I don't think Microsoft realizes that if they re-introduced a lightweight Win2k style OS for professionals they could charge any price they wanted for it.
I would gladly pay for Windows if it wasn't a hot pile of incomplete and disjointed consumer-focused noise.
I have an i7 3770k box that I repurpose occassionally for random projects. It runs Linux really well, but Win10 is an absolute dog. I can't even imagine Windows 11? Overclocked, 16gb RAM, SSD's in RAID... it doesn't make sense.
I don't use Windows, but have to touch it once or twice a year for various reasons. It's absolutely wild whenever I do. I go to launch Notepad and the Start menu decides to inform me about some mass murder situation or the latest horrible politics news or some natural disaster?! I just wanted to write down some text, not spiral into depression. Who asked for this?
It was being shown a tweet from Nigel Farage (Brexit starting British ‘politician’ [never elected as an MP]) in the start menu that made me start swearing at work one day when I had to do some Dev on Windows. Like, yeah anyone can tweet all they like and what have you, go nuts - but I don’t want that crap shown to me at work when I have to get stuff done.
Honestly would have been frustrated if it was a politician I actually liked.
But I agree it's absolutely nuts that advertisements and "suggested content" is included as standard without a very clear prompt on first use saying "you can turn this off if you like"
-- or perhaps a "set this PC up as a work machine" choice in installation that automatically shuts the noise off and adds the Windows classic theme rather than the weird start-metro hybrid we have now.
I'm not sure I'd pay any price for modern Windows 2000, but I'd certainly sing its praises which is something I've never been able to do.
I'd pay to remove the 2021 social media/marketing BS, sure.
But there's no reason for them to do that. They can instead offer Windows VIP down the line as a subscription-model recurring payment to keep ads and other shit away.
This isn't anything specific to Microsoft, this is what any company that wants to maximise its profits would do.
Doing the right thing isn't "what's right for the consumer" any more, it's "what's right for everybody" -- but where "everybody" is defined as the provider, its shareholders, and perhaps whatever subset of all customers contribute the most to the bottom line.
Has to benefit the provider, "they're running a business not a charity" -- an innocuous line of dialogue from the movies that can be used to justify almost any shitty, consumer-fucking decision you can think of, because we're capitalists, it's 2021, if you're not squeezing every dollar out, you're not doing it right.
Except people in the movies who said shit like that were typically gangsters or at least crooks. But they're the heroes now. The notion that they did wrong never really stuck -- they made lotsa money, you can't blame them. But they got caught, so work hard, run after that dream, they got the idea right -- money is what you want, just gotta be smarter than those silly gangsters.
Do it cleverer -- make your racket legit. It's not extortion, it's a subscription. It's not protection, it's premium. It's not more than they can afford, it's almost too little, they don't even know it's gone.
You can't, really. De-Crapifying Windows 10 (and I imagine 11) is a never-ending task.
Doing it manually is exceedingly painful. Doing it even with Scripts is fraught with danger and may result in things just being broken because of stupid dependencies.
And then there's a good chance that you'll find it's been undone with the next Windows update. That chance goes to 100% over the course of a year or so.
I think this is what made me so annoyed - we were doing lots of interesting low level, performance related stuff across platforms so this machine must have been the extra ++ Enterprise whatever version of Windows and the associated development software, cost was pretty much not a concern.
And yet, this is what we have to put up with. If it was free I’d understand…
The problem with Enterprise isn't the cost. It's that in 2021 Microsoft still can't make a webpage that asks for credit card details and gives out product keys.
To acquire an Enterprise license legitimately, you need to go through a reseller and pad the order with inexpensive client access licenses to reach the 5-license minimum order.
I wonder if part of it is a "covering ears and singing" thing.
Right now, the trend is all about the recurring revenue. Not just Windows, every bloody product is that way. It doesn't matter what bridges they burn in making a horrible customer experience, as long as they can show Wall Street a chart saying it returns 35 cents per month per customer in ad/behavioural tracking data sales.
But what happens if we have something that shows that's not a winning strategy? If, say, the Windows Enterprise license at $175 ends up outselling a $100-plus-$50-in-nickel-and-dime-revenue-over-the-next-five-years Windows crammed with bloatware? How would investors respond?
I don't use Windows, but have to touch it once or twice a year for various reasons.
I'm in a similar situation.
I have to fire up the company ThinkPad every other month or so. It's amazing to me what is permitted in an so-called "Enterprise" edition of Windows 10.
The part I find most annoying is the way Windows 10 automatically connects to my wifi, even when the setting to not permit auto-connect is enabled. I didn't care when I was in the office, but now that I'm in a work-from-home situation, no, Windows, you don't get to connect to my LAN whenever you feel like it.
After checking and re-checking the setting probably a dozen times, but it persisting in auto-connecting to my router, I had to ban the ThinkPad at the router level. Now on those occasions when I use the machine, I have to remember to un-ban it from my network for the duration of the task, then re-ban the machine.
Microsoft (and my billion-dollar healthcare company) are working with a definition of "Enterprise" with which I was previously unfamiliar.
The part I find most annoying is the way Windows 10 automatically connects to my wifi, even when the setting to not permit auto-connect is enabled.
