For some of us the last sane Windows was XP, so we’re well over it. XP was the end of the era when geeks ran Microsoft.
Working at MSN Tech support during the. Blaster Worm and its subsequent variants which triggered reboots in Windows 98-XP, I was put off from every version of Windows including XP, and it was the last windows I installed.
After working an 8 hour shift of repeating the same proceedure on a customers machine to properly fix the virus every 15 minutes, the same thing I had done every day for three weeks, I came home to find my XP machine bootlooping due to the second variant (Sophos) finding its way into my patched machine as the fix for it had come out while I was at work. Instead of joining the Freelancer LAN party I was due to be at that weekend, I spent the time fixing my machine and learning Linux. That year Windows became a secondary install, and remained that way until Wine had stabalised for most games I played. I think I dropped dual boot around 2011.
I’d say Windows 7 was last that was relatively normal, even though I was all in for Linux even then. It had fairly coherent UI, wasn’t crazy about adverts, it didn’t feel like 10 layers glued on top of an old OS so that it could make impression that it’s contemporary. It also didn’t try to be anything but desktop OS
Praising windows 10 is just wild. (From someone who experienced 95 onward). I mean, it was alright. I think 7 was my favorite.
10 was the last one with a technical improvement (its kernel had a scheduler that was better at scheduling on modern processors where some cores share caches while others don’t). Though the anti-features meant it was a tradeoff vs 7 (and just ignore 8 entirely).
It was kinda funny because before I switched to linux and made the question moot, I kept searching for some technical reason, anything, to actually want to switch from 10 to 11. All I’d get were things that other desktops have been able to do for decades (virtual desktops, which I first saw in Litestep (I think?) back around 2003), or anti-features like recall and copilot integration.
Mine too, it had a good looking UI and the addition of combined tabs changed everything.
I never liked windows, windows 7 was the most tolerated one
Windows 10 already had a ton of forced telemetry and more UI clutter than ever. It was a huge downgrade from Windows 7.
I’d rather use a Mac these days and I hate apple products.
I’ve used everything from XP to 11. Win 7 was definitely, and by far, the most comfortable for me to use. 8 was hot garbage, 10 was tolerable, and 11 made me switch to Linux a week in.
8 was pretty solid under the hood, but they really pushed that Metro interface, and even if you managed to disable it with something like Start8, it was still crippled by the tablet-first design on an OS that had like 2 tablets. And even with the tablets it sucked because lots of settings were still in the old control panel that required a mouse and keyboard.
If we’d had a Service Pack that just gave us the Win7 UI and the Win8 backend it could have been great.
I vaguely remember they might’ve done that later on? Maybe that was for the business version only. It was at least interesting that Microsoft was trying to directly compete with Apple for a while in having a whole ecosystem. I was waiting for more hardware because I liked metro on the phone, but then that all collapsed.
Really the worst part of 8 onward was the fragmenting of the settings, Vista you could at least fallback to the old stuff but they started removing old functionality. I get that they wanted to “update” from the control panel. But that it’s taken them 20 years, and they’re not done, and now neither the new system or the old system is feature complete, is fucking bonkers.
Pointing out that Windows Vista is turning 20 this year is a gut punch.
Oh no… I thought I was exaggerating. 😅
Someday digital archaeologists will search for Windows 9, the legendary Lost OS, said to give its users unlimited power.
I made the mistake of starting on 95, now I can’t stand anything fancier than XFCE.
Our family PC still has 8.1 (parents really don’t like change and Firefox got security updates until recently). I think I’ll upgrade it to 10 when I have time, the amount of debloat required to keep it sane is manageable as opposed to 11. Mom could handle mildly riced XFCE Linux with Firefox and our legal copy of Office 2007 under Wine but dad uses Total Commander and won’t use anything other than drive letters.
