To his point, even in the Linux world, DEs have accumulated the bloat of features, animations, complex compositing, front-to-back theming, and other frivolities that have made them large and slow. Not to mention that "flat" theming has somehow consumed everything. Try using an older stacking WM. It is shocking how fast they are and how few resources they use. Their problem is that they're not maintained.
Is there a WM out there that can do the basic quality-of-life functions of today's DEs? I'd love a simple, opinionated WM that takes the features we know are useful today (workspaces, expo mode, sensible file manager layouts, system trays) and gives them a color-adjustable window theme inspired by 90's aesthetics, with minimal compositing that can run fast on hardware as minimal as a prototype RISC-V board. Or really, what we need is a truly minimal DE. Something that doesn't care about GTK or Qt or Kvantum, and stays lean.
Edit: I've already tried tiling WMs and I don't like them. I want a primarily mouse-driven UI. I'm sort of in agreement with the NeXT philosophy there. I primarily use Mint and Cinnamon these days.
I also understand that applications are bloated, but they can be bloated in their own little sandbox instead of creeping out to the rest of the system.
To be fair, while I remember the Windows 95 shell being quite snappy on a 133 MHz 5x86, it’s not exactly the epitome of the suckless ideal internally—it’s centered around COM/OLE2 (with Unicode strings!), has a full-blown object browser under the guise of Explorer, and to avoid the slowness all of that causes, has a restricted reimplementation of COM inside[1] that through carnal knowledge of Windows internals is capable of interoperating with the system one.
One would think displaying seconds[2] would be the least of its problems, but apparently not. (Maybe the Unicode-only TrueType renderer really hurts that much? Did they not have the time to write a eleven-glyph cache?)
Compromises were made, because of the hardware limitations of the time. A "Windows 2095", rebuilt for modern processors and security practices while maintaining the essential aesthetic of the original, would be blazing fast.
I think serenityOS is heading that direction: "Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user accessibility of late-2000s *nix."
https://serenityos.org/
I'd be delighted if something like SerenityOS, or Haiku, or hell, even ReactOS could gain enough traction to develop into a viable desktop OS during my lifetime. But I'm too dumb to do it on my own, too burned-out to become less dumb, and too jaded to feel passionate about something like that again after being rug-pulled since the 1990s. Back when I was richer, I threw money at Haiku, but in ~20 years it hasn't really shaped up into something that will supplant any of the big boys. Pipe dream. Sadly.
I love SerenityOS. Hard to say how long it will take to become viable on real hardware though. It does not seem to be a priority for the project.
Haiku feels like it is getting very close. I have been meaning to give it a serious shot.
ReactOS feels like it is never going to get there. It is a real shame.
Honestly, what I want is Serenity Linux. The Linux kernel and drivers are already fine. If it booted into the SerenityOS WindowServer ( and maybe ran Podman ), it would be perfect!
Anybody interested in Serenity or in OS design in general would probably love the youtube channel[0] of Andreas Kling, the primary author. He streams videos porting games and applications to Serenity, deep dives on individual issues, etc. Great content.
If you put your mind to it a bit, you can approximate this on Linux today. There's a lot of options other than Gnome and KDE, and the XWindows ecosystem may be a bit "out of date" but it's extremely mature and very, very pluggable.
And the result is indeed pretty blazing fast. I tend to run pretty close to this now; my world is basically a tiling WM, some shells, and a browser.
The biggest compromise overall is that browser. They just keep getting bigger and bigger, and I need it to work. Props to the people writing them who are doing an amazing job making them faster, but, well, as the saying goes "if the hardware doubles its speed, software will become three times slower" must now apply even harder to the browser, which just keeps becoming a more and more amazingly performant platform for serving pages with tens of megabytes of JS and dozens of layered video ads playing.
I wonder what a 2090s release of Windows would look like, if Windows (or humanity) is still around by then. I’m pretty sure I won’t be.
Maybe: Windows 2095 has a chat window which connects to an AI at Microsoft HQ. That AI has full access to the Windows source code. If there is something about Windows you don’t like, complain to the AI and it will modify the Windows source code to create a patched version fixing the thing that annoys you. The binary patch will be downloaded and hot-applied without reboot.
Maybe Windows 2095 will be closer to Windows 3.x - a layer which runs on top of another OS. NT, Linux, XNU, Fuschia, seL4? The apps and the user won’t know and won’t care.
Porting Windows to run perfectly on all those different kernels may seem like a pointless exercise, but someone asked the AI for it so it happened. Some of them didn’t expose the necessary primitives, so the Windows development AI asked the AIs responsible for those kernels to make the necessary enhancements
It is implied that it will also install a personal shopping assistant and book-keeper that will track how much you have to spend and make recommendations. It might even take the liberty of ordering things it knows you will like or need that offer generous return policies.
Oh, and it will break a few other things so you have to ask it again. Right after it posts to your social media some deep fakes about how much you love the stuff it bought.
> It WILL even take the liberty of ordering things it knows you SHALL like or need
FTFY.
This will be unlike MacOS (which, by then, will have probably rebranded 5 times into something like OneOS, AiOS, or ${latestFad}OS), which will simply take a percentage of your bank-account balance every month, in exchange for good feelings and a fake sense of belonging.
> it’s centered around COM/OLE2 (with Unicode strings!)
While NT was Unicode internally, Windows 9x barely had any WinAPI functionality implemented with wide strings, for the most part only ANSI versions of the APIs were available (unless you were using the much later released UNICOWS compatibility layer).
> Did they not have the time to write a eleven-glyph cache?
Come on, the answer is right there in the article you linked:
> saving even 4K of memory had a perceptible impact on benchmarks
Granted, you won't need a full 4K of memory for those digits, but the point still stands.
>> it’s centered around COM/OLE2 (with Unicode strings!)
> While NT was Unicode internally, Windows 9x barely had any WinAPI functionality implemented with wide strings, for the most part only ANSI versions of the APIs were available (unless you were using the much later released UNICOWS compatibility layer).
True, but does not contradict what I said: OLECHAR was 16 bits on all Win32 implementations—witness the OLE2ANSI shim on old VC++ versions that allowed you to pretend it wasn’t (it was 8 bits on Win16 and IIRC on the Macintosh port). Consequently, Unicode strings were used throughout the new COM-based NT4/95+ shell APIs, even on 9x/Me.
I remember reading that the TrueType implementation used Unicode everywhere as well, even on non-NT where you could only get to it via MessageBoxW and ExtTextOutW.
>> Did they not have the time to write a eleven-glyph cache?
> Come on, the answer is right there in the article you linked:
>> saving even 4K of memory had a perceptible impact on benchmarks
> Granted, you won't need a full 4K of memory for those digits, but the point still stands.
I don’t think it’s all that obvious. On a typical Win95 box the taskbar clock is what, probably around 16 pixels or so high? With non-antialiased fonts, that’s eleven (ten digits and a colon) bitmaps of (generously) 16x16 bits, so under 400 bytes, a full order of magnitude below 4K. There are probably other places in the Windows shell you can shave half a resident K off of, even separating hot and cold data in the linker is liable to get you that much.
(Keeping the window procedure of the taskbar paged in—also mentioned in the article—is probably a bigger issue, although doesn’t it mean in the intended state the system will page when the user wants to interact with the taskbar? That doesn’t sound pleasant. The whole thing might also have come very late in the development cycle—I seem to remember there was a registry setting that brought the seconds back, so the code wasn’t even removed.)
I use a Mac as my main system and what frustrates me is there is no way to truly disable all animations in the system. Sure you can reduce them which gets you about 80% of the way there but there is no supported way to totally disable them all.
It actually surprises me given Apple is very pro accessibility. The reduce motion option is after all an accessibility feature. It is always why I never understood why Apple don't embrace more keyboard shortcuts for simpler app window management (snapping) rather than the decade old, half assed implementation we have currently.
For me macOS would be perfect with just a few very small features for better window management built in along with the ability to customise it a bit.
