Quite often, I wonder how much nostalgia plays part in our perception of past events. Luckily, with software, you can go “back” and retest it, and so there’s no need for any illusions and misconceptions. To wit, I decided to reinstall and try Windows 7 again (as a virtual machine, but still), to see whether my impressions of the dross we call “modern” software today are justified.
↫ Igor Ljubuncic
The conclusion is that, yes, you can still get quite far today with Windows 7, and I honestly don’t fault anyone for longing for those days. Windows 7 sits dead smack in the middle between the dreadfulness of Windows XP and pre-patches Vista on one extreme, and the ad-infested, “AI”-slop that are Windows 10 and 11. Its Aero look also happens to be experiencing somewhat of a revival, with both Apple and Google borrowing heavily from it for their latest software releases. Transparent blurred glass is making a comeback, but I doubt the current crop of designers at Apple and Google will be able to top just how nice Aero Glass looked in Windows 7.
Still, I don’t think you should be using an out-of-support version of Windows for anything more than retrocomputing and as a curiosity, for obvious reasons we’re all aware of. With the end of support for Windows 10 – still used by two-thirds of Window users – approaching quickly, a lot of people are going to have to make the same choice that fans of Windows 7 made years ago: keep using what I like, risks and all, or move on to what I don’t like, but is at least maintained and supported? That is, assuming you can even make that choice in the first place, since in the current economic uncertainty, most definitely cannot.
Maybe the Windows world will dodge a bullet, and the circumstances force Microsoft to extend support for Windows 10, like they did with Office applications. Let’s see if they blink, again.
Windows 7 was the last Microsoft OS that was a product in itself, instead of being an OS whose primary design goal is to force-feed people online services they don’t want or need (including a store that sells tablet-optimized apps nobody wants on a desktop or laptop, which is what Windows 8 was).
People even hacked ESU support into their Windows 7 installations to keep them updated until January 2023, which explains the large drop of Windows 7 users after January 2023 (despite the OS being officially dead for consumers for 3 years by then). And people will hack ESU support into their Windows 10 installations to keep them running for 3 more years too.
Every Windows version after Windows 7 is worse than the one it supercedes. At this point. Microsoft is Unisys For The Desktop™, selling backwards compatibility (with apps, drivers, and DRM like Denuvo) while trying to force-feed you services you don’t want or need.
And yes, the similarity of Microsoft suing on soon-to-expire FAT32/VFAT patents (like Unisys did on GIF/LZW patents) is not lost on me.
Windows 10 is better than Vista. With Windows 11, I don’t see much difference. I think it is mostly the same OS dropping support for old hardware. And take into account they said for some time that Windows 10 was going to be the “latest version of Windows”. I think at some point they realized that selling preinstalled copies of the OS is incompatible with dropping support for said hardware so they had to fork it in 2 just to set a new hardware baseline.
Updates for Win7 are still available in May 2025 (the current build is 7601.27730), and June update is just around the corner.
That said please stop talking about windows like if an OS was the GUI alone. What’s under the hood is important too, more important actually.
And since win8 the list of USEFUL features included in windows are endless.
Deduplication (probably one of the best features MS developed in 40 years), Hyper V, WSL, vhdx virtual disk, native vhdx (native vhd and vhdx are a REVOLUTION albeit the average Joe have no idea of what they are), the working Remote FX (then stupidly removed by MS) and so on
Now, while is deadly simple to fix the GUI of Win8 – Win11 (Classic shell, explorer patcher, Start is back/All is back, Aero glass and so on), is hard or impossible to add a kernel improvement to Win7 (and earlier OSes).
You can use VMware over Hyper V, you can use Cgwin over WSL as a partial replacement, but you can’t have a working deduplication, for example.
So yes, Win7 was (and still is a great OS) but most people who talk about it (including the guy of the linked article) are people who mostly have no idea of what they are talking about.
This isn’t arduino or AWS we’re talking about. GUI is the single most important part/function of Windows. Enshittifying GUI means enshittifying Windows.
An OS first nedd to do the work that you need. If that work is done using a pleasant UI it’s obviously better, but a fancy UI w/o a good engine under the hood is useless or next to useless.
Single most important feature? NO.
Or according to your logic Win 3.11 with Calmira XP on top of it would be the best OS ever, and I think it isn’t 😀
Confession bear: I used Windows 8.1 from 2018 until 2023 to avoid Windows 10 (and I didn’t want to install Windows 7 in 2018 just to see it go EOL 2 years later), obviously with Classic Shell Start Menu (didn’t bother with any fake Aero stuff, without transparency Aero is just tacky).
