hckrnws

(2014)

Recent related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46566465 "I installed a KDE Plasma theme that makes it look like Windows XP"

Please edit the title and add (2014), it's quite confusing to find over 10 year old articles in the Hacker News frontpage.

"By Carla Schroder - April 8, 2014".

I am all for replacing MS products with Linux, but the article is old. We are not in a time travel capsule; at the least not most of us. I would more expect current topics to match, e. g. replacing Win11 with Linux.

Also, I found WinXP actually better than Win7, Win10, Win11. At the least simpler to use.

I remember switching my Windows computers from XP to the alpha releases of Windows 7 (back around late 2008/early 2009), and noticing improved stability. I remember needing to reinstall Windows at least once a year with XP, which was something I never needed to do with Windows 7 and onwards. This may have been true for Vista once it stabilized, but I had a very poor experience with Vista around the time it first came out (particularly with BSODs relating to Nvidia drivers), and ended up skipping over it.

Your mileage may have varied, and all that.

> This may have been true for Vista once it stabilized, but I had a very poor experience with Vista around the time it first came out (particularly with BSODs relating to Nvidia drivers), and ended up skipping over it.

I remember buying one of the first AMD Turion X2 laptops with an ATI GPU (Acer Ferrari 5000?). Initially came with XP, but I installed Vista 64-bit on it (courtesy of my college's MSDN subscriptions) several months after release. XP BSODed about once per month under normal use, but with Vista, it never did. Everything I tried to use it with worked, it was fast enough and looked great! (The start menu's search bar was a killer feature for me! back when Windows search worked...) My college issued everyone Thinkpads, and when they had a Vista-based image, I got it, and my experience with Vista on that was likewise.

I built a gaming desktop a while later and put Vista on it, and it had occasional BSODs. I also suspect the Nvidia drivers, but I recall that stability improved with Windows 7.

For those reasons, I seem to be 1 of about 3 people on earth that has a mildly positive opinion about Windows Vista.

That's fair, and I suspect that if I either A) had a different hardware configuration at the time or B) had tried Vista about a year later than I did, I may have ended up with an entirely different opinion of it.

WinXP in a (properly configured) VM boots, runs faster than Win7, Win10 - at least under Linux. It is plagued by compatibility issues though - eg. no modern HTTPS, no modern browser, .NET issues, insecure SMB... you really need to know what you're doing.

But armed with TuneXP 15, a recent AVG, CCleaner XP 1.38, sdelete, and WinKeyFinder175 (to be used together with UMSKT, basically the only way to reactivate it when your tweaking efforts inevitably trigger the - now broken - activation), you can start your adventure. No modern browser, mind you, though eg. "supermium 122" works, and don't forget read-only VMs or snapshots are your friends. I couldn't get virtio working, because VirtualBox 7 had a regression with it, so stick with emulated AHCI since VirtualBox 6 is so ...passé

Which goes to show how often this comes up, yet Steam hardware survey is now about 3%, a decade later.

XP was inevitably not very stable, but I love it's sound stack.

What was unique about it? (genuinely curious, I'm coming from the Linux side of the pond)

Direct access to the sound hardware makes possible using huge discretization value, that's why Windows XP along with Mac the only OS able to produce a typical pop album.

If you are doing music on your Linux PC, I would like to know your best ping from some MIDI instrument to the headphones. Last time I tried to do that I could not make it faster that 20ms but it was in 2010. So, I do not use Linux for any multimedia.

should be quite a bit faster than that now. 1-2ms would be normal

[delayed]

Loving the "ubuntu unleashed" recommendation at the end

More current discussion:

I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46574707

One of these years is going to be the year of the Linux desktop!

Hmm: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Linux+desktop&...

The difference between Linux users and Jehovah’s Witnesses is that Christianity seems to be on the rise again.

I would think Windows is more comparable to JWs, because they’re always hysterical and saying the end is nigh every 10 years and getting rid of worldly possessions (like their “unsupported hardware” that they won’t need anymore in the “New System”) and then pushing the LTSC end of support prophecy date back .. to what is it now? 2014? 2032?

1914? 1976? Who’s counting? e-waste? Who caaaaaares, it’s the End Times and all things will be made new again, go ahead and use the planet like it’s a disposable Kleenex or the Ganges.

Surprised they’re not standing outside of Whole Foods spreading the news with racks of Wired and PCMag. Or better yet, iPads they can go back in and remove any trace of prior publication so we can’t pull up old articles from 2014 or 2025 on HN and laugh at all the contradictions and stuff that didn’t check out - like we can with period-appropriate prints of the Watchtower or Awake!

(Ex-JW)

No idea what you’re on about. I’m happy for you though. Or sorry that happened.

YOLOTD?

>Immune to Windows malware, and you don’t need anti-malware software

Ah yes! The old "Linux doesn't get viruses" argument. Thanks for sharing this bit of history with the class.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_malware#Threats

Linux distributions do typically have the huge benefit of having a decent package manager.

Whereas on Windows, you are expected to download all your software from various websites, ridden with big green download button ads.

And as for updates, once again there is no uniform way of finding or installing updates, so your chance of using outdated (and maybe vulnerable) software is higher on Windows.

Yeah, except for those frequent "add our private PPA repository" packages or, even worse, "'curl | sudo bash' and just trust us, lol" installers.

I haven’t had anti-malware software on Windows for over 10 years.

If you’re computer literate then you don’t need it regardless of which OS you use.

If you’re not computer literate and you click on every link that comes your way, not even the holy spirit of Linus Torvalds himself can save you from threats. So this claim is misleading at best and dangerous at worst.

> I haven’t had anti-malware software on Windows for over 10 years.

Unless you have gone through hoops to remove it, you most likely were still running Windows Defender Antivirus.

Fair. I was thinking of third party anti-malware that I have to go out and get, not something that is tightly integrated into Windows itself and enabled by default.

Also, I don’t need the antivirus portion of Defender since I don’t click on executables or install apps willy nilly. It’s very light and silent so I wouldn’t go out of my way to turn it off. Plus the firewall is also part of Defender.

Edit: pointed out a now corrected typo

My bad, fixed