It was only 6 3.5” disks.
Well ackchyually... Windows 3.1 was just a window manager, you needed another 3 disks for DOS, and if you wanted that sweet networking support, you'd need Windows for Workgroups 3.11 which was 8 disks!
Microsoft BASIC was a pretty decent interpreter, I wouldn't call it "shitware", so there you go?
I don't remember DOS 6.22 blue screening on me. Maybe it wasn't so bad.
That's because it black-screened instead.
I would have preferred a Forth on my C64 seriously. But no, we were stuck with this "38911 bytes free" crap.
That happened all the time. My Windows machines, from XP all the way up through early Windows 10, just worked. They didn't crash. And they certainly didn't need to get reinstalled for no reason. Your experience, while unfortunate, is not remotely typical.