But very few people thought of doing that, so when you tell them you were using Windows 8.1 with Classic Shell Start Menu, they give you weird looks.
By 2023 Microsoft had stopped pushing large updates to Windows 10 because they were busy randomly breaking Windows 11, so I moved to Windows 10.
PS: Still miss Windows Media Center, such a nice TV tuner app
BTW if you are wondering how I got Windows Media Center on Windows 8.1, I bought some “Pro Pack” boxes on eBay for cheap, I still have one in its shrinkwrap.
Include me. My game partition in Win 8.1 with classic shell. My mobo is Win8 era, tried 8.1 as I didn’t need a key or hack, worked fine and kept it.
Did you live under a rock in the last 10 years?
WMC is available on Win10 since a couple of months after the release of win 10 in 2015.
We (me and few other fellows) ported it after a months of cooperative work, and I’m the first person in the world that had WMC working on Win10.
We continued to work on it. Keeping it well alive in to the Win11 era.
I even studied for a way to get the recent H265 (HEVC) channels working on it, and again I was the first person in the world to watch a HEVC channel on WMC.
My method (dvblink based) was then improved by my friend Kevin Chalet who come out with a fully open source way
https://kevinchalet.com/2023/07/05/connecting-windows-media-center-to-tvheadend-with-hdhrproxyiptv-an-alternative-to-dvblink/
Worth to mention that our WMC works not just on any Win8.1+ client windows but also on most servers (WHS 2011, Server essential 2012/2012R2, and server 2016/19/22/25)
I have been browsing TheGreenButton for a while. I know you can hack WMC into Windows 10, but with no single popular-enough project, I don’t want to risk messing up my system.
Windows 8.1 was the last Windows OS to officially support WMC.
@kurkosdr
First:
Having a single system installed on a PC is just stupid. I have like 15 OSes in multiple boot, but two, is really the bare minimum to get out of troubles in case something goes wrong
Second:
Me and other people who worked to have WMC working on W10/11/Server spent months to reach the result, to improve it over the years and to keep up with the updated Windows, and you are scared to spend 15 minutes installing the ready meal? O_o
Third:
My original installer was easy enough, but further improvements by various people made it even easier.
Garyan2 even made a monkey proof traditional setup
https://github.com/garyan2/wmcsetup/releases
So only laziness can explain a life w/o WMC, there isn’t any other valid excuse.
Windows 7 was the cleanup after Windows Vista.
Why Vista failed is a long story. But it contains a lot of in fighting inside Microsoft, and terrible software quality from hardware partners like nvidia and creative. But what is done is done, and that reputation is forever tarnished.
I would suggest Windows 8.1 was also such a cleaning act. The backlash in Windows 8 due to too much focus on tablets made them clean house (removal of Start Menu! for a Start Screen!).
Windows 10? I was indifferent. There were some ups, many downs (Start Menu becoming a full fledged advertising platform). But they at least made it “free” and widely available.
Windows 11? Do you see the pattern? Yes, it is hot garbage. The start menu runs a local Electron app to load JavaScript based software! Who designs such monstrosities? Not to mention lack of hardware support (forced TPM 2.0, even though later relaxed a bit) and quick drop of Windows 10 updates. I can go on all day.
Maybe Windows 12 (or Windows 11.1) will bring back a good version.
Sorry, but windows 7 was a big pile of canine-produced annoyance for pedestrians.
Don’t forget that in that era spinning rust storage was still the default. I dare anyone who has this rose-tinted-view of windows 7 to reproduce this experiment on an hdd.
That’s an interesting take, it was objectively better than Vista that came before it and Windows 8 that came after. As others have mentioned, there was ample reason people went to extreme measures to keep running it nearly a decade after Windows 10 was released.
Win Vista means nothing. You must tell which Vista you’re talking about, Vista RTM was absolute crap, but Vista with all the SP added isn’t that much worse than 7.
Win 8 + classic shell (+Aeroglass if you like) is better than Seven by any metrics, for sure is the lightest and fastest Windows to the date.
Probably the best OS you can install in an older / undepowered machine in 2025 if you don’t mind to use Q4OS
Correction, Win 8.1 + Classic Shell was great. Win 8 was buggy and flaky.
No.
Win 8.1 Is way slower than win 8, it has some worth improvements like the RESETBASE option in DISM something long overdue, and native NVME support. But that came at the price of a way heavier/slower OS, if compared to Win8.
Also its rudimentary start button interferes with Classic Shell’s one,
Something that doesn’t happen in any other Windows from Win Vista to Win11. Obviously there is no interference in Win8, given it comes with no start button at all.