Have you tried disabling the network adapter? That's something it won't try to revert... (and I'm almost tempted to add "for now", given all the other abusive behaviours they've introduced.)
haha I started using a Windows 10 laptop from work recently and had a similar experience. I asked IT why they didn’t suppress it in their controlled deploys and they said no one knows how to do that...thankfully it’s not my only computing platform, I’d go mad.
Jeez at the beginning of the day I just want to write code with only the distraction of measuring my work against user requirements. shouldering aside Guilt tripping adware all day harshes my mellow, upsets my flow, makes me waste my energy daydreaming of revenge hacks (fantasies of course, I’m very mellow at heart, but with a wellspring of ideas definitely NotSafeForPublicAttribution).
There is a group policy to "turn off windows consumer experience". To edit local group policies win 10 pro is needed. It is also possible to change the register value. See the link for more info.
I'm pretty sure they think it's good for "engagement" --- the new euphemism for distracting users and pulling them into scenarios where they can be monetised via ads or otherwise.
The older versions of Windows were definitely far "quieter", but I guess MS saw how a lot of average users had installed adware themselves, and thought that they could also profit from bundling it by default.
I'd run (probably pay for) an 2K/XP style Windows 10 for sure.
Just leave me WSL and Winget. Put the control panel back in one window.
Most of that other junk can go - UI framework of the day, Cortana, Bing in my start menu, Windows Store, enhanced error reporting? Don't need it. Don't want it.
There are reasons I run Xfce on Linux desktops. Fast, has the features I need (which isn't much) and the features it has work reliably. I'm looking for a way to move and switch windows and launch programs. Everything else is just distraction.
The control panel situation is astounding. It's clear that there are a bunch of different silo'd teams in MS doing all this work, because I can't really think of why they would do this "transition" over years of half-baked lavaflow features. It seems like there are 2 or 3 places to access any given setting. Some of them have the same UI toolkit from 2000, and others look like an Xbox application.
In Linux/BSD it always blows my mind that you can do "crazy" configuration changes like bring a LACP/LAGG interface online with essentially one command and zero downtime, while on Windows you will peck around 23 different UI's like a chicken in the sandbox only to break yourself.
I think it's more to avoid complaints and compliance issues than anything.
If they refactored everything in a single update, which I believe they are very capable of doing, I can't imagine how much shit they would get from users and businesses, look how much fuss was generated over the start menu.
By doing the snail pace transitions they can rebuff anything with a "you had years to get used to it / it's been there for ages and we didn't hear anything about this". I just don't have a clue of why they decided control panel needed to go, settings is absolutely subpar.
The irony is they get hate and complaints no matter what they do - so I believe they are optimizing the wrong metric. It's bureaucracy at work: make fuss, busy work, spend lots of money, spin wheels, start big projects then abandon them etc...
Or just make good software. Do it right the first time. Accept responsibility when things go south. If your mission is righteous the rest will fall into place.
I don't buy that one bit. They could update the UI in one go, but that's not what they decided to do. When you look at what has been brought over to the new whitespace-everywhere settings, they have decided that what needs modernisation isn't only the UI, but also the preferences themselves. That means it's really hard to change, and not everything can be changed.
Whenever something is brought to that forsaken app, the old functionality is simplified and changed. Sometimes everything makes it through to the new app, sometimes breadcrumbs are left in the back of the couch, meaning you can click on stuff and end up in XP land.
With this current strategy, I do not believe Windows will ever have one single UI for its settings like macOS.
I believe it's because important businesses literally have scripts that do things like "open the network control panel and click at the button at position (123px, 456px)". Backwards compatibility is hard.
> Most of that other junk can go - UI framework of the day, Cortana, Bing in my start menu, Windows Store, enhanced error reporting? Don't need it. Don't want it.
You are not expected to. Most people believe the new features in proprietary operating systems are for them. Sure, a few of them are (although in the case of Windows 11 they might not be obvious). But today most of these are aimed at extracting value from the existing position - hence tons of adware on a fresh copy of your OS.
It has been a long time since I've tried ReactOS. It wasn't something I consider daily driver, real hardware ready.
WINE and Proton have made the situation better. My desktop remains Windows and I more or less treat it like a game console. It runs games, some recording/modelling software, Adobe Reader for some terrible gov't PDFs, and my wife's cutting machine. The rest are my Linux distro choice of the week.
I've just upgraded to a Ryzen 4300GE and tried some games under either plain WINE or Playonlinux with success; I didn't even need to overclock it.
I've also used extensively WINE in the past for electronic simulation and music software with success. Before being also ported to Linux, Reaper for Windows run perfectly with very low latencies without using ASIO drivers, and MicroCap is now free as in beer, and runs great under Linux using WINE. http://www.spectrum-soft.com/index.shtm
The number of software that run great under WINE is getting bigger and bigger, and I can understand why Microsoft is so concerned that they had to create their anti-WINE (WSL) which does exactly the same in reverse.
I want this for Android. If something like Android 2.x or 4.x would get a security update and I could run normal apps on it, I'd switch back in a heartbeat.
Back then, the enhancement community was huge. Every Android version since then has seen fewer and fewer enhancements because they just keep getting broken over and over again by some new OS requirement. New versions require you to turn off permanent notifications for every application that needs to do anything in the background (signal, wire, email, etc.); I can no longer modify the status bar because the developer for that mod gave up after Android 8 and I can't find a new one; I can't slide over the notification bar to adjust brightness (useful when the screen is too dim to see the brightness slider); the concept of just returning an empty contacts list instead of breaking the app by denying a permission is gone; etc.
