Ah I wouldn’t know about THAT. I just download and convert epubs from the likes of z-library/libgen, and have done so since getting my first Kindle circa 2012

What for? Cuz loading pirated books is trivial?

Only if you want to synch reading progress between multiple devices.

Well damn. A person who disagrees with me and is nice and eloquent about it, even teaching me some new information.

Mad respect, stranger.

It isn’t. It has its own Driver model. DOS drivers are installable and can be called up for backwards compatibility, but windows drivers are different and incompatible.

Windows 95 was still just another dos program on top of a shell.

That’s just straight up misinformation. Even 3.1 wasn’t really like that anymore (though, it was closer). Windows 9x uses DOS as a bootloader, and retains the original DOS components for backwards compatibility, but loads into a fully 32-bit kernel with preemptive multitasking and many features DOS couldn’t dream of touching. It is built atop the original 16-bit DOS, and inherits a lot of jank from that, which is why eventually they ditched it to use the developed-from-the-ground-up NT kernel everywhere instead (and broke compatibility with a lot of old hardware and software because of it, much to the chagrin of the users–)

Huh? Coming from an Amiga it really didn’t seem innovative. Or OS2 or BeOS (which ran circles around Win 95) or Macs.

OS/2 and Windows are siblings, with most of OS/2 being written by the same people within Microsoft. Windows NT is what happened when Microsoft decided to backstab IBM (again) to increase their profit margin (as I myself have said, Microsoft has always been bad from the ‘evil megacorp’ angle).

BeOS was, at the time, an operating system only for Be’s own PowerPC based workstations (and workstation != desktop, especially in those days) – Though there were talks to bring at least parts of it to desktop as the basis for MacOS Copland, that didn’t go through (instead Apple vored NeXT and used its nutrients to make OSX). – It didn’t get a public, user-facing, desktop release that a mere mortal could buy until 1997 (on PPC Mac. 98 for the x86 PC version), which in mid-90s tech terms is like a geological epoch later. Are we also going to compare Doom 2 to Half Life and shit on Doom 2 for being behind HL?

MacOS at the time was still using Cooperative Multitasking (which is what Win 3.0 used, and is unreliable af because any crashed program takes out the entire OS with it) and wouldn’t get true Preemptive Multitasking until OSX in '99.

The amiga did get Preemptive Multitasking to the desktop first (in '86, even. Commodore seriously didn’t know what they had, or they would have ruled the roost), but preemptive multitasking wasn’t the only feather in 9x’s hat.

DirectX was so good at doing what it did (acting as a layer of abstraction between gamedevs and hardware, allowing them to just ask the library to draw and play stuff, and it would figure itself out with the hardware) that alternatives like SDL took another 3 years to exist and much longer to catch up – And it was necessary, because the PC space, unlike the likes of the Mac or Amiga, was an industry standard rather than being controlled by one company, and users could have any combination of wacky third party video and soundcards, and DirectX just dealt with it.

And Plug-and-Play, while buggy as fuck to the point that it really only worked when it wanted, was something that hadn’t been done before. Adding new hardware and the OS just figures that shit out, no reboot required? Unheard of.

Edit: BeOS in 97, not 98. Still retains the whole ‘this was a geological epoch by 90s tech standards’ comment though.

That.

I’ll add that a lot of the issues people have with the registry have less to do with the registry itself (it’s just – A database of settings. Nothing shocking about that) and a lot to do with Windows’ philosophy and the problems that creates.

Like yes, the registry of a computer that has been running windows for a few years is a bloated mess which creates a bunch of problems of its own – But that’s not in and of itself because the registry is a centralised binary database.

Rather it is because – Well. Microsoft. Tech corporations in general. Want computers to behave like magic boxes. Not machines you have to learn to operate. This means that whenever you install something or modify something on windows, you are left in the dark as to a lot of the stuff going on under the hood. Windows error messages are very obscure and nonspecific. When you install something, do you know what it has added to your registry? What dlls it has dropped around your machine? And with so many third party programmes and utilities dropping into the system, that shit builds up, and not even an experienced user will fully know what has built up unless they’ve been making a deliberate effort to keep track.