I'm not talking full on tiling window manager level features with gaps, master-stack, fib spiral, etc. Basically just something like Magnet/Rectangle built into the OS out of the box, plus two-window resizing (like we already have with the current full screen snapping feature).
One aspect that I find particularly vexing is the apparent lag when toggling between MacOS Spaces, even when the 'reduce motion' setting is enabled.
I utilize Spaces as an alternative to multiple monitors, often alternating between a full-screen terminal and a browser window in different Spaces. Anticipating the need to open a new browser tab, I transition to the browser Space and instinctively press 'Cmd+T', only to discover that a new tab has instead been created in the terminal window.
AFAIK, there doesn't seem to be a way to achieve instantaneous Space-switching devoid of any animation or delay.
> Basically just something like Magnet/Rectangle built into the OS out of the box, plus two-window resizing (like we already have with the current full screen snapping feature).
On newer versions of macOS, if you hold down Option while hovering your cursor over the Zoom button on newer versions you'll be given the option to split left/right without fullscreen. Not a full replacement for an Aero Snap sort of thing but covers its most common use case.
Yup this has been an option for a while but it isn't a nice quick keyboard shortcut :)
Apple managed to make it one of the most awkward features to use in macOS IMHO. You have to position the mouse over a small UI target, wait a second and also use the keyboard. I wish it were just a keyboard shortcut.
It's true that these don't come with a keyboard shortcut, but you can add your own!
Open System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > App Shortcuts and then add a new shortcut to All Applications, with the menu title being "Move Window to (Left|Right) Side of Screen". After doing this, in any app that's left the system-standard Window menu in tact (in my experience, the vast majority), your specified key shortcuts will split the frontmost window left or right.
You're right I should have acknowledged you can make it a keyboard shortcut.
That is what is frustrating about macOS window management, they could add everything I want as it is sort of already present. It is just missing customisation and a few additional options.
It seems that since Apple started trying to create consistency between macOS and iPadOS features they have (purposely) forgotten that people work with macOS quite differently to iPadOS :(
You are right, I was wrong. I didn't read the menu items closely. Holding the button down while pressing and releasing Option makes the toggle obvious. Thanks.
> It actually surprises me given Apple is very pro accessibility.
I have a hard time accepting that seeing as there is no way to configure system-wide fonts. CMD+scroll-wheel in Chrome doesn't even work properly (you can zoom the entire desktop, but it doesn't scale just the fonts on the website + remember your setting like it does on Linux and Windows machines).
I had to use a Mac for work and found it very difficult on the eyes when using an external monitor. To me this was not just an accessibility issue but THE accessibility issue. The fact that Linux gets this right of all operating systems, but Mac doesn't, speaks volumes to how much Apple actually cares about accessibility IMO.
On a Mac you just scale the whole display, not fonts.
I've never understood why someone would want to scale just fonts rather than all UX elements. What good is it to be able to read text but not see checkboxes or click the window's close button?
There's also a magnify feature if you need to scale so much that things don't fit on the screen anymore.
Yes, Apple is not only pro-accessibility but basically sets the standard for it. Nobody else even comes close.
because I need to be able to read text. I only need to see a square box and click on it. it does not need to be the size of the line of text.
because I don't need the windows close button at all and it takes up useless space. I close windows using the keyboard.
because icons don't need to be big. i don't need to read them. i can tell a stop sign is a stop sign even if it's too small to read the text on it.
that is why scaling the whole display, is a ridiculous idea functionally. now if you want your display to look more pretty while fitting less things, you should buy a painting to look at, or something from google with lots of that sweet pretty empty space and some light gray on white text. me, I have work to get done.
I have experienced this on both nix and MacOS. Increasing the font size gives the benefits of the high resolution display desktop space without making the text uncomfortably small. Scaling the display makes the desktop space feel like you're downgrading the resolution of the whole display.
> Yes, Apple is not only pro-accessibility but basically sets the standard for it. Nobody else even comes close.
That attitude summarizes the problem, thanks. Those who have actual accessibility issues and explain them are dismissed by Apple and their zealous fans as if their opinions, as actual end users struggling to use the product and asking for particular accessibility features, just don't matter.
I came across this "accessibility" setting up a Mac mini using just voice over. Selecting a WiFi network was almost but not quite impossible because it was doing something strange going through the list of SSIDs. I have no idea how it compares to a Windows PC during setup, but it seemed obvious that it was untested in a real environment. We're talking Catalina, I think, so plenty of opportunity to have gotten it right before that.
Thankfully I'm not blind, just a victim of Apple's notoriously bad HDMI port on the mini.
> plus two-window resizing (like we already have with the current full screen snapping feature)
Rectangle Pro[0] (the paid version that's more akin to FancyZones on Windows) has this now (though it doesn't animate it, it just resizes the other windows after you resize one). It seems to just detect what windows are adjacent and resize them to match.
You can disable all the animations in Gnome with the following:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-animations false
This is exactly what I do on my Fedora system and as far as I can tell every animation is disabled. Do you have an example of something not disabled with the above setting change?
Not picking on you, as it seems this is common: treating open source software as if it's someone's else's product, and treating ourselves as helpless consumers.
Instead of being sarcasting and unhelpful, you all could have a look at a settings window and realize that the option already exist and there is no PR to do.
I'm not being sarcastic. They've had 3 "waves" where they either threw away a whole bunch of stuff or outright started from scratch. Not to mention the ever changing libraries (there is no stability). I'm obviously not talking about this one feature, but with a history like that, why expend the effort, there's basically no guarantee how long your contribution is going to last.
I'm not saying it's easy or that everyone is capable. Only that it CAN be changed, but the conversations around OSS often don't reflect that reality. (We've all seen Github issues being abused as a support channel, often with a strong odor of entitlement)
If someone has strong feelings about how a UI is lacking, why suppress it in order to be more polite and avoid appearing entitled? That's a very useful signal. Imagine if nobody expressed their strongly-held opinions about UIs; nobody would know what's missing or bad. Why must everyone who complains about something also attempt to fix it themselves?
Sure. KDE is great and all, but if they shipped a default config that included a Taskbar and a root menu that opened a terminal, there would probably be fewer people scratching their heads after starting it.
<joke>Besides, everyone knows twm is the window manager of the TRUE Unix Haxxor.</joke>
Seriously, just use KDE Plasma. Sure, it's not 'minimal', but on modern hardware it sings. It just works. It's a batteries-included desktop. It's built on a toolkit that people actually like using (Qt) and they don't change it constantly in backwards-incompatible ways just because the mood strikes them. It doesn't treat you like an infant with ADHD. They don't constantly fix things that aren't broken. Plus if you have a problem you have a decent chance of finding the solution via Google, unlike with a lot of the 'long tail' WMs/DEs people have mentioned.
As a KDE user i agree with this point of view. KDE is the most customizabile DE ever created. You can tweak the crap out of it to make it look and behave EXACTLY the way you want it. And, from my experience, the performance of the current 5.x version (running on Wayland) is very good.
I have xfce and KDE plasma installed. If you turn off everything in desktop effects for KDE, I can't tell any difference between xfce and KDE in terms of performance on an old 4 core i5 with 16 gigs of ram.
The only real difference is that KDE is much prettier. I almost never boot into xfce.
I've used KDE quite a lot. A like it, I really do. But the amount of small issues I have with compositing and caching that build up over time, regardless of distro, until after a few months I'm plagued by flashing and compositor crashes, or menus and file managers hanging for ages...it's just untenable. There are too many small bugs in too many nooks and crannies, and with KDE's scope (and scope creep), I'm not confident they'll ever be fixed.
This has not been my experience with Kubuntu 20.04 or 22.04. I have occasionally (like maybe once every six months?) had an issue that seemed likely to be Plasma-related, and was fixed by a reboot. And there was an issue with Plasma Search where if I let it search "Recent Files", it would hang the whole UI if I did a search that (I guess) was a match for some recent files. (Worked around that by unchecking "Recent files" in the list of things that Plasma Search searches...) So I mean not 100% issue-free, but nothing like what you describe. And certainly compares quite favorably to other Linux DEs I've tried (Gnome, Mate, XFCE, LXQt).