Just look at the number of workarounds OsmAnd needs to apply and tell users about to keep track recording working, you can ctrl+f for nearly every android version and find remarks like "No good solution found for now. Current mitigation is we do not use AlarmManager wake-up, instead keep GPS always on": https://docs.osmand.net/en/main@latest/osmand/troubleshootin... (Of course, Google has no problem keeping location history for you. Only if you want to store it locally...)
As a developer I will concede that many of the new APIs are so much nicer than the ones available for Android 4 so I do understand people drop support for it.
Another thing is that battery drain of garbage apps is a real problem, but similar to the Win2k style OS proposal, this isn't meant for the mainstream. The mainstream can have their OS manage things for them, but as a power user that knows how to run 'htop' I'd really rather just manage my own device by myself.
Why ask me? I'm not really into the politics of whether Google is interested in "running" Android (clearly they are doing it and getting massive gains from having the most popular OS on the planet, what even is it supposed to mean that they're not "interested" or "running it") or who John is. I'm just a humble user that would like control of the device that touches on so many aspects of life.
I'm curious as to how Windows 10 runs that poorly for you, or what to you counts as an "absolute dog".
I've got a laptop that's only a CPU generation younger than yours, and Windows 10 for general use works okay for me. I don't see a great overall difference in performance when compared to Gnome on Linux. Do you use a lightweight desktop or something on Linux?
(FWIW, I run Fedora for the majority of the time, and I've been using mostly Linux for nearly 20 years, at times exclusively, so this isn't Windows advocacy.)
I think it's a bit of a stretch to call Windows 10 an "absolute dog", but I have experienced a noticeable performance issue myself: low-end power consumption.
I have a new-ish ultrabook laptop with a mobile Intel processor that dual-boots Windows 10 and Linux with the Openbox desktop environment. On Linux, doing Lisp development with Emacs and SLIME hovers around 3-5% CPU usage. Windows 10, with no applications open, idles between 8% and 15%. As a result, I get significantly worse battery life in Windows than in Linux (despite the opposite situation usually being true due to better power-management (drivers) in Windows) - 7 hours vs 10.
(Windows 10 also uses more RAM doing nothing than Linux+Openbox does, but that's not as much of an issue for me - RAM does nothing if it's not being used, while a CPU not in use directly translates to longer battery life)
What is using those CPU cycles? Also, how frequently are you booting into that Windows environment?
There's a number of background tasks that Windows will run periodically (update checks, search reindex, etc) so if you don't regularly boot into Windows it'll end up running those soon after you boot up. Those should really only take a few minutes to complete so it should drop back down to a normal idle level within a short period even if you don't boot into Windows often. But if you're checking CPU load only a few minutes after boot when you haven't booted in a while, its not surprising to have some amount of CPU activity in Windows.
Its really strange you experience that much CPU load idle. I have an i5 3350P running Windows 10. I use it for Steam Home Streaming, Emby, and a few other tasks. Normally its CPU load is <5%. Having your machine use 15% CPU at idle is definitely not normal, I imagine there's something other than just Windows churning away.
The CPU cycles are being used mostly by the Synaptics touchpad driver, Microsoft Telemetry, and Microsoft Defender. However, I will say that I was mostly looking at my CPU usage right after starting up Windows - after I gave it some time to settle down, it did indeed drop to 3%-5% CPU used - so, I was mistaken!
You're right that Windows 10 is "generally okay" on an old CPU, even for relatively heavy dev work. But I just upgraded from i7-3770k to i9-12900k and it made me realize how much time I spent _waiting_ for every little thing. I've been switching back and forth between the two as I migrate, and the old CPU definitely feels like a dog to me now.
Aside: I was planning to switch to Linux too, but apparently this CPU/chipset is "too new" for Ubuntu to work, so I'm stuck on Windows for a few more months.
No doubt things are snappier on a present-day i9 than on an i7 from nearly a decade ago. It's also true that it's easy to get used to things and not see e.g. gradual degradation of performance with new and heavier software revisions.
I was mostly interested in the perceived differences between Windows 10 and present-day mainstream Linux desktops because I don't generally feel a great difference between those.
I have a laptop from 2020 with a midrange CPU, 64GB of ram and a fast ssd. It is slower in almost every task that I throw at it compared to my kid’s lowest config MacBook M1 Air.
My previous Windows 7 device with similar specs was slower on compute tasks, but “felt” faster, and was running all of the same corporate bullshit that the new box runs.
It’s not the hardware, because Linux runs better in a VM.
Also how fast is this SSD for reference - windows seem to absolutely chug on my mother's laptop despite it actually being fairly snappy when the data is loaded into memory.
It’s been about a year, I can’t completely remember all the specific gripes. It just felt slow. I’m thinking of trying again because I’d really love to play that new Halo game :)
A "modernized" - i.e. new icons, better colors and fonts - Windows 2000 UI would be awesome. One thing I really like of Mac OS is that after doing the big switch with Mac OS X, the UI has remained very similar and consistent, without too many paradigm shift. Windows went instead from having one of the best UIs ever designed (Windows 2000) to a fractal of inconsistency that has only worsened with every release since then.