Man 8.1 Metro was the worst UI pick Windows has had
We’ve been using Classic Shell since Day 1 of course. I modded it to quit qBittorrent when Mom opens the Shutdown dialog* (yes, she always opens that awful window) because that takes the longest to terminate. I’ll use it plus Explorer Patcher on 10, a semi-transparent taskbar without blur is so handy
* Classic Shell Start Menu can run arbitrary and predefined commands from buttons but not both at once. The Shutdown dialog can only be triggered with a predefined CSSM command or JS script so I’m using a VBS script (unlike BAT or JS, it can run silently) that runs the JS script and
taskkillcommand.
Mate! If your hardware is good enough, then download windows 11 from massgrave.dev and then use this unattended method, which lets you turn off all the crap including TPM and BitLocked and all ai and o365 teams bollocks.
Source: me using windows for work
I already use unattend scripts for the rest of my family’s Windows shit… I add
irm https://christitus.com/win | iexat the end too so I can then install cool stuffAnd no, I’m not upgrading any Windows 10 stuff rn
there are tons of ofms for linux. show him gnome commander or krusader to start with.
Drive letters? (Yes, they are stupid and don’t work with MTP but I won’t explin
/dev/to him)
get the iot ltsc version, it’s the only sane option rn
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I agree 100%
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I ran the LTSC version until it recently failed a regular update multiple times, every shutdown and restart would take over an hour, and I would never wish that curse upon anybody ever. It frequently BSOD’ed, usually involving nVidia audio or Windows Store applications (I didn’t have any windows Store Apps installed but they’re sometimes dependencies), and the only way I could tell you that was the source of the problem is I learned to read the clusterfuck that is the Event Viewer logs, but I haven’t had a single similar issue on Linux since I made the switch.
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A suggestion:
Dual boot!
Call the Linux partition “Mom’s speed machine” and the old Windows 8.1 partition “Dad’s slow shitheap”.
Make the Linux partition as easy and intuitive to use as possible. Let the Windows partition rot.
I’m sure dad will come around pretty soon when he sees mom’s sleek setup and he gets a pang of jealousy.
Good luck!
Off topic but I always thought Vista was pretty good. A lot of the stuff people hated was just change. Things like UAC are normal now, can you image how bad it would be if everything still ran as administrator? Vista basically threw itself on the grenade.
I use Linux by the way, don’t lynch me.
I hated vista, because I had to repair and re-install it multiple times on my less-tech sawwy friends PC, since sometimes it would simply kill itself! Lol. I do not miss that garbage pile.
I am not entirely sure that is a Vista thing. I recall repairing and reinstalling 95, 98 and XP for less tech savvy friends for this same reason.
It is probably a Windows thing, yes. I just had to do it the most often with Vista, which soured my experience with the operating system.
I use arch, btw.
Is that with or without the malware?
./jk
Same, btw
Same, btw
Sanity died with $(windows_version_i_grew_up_with)
I grew up with 95/98, and still think 7 was the best one and it went downhill after real quick.
Naw. I grew up with all the Windows, 7 was the last sane one.
Have to agree. Windows 10 LTSC was tolerable, but it still was pretty batshit with how they designed the settings menus. So many things were now tucked away and hidden, with the real settings you often needed being in Windows 7 settings windows that carried over, but virtually always hidden as normal hypertext links below a much larger windows 10 button that didn’t actually do the thing you needed. The only real advantage of 10 was the inclusion of many drivers out of the box, updating a bit faster, and being able to swap the SSD between completely different computers without it freaking out and bluescreening.
Windows 7 was just an advanced Windows XP/2000, and for the most part was still very intuitive to use, with logically laid out settings menus.
Nowadays Linux has far surpassed Windows in ease of use and UX for normal settings with the mainstream desktop enviornments.
And what was up with 3 different styles of settings pages? There was the old MSC style, the more UI friendly pages and then the full-page, here’s your phone on Windows, you need to reboot to get back to the desktop version where you have 2 buttons for all your network settings. Fucking infuriating.