I switched to KDE from xfce4 because it handles dual monitor better and remembers settings for various second displays.
Then I started using Bismuth for tiling. Add to that the need for various desktop things like status icons, notifications, wallets etc, I am pretty much stuck because no wm provides this combination of features unless you take a tiling wm and spend days configuring it. (There's also the option of using something like xfce4 with the wm bits from a tiling wm.)
You could try Chicago95 for XFCE. It is a custom theme you have to download and install, but it gets the 95 theming down EXACTLY.
If you don't care about customizing like crazy and want something minimalist by default, the best thing I can point you to is GNUstep. Its a bit basic, old, doesn't really care about modern features, etc. It is, for lack of a better word, comfy. IceWM is also very nice. My biggest problem with these is that it takes a bit of config file editing to change the wallpaper.
Now if you want a lightweight WM with more modern features, I recommend enlightenment. Changing wallpapers is pretty easy and there are a few widgets...but it still feels very old-school.
Until recently (3/4 years ago?) I had been using Window Maker. Since 1998.
My only reason for abandoning it is because it doesn't support workspaces arranged in a matrix, only as an array.
I started using workspaces in a 3x3 grid, with the center one the "main" one and each of the compass points from center dedicated to a specific project.
Maybe I should see if Window Maker can be modified the way I want it to be.
Windowmaker allows you to map keybindings to workspaces, the default is to use the first 12 function keys. That's ... usually ... enough for me.
You can also pin the workspaces menu as a poor man's switch / navigation tool.
Logically, Windowmaker's workspace topology is either a list or a loop (daisy chain), depending on whether or not you've configured it to wrap last to first or not.
> Is there a WM out there that can do the basic quality-of-life functions of today's DEs? I'd love a simple, opinionated WM that takes the features we know are useful today (workspaces, expo mode, sensible file manager layouts, system trays) and gives them a color-adjustable window theme inspired by 90's aesthetics, with minimal compositing that can run fast on hardware as minimal as a prototype RISC-V board. Or really, what we need is a truly minimal DE. Something that doesn't care about GTK or Qt or Kvantum, and stays lean.
Mate desktop environment in my opinion comes closest to the simplicity of the Windows 95/GNOME 2 environments of the old: https://mate-desktop.org/.
Not sure how hardware-frugal it is since maintaining it under GTK 2 was not feasible and it's now developed against GTK 3 (with still maintaining the look and feel of GNOME 2).
I use MATE, personally, because it gives me the configurability that I want without the resource hungriness of KDE or cinnamon.
Cinnamon, while more resource hungry than MATE, actually isn't bad except that Nemo (its file manager) seems to have this bug where if you're doing a lot of batch file operations it just gets slower and slower to the point of becoming unusable... and it seems like its gone unfixed for ages. That's a deal breaker for me since I do photo and video editing and have to work with a lot of files. Caja (MATE's file manager) never seems to have a problem no matter how much I throw at it.
I find that MATE looks pleasing enough to me and is fast enough that it never reminds me that I'm slowing down my machine with a full-featured DE. That said, I tend to run modern hardware even though its by no means a powerful gaming rig.
For those who need something similar on older hardware, or who want a bare minimal but "nice" DE that will consume minimal resources, xfce is likely it.
Indeed, I believe MATE is still quite close to GNOME 2 which has launched in 2002 according to wikipedia. You can still probably run it in the low 100MBs of RAM comfortably :)
The Linux desktop ecosystem still feels more like a playground. And that's not a pejorative in the sense that a lot of serious work hasn't been done on making powerful software and doing professional work on Linux desktops. I mean that in the sense that "Linux desktop" isn't very defined, formalized or standardized. It comes in all shapes and sizes and people are very free to customize it and use it as they see fit. Many people think this is a good thing and a benefit of software freedom. For example, if I walk up to a random person's Linux desktop, I don't know what I'm in for. That's very different than walking up to someone's Windows desktop, macOS desktop or even Solaris back in the day.
The average Linux desktop has never been fully standardized. The average Windows desktop today (let's say, W10/11) is descended from W7 which was arguably really consistent. Even if they took W7 and bastardized it by introducing 10 different design languages (Metro, Modern, Fluent, new Fluent, ...) there was something to build on top of. On Linux, there are some GNOME guidelines, there are some KDE guidelines, nothing really universal. As much as I dislike the general macOS experience, Apple got it right early on by simply forcing you to adhere to the general vibe of the OS
Fwiw I use the i3 window manager so whenever I see conversations about Gnome vs. KDE vs. whatever - I could care less. It's irrelevant to me. So that idea, that Linux isn't standardized, really resonates w me.
I've been using xfce and it's been a good compromise. However I think it's impossible to stay 100% away from the bloat. Even if your desktop is lean, you will have to use some "modern" app, eventually. Especially when it comes to web apps.
I'd argue that a file manager shouldn't be a function of the Desktop Environment. No that a GUI file manager is necessarily bloat, but a file manager should be independent of whatever DE you're using.
Tiling window managers like i3 (or Sway) are very performant, if not really intuitive.
XFCE is still under active development and it behaves the way you'd expect a normal desktop to.
Its been a while since I distro/desktop hopped around the Linux world, but these are definitely still out there.
Bodhi Linux especially comes to mind with their enlightenment fork moksha. LXQT or XFCE might also for the bill if you want something a bit less foreign. Or Openbox if you want to go all the way minimalist. Or i3/sway if you're into tiling WM's.
>To his point, even in the Linux world, DEs have accumulated the bloat of features, animations, complex compositing, front-to-back theming, and other frivolities that have made them large and slow.
I use xmonad for over a decade now on multiple workstations. No bloat here.
I have been using fluxbox[1] for many years now, happily. It's a very barebones thing (in a good way) while also being highly configurable — customizable keyboard shortcuts, menus, scriptability, etc.
It is not a tiling WM. It also doesn't have desktop icons by default. I thought I would miss those, but have found I do not. There are options[2] to add that if you want it.
It also has no file manager. I use xfe[3] on the rare occasions I want that.
So, my setup is ~8 virtual desktops, with very minimal window decoration and task bar. Applications are easily launched via either custom shortcuts or the "right click" menu (though I use the keyboard to trigger it).
I also have a few keyboard shortcuts to position windows manually (eg: WinKey+NumPad key squashes the current window into a N,S,E,W -style location onscreen)
Standard X11 window management (eg: alt+drag to move a window) work as expected, etc.
If you use network-manager to manage wifi &c the nm-applet will display in the Fluxbox panel and I use cbaticon to monitor battery. No extra panels or docks.
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[Fun fact: about 15 years ago, 30% of the total bandwidth from my vanity home page was produced by a picture that some teenager had linked to from a death metal forum. It was just a snap of a bit of wall art locally.]
A default (i.e. full) Slackware install has blackbox, fluxbox, fvwm, window-maker and icewm available by default along side kde and xfce desktop environments. And twm. And hidden away, not available from `xwmconfig` for some reason, lurks mwm.
I was the biggest fan of LXDE for ten years, then they abandoned all the polish and maturity for the brand new LXQt. They lost me due to the bugginess and relative bloat.
Before that, it was the same with GNOME 2 to 3.
I’m sure there were good reasons for both of these, but I have moved on to XFCE.
> Is there a WM out there that can do the basic quality-of-life functions of today's DEs?
For some reason nearly all standalone Wayland WM development is tied up in hyperminimal tiling WMs, which is frustrating. Boring old floating-first WMs with lightweight tiling options might not be trendy but they're what a lot of us work best with.
I have a soft spot for Window Maker and I have been using it until recently , when I moved to Wayland-based environments.
I also really like its dockapps (I even wasted some time writing one to display and control screen brightness), the only weak point for me is the systray dockapps, probably because it is a concept “transplanted” from other desktop paradigmsthat does not fit great.