Honestly, Windows 2000's UI wasn't as great as people make it out to be.
But what it was is consistent. Every program looked like it belonged on the system, except for some wacky video or audio players that consisted of text rendered on top of bitmaps.
From the bootloader to the web browser, early Windows felt like it was all part of a single experience. Windows XP provided the same, except it was around for so long that the ecosystem around it tried harder and harder to mimick different operating systems. Win2k was right in the sweet spot.
I'd love for Windows 11 to have a Win2k mode available. Keep the impressive kernel improvements, the virtualization based security, the WSL system, and just give me a UI that doesn't take a second to render the start menu.
Even modern Windows explorer is quite usable (without the menu redesign), it's honestly just the shell and everything that you'd call an "app".
The general public can take their candy story Fisher Price Windows if that's what they want, full of gaudy colours and fancy effects.
The gaudy colors and fancy effects was Windows 7, IMO.
I really enjoy Windows 7 though. It's fast, very little bloat, and modern enough that pretty much any Windows software works on it. Also, something about the Aero theme feels warm and cheerful to me. I can't replicate the feeling on Linux or Windows 10, and it saddens me.
I have a hard time understanding what possessed them to create Windows 11.
From my perspective it appears to be an OS designed by MBAs with no understanding of how software is designed or refactored. It very much feels like there was heavy handed too down instructions without any input taken from those building.
It's subjective. I like my Win 11 installation much better than 10. What I (still) miss though, is a tabbed Windows Explorer and some more polishing here and there. The Windows terminal and WSL2 work great. -- This said, my main computer runs Pop!_OS and Windows is only used when externally required.
Kind of a trend... I don't think Apple realizes that as well.
Photos? Tons of frameworks for scanning my photos and adding 3d custom emojis to Messages? They also lead the way for vulnerabilities like the latest NSO.
What if we could just have a bare OS with all core frameworks and let users decide what to install.
That's a matter of taste, but it's certainly not an unreasonable argument to make if you're purporting that Arch is such a system, which is implied by your post.
I don't find it to be a deal breaker, just saying that systemd is at least controversial enough for such things to exist and that it might disqualify Arch from being a system that qualifies as one that is a "bare OS with all core frameworks" to some.
That's weird, until recently I had a 3930k on which I occasionally ran Win 10. The computer had a SATA SSD (Samsung 840). It worked very well. It was occasional because I find Windows annoying for reasons other than performance.
I've upgraded the CPU to a Xeon E5-2667 v2 (basically a 4th gen i7) to get PCIE 3 for my GPU. I've installed Windows 11 on it for my curiosity / gaming needs. It works very well, I'd say it's smoother / snappier than Win 10, but I'm wondering whether that's just some tweaked animation delays.
It's undeniably better than on some 8th gen i5u + NVMe I have on a work laptop - which is officially supported!
What you propose seems nice but is infeasible. Lightweight doesn't just mean getting rid of Paint3D and all this cruft installed by default. Today you have tons of APIs and services that need to be running, otherwise X breaks. The X could be your Bluetooth audio connection, and app that uses an obscure API call, a network service etc. So basically your lightweight alternative would be a broken, less powerful copy of Windows 10.
So at that point it's just safer to use an older combination of OS and software that you know has been working fine.
I don't follow / automatically agree on second part. I have three ThinkPads with i5-2520M that my family and I use daily with windows 10. Email browsing word excel etc. Some light games, lots of photo browsing and sorting and minimal editing via acdsee. If windows 10 is lagging in what is clearly a superior system from specs perspective, something doesn't work right. My first suspicion is ssds in raid as there's a myriday ways to get that wrong, but who knows?
You don't notice the lag unless you've used a MacBook or Linux. If you ever upgrade to an i7 you will see a performance boost and your current system will feel slow. So running Linux on the same specs as Windows you'll see that Windows is slower and after a while as the bloat happens the slowness will become even more apparent.
I mean, yes... My main desktop and laptop are faster for big tasks. It's just that win10 on the 2nd generation mobile Intel is usable as opposed to a deal breaker. I don't yearn for xp from that perspective which never felt particularly snappy on anything. I feel we are at point of asking from windows to be something it is not.
That is true. Windows in the end will always be a mom and pop OS. But with increasing computer literacy I expect Microsoft's market share to dwindle. Btw what about your secondary memory is it SSD or traditional HDD?
In the thinkpads I added a sata ssd to replace original 320gb or 500gb spinners. Either crucial or Intel,nothing fancy. For one of them I replaced the DVD drive with secondary 2tb HDD for photos / movies... Ah ultra bay, how much we miss thee :). The 420s (slimmer version) is basically as lightweight laptop as I need, but has great keyboard and easy modularity of drives memory battery etc. What a time it was to be alive!
My main laptop is ThinkPad t25 which is basically t470 with traditional keyboard layout. 512mb ssd. No room for secondary HDD.
My main desktop is an aging beast - amd fx8350 and rx470 8gb. Bunch of ssd and HDD drives at any given point :).
Speaking of storage, synology 918+ as Nas fwiw.