Compare that to Linux, which is made by nerds FOR nerds… And so everything is thoroughly documented. With the general unspoken understanding that a. You will sooner or later go under the hood and mess about in there; and b. If something fucks up, whether it is directly your fault or not, you’re the one who will have to fix it, so here’s ALL the receipts on how shit works so you CAN do that.

People who don’t like Glass Themes can’t be my friends. Frutiger Aero looks like happiness and a better time when technology was exciting instead of alarming.

You are otherwise entitled to your opinion (fwiw I never used those libraries and still don’t know what they were FOR) and I entirely believe your experience of having instability. Windows just be like that sometimes. No pooping here.

Nothing wrong with the Registry

It’s a different way of handling things compared to how Linux (and most unixes) does it with 18391823 text files

But it’s a perfectly functional and sensible solution for storing system configurations.

Not really

Windows 7 was pretty, it was customisable, it was stable. And microshaft had yet to start fucking about with ads everywhere and invasive “features”. Peak windows right there.

XP was also pretty good for its time. At that point Linux and OSX had caught up and surpassed it in many ways, but it did what it had to without getting in the way.

95 was an innovator if anything, ahead of pretty much anything else on desktop at the time, even if it DID fart and die whenever someone looked at it funny.

It was always a proprietary creation by an anticompetitive tech megacorp, and therefore bad from THAT angle, but it didn’t start being truly shite from a pure user experience angle until like. 8.

Perhaps, but what I do know is modern NVidia GPUs do work on Linux. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My friend has a laptop with – Some low-tier mobile RTX-2000 series card, idfk – And games on it on Linux.

Hence “seems more likely that cards older than the 500 series are still borked since no one cares”

I think only up FROM the 570 is more likely.

Calling Linux’s version of DVR a “viable video editor” is rich given that a. It doesn’t work on most distros (it’s designed for Rocky Linux. It throws a fit on any other distro. You need to jerry-rig it), requiring a whole thang to get it to play nice; and that b. It doesn’t support any of the video formats and codecs people actually want to use, for seemingly no reason, since the Windows version supports those formats just fine.

KDENLiVe is like, fine for a simple project, but you quickly start hitting your head on its limitations. Plus its UI sucks just in general.

Video editing is the reason I keep a small Windows install, because sometimes I need to do video stuff for work and – Sorry. No. No Linux video editor even compares to the likes of Premiere and Vegas. They’re still barely above Windows Movie Maker.

GIMP is a perfectly serviceable image editor, and yes, GIMP 3 is a major improvement – But it’s kinda missing a lot of things Photoshop users take for granted, and its UI and hotkeys are very idiosyncratic, which makes migrating very hard (… I sorta have the opposite problem though. I learned image editing on GIMP and all my muscle memory is GIMP oriented, so even when I’m on my ‘time to work’ windows install, I only really open PS if I desperately need one of its exclusive functions)

I have no idea what SMIT(ty) is, so I’ll just smile and nod [smiles and nods]

YaST on OpenSUSE is pretty nice.

I am very sorry and promise to do better in the future.

Possible? Yes. Going to happen? No.

If your authoritarian government wants you gone they don’t need to pull off Hollywood Hacker shit. They can get you for “drugs” (that they planted) or even just outright “disappear” you. They can get rid of you quietly, anonymously, and only your equally powerless kith and kin will care.

This kind of evidence planting is only for REALLY FAMOUS PEOPLE, when they want to put them through courts and convince the peasantry that, actually, this guy deserved it, and don’t be like him, before putting them in an electric chair.

I agree.

Whow (basedbasedbasedbased)

Run by an open fascist who actively and proudly boosted the Trump campaign = Pro christianity, d’uh.

This guy’s a specialist in saying the quiet part out loud, tbqh.