It’s just heinous now. I don’t know how people handle it, I get fucking mad within 5 minutes of having to do anything technical on Windows now.
And what was up with 3 different styles of settings pages?
And from a company that used to scaremonger about Linux being inconsistent and therefore wasting time & money…
You handle it because your boss says so…
Hell no, fuck Windows 10 too. It’s what started a lot of the bullshit we’re dealing with today.
Yeah it’s funny reading now that Windows 10 was good. I remember how people didn’t want to migrate from Windows 7/8 to Windows 10 like people today don’t want to migrate to Windows 11. Perhaps back then the issue was even bigger than today.
Sanity died with XP (sp3)
Im loving Bazzite.
Except for the whole “now I have 6TB of SSDs that I can’t figure out how to get rhe data off them without buying new hardware”
I spent like 3 days shuffling stuff off an NTFS partition and into a btrfs one last week. It’s doable but takes a while especially if you don’t have much space to put things temporarily. Should probably mention I did it on cachy for the most part, had to use the mount ntfs-3g command a bit
now I have 6TB of SSDs that I can’t figure out how to get rhe data off them without buying new hardware
Are these drives completely full? If not you can likely split the partition 50% NTFS where your data resides and 50% EXT4 so that Linux distro’s can access them properly.
Move the data from the NTFS partition over to your new partition gradually, expand the EXT4 partition and shrink the NTFS one as you go.
NTFS partitions do work on Linux however you’ll experience permission issues and such which is why it’s generally not recommended for day-to-day use, Bazzite is such a beginner-targeted distro that they don’t want the blame put on them if you do something wrong and lose data.
Sorry, why do you need new hardware? Bazzite doesn’t detect them?
They’re NTFS. Bazzite didnt like it when I tried to access them.
Plug them into a non-gaming Linux distro like Fedora. It’ll read them no problem unless they’re Bitlocker encrypted. Then reformat them in Bazzite so you can use them for storage.
Bazzite is Fedora, no?
I daily Bazzite KDE and my NTFS drives are mounting all fine. The only annoyance is that it pops a warning that Bazzite doesn’t like non-Btrfs/ext4 drives every time I access them.
It is, but I suspect they’re trying to mount the NTFS from Steam Big Picture mode. Also, Bazzite is immutable, so there may be something funky there.
Are you sure you mounted the drives correctly?
I’m never sure of anything ever.
Except for the whole “now I have 6TB of SSDs that I can’t figure out how to get rhe data off them without buying new hardware”
Do you mean reading the data or deleting the data?
Reading. Then deleting.
Ah okay, is it because of Bitlocker?
You know, I dont think so. I dont remember enabling it
“I love Linux except for <devastating hardware compatibility issue>”
Sounds frustrating, I wonder if anyone’s ever had that kind of problem?
Not a hardware issue; Linux handles NVMe and SATA drives just fine. They probably encrypted everything with BitLocker. Of course Linux can’t access an SSD encrypted using a proprietary Microsoft software with keys that may no longer be accessible.
Linux actually can mount Bitlocker drives, even automatically, but you need the key which is usually stored in the TPM which I’m pretty sure you need to boot with secure boot to get working in Linux.
If you still have Windows, it’s way easier to just set a secondary key and use that instead.
On a related note, I would actually recommend weighing the benefit of using LUKS because even with AES-256 hardware acceleration, it can significantly reduce your performance depending on your CPU.
LUKS does reduce performance, but I’d argue that modern midrange or better NVME drives already vastly outclass the needs for normal users. Unless the user is doing massive audio or video encoding or using it for a heavily used database, they probably won’t notice.
Source: Me, and I do the above activities and still think it’s fine.
Luckily there is a new publicly known backdoor so they might be in the clear.
Not Bazzite, this one doesn’t handle
NVMeNTFS for whatever reason, unless that was changed in the last year. The only distro I’ve seen with that issue, and I’ve used 4 (okay 3 of them were Ubuntu or based on it).Source: had to reformat my data (games) drive. Fortunately, Pop_OS could do that just fine.