Bunch of other computers around such as ThinkPad e545 and e580, plus an intel nuc around every tv. None of it fancy anymore, I have no time left for complex vlans or VMs or breakable OS's, but computers are my hammer so there's plenty around :-)
> I don't think Microsoft realizes that if they re-introduced a lightweight Win2k style OS for professionals they could charge any price they wanted for it.
I don't think you realize that, no, they couldn't.
I went to fire up Windows 2000 in a VM this past week. I had completely forgotten it was the last 32-bit version. If it were 64-bit, I expect there would be many still in service today.
There isn't one for AMD64/"x64", only for Itanium and DEC Alpha, and the Alpha version was never truly released so there's only an RC2 build for that platform.
While there was a 64-bit edition of Windows XP (actually two: one for Itanium and one for AMD64), it was not very popular or well supported by drivers.
It eventually did get nearly full driver support, the last pain point i had on WinXP x64 edition was ASIO4ALL, for years the author said, paraphrased, "I will never support 64 bit OS" - although it works fine on win7 x64 and up.
The drivers that never worked correctly were industrial and "weird" things like radio programmers, stereoscopic headsets, and limited run PCI[e] cards and specialized USB peripherals, but most of those had issues with XP 32-bit as well, and never worked past XP, in general.
> I have an i7 3770k box that I repurpose occassionally for random projects. It runs Linux really well, but Win10 is an absolute dog. I can't even imagine Windows 11?
The closest you can get to this is modifying a Windows ISO with NTLite[1] and remove any unwanted bloatware. I've been doing this for the last couple of years on all my machines and I suggest you give it a try.
> I have an i7 3770k box that I repurpose occassionally for random projects. It runs Linux really well, but Win10 is an absolute dog. I can't even imagine Windows 11? Overclocked, 16gb RAM, SSD's in RAID... it doesn't make sense.
I've been using Windows 10 (previously Windows 7) on an i7-3770 for close to ten years (!). That shouldn't be a slow machine. The only way my system might have an advantage would be the GPU or the 32GB of RAM. Sad to think that big chunk of memory might actually be needed, but, might be worth a try?
There are some things that are easy to get wrong in terms of motherboard setup (memory timings!) even if you're not overclocking. It seems farfetched that those would effect Windows a lot more than Linux, which you said is working fine, but again, it might be something to look at.
Contrary to another commenter, I never noticed Spectre and Meltdown mitigations to cause a real problem, and I did some benchmarking because I was concerned about that.
I would love to see the "internal wiki" at MS that explains how to do this yourself. I have to imagine that there are employees internally who feel this way too and run their own "lightened" OS.
There are multiple stripped out SKUs internally but none of them are "win2000" style. More like no shell (OneCoreUAP) or no compositor/desktop (OneCore).
It's hard to say. MS changes the strategy all the time and there are so many SKUs it is hard to follow, at least for an outsider such as myself. I know there is a long-term release version that tends to recieve fewer updates and is considered more of an LTS/Stable release - but I think that there are also artificial limitations on this too as far as what it is capable of and how you can get a hold of it.
I haven't noticed any particular limitations, but my understanding is that it's not very straightforward to get by "official" means.
At work, another team is in charge of point of sale and other similar devices running Windows IOT or whatever it's called now, and apparently licensing is completely different from the "regular" desktop and server installs.
I don't think Microsoft realizes that if they re-introduced a lightweight Win2k style OS for professionals they could charge any price they wanted for it.
> "I don't think Microsoft realizes that if they re-introduced a lightweight Win2k style OS for professionals they could charge any price they wanted for it."
Then buy an MSDN subscription and use the enterprise or even server editions. You did say "any price" after all.
They likely do realize it but don't care. For all the talk of Linux this or Mac that the truth is Windows still dominates the PC market. Microsoft doesn't need to make an OS that really appeals to businesses to get their business, so why bother?
Can you game with it? Is Direct X running on it? Honestly, gamers, who so often lead the trends in destop PCs, have been asleep at the switch decrying all that cruft.
With some effort, yes. I successfully ran Battlefield 3 on a GPU-enabled AWS instance with Steam streaming, so I'd assume it would run just as well on the bare-metal.
You can't without group policy changes. It even has its own anti-tampering protection so it can't be disabled, Admin rights or not. However, it is doable - have been running it like this for a few years.
Instead of "Making Windows 2000 Usable in 2021" I'd like to see something more along the lines of "Making Windows 11 Usable in 2021". Past attempts at doing this (oftentimes) produced shady utilities (or illegal ISOs) that would hack out "essential" Windows components. If done right, open-source, developed out in the open, I could see this being a hugely successful endeavor. Imagine being able to use a modern Windows system (officially) that had no bloatware or the things we hate about modern Windows. (yes, I know I'm almost describing Linux and MacOS here)
To pull this off, I see a utility (kind of like Chocolatey) with modules that can be run to disable certain annoyances- and changes that can always be fully reverted if necessary. Create some global modules such as "gaming-only" that removes all the bloat needed except for gaming.
You might be interested in the LTSC versions of Windows 10. I know you said Windows 11, but IMO, Windows 11 currently is missing some usability that's still present in Windows 10 (like the taskbar). Of course you'll also be missing the scheduler updates, but I've witnessed some users disabling efficiency cores on Alder Lake anyway due to bugs or performance.