Personally i'm not that invested in what NeXT came up for their DE, i don't even think they were that great from a UX perspective (i used Window Maker long before i even learned about NeXTSTEP and once i used one i found its window management way inferior to Window Maker), so i don't mind the systray stuff. I use a dockapp (wmsystray) that "splits" the icons into pages with (IIRC) four icons per page and little arrows below.
The only thing i'd like (and i might do and try to submit a patch at some point since AFAIK it is still being maintained) is for it to put a small frame around the icons like some other dockapps do for their contents as right now it just displays the icons on top of the dock tile background. But that is very minor.
FWIW NEXTSPACE isn't just a Window Maker fork but an attempt for a complete NeXTSTEP-like desktop environment based on GNUstep and Window Maker is only for the window management bits.
My previous one, a 2015 mba, runs like garbage now. It's the slowest thing you can imagine.
My equally old linux laptop runs just fine though. Not 100% as fast as before, but there's so much less cruft that it's still good to use.
The mac I returned had 8gb of ram and was meant to be an internet box, but the m-series aggressively uses swap memory to burn out the SSDs and force you to replace the entire machine within a few years. It's nuts. I had 1TB of SSD writes in a single day when I downloaded and installed nothing due to all the swap being used--7GB. That was just web browsing. The same workload on my old 2015 mba uses like 6-7GB of ram and no swap.
At 1TB per day of writes to swap, the lifespan of the machine was going to be extremely short
It's so gross.
I don't know what I'm going to do for my next laptop. I wish more companies could make good keyboards
I just picked up a Surface Laptop 5. Much like the Surface Laptop 3 and 2 that I had before it, it is a best-in-class piece of hardware.
I actually prefer its form factor to my M1 MBP; it's thinner, lighter, and I prefer a 3:2 display to 16:10. It runs 3x4k + 1x1080p over a single Thunderbolt cable into a dock (granted, I am using a USB 3.0 to dual DisplayPort adapter, but the SL5 is driving 2 of the 4k displays.)
I still use my M1 MBP for most things, and I have one for my job, as well; but the SL5 may be the nicest physical laptop hardware available today.
(Windows is another story. If I could run Linux on it with no compromises and no hassle, I'd likely ditch the Mac. So it goes.)
Surface Laptop 4 here. Great keyboard. Great screen. Great trackpad. Surface Dock is great. And WSL gets the job done too. It's lighter than the Mac. Dunno that battery is better, but it's certainly good enough. And it was relatively cheap!
But I still try to copy & paste like it's a Mac. And it's not a question of remapping. I want Alt+C and Alt+V to copy and paste system wide.
What exactly is the downside of no (or as many others have noted, far more accurately relatively minimal) maintenance?
What I'd already come to chafe at in the 1990s regarding GUI environments (applications, window shells, etc.) was that they changed gratuitously between versions. What's remarkable about classic Linux / Unix / X11 window managers is how little they change, if at all. I've been a Windowmaker user for going on three decades, and recall how the switch to proportional rather than bitmapped fonts was jarring. (I got over it.) Pop up twm (it's stock on MacOS with XQuartz) and you're transported back to 1987 ... and not at all in a bad way.
(For those who are under the misapprehension that such WMs are obsolete or impede performance, I can only point at a former cow-orker who'd had a heavily modded vtwm configuration that was virtually completely keyboard-driven and with which he'd swap between windows and workspaces with blinding and mesmerizing speed and agility.)
The biggest issues of which I'm aware are issues such as fonts, possibly Unicode support, and ... what exactly?
What you describe sounds an awful lot like SerenityOS, with the exception that it's not a VM, but a full-blown Operating System. It really does embody that pragmatic sense of no-fluff UI design that peaked in the 90s, but applies it to systems design as well.
>Something that doesn't care about GTK or Qt or Kvantum, and stays lean
Aren't Qt and GTK the building blocks of Linux GUIs? Sure, you can ask someone to build a GUI framework from scratch for shits and giggles, but to what end? Now every GUI program will need to use its framework, or else have Qt or GTK dependencies.
Its like asking for an OS built in rust that compiles all its programs from source ala Gentoo and "doesn't care if I have GCC or the JVM installed".
Dunno if this is what you’re getting at, but as much as I feel nostalgic for pre-windows xp/7 interfaces, computers do a lot more than they used to. Its at the very least much better to have a search bar that (only) filters through all the programs we have installed on a given system, no?
I wonder too what it would be like to use one of those old uis to navigate a modern system but I think theres just an overwhelming amount of “stuff” on systems now.
Luckily you can get an efficient, clean Desktop Environment that works well and is actively developed: Xfce ( https://xfce.org/ ) I think you will like it. It has a very early-2000's feel IMO.
One would think Linux would make sometging clean and responsive, instead it's a hot sticky mess. Remember i was aleays looking for that clean distro, elementaryOS luna was the pinnacle, then came updates and bloat
Who is this Linux you speak of and does he develop everything for the OS with the same name him/herself?
Seriously though, if the problems you mentioned are shared by enough people, someone will make something like that. Chances are though that something fitting your needs already exists or they are so niche/specific/nitpicky that you'll never find what you're looking for (in any OS).
User gibspaulding mentioned Openbox and I second giving it a look. Robust, compliant, minimal and finished (i.e., do not be disappointed by the lack of activity).
Windows 95 was developed over several years with a lot of research and user studies. The primary objective of all this work was so that a person without prior exposure to computers could figure out how to use it. The software was designed to help the user accomplish the tasks they have set out to do before sitting down at the computer.
Today, both the audience and the objectives have changed. The overwhelming majority of the audience is now computer-literate and can be counted on to figure out how to use the basic features regardless of how poorly designed or inefficient they may be. And the priorities for many interfaces have changed, with the user's tasks relegated to a side quest.
Another factor is that Windows 95 was developed for "install it and leave it" operation, with the next upgrade coming in a year or two. Giving more attention to detail was unavoidable because you could not patch a bug a week after release. And Microsoft was offering phone support for its products, so every UI flaw would increase support costs.
Also, one of the design requirements was to fully support only-keyboard operation as a first-class access method, and a lot of QA effort went into ensuring this was true. This parallel access method resulted in a UI which was much more thoroughly evaluated for its efficiency.
Finally, I think a higher portion of people in the UI field were there for personal and passion reasons, and would have been embarrassed to have anything to do with the type of blundering buffoon of an interface that is common in today's computing.
> Today, both the audience and the objectives have changed. The overwhelming majority of the audience is now computer-literate and can be counted on to figure out how to use the basic features regardless of how poorly designed or inefficient they may be.
Not sure if I agree, and anyway this doesn't seem to be the assumption of mainstream modern UI design. Rather we have extreme simplification justified by the need not to overwhelm the users and isolate them from (arbitrarily) "less needed" features and technical considerations. I don't know if UI departments base this on research and studies, but anecdotally both for me and non-technical people I know smartphones have become black boxes due to this. We often discover features by accident, not sure how we even triggered them. Many simple tasks have to be googled, because there seems to be little logic in where they're hidden. Maybe very young people are better at this - though on the other hand we hear about them being less PC platform-literate - and this knowledge still feels like a random collection of incantations rather than a system you could master.
Maybe I wouldn't hold up Windows registry, Office 2000 etc. as paragons of mental tractability, but I would posit that 1. the filing cabinet mental model was useful in learning generalizable, organized knowledge of using computers, 2. it has been destroyed by tech corporations for the mass audience. I don't believe that we are fundamentally dumber compared to 1990s, we could figure this out if given a chance.
> The overwhelming majority of the audience is now computer-literate and can be counted on
HIGHLY disagree. From what I have seen in the professional world and in school systems, just being able to type on a regular keyboard and use a mouse seems to be premium features to ask of a human, let alone navigate completely alien user interfaces and concepts they were never taught like files and folders, or what the hell the save icon is even depicting (or what it means).