Reformatting isn’t going to change how your SSD is electrically connected to your mainboard. Do you actually mean NTFS?
I suppose a distro might ship without NTFS-3g or the ability to install it, although Bazzite should be able to at least read NTFS.
Actually, what happened to win10? like much no updates, if some security hole get discovered, there wont be fix for that, sure, like it never was any extra secure in the first place… so, what changes now?
People still run windows 7.so nothing changes
Windows 10 only exists because of how much Windows 8 sucked.
Windows 7 also only exists because of how much Windows Vista sucked lol.
XP and 7 was Microsoft at their best. They’ll never reach those heights ever again.
Win11 has been fine for me at home and for the laptops I managed at my last job. Start your machine, skip through the install questions, reboot to USB with a MS ISO, install, done without all the factory bullshit.
Yes, that’s a minor pain, but it’s a tradeoff against post-install configuration with Linux. Either way, it’s hella better than the old days of struggling with pre and post install.
This might surprise you, but I don’t think anyone here is complaining about ease of installation… The “factory bullshit” is built right in to Windows now, and trying to remove it goes way beyond “post-install configuration”.
Also, as someone who’s done server deployments… doing automated linux installs is trivial.
Was just an ugly version of NT/2000 that’s the last windows machine I bought/built.
I did have an XP box for a while that I picked up on a curb on trash day. It still had the wedding photos of the previous owners when I plugged it in.
Windows 7 was the peak. everything since has been a decline.
Windows 7 was the first Windows OS that didnt require constant reboots, didnt require regular reformat/reinstalls to fix random over time slowdowns/degredation/crashes/etc.
Windows 7 had a relatively light weight, and very easy to use interface.
Windows 7 was the last Windows OS that you actually owned when you bought it.
Every OS after Windows 7 was centered on taking control and usability away from the owner/user.
iirc microsoft began going heavy on telemetry (and consequently cutting their QA and testing budget) at some point during Windows 7. That’s why it went downhill after that (Windows 8 and after)
They had QA before?
Yeah, that was towards the end of windows life, after win10s release… and it was added as a windows update package, and as a result was easily uninstallable.
and every news article i saw informing people about the telemetry update, also told people how to uninstall it
The only thing that sucked about windows 8 was their decision to force mobile friendly UI on everyone. Seems to be reoccurring issue.
Even Vista was ok, it was just pre-installed on computers that could barely run it and UAC was overtuned but it was solid with the later service packs.
Yea, vista was the ME problem all over again.
People running it on old hardware and old software wasn’t written to use UAC yet.
Well, sort of, but it was SOLD on hardware that couldn’t run it
Pre-installed with the craziest bloatware too. I had multiple come to me thinking there computers were hacked they had so much trash from the factory on them
Tbf, latest update Vista and 7 are barely different aside from their aesthetics. They just decided to repackage the next update into a different operating system because the well was already poisoned with Vista. Which makes me question why they aren’t doing the same business strategy with Windows 11 now that its failing. Oh well, I want everyone to switch to Linux anyway so 🤷♂️
The same could be said about 8/8.1.
It was not ultimately a different OS compared to 10. The major difference was a start button and a baked in telemetry. Other than that, under the hood these used to be the same OSes.
the only sane windows left
Windows 8.1 exists.
sane
Windows 8
…are you ok? 🤨
Edit: guess the .1 WAS significant! I sit corrected!
8.1. That’s different. It was also IIRC the last Windows version without any sort of AI, enforced telemetry or any of that crap.
8.1 was a very different os to 8. it was basically windows 10 light, all the features people were wowed by in 10 originated in 8 and were polished up in 8.1. it made the metro interface optional and brought back the start menu, improved performance, and was altogether a pretty pleasant experience.
Anything banned in China has some credibility with me, but it stopped receiving CPU compatibility updates in 2016 and after multiple extensions the last supported versions hit EOL in 2023.