> LTSC, Long-Term Servicing Channel (which was until 2017 branded as LTSB, Long-Term Servicing Branch), is a unique version of Windows 10 Enterprise. Unlike all the other versions of Windows 10, LTSC has zero bloatware and the least amount of telemetry (data being sent back to Microsoft).
A friendly intro can be found on this Reddit wiki:
The main problem with LTSC (assuming you're fine ignoring licensing requirements) is what you touched on - it's LTSC so rarely up to date from a feature perspective. Of course this is it's real purpose and 11 will eventually get an LTSC release as well (once it's fit for said main purpose) but these types of "well there are a few things it doesn't have" are rolling issues not one off things you can just accept up front.
Also it's a pain to get Store stuff working. Normally that wouldn't be a big deal but Minecraft Bedrock is a common dealbreaker.
Windows serves whichever axe is deemed to need grinding and they're not going to give up that control.
At the moment it's Edge getting shoved down our throats at any opportunity and in some cases it even ignores the "default apps" (looking at you links from the lock screen)
I've also started getting prompts to "restore my web browser" settings as a way to get Edge reset back to the default along with a permanent "restore recommended" banner on the top of the Settings app.
Use Microsoft recommended browser settings: Set the latest Microsoft Edge as your default browser and pin it to your desktop and taskbar. It's the best browser for Windows 10 with enhanced privacy protection.
The "learn more" takes you to https://microsoftedgewelcome.microsoft.com/en-us/privacy and two of the promises are "control" and "respect". It's funny, I don't feel either in control or respected about my choice not to use Edge.
Unfortunately, using Windows Server as a gaming computer is highly frustrating, and rarely works long-term. Biggest issue is driver compatibility (especially video drivers). Direct X used to be an issue, but I think it actually runs fine now in Server 2019. A much better solution in today's world would be to just run Linux. Steam now has >80% of the Top-100 Windows games running on Linux.
> Steam now has >80% of the Top-100 Windows games running on Linux.
When it works. CSGO claims to work on Linux but has stopped working for many months now. There is a fix that includes changing a library but you risk getting banned by anticheat.
I was ruthless in tearing out cruft. To me this made the consumer versions seem quicker and more stable. I have absolutely no flight sim use case now for any of the Windows OSes, past or present.
Solitaire had a secret purpose, it taught people how to use a mouse in a way that they would enjoy, an important consideration when most people had never used a mouse before.
It goes back to 3.0 and quite notably did not convey advertising to spend money. It also wasn’t located blatantly in your face in a tiled menu. There’s a very different incentive.
Windows 10 also ships with Solitaire, except it plays a video ad after every game and the only way to remove the ads is by paying for a $10/month "solitaire premium" subscription.
Sigh, no it doesn’t. The Spolsky argument was directed mainly about supposed feature creep within applications like Excel and Word. This could apply to the OS level - but it was never used to argue for the inclusion of micropayment shitware.
Further countering your argument - minesweeper, solitaire, and paint are no longer included in Windows. If anything had established itself as staple OS accessory “feature” apps those would qualify.
Either it applies to the OS level or it doesn't, micropayments in software are something completely orthogonal and irrelevant to what Spolsky and this thread was talking about one way or the other.
The counterpoint seems tangental as well. Whether or not something is removed or kept isn't what defines it as a staple feature to a portion of the userbase. Most of the uproar about Windows 11 is things people considered core functionality being remove e.g. local accounts during setup on Home or moving the taskbar away from the bottom of the screen. Also iterations of Solitaire and Paint are still default apps anyways.
> Either it applies to the OS level or it doesn't, micropayments in software are something completely orthogonal and irrelevant to what Spolsky and this thread was talking about one way or the other.
You completely miss the point. Candy Crush was never an essential feature of the OS. If removing it will piss off some people such that they have to download it from the App Store, so be it (it is less reasonable to expect people to download individual features into a single app like excel - addons non withstanding). The micropayments comment is not about a feature but pointing out that its inclusion was nothing more than a cynical money grab.
Does Excel not provide other functionality and features even though it has a DRM licensing aspect? Of course it does as such an aspect being present doesn't dismiss everything else outright. The same is true for micropayments, that they are there does not dismiss the idea others could find the app (or games in general) a useful functionality in an OS to the point they would consider a core feature.
As an anecdote I've removed default apps while cleaning many PCs and gotten more pushback about CandyCrush being missing than Calculator. Regardless of how much more base utility I think Calculator provides personally it doesn't mean others don't find the same base value in an entertainment component, even if it has micropayments or other revenue streams built in or could be a click away in an app store (as any component could be anyways).
It looks like blackbird hasn't been updated since nov 2020, while O&O shut up was updated just last month. One thing I wish O&O had was a feature / taskbar version that watches if any setting has been changed once an hour / restart, alerts you, and asks you if you want to restore that setting, along with auto update.
The reason is that Win11 (and 10, and all the other "still in support" OSs) is still subject to constant change by MS --- including the automatic updates --- so it is quite a moving target to fight. In contrast, "EOL" OSs won't change any more and they start off not fighting you as much in the first place. They're also probably much simpler in many ways. I see many similarities between projects like this and the automotive tuning community; there's a lot of people interested in newer cars, but many of them prefer working on the old stuff (roughly 50s-70s).
Hacking a platform puts you at odds with the platform vendor, with the consequence that any hacks are likely to be incompatible with subsequent releases of the platform.
