Of course, and I recall there being a single windows process that pretty much did everything -- but at the same time I knew that there were no other processes acting in the background other than the ones I actively used, and Windows.
So the point is just “shorter list is easier to look through, and remember which processes are supposed to be there”?
In Linux it was usually pretty obvious what daemon did what on a somewhat well curated system, though. No svchost.exe, and no gargantuan system processes or a kernel overstepping its boundaries.
Back then I was not so savvy with what every process did (over the years, of course, one learns). Windows XP had one main process, and everything else was practically userspace apps
Yeah, that makes sense. I think the (slight) backlash you get is from your original statement that that is what makes it the “best OS”, when in reality it arguably rather indicates some problems.
From what I remember a single svchost.exe process instance could be handing multiple "services" - you could see the mapping of service to PID in the Services, and there wasn't a 1:1 relationship.
So did you actually know what services were running based on the processes to support the belief that "there were no other processes acting in the background"?