> Today, both the audience and the objectives have changed. The overwhelming majority of the audience is now computer-literate and can be counted on to figure out how to use the basic features regardless of how poorly designed or inefficient they may be
Except that the majority of the audience has no idea how a computer works, what is a directory/folder and that the USB stick has a filesystem on it.
>Another factor is that Windows 95 was developed for "install it and leave it" operation, with the next upgrade coming in a year or two. Giving more attention to detail was unavoidable because you could not patch a bug a week after release.
This should be qualified. Windows95 was famed for its weird bugs e.g. 49.7 days of uptime leading to a crash. Once these bugs were in the wild they were very hard to fix on the majority of installs.
If the price of being able to fix bugs UX easily with an internet connection is shoddier initial development on the initial release it's a small price to pay.
To be fair to Microsoft, that's still mostly true for the Windows server editions.
The pared down version without the GUI even runs fine on 512MB of memory. Though still a far cry from the 64 MB that XP needed, which included the GUI.
95 needed at least 4MB, ideally 8MB or more of memory. Which means it will fit in the cache of modern CPUs many times over, though I may be ignoring some swap stuff.
512MB isn't a lot today so might as well use it, at least for things that are useful, but it's nevertheless impressive how puny these old operating systems were, despite having user-facing functionality that would still feel familiar and natural to today's users.
> Which means it will fit in the cache of modern CPUs many times over, though I may be ignoring some swap stuff.
has anyone ever done this with an OS? I assume it'd be impossible with hardware that needs DMA, and a bunch of other reasons, but it'd be cool to see a machine keep running after you pull out the RAM.
In 7th grade, my class had Boeing surplus computers at each student's desk. Most were 386SX with 4MB. I remember getting a chance to harvest parts from a broken machine and mine went up to 8MB. That was enough to install and run Windows 95.*
* On paper
It was awful and while that CPU did no favors, it was swapping that made it awful.
Windows 95 was released 13 years prior to the article, roughly the same time span as between Windows 7 release and today. Windows 7 is still installed on a single-digit percentage of computers. It is interesting to see that the reasons outlined in the article could be used almost word-for-word by someone justifying their use of Windows 7.
One difference is the switch from 95/98 to 2000/XP meant all future games and apps would be incompatible with the older OS.
Aside from security patches, I see nothing that prevents 7 from being used today. Subsequent OSes added nothing useful that I noticed, and a lot of negatives.
Ironically, you may actually be more secure today running 95 than 7, since any modern exploit would be incompatible with it.
(obligatory security patches aside) Major OSs are arguably almost exactly the same as they were 20 years ago, with some random nonsense baked in.
Functionally speaking, there's no reason I couldn't be on OSX Tiger or Windows 2000. Linux did get better in terms of hardware support. Freaking NDISWrapper still gives me nightmares.
> Functionally speaking, there's no reason I couldn't be on OSX Tiger or Windows 2000.
On the Mac side I think I'd go up to at least 10.5/10.6 for its native virtual desktop implementation (Spaces) that's actually better than modern Spaces by way of being a 2D grid instead of a single row.
Plus better networking, pulseaudio and a bunch of user level services got a lot better. If anyone remembers what a nightmare HAL was or that there was a time before dbus being used universally
Something tells me that a kernel from 1995 would run on lower-end hardware than a 2023 kernel with "speed improvements" (and an unmentioned million added features)
Sure, it might. But that doesn't mean things like schedulers or I/O handling haven't improved and got better in terms of latency or at handling various workloads.
Other things that may not be noticeable to most people but matter to others may also have improved, such as audio latency; I don't know how e.g. Pipewire or PulseAudio compares to plain ALSA in terms of that, but at least plain ALSA apparently wasn't enough for audio work back then because there was Jack, and I'm also under the impression that latency and responsivity in general have improved a lot on the kernel level as well, and not just in terms of audio.
Open source graphics drivers have also improved a lot over the years. Perhaps the entire graphics stack has, or perhaps overhauls of the stack have facilitated some of the improvements in the drivers themselves, but I don't have enough expertise to judge that.
Improvements (or degradation) in performance are rarely something that happens evenly across the board.
Do you mean what counts as lower-end hardware in 2023?
In that case, I doubt it. You probably couldn't even use all your RAM. Linux back then also supported only a single processor (if it boots at all): symmetric multiprocessing support was added in 1996.
Not necessarily, at least on my M520-based X201 it got slower in media-related workloads with recent kernels (last 1.5 year or so). But both KiCad and FreeCad are faster than in Win7.
>Aside from security patches, I see nothing that prevents 7 from being used today. Subsequent OSes added nothing useful that I noticed, and a lot of negatives.
Steam is EOLing 7 because Chrome dropped support. No modern hardware manufacturer is going to continue churning out drivers with 7 support.
You're right that it works ok now, but that's rapidly changing.
As for whats better? Who knows. The new MS OSes are tremendously painful to use, personally speaking.
>Ironically, you may actually be more secure today running 95 than 7, since any modern exploit would be incompatible with it.
that's an interesting concept. Reminds me of how prepper types have recently been into MS-DOS machines -- but is 95 all that incompatible? I mean, I guess nothing trendy will run, but a good old-fashioned malicious assembly executable? do they no longer exist in the wild?
Agreed, lots of software is dropping 7 support, but that decision (as far as I can tell) is an arbitrary one, not a technical one. Is there a reason the latest chrome can't run on 7 if it didn't check for it?
> Is there a reason the latest chrome can't run on 7 if it didn't check for it?
The reason is precisely because it doesn't check for it.
That is: instead of checking for older Windows releases, and using fallback code paths for them, it simply assumes the presence of newer APIs (or that older buggy APIs now work properly). As time goes by, the cost of maintaining these fallback code paths only increases (and in some cases, having to stay compatible with them prevents important enhancements and cleanups), and since they're less tested (because they're only used when running on older operating system releases), they tend to break. As an example from an unrelated project, before they dropped Windows XP support, the fallback code for panic!() in Rust was broken when running on Windows XP (https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/34538).
I imagine over time there will be API differences but probably nothing insurmountable.
I suspect the real reason is Microsoft themselves dropping support for W7. Once that happens you can’t really claim Chrome is a “secure browser” because the underlying OS might be exploited and never patched.
The same decision has been made in Python, to use the newer APIs blindly, but fortunately there's a fork: https://github.com/adang1345/PythonWin7 Hope Chromium will get one soon.
If you are looking for a computer that can do quite a bit, but still is reasonably "maintainable" with a soldering iron and parts, you can do much worse than an MS-DOS machine.
And almost by definition everything that was available, was all self-contained, because it was all pre-Internet.
> If you are looking for a computer that can do quite a bit, but still is reasonably "maintainable" with a soldering iron and parts, you can do much worse than an MS-DOS machine.
Some big problems with that idea are: 1) the machine would probably use a lot of power (unless you got some weird unmaintainable MS-DOS palmtop), 2) if the SHTF where are you going to get parts (especially for an obsolete retrocomputer)?
Practically, it would make far more sense to use Rasberry Pi with a DOS emulator. Then put ten more on a shelf as as your "spare parts." But I'm very skeptical of the use of a computer at all in "prepper" scenarios, so it makes even more sense to just not bother.
Yeah, I love how Valve is dropping support for Windows 7 (despite selling and shipping tons of games that are literally designed for Windows 7 or earlier) strictly because Steam is a web page served by Chromium Embedded Framework. Even software vendors don't truly own their own software anymore, do they? :)
> Aside from security patches, I see nothing that prevents 7 from being used today
Security patches for Windows 7 are still released each month, you "just" have to download [1] them manually and convince Windows Update service to apply them [2].