Platform vendors want to shunt you down very specific paths. The interests of platform vendors and developers are not always aligned, and are often diametrically opposed — especially with regards to creating portable code that runs on multiple platforms.
Kinda interesting, but I can’t help think that starting with Windows XP and using TweakUI etc. to turn off most of the annoying things XP added would be a slightly more useable NT 5.x experience, as it got support longer.
I was a big user of nLite in the XP days. It allows you to slipstream Service Packs and remove/disable lots of unwanted functionality directly in the XP ISO. There's a checkbox for almost everything. You'd boot directly into your perfectly customized desktop with everything working.
nLite takes me back to the days of having a carputer in my TT, complete with a touchscreen, rugged industrial PC chassis and a special PSU hooked up to the ignition. Good times!
Pre-Vista Windows is simply insufficient from a security perspective compared to modern post-Vista Windows.
All XP-and-older versions of Windows allowed any program to access the hardware directly. Back then, a Win2000 program would need to access the "in" and "out" hardware instructions to talk with gamepads because... well... gamepads were read to directly through hardware instructions.
Don't look at me like that! USB wasn't really that common yet, and there were all sorts of weird specific hardware differences in controllers still. It was a different world. Gamepads were glorified potentiometers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentiometer) and game-ports were just ADC converters controlled by Windows. And assembly language knowledge was much more common too!
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Letting modern software touch the hardware directly like that is a security nightmare. Vista+ forced everyone to write signed device drivers and hide that direct-hardware access behind a layer of APIs (the Windows Driver API).
Today, if your video games touch hardware directly, you at least know about it... and the practice is discouraged (though still widely used for DRM and other such "features").
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In any case, "stripped down" Windows 10 IoT core builds and runs on the Raspberry Pi.
Are you sure? I don't think any NT kernel allowed userspace code to directly access I/O ports. The earliest versions didn't even let graphics drivers do that, but that was changed (in either 3.51 or 4.0?) for performance reasons.
For compatibility with DOS and 16-bit Windows versions, the kernel may emulate I/O access, similar to modern virtual machines. For simple devices, that layer of emulation may be very thin (with some accesses going directly to the hardware), but that isn't a security problem. A simple polled ADC can't do any harm to the system, at worst you get garbage if multiple programs were to use it at the same time.
IIRC, the big one was Serial-ports and Parallel-ports (which were commonly used for all sorts of custom equipment, especially in the medical field).
IIRC, user-mode programs of WinXP (and earlier, including Win2k) were able to directly access these hardware ports. Which meant that WinXP / Win2k had far better latency, leading to obscure hardware bugs to anyone who upgraded from XP -> Vista (or later). Even if you rewrote the program to use Win Vista+ style COM ports, it wasn't good enough.
So a lot of people stayed back on WinXP / Win NT.
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16-bit programs were DOS / segmented mode. Win95 remained compatible. IIRC, Win2k forced you into 32-bit flat-mode programs, which had some security benefits.
But these 32-bit "flat mode" security benefits were not enough, and were still a far cry from the expectations of the modern computer user.
You are not remembering correctly. No flavor of Windows NT (this includes 2000 and XP) gave direct hardware access out of the box.
There were a couple of undocumented but well known NT kernel functions to manipulate the task IO permission level (eg Ke386SetIoAccessMap) and there was a commonly used hack/gaping security hole to manipulate these with a 3rd party driver that was built to do nothing except that (probably the most commonly shared one went by the name of GIVEIO.SYS - first presented in Dr Dobbs Journal in the 90s). This would work similarly on Vista and 7 as it would on the older OSes.
Win2k didn’t so much as force you into flat mode as it was a completely different kernel architecture from Windows 98/95 - the “security benefits” include the myriad other ways that NT is an actual multiuser OS vs 98/95 being a glorified DOS extender. The Windows 11 kernel is an NT descendant through 2000/XP and the preceding NT 4/3 releases preceding those.
As long as the hardware isn't DMA-capable or has to be shared, allowing programs direct access isn't a security violation. Since everything runs in protected mode, the kernel is still "in charge", and can limit what I/O should go directly to the hardware. This is supported by the processor, which has a per-task bitmap of allowed I/O ports.
Virtualization was introduced on IBM mainframes in the 1970s, and in a somewhat more limited version has been present in 32-bit x86 operating systems (even Windows 3.x could run several virtual DOS machines at the same time).
Every 32-bit version of Windows still supports running 16-bit programs. Microsoft could have continued supporting 16-bit protected mode even on 64-bit, or even used the newer virtualization features (in place of V86 mode) to run real mode code, but choose not to.
As for the expectations of modern computer users, those that don't know how any of this stuff works probably believe that everything has to get slower, more restrictive, and less backward compatible in the name of Security :(
> As long as the hardware isn't DMA-capable or has to be shared
We're talking about Parallel-Ports here, aka "The Printer Port". Any printer program written "old-school" would have tried to send data to LPT-1, except you have an X-Ray machine sitting there confused at these messages its getting.
The proper technique of printing, is not to directly contact the LPT-1 port and shove data into it... its to talk to Windows's printer spool and interact indirectly.
The user then configures the LPT-1 port: is it to be managed by the printer spool? Or should LPT-1 port be divvyed out to a particular program and reserved through another manner?
