So part of me agrees, but part of me also feels like a victim of the boy who cried wolf.
People have ragged on Windows going back for as long as I can remember. Only in hindsight did people ever express fondness in public for Windows XP (and maybe a bit for Windows 7). It's hard for me to distinguish how much of the vitriol is legitimate this time from developers, or will nostalgia glasses just haunt Windows forever.
I've been using Windows 11 and... it feels fine? If anything, it doesn't feel substantially different enough from Windows 10 to care. My other comparison points are a Macbook and a Steam Deck, and both of them have so many faults of their own that I don't understand the need to rag on Windows in particular.
I was there when XP came out and it was clearly better than any of the entries in the two "parents" that it replaced (NT/Win2k, and 9X/ME). I was the local "hey, my PC is broken" guy and the first thing to try was always to replace whatever version of windows they had with XP.
I certainly have some anti-fondness memories as well (I had the service pack burned to a CD because it took longer to download and install the updates than it did to get infected with one of the various worms around at the time), but there was zero doubt in my mind that XP was the best windows yet when it came out.
I bought into the windows 95 hype big time when it was launched, and I think it by and large lived up to that hype. I was in highschool still, and I gladly bought a copy using money that I had been putting away specifically for this. It really was a high watermark for Microsoft and the Windows product for sure.
I was definitely somebody who rolled their eyes when people were up in arms about XP, Vista, and 7. Was OS X becoming better at the time? Sure, I’ll concede that. There were also initial driver issues with Vista and too many UAC prompts, but they worked to smoothe those out for 7 because they still prioritized the user experience.
What is happening now is even the longtime Windows power users and defenders are throwing up their hands and giving up. This is very different than the people running Gentoo in the 2000’s badmouthing Micro$oft on Slashdot
Never had any nostalgia for Windows, and I’ve met plenty of full of themselves developers being ‘nah, Windows is good, you just incompetent’ with their vibes. I could write books about their technical decisions, but I’d just mention none of them knew even slightest bits of Linux. It’s just absurd to me, like man, you do that for work, and the things you were over engineering could be done within one day, if you care to learn something new, instead of applying things you learned 40 years ago. I see no point in even attempting to explain anything to those people. Yeah, nothing wrong with Windows. XP was good, 7 was good, 11 is also no problem. I feel the same, I just mostly never used them myself, with occasional horror of things I’ve seen with others. Like those in abuser relationships who keep telling it’s how things should be and nothing wrong.
> Only in hindsight did people ever express fondness in public for Windows XP (and maybe a bit for Windows 7).
I don't agree. Those of us using it for embedded development skipped from XP to 7 to 10.
Windows XP started off a bit rough. Once it had some time to mature, nobody in their right mind wanted to go back to Windows 95/98/9x, though.
Windows 7 was definitely lauded as decent contemporaneously. Vista was a disaster by comparison (but a necessary one--Vista took the arrows to allow Windows 7 to appear). And lot of people avoided Windows 8 like the plague it was.
Windows 10 was definitely a step back from 7, but wasn't ... terrible? Especially relative to Windows 8. But Windows 10 definitely wasn't genuinely good on any axis. And everybody was constantly bitching about all the stuff that was clearly the beginning of enshittification that got turned to maximum on 11.
I keep hoping the EU comes out with a "No Means No" legislation to end this "Ask Again Later" nonsense.
Tricky to thread the needle on what would/not be allowed, but the pattern has been abused long enough. Maybe even saying it cannot re-ask for 30 days would be a significant improvement.
any word on GOG offering links to upgrade to linux, i think it would speed things up, right now we are almost at the part where the mortally wounded leviathan trashes everything about in its final death throes.
it really would be nice for early emancipators to have a comfortable landing, and avoid being subject to collateral damage.
I'm not familiar enough beyond casual use of Steam on Linux and a few one-offs to know the current state of gaming... but can only posit that a GoG installer/launcher for Linux that uses Proton (like Steam) wouldn't hurt.
This is pretty much what Lutris does. I'm using it with already downloaded GOG installers, and Lutris' crowd-sourced install scripts. It looks like they do account integration, so it might be possible to directly download and install games.
It can run things with regular wine or proton installed by steam. There is a lot of complexity compared to Steam or the GOG client.
So part of me agrees, but part of me also feels like a victim of the boy who cried wolf.
People have ragged on Windows going back for as long as I can remember. Only in hindsight did people ever express fondness in public for Windows XP (and maybe a bit for Windows 7). It's hard for me to distinguish how much of the vitriol is legitimate this time from developers, or will nostalgia glasses just haunt Windows forever.
