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@westyvw > Pretty good at collecting every virus under the sun

Not really.

It did have some fails security-wise but 99% of exploits happened on non-updated machines which also had firewall disabled.

98 was far worse in that regard.

@drq It is not like we have two nations at war here, each with their ideals, religion and glorious leader. It is more about people who are users, developers and other contributors and it is also about evolution.

You’ll have hard time evolving if you dismiss everything (or maybe you’ll get real good at fleeing and hiding but that’s about it).

I mean there were countless times when I saw people asking “how do I do this on Linux which I did in Windows” and getting “YOU DO NOT. WE DON’T NEED THIS SHIT HERE”. (for me it was something Samba related and I got a great advice to just use NFS. Yeah, right).

For three or so years using Linux I never had people asking or talking about Windows features that would be cool to have. It is like taboo. Even Mac gets a pass.

It gets a bit better in corporate sector where people care less about tribalism and more about getting things to work. I wonder if Linux would took off to what it is now if corporations ignored it for some reason (e.g. extreme licensing enforcement) and decided to make their own - which is kind of happening btw.

@mittorn 2000 was workstation system.

By the way Server 2000 was pretty nice too. I think it was the first Windows server OS I worked with.

@mittorn In my experience XP had larger set of drivers for older hardware as well. Or maybe it was better at detecting devices. Anyway it was just easier to put it on even older laptops where it was a bit slow but everything worked out of the box.

@drq This sort of flippant fanboyism never helped anything.

Myself I think this is one of those things that really stall FOSS as it just dismisses both competition and coexistence.

@mittorn Well, my experience was clearly the opposite. Notably I worked in refurbished laptop store back then and later in some factory in IT department - and installing XP was the first thing we did. We had 2000 for most workplaces as established standard but it almost always required drivers for everything and it was even worse before with laptops. XP picked up all basic devices most of the time, quite often - all of them including weirder laptop hardware like IR ports and dock stations.

@mittorn It is just an example.

You can check other sources and the picture is largely the same.

As for enshitification - not everything is about UI. One watershed moment for me was with XP almost never requiring basic drivers. Maybe except audio. Another was about being able to just use Explorer and not needing additional file manager. Yet another was supporting a lot of file formats out of the box.

Suddenly I needed only OS distro CD to make a simple desktop work.

@lritter We’ll see how it goes.

I expect Windows becoming less relevant because of web apps and cloud taking off.

It is not necessarily good by the way, for the most people it already means they don’t have to run anything on their machine… or even have anything on their machine… just buy a subscription for movies, photo storage, email, messaging, office apps, isn’t it great? Gaming isn’t there yet but soon. And all these nice cloud-controlled IoT toys! No drivers, no cables, just your Wi-Fi password (and soon it won’t need even that).

@mittorn I guess everything that hit their trackers and had adblockers good enough to hide the platform :)

@mittorn I don’t care much about interface consistency when I can’t run software which worked on '98 :)

Also that consistent interface lacked features. A lot.

But it did crash far less than 95/98/Me family and still was less rigid and soulless compared to NT.

Still I welcomed XP with open arms.

@lritter Yes, this works like that for everything in life.

However it is also the problem. Criminals go for popular things because they go after people using them. Lesser interest to make viruses and exploits goes together with lesser interest to make software, drivers, hardware… Heck, I remember days when a lot of popular websites didn’t work too well with anything except Internet Explorer - and it was real security nightmare at the same time with very real zero click exploits.

@teft No, not really. It was stable but lacked versatility. It was nice for business but gave some headaches at home.

Also some people went even further and run Server 2000 on home computers :)

@lritter Yeah, looks like this is what it will take because nothing else works (or everything else is much worse that no amount of enshitification offsets it).