I do think Windows 10 has better support for DPI scaling and PTYs than Windows 7, alongside a laundry list of antifeatures like pervasive telemetry, automatically installing drivers without user consent, Candy Crush in the start menu, clickbait in the taskbar, etc. I think it would be interesting to, instead of forcing apps (eg. anything based on Qt 6) to include fallback paths for missing DPI scaling, instead patch the system APIs to include stub implementations of DPI scaling which always return 96 DPI. (PTYs are a lot more technical and difficult to implement.) Unfortunately, https://github.com/vxiiduu/VxKex didn't work properly the last time I tried installing it on my nostalgia laptop, and I struggled to build and install it myself, and I'm not aware of other programs taking this approach (http://ximonite.com/win32/index.html is Vista 64-bit only).
> Ironically, you may actually be more secure today running 95 than 7, since any modern exploit would be incompatible with it.
I'd guess a lot of malware is opportunistic and not really designed to maximize compatibility, so I imagine you're right but I would be curious to hear from someone who actually studies malware.
In a similar (also ironic vein), the lack of modern HTTPS probably also makes Windows 95 "secure" in that it will be inconvenient to use a Windows 95 machine for anything that needs securing.
Edit: It does make me wonder how fast computer viruses and malware goes "extinct." Probably much faster than biological viruses (if that's the right term) since malware doesn't evolve like viruses do.
Windows NT has had async I/O and named pipes from the beginning. The API isn't identical to what you described but the concepts are similar enough to port higher level primitives.
Except that, when applied to Windows 7, they would actually make sense. There have been no objective improvements since Windows 7 that I can think of. The UI is changed all around for no reason, the system is less responsive, the hardware requirements are higher, and there's a whole lot more built-in malware, but that's it. There's a reason Microsoft had to deploy every dirty trick in the book to make people upgrade.
Windows 95, on the other hand, was barely usable. My installation would go down literally every day. Running DOS programs in emulation on a more recent version of Windows is a vastly better experience than running them on DOS ever was.
> There have been no objective improvements since Windows 7 that I can think of
I think this is pretty rude to the many people who have contributed to Windows in the years gone by. I won't argue that there hasn't been some crappy things added or on the advantages/disadvantages of later Windows versions but there have been plenty of things added since Windows 7. Some I can think off just off the top of my head
* Credential Guard - protection of secrets in the lsass process even from kernel access
* gMSA support - Windows 7 could only use standalone MSA accounts which weren't as useful
* Windows LAPS - now supports encryption and is builtin to the OS
* Schannel improvements - newer cipher suites and TLS protocols (cipher suites in Win 7 are right at the edge of what people might support these days)
* Windows Terminal - including ConPTY support in the underlying APIs
There's plenty more out there but these are pretty important features for me to have on Windows. Granted some only make sense in a more corporate/domain environment but not all of them.
Wanting Windows 7 back does not mean there should be no further development. By all means update the cipher suites.
I just want the window borders easy to grab on a high resolution and a sensitive mouse, and no latency when I activate a program in the task bar. I want no ads in the start menu and no telemetry. I want an operating system doing work in the background, and not an anonymous entity called "we":
Re-reading your list of improvements it doesn't impress me either for a decade of work. And I don't think people in this thread are particularly 'rude', i.e. they're not expressing what they really think about Windows 10+ ...
Yeah I literally care about zero of those. Plus there's no reason those features couldn't have been shipped as part of Windows 7, without bringing "telemetry" and Start Menu advertisements and coercive updates that wipe people's drives, etc.
The time between 1990 and 2005 saw much more dramatic changes in consumer operating systems than the time between 2005 and 2020 though. Especially Windows has been on a slow usability downward spiral since around Win2k.
Even Windows 2k felt a little frivolous compared to the more somber Windows NT. Windows NT 4 looked alright, but Windows NT 3.51 (or whatever) was rock solid and felt buttery smooth.
Yes, there was some tearing when you played several AVI videos at once on the desktop, but anything else would have been SGI level sourcery and black arts and not expected.
Windows NT 4 felt faster than Windows NT 3, but NT4 felt jittery. NT 3 never slowed down, it was like cream.
Once I saw Windows NT 3 on a trade-show on Alpha CPUs. That felt just like the future arrived, an evil smirking corporate future which laughed at whatever I knew about optimization, 68k assembler, blitter objects and sound chips.
The future was here, and it was here to tell me that none of that arcane juggling mattered anymore. The only thing that matters from now on is raw speed, of the core and the bus.
I still use windows 7 in a vm for a legacy program. Works really well. Is hugely faster than any modern windows. Even in the vm.
I have to run an old version of tortoisesvn. Needless to say the vm is only connected to a local network.
Precisely. Compare your comment with these excerpts from the article:
>Windows 95 is reasonably fast in performance, and is not compromised by the arguably frivolous animation and eye candy features in Windows 98 and newer versions.
>I prefer to have as much native compatibility as possible with DOS applications such as older games I own.
I think Windows 7 was the last version of the OS that wasn't phoning home every time you clicked a button in the Calculator app. That could be a reason.
Horrifying. That's exactly why simplewall [0] is among the first programs I install on Windows. Then I block stuff like compattelrunner.exe, devicecensus.exe, explorer.exe, the various Intel / Nvidia driver-related bullshit background processes the first time they attempt to connect to a remote server.
windows 7 was the peak of a desktop os that is fast, easy to use, out of the way. i miss it.
i really hate this modern trend of every single good desktop os telling you what to do, not allowing you to remove stuff, banners that ignore settings, ads, terrible uis, etc
Yeah, personally I'm just totally done with Windows as a whole. Every new OS install on any machine of mine is now Linux or BSD. I just got a new (used) computer from someone that came with fully licensed Win 10 and Office.. I don't care, wiped instantly, Linux running smoothly and with more freedom than I ever would have experienced with Winblows. Ironically, even the hardware in the machine works better (and has more actively-developed drivers) than what was available in Windows, because the manufacturer had basically abandoned development for that hardware.
My main development machine (of several here) is still on Win7, mainly due to the hassle of having to migrate 10 years of Win dev tools and legacy third party COM licenses to Win10. (the rest of my systems are on Win10)
That said I'm going to have to bite the Win10 bullet soon as several applications are phasing out Win7 support, Chrome being the main one right now. It's disappointing as having grown up with Windows since 3.1 I'm still partical to the compact classic theme (even despite the old grey colour). I still find the Win10 and up UI to be a waste of space.
I know numerous people who still run Win 7. I had one close friend who I helped get set up with a new computer when his current one got destroyed by a colossal power surge. The new machine came with Win 10, and he absolutely hates it and is asking me if I can get Win 7 running on it...
I was playing around with Windows 95 in a VM a few years ago (I think 2020 when we all felt we had too much time on our hands). I was curious how modern of a web browser I could get and I found RetroZilla: https://rn10950.github.io/RetroZillaWeb/
It essentially backported some newer Gecko features and SSL certs to older version of Windows. I was able to use many common websites perfectly fine on this browser.
RetroZilla hasn't received an update since 2019 so it may not work as well now three years later. It looks like there may be a current build of K-Meleon for Windows 95 though so I may give that a whirl sometime.
"Download blasphemous books"? That sounds like a highly specific use case, one I've never sought out. Why would it be inherently dangerous on Windows 95?
I think there's some context or euphemism I'm missing.
No, I’m being literal, it’s just the environment I’m suddenly finding myself in in recent months :) I simply meant that the security of the TLS library (port) is founded more on good wishes and optimism than on testing or expertise (which the authors freely admit), so don’t use it as a daily driver.
> I live in the United States and there is no such similar concern.
The "blasphemous books" the parent was referencing could very well be any book that acknowledges the existence and humanity of trans people. See Florida, as well as a couple other states are particularly bad
I had similar thoughts when I was messing with Mac OS 7 and 8 a few months ago. I was astounded at how featureful most software was. Microsoft Word version 5 had every feature I possibly needed and was extremely fast, way faster than modern Word. It makes me wonder what has modern software added to justify making it so slow? Because it’s obviously, at least to me, not new features.
If I could I would be just like Andrew here but my work, and love for playing video games (modern and classic alike) prevents me.
There is a huge number of minor annoyances (People tend to complain about start menus ads performance regressions, poor context menu in Win11 etc - and I agree with all of them).