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There's absolutely a security concern about random programs sending messages to the hardware. Maybe the OS doesn't have a security issue, but those medical devices could have commands (such as rewriting firmware) sitting on those ports.
You'd want to make sure that only approved programs directly interacted with those kinds of hardware devices... with the protocols that are appropriately specified by the user.
You are correct, the NT kernel did not allow direct IO access from user space - but there was a commonly used trick of using a small driver (the original one named giveio.sys) that manipulated the IOPL of the TSS through some undocumented kernel functions.
I don't use Windows as my host OS, but I still keep a Windows 2000 VM around for running Win32 software. It's so much more lightweight than recent versions of Windows that if the software works in Windows 2000, I much prefer to run it there.
I honestly can't think of any features of Office since Office 2k that I require for my personal use either.
I just don't allow the Windows 2000 virtual machine access to the network.
The guide seems to focus on getting office 07/10 running. Honestly, if I'm going to run an OS that old, I'd download the support packages for office 2000 that can open/save docx/xlsx. Would love to see a browser with ssl.
What I dream of is an unholy union: a modern Linux with a Windows 2000 VM as its GUI. The VM will have enough Wayland bits to provide any missing modern amenities such as a web browser isolated in a container far far away. It would be beautiful.
As much as I loved Windows 2000, the ability to use XP msstyle themes is a significant enough value add for me that for a retro build, I think I’d use XP instead unless the machine in question is old enough that it would’ve originally shipped with 98/98SE. Some of those themes looked great and it’s a bit of a bummer that there’s no way to use them on modern systems.
> it’s a bit of a bummer that there’s no way to use them on modern systems
I agree. It's odd knowing the original classic theme still exists in some form in Windows 10 and 11 for compatibility reasons, but there's no way to access it. You can install themes and lookalikes, but it's just not the same.
You can by modifying the security attributes on DWM's theming handle so that it's inaccessible(you could also just force close the handle but that's not reversible).
There's probably plenty of local privilege escalations, but those are not really anything worry about for a single-user machine. That one you pointed to is an RCE, so definitely more severe. I wonder how easy it is to exploit those. I suspect the community is eventually going to fix them somehow (especially since the 2k source was leaked a long time ago) if it's enough of a concern.
Even though I’m not going to use Windows 2000 again, this was an interesting read.
On a related note: I have an old scanner that I use about once every year. Drivers max out on XP support, so I installed Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs in a VM, which is a stripped down Windows XP. Perhaps someone in the W2k crowd would be happy with WinFLP as an alternative.
Been following and using BWC's (Blackwingcat) Kernelex for years. Those same instructions will get you very recent versions of Chrome as well for daily browsing use. BWC hasn't posted an update in quite a while. I hope he's doing well!
Honestly, I just run it as-is in VMWare, with contemporaneous applications, like my copy of EAGLE 5 that works perfectly. If it ever gets hosed I have a checkpoint VM image with all the patches and applications install, I can just warp immediately back to Windows 2000 nirvana.
And a few days after Windows 2000 was released, I was obsessed with installing FreeBSD and then only the ports I needed, to keep things as slim as possible.
Beyond the step-by-step guide, the writer's main page has some compelling words about Windows products being less engaging since XP and the planned obsolescence that was built into Windows 8 and 10.
I do feel like one could also protest bloat and planned obsolescence with a Linux desktop (as long as they aren't running Ubuntu).
I think what they’re trying to say is something like “If you want to act in protest against bloat and planned obsolescence you can use a Linux desktop other than Ubuntu”
Indeed. To use a snap to install something that is pretty much integral to the Gnome desktop and has no dependency on anything other than Gnome, this is ridiculous.
Snaps are useful for packaging dependencies that aren't (AND CAN'T in a timely fashion) be provided by the distro.
One of these days, I need to create a guide like this for OS X 10.9 Mavericks. I have a bunch of tools at https://jonathanalland.com/old-osx-projects.html, but it could badly use some overarching instructions.
Just wondering, why 10.9/Mavericks over 10.12/Sierra?
As a side note, I’ve been using macOS Sierra as my main OS for a few years now (until quite recently when I switched to Manjaro), and find it works quite well, aside from not being able to run a large chunk of newer software.
I’m assuming this can only be run offline? The number of security vulnerabilities published and not are probably too numerous to risk getting this on the www
I would think running it behind a hardware firewall/router/NAT and using a modern browser (someone further up mentioned recent versions of chrome) should take care of most vulnerabilities unless opening something malicious (document/app).
The practical difference is that keeping on top of the Win10 vulns would take considerable effort, whereas exploiting (a stock install of) Win2K is “download Metasploit and run this one line to get a remote SYSTEM shell”.
The argument is not that 10 is better or even more secure—surely all the added code has to count for something, although the (glaring absence of) security engineering in 2K gives me a sense of vague horror—it’s that running the latest 10 probably makes you substantially faster than the slowest camper, even if it doesn’t make you faster than the proverbial bear.
I would gladly pay for Windows if it wasn't a hot pile of incomplete and disjointed consumer-focused noise.
I have an i7 3770k box that I repurpose occassionally for random projects. It runs Linux really well, but Win10 is an absolute dog. I can't even imagine Windows 11? Overclocked, 16gb RAM, SSD's in RAID... it doesn't make sense.