I've been using Windows 11 and... it feels fine? If anything, it doesn't feel substantially different enough from Windows 10 to care. My other comparison points are a Macbook and a Steam Deck, and both of them have so many faults of their own that I don't understand the need to rag on Windows in particular.
I was there when XP came out and it was clearly better than any of the entries in the two "parents" that it replaced (NT/Win2k, and 9X/ME). I was the local "hey, my PC is broken" guy and the first thing to try was always to replace whatever version of windows they had with XP.
I certainly have some anti-fondness memories as well (I had the service pack burned to a CD because it took longer to download and install the updates than it did to get infected with one of the various worms around at the time), but there was zero doubt in my mind that XP was the best windows yet when it came out.
I bought into the windows 95 hype big time when it was launched, and I think it by and large lived up to that hype. I was in highschool still, and I gladly bought a copy using money that I had been putting away specifically for this. It really was a high watermark for Microsoft and the Windows product for sure.
Before SP1 it was unusable.
I was definitely somebody who rolled their eyes when people were up in arms about XP, Vista, and 7. Was OS X becoming better at the time? Sure, I’ll concede that. There were also initial driver issues with Vista and too many UAC prompts, but they worked to smoothe those out for 7 because they still prioritized the user experience.
What is happening now is even the longtime Windows power users and defenders are throwing up their hands and giving up. This is very different than the people running Gentoo in the 2000’s badmouthing Micro$oft on Slashdot
Never had any nostalgia for Windows, and I’ve met plenty of full of themselves developers being ‘nah, Windows is good, you just incompetent’ with their vibes. I could write books about their technical decisions, but I’d just mention none of them knew even slightest bits of Linux. It’s just absurd to me, like man, you do that for work, and the things you were over engineering could be done within one day, if you care to learn something new, instead of applying things you learned 40 years ago. I see no point in even attempting to explain anything to those people. Yeah, nothing wrong with Windows. XP was good, 7 was good, 11 is also no problem. I feel the same, I just mostly never used them myself, with occasional horror of things I’ve seen with others. Like those in abuser relationships who keep telling it’s how things should be and nothing wrong.
Well, that's because 11 and 10 are similar while being substantially worse than XP.
Windows 10 is worse than xp? How do you figure??
There are plenty of things that got better, but it's also easy to find things that got worse. Examine the minimum system requirements.
> Only in hindsight did people ever express fondness in public for Windows XP (and maybe a bit for Windows 7).
I don't agree. Those of us using it for embedded development skipped from XP to 7 to 10.
Windows XP started off a bit rough. Once it had some time to mature, nobody in their right mind wanted to go back to Windows 95/98/9x, though.
Windows 7 was definitely lauded as decent contemporaneously. Vista was a disaster by comparison (but a necessary one--Vista took the arrows to allow Windows 7 to appear). And lot of people avoided Windows 8 like the plague it was.
Windows 10 was definitely a step back from 7, but wasn't ... terrible? Especially relative to Windows 8. But Windows 10 definitely wasn't genuinely good on any axis. And everybody was constantly bitching about all the stuff that was clearly the beginning of enshittification that got turned to maximum on 11.
> would you like to purchase an Office 365 subscription? No? Okay I'll ask again tomorrow),
Ironic, given their website showed me two unrequested popups.
I keep hoping the EU comes out with a "No Means No" legislation to end this "Ask Again Later" nonsense.
Tricky to thread the needle on what would/not be allowed, but the pattern has been abused long enough. Maybe even saying it cannot re-ask for 30 days would be a significant improvement.
any word on GOG offering links to upgrade to linux, i think it would speed things up, right now we are almost at the part where the mortally wounded leviathan trashes everything about in its final death throes.
it really would be nice for early emancipators to have a comfortable landing, and avoid being subject to collateral damage.
I suspect they would put out a GOG Galaxy that works on Linux well before promoting it on their web site that aggressively.
I'm not familiar enough beyond casual use of Steam on Linux and a few one-offs to know the current state of gaming... but can only posit that a GoG installer/launcher for Linux that uses Proton (like Steam) wouldn't hurt.
This is pretty much what Lutris does. I'm using it with already downloaded GOG installers, and Lutris' crowd-sourced install scripts. It looks like they do account integration, so it might be possible to directly download and install games.
It can run things with regular wine or proton installed by steam. There is a lot of complexity compared to Steam or the GOG client.
There is the Heroic Game Launcher that also interfaces with the Epic Games Store.
To me GOG needs a big picture mode like Steam. I want my PC to act like a console and that would help a lot