But there is also a massive number of small things added and improve. Just between base Win10 and more recent Win10 there is a huge number of features added regarding for example how apps DPI scale, especially when moving across multiple screens with different DPI for example. Or WSL. So I wouldn't agree "everything" is going in the wrong direction. Something as simple as Win+Shift+S is an amazing improvement which required a third party tool under Win7 but no more since 2010CU. The new terminal... the list goes on and on.
WSL is not fundamentally different to me than a PC emulator. I'd still take Windows 2000 over Win 11 if I could run modern apps like browsers and IDEs on it.
It's been on my mind lately that Windows really hasn't done much lately except improving upon the way it's an Azure and Ads vehicle. That's the real "innovation".
The OS is no longer the product, it's just an appendage to the cloud. The mushroom, if you will. The mycelium it's connected to is much larger.
WSL was just one exemple. There are literally thousands of other improvements. Not all are revolutionary but at least some matter in a big way to most people. Any gamer would say DirectX 12 is enough to upgrade from Win7 to Win10. Anyone with two screens of different DPI should say the same. Anyone with a Wifi6 router would want to upgrade. The list goes on. I also liked the fast and simple Win2000, or Win7. But I do remember how terrible the screenshot functionality was, how bad the terminal was and how crappy the dpi scaling was. Nostalgic glasses are some times too rosy.
> The OS is no longer the product
It used to be that the product was office, sql server, exchange and windows was the vehicle to deliver it. It’s really not so different that the products are OneDrive or AppInsights or GitHub.
It's not. DirectX is an add-on. WiFi is additional drivers. Screenshot is just a user space application. The only thing requiring deep surgery is different DPI on different screens.
Too bad we have to choose between no spy-ware in the OS andd different DPI monitors.
>Something as simple as Win+Shift+S is an amazing improvement
Just now I hit that chord once to try the feature out , it came up but I hit "escape" to cancel the interaction. Now, typing the chord a second time, Windows no longer brings up the snipping UI. If I can find a show-stopping bug in an "amazing improvement" in five seconds then, I'm sorry, but it's not an improvement.
Ditto with the new Windows Terminal: occasionally connecting via SSH to a box already running `tmux` will just crash the renderer. Of course crashing the renderer (a fairly fatal error for a terminal emulator) doesn't tear down the program (!?!) so the renderer continues to crash once per frame drawn, every time you say OK to dismiss the error, until you terminate the program.
I cannot even think of something new in Windows 10 or 11 that has not, at some point, given me grief. The new task manager refresh, maybe, but I still have to dive into Resource Monitor (Vista) multiple times weekly, so even that improvement is not so good that it displaces its predecessors.
This is software that costs 100s (Windows, Office) or 1000s (VS) of dollars, and they can't even get it right. I generally like surreal humor, but we are way beyond absurd at this point.
Win 10 CU is when the replaced snipping tool with snip and sketch, but snipping tool dates back to Windows 7 at least, maybe Vista. It wasn't hooked up to a default shortcut, but you could fix that yourself.
i remember making a slip stream install of windows 2000 x64 edition. it was a bit unicorn finding drivers/hardware but that is still the fastest desktop experience ive ever seen in 30 years
No x64 (AMD64) version of Windows 2000 ever existed. AMD64 CPU's didn't debut until 2003 and XP x64 was based off the work done on 64-bit Server 2003 for Intel's 64-bit Itanium chips
There was a brief period of Alpha machines that ran 64-bit CPU's that had early "Whistler" builds but nothing ever released to the public
>for a variety of reasons I have a major aversion to Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 and higher: I do not want to use it and I do not want it present in any form on any computer I own.
I'm always at awe when I see these kinds of Stallman-y statements. This unrelenting, uncompromising, passionate defense of something that I personally just don't give a shit about is fascinating.
I love them; they almost always stem from something real, and it can be quite the adventure discovering just what it is (like in this case, losing the actual file explorer as a separate program).
Windows 98 SE was probably the most stable ‘light’ version of Microsoft Windows ever made. I Microsoft got rid of the DOS underpinnings in Win 2k the systems started requiring much more ram just to run. When combined with VS6 and at least a gig of hd space, it was a very capable machine for development.
I had a Libretto 50ct (pentium 75mhz, 32 meg ram) running 95 and 98 perfectly, but on upgrading it to win 2k, not only was it extremely slow, but it also was limited to 16 colors (no drivers for video). There was no retro community in those days, so the recommendation to get a usb or Wi-Fi connection to the internet was to upgrade to win98 as I don’t remember win95 having any support for Wi-Fi or usb. Since win98 was already old at that point, a user such as myself might as well use win98se. I remember it being rock solid
Linux with the 2.4 kernel ram just as slow as windows 2k in the basic bash terminal mode and x windows was very slow. The terminal was also sadly very slow given the limited bus capacity for the hard drive which ran at 5200rpm. The Linux 2.2 kernel ran much faster, but everything was too old in the debian software archive to support usb over pcmcia.
Also listening to MP3’s and doing anything else caused a slow down in the gui and skipping in the mp3 except in windows and older Linux kernels
Every second version was useful (of the consumer-oriented Windows). Windows 95 was good(OK, it wasn't perfect, but a big step up from earlier version). Windows 98 sucked. Windows 98SE was good. Windows ME sucked. Windows XP was good. Vista sucked. Windows 7 good. 8 sucked. 10 good. 11 sucks.
Though it might seem like a suck at the time Win 3.11 was good. MS Bob ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob ) ... IMO a massive reduction in productivity; it doesn't show up in the list of 'windows' versions, apparently because it was an addon (replacement for the shell). Windows 95 came out (shortly it seems) after that.
Except for performance, a light linux distro with DOSBox is much better than windows 95. If it is possible to run DOSEmu then the performance penalty may be smaller but also would be compatibility.
Let's face it, Office 97, or 2000 at the latest, is peak office productivity software. Everything since then has been backslide and churn for the sake of selling new licenses.
Excel has dramatically improved since then. It’s not even close. It’s much more powerful. I’d also argue that the whole OneDrive/SharePoint live syncing/version history/sharing is also a huge productivity enhancer, though that’s not directly related to what the programs themselves can do.
I'm still using Ubuntu 10.04 (2010) to type this here in 2023. The newer linux distros just don't have the text to speech ecosystem good enough to compare to the Festival 1.96 + Nitech HTS voices only available on older distros.
Completely unrelated, but I refuse to run a retail SKU of Windows. It's LTSC or bust.
I don't care about all the bloat that comes with retail SKUs. In fact, I absolutely hate it. Virtually the only thing I use my windows box for is gaming, and still, it's LTSC or bust.
Currently running on Windows Enterprise LTSC 2021 (Build 21H2), and I'll upgrade only when the next LTSC version comes out.
I setup a Windows 98 SE VM back in 2020 that I spin up every couple of weeks to play games from my childhood. It's almost like a nostalgia shrine for me. It makes me feel cozy inside when I hear the startup sound or listening to AoE:RoR soundtrack.
I feel that, in the Desktop OS development progression, at some point the providers (MSFT, Apple, Lunix distros) simply exhausted the list of features that users actually need. I think for Microsoft it happened at around Windows XP (and some people think it was Win 95). At least for me, past Win XP, the OS simply gotten worse though the infinite bloat and making UI "cool and looking like Facebook page (the so called Facebook envy at the time)".
Desktop Mac OS, which I currently use, has 99% features that I don't need and don't like. I don't need to spend every second of my life checking latest social media posts, "cool" videos or "wonderful" songs. Luckily the UI is still good and kernel is still POSIX compliant, although I would strongly prefer straight Linux and none of the Apple's command line, storage and memory compression "innovations".
Desktop Ubuntu Unity -> everything is a search. Why do I need this? What wrong with the straight windowing system coming from XEROX PARC? It was designed to be just like the pieces of paper on your actual desk. Why would you not want this? It feels like innovation for the sake of innovation.
The way they try to "intelligently" organize everything and make "searching" the default way to access things really breaks the mental model. This disconnect also makes it hard to utilize muscle memory and procedural memory to find things. I remember when I was younger and using Windows 2000, I could flick my mouse like I was in CS:GO grand finals, and use keyboard shortcuts like I was hackerman. That speed came from a procedural familiarity, not from my young age at the time. I know that because kids of the current generation don't have the same abilities, because modern OSes, in their strive to simplify everything, have in fact created more friction for the user.
That's rookie numbers, I still use a Citizen watch which is solar powered but is otherwise identical to an 18th century mechanical watch, with a single crown to set date and time. Beats charging a smartwatch daily or fumbling with button combos to change timezone while traveling.
Now it's true that I got a hardware update, but the author would presumably like a new desktop/laptop if it didn't force unwanted UI changes from what works for him. It's a sign that computer tech has not matured yet. You can easily get a car, or watch or a TV with the same controls that worked for you your whole life. There is no reason laptops or smartphones should be different, especially since software can easily support multiple themes for different tastes.
Cars, old school watches and (unconnected) TVs are things don't change because they aren't updated. If you disable updates many laptops and smartphones won't have any UI changes.
"Second of all, for a variety of reasons I have a major aversion to Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 and higher" I remember how painfull and ultra-integrated with all the operative system IE 4.0 wanted to be back then. The computers were suffering all the time, and some widgets cloned on the screen when they've been dragged.
Meh. 95 was crap for reliability, but I preferred it's UI to the Mac or X or NeXTStep. Unfortunately not all of the #a11y hooks worked as well as 98 or W2K... But those OSes incorporated "weird" UI abstractions that weren't present in 95.
And I got scared away from everyone saying "oh, NT has such beefy hardware requirements and doesn't support joysticks." And before I realized I didn't play games on my beefy work computer, win2k was out and it seemed to have better support for multiple displays.
Someone I know is still working with an old HELOS particle size analyzer, which came with a Windows 95 PC and an ISA interface card. Considering the daunting cost of a new machine, they're doing everything they can to keep the PC alive.
Are there truly insurmountable reasons why an ancient os can't be used, even a closed source os like Windows, that couldn't be worked around by building some kind of compatibility layer, given infinite effort and resources?
If you really wanted, you should be able to use any old version of Windows or whatever in VirtualBox or VMware or under Qemu/KVM. Probably have limits around screen resolution - I don’t think you could coax Windows 3.11 or 95 to do fulscreen at 3480x2160 - but if you just want to get it going, you could.
A few years ago I nearly got the first Red Hat Linux release going under KVM. I imagine someone who knows it better than I could succeed.
But the older the OS, the harder it's going to be to get anything modern working on it. And people do have finite effort and resources.
And frankly, it's just not a great idea anyways. For all the complaints, modern Windows is heaps better than its older counterparts for usage today. It's much better at utilizing modern CPUs, SSDs, GPUs, etc. It has (if imperfect) up to date security measures. More or less everything is out-of-the-box compatible with it. I can't even remember the last time I had something break and it was actually on the Windows end and not an application running on top of it that was the problem.
Things like kernelEx did exactly that. There’s also HX for MS-DOS. Thing is, as fewer and fewer people use the OS for which compatibility is intended, the translation systems fall into disrepair.
I find the attitude in the article troubling, as if the author is resistant to change.
I can get staying on something because it works, and "if it aint broke, don't fix it."
I also will admit that I don't rush out to get the new version of Windows / MacOS anymore. I've skipped over a few. (But I really, really like Windows 11)
But, in 1990s and early 2000s computing, a big thing you had to accept was that the technology you were using was going to be outdated soon; and that the new version will be different. Change was part of the bargain.
Honestly, respect to him for using it that long. I wonder if he is still able to use it, or if security certificates will keep him from accessing anything on the internet?
It's an interesting article. He rejects Linux because he has a "day job" and no "time and enthusiasm to tinker with computers for their own sake instead of using them productively as a means to an end".
I mean... isn't this a little rich for someone who wants to devote time to tracking down retro computer parts being sold by "two-bit resellers", just so he can keep using Windows XP?
At some point, maybe you should admit you're a retro-computing enthusiast (high-five to that!), and none of this has anything at all to do with productivity.
It's the difference between keeping your 1948 Dodge Custom 6 running (work on it or pay someone to work on it, everything else remains the same) and buying an entire new car. I can certainly believe it's productivity; Linux itself is annoyingly "changing" over time, Windows 95 will never change.
I don't think anyone keeping a 1948 Dodge Custom 6 deludes themselves into thinking they're being productive in doing so, or that they're doing it because they're been too gosh darn busy to learn how to operate a new car for the last seventy-five years.
People who keep '48 Dodges running (or Windows 95 running) do so out of love. And I'm totally on board with that. I just find it a little silly to pretend otherwise. It's not a rational decision to keep a '48 Dodge running, or Windows 95 running. There's no productivity gains that aren't immediately devoured by the expense and time of upkeep.
Thankfully, not everything in life needs to be productive or rational. Do what you love, be unproductive, kick dirt, boot Amigas!
Eh. That would be worse. Software made a few months later would require newer libraries. The only “stable” (in the sense of unchanging) API out there is effectively win32. I can easily make software written for Win2K or Win95 work on Linux through WINE, but I cannot do the same for Loki games, or even for some abandoned application written a year ago.
It's not productive because it gets progressively harder as time goes on and support/hardware availability gets worse. It's the opposite of futureproof
I love how he wants stability for himself but front page of the blog is filled with dunking on conservatives. There is some nuance in that one can want Windows 95 for him/herself and still allow others to have Windows 11. But having "Windows 95 states" and "Windows 11 states" should be at least considered as a solution and also, what if people forcibly install Windows 11 on your kids laptops and don't even bother telling you? Anyway, since he wants to force everyone to take COVID vaccines, surely he can't object to being forced to install the latest OS that still gets up to date security patches?
I think Windows9x is not usable anymore with internet unless one uses proxies for the ssl and accept not using modern javascript pages. There was a similar thread about this a month ago or so.
XP is more or less usable as there are hacks to use a Chrome version from 2022, I was tempted to create a VM with it to try it as a daily driver, but I lack the time.
Might be better served with one of the lite10/lite11 type windows remixes with most of the fluff removed. Though not sure I'd remove UAC or Defender myself.. but would be roughly similar to XP in terms of overhead with an arguably nicer skin.
I don’t think pragmatist is the word I’d use for him. I can empathize with the annoyance of things changing, but a pragmatist wouldn’t be this inflexible.
Given his other writings and the fact he hits things when they anger him, I’d go with curmudgeon. A word harsher than I’d like, but it captures the essence. He seems angry at the world around him and does not like adapting to it.
This is pretty common but most people don’t take it this far. :)
My first computer was a 95 Packard Bell. I loved it. Maybe I have nostalgia goggles, but I distinctly remember the UI being extremely responsive. Even the mouse was extremely fast.
The difference between Windows XP SP2 in 2008 and Windows 95 is much bigger than Windows 7 and Windows 11. By 2008 nothing mainstream was supporting Windows 95 at all.
Windows 7 was considered by many to be the last version before Microsoft really started screwing things up. I am pretty certain there will be people on it for decades
Is there a WM out there that can do the basic quality-of-life functions of today's DEs? I'd love a simple, opinionated WM that takes the features we know are useful today (workspaces, expo mode, sensible file manager layouts, system trays) and gives them a color-adjustable window theme inspired by 90's aesthetics, with minimal compositing that can run fast on hardware as minimal as a prototype RISC-V board. Or really, what we need is a truly minimal DE. Something that doesn't care about GTK or Qt or Kvantum, and stays lean.
Edit: I've already tried tiling WMs and I don't like them. I want a primarily mouse-driven UI. I'm sort of in agreement with the NeXT philosophy there. I primarily use Mint and Cinnamon these days.
I also understand that applications are bloated, but they can be bloated in their own little sandbox instead of creeping out to the rest of the system.