@Moochman, I tend to agree, I found Win 8 slow and buggy, Win 8.1 was a vast improvement as was Win 10. I’ve found 8.1 and 10 to be a vast improvement over pretty much every earlier release. I could upgrade workstations from 7 to 10 and not notice any degradation, the only issues I really had was waiting for drivers to become available as hardware vendors dragged their feet getting product 10 ready.
I don’t remember this happening to me the slightest, but I only installed the Start Menu part of Classic Shell and didn’t customize the button’s appearance.
@cpcf
I understand that mileage varies depending the HW, but I’m using Win8 (and server 2012 and Windows Embedded Standard 8) In my ancient Acer 5104 notebook, released in the XP era and still with PATA disks (the same model was updated when vista was released so there is a SATA flavour too)
Win8 boots in 15 seconds, Win7 takes almost one minute to boot, Win 8.1, Win10 and Win11 are all around 30-50 sec.. In short nothing come close to Win8, and I have the same experience practically on any machine I tested.
So no Win8 and slow on the same sentence sound definitely wrong to me.
@kurkosdr
Just click in the very bottom/left corner of the screen and see what happens.
It happen only on Win8.1 / Server 2012R2
Part of what gave Vista a bad name was the “Vista Capable” program from Microsoft that grossly mislabled underpowered hardware that barely ran with XP as “Vista Capable” when it clearly wasn’t. That was only part of the issue though; Vista did improve somewhat during its short lifespan but it never came close to the polish and stability of Windows 7.
As for Windows 8, my own experience was that it was often slower and less stable than 7 on the same hardware. It may have run better on hardware that was released after the OS was, but on hardware that shipped with 7 it was a downgrade. The heavily increased telemetry that required registry hacks to turn off was another arrow to the knee for Windows 8, and it has only gotten worse with 10 and 11. Windows 7 was the last Microsoft OS that didn’t collect personal information to be sold to advertisers. There was telemetry in 7 but it was feedback to improve the OS, which many major Linux distributions also ask for.
First things first, gaming laptops and premium laptops released during the tail-end of Windows 7’s use by OEMs did feature SSDs as the boot drive, for example:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/7284/alienware-17-gaming-notebook-review
The idea is that you put your Windows instalation and your apps in the SSD and your games and personal files in the HDD. I own this exact system (a lower-trim variant with the 770M GPU) but the exact same CPU, RAM, and SSD size, and it’s blazing fast on Windows 7, 8.1, and 10.
Also, apps were less fat back then, so if you had 2GB of RAM, even a “spinning rust” boot drive would do, the apps just took a bit longer to launch. 1GB of RAM was hell though, as you were constantly swapping to the HDD.
Also, it’s not really “spinning rust”, by the time Windows 7 had come along, HDDs ad shifted from using iron oxide to using thin film magnetic material vapor-deposited to the platter to ensure a uniform surface, something that enables higher densities. And the platter surface is silver-colored, not orange or brown.
That it *could* run faster with some sort of ssd caching is not really relevant to my comment, as any sort of inclusion of ssd, whether cache or not, is nowhere near to what was **default** for systems well into the windows 10 days.
Enshitification is everywhere, but the causes are different in open source land to closed source land. In closed source land it’s because of interest rates rising and cheap/free money ending. That combined with the public’s perception training of the last two decades that software should be free/you are the product. Has meant that companies would either have to jack prices/lose market share or drop quality. Quality drop has been the easiest option for executives not wanting to explain to shareholders why they are making smaller volumes. In Open Source land, Linux/other GPL Desktop projects got away for a long time with minimal code maintenance. The result has been extensive code rot. This was fine as long as X11 remained compatible with everything. But the move to Wayland is exposing all the problems with projects that aren’t being actively maintained, or which haven’t got enough programming man-power to make the transition to Wayland. A lot of desktops have broken, e.g MATE. Long term I think the Open Source Projects will clean up and get better, I don’t know if the same will happen to proprietary software.
Nobody really forces you to switch to wayland though and I don’t think that wayland serves as a good example for anything.
As I see it: for the normal end-user wayland simply does not provide enough advantages and X not enough cons to really enforce adoption. A similar thing happens in the Java World with the module system: nobody really uses and sticks with JDK 11 as long as possible unless an upgrade to JDK17+ becomes inevitable. Python2 vs Python3 was a similar story.
When X ceased to work, everyone would move to wayland prompt. But right now I have no interest to change this part of my systems since I see no benefit.
Nobody forces?
Firefox already has glitches under X11.
Wayland is just the last addition to a long string of imposed novelties that are slowly but steady destroying Linux and the concept of a real open source OS driven by the community, rather than the ego of few developers.
Let be honest, if all the energy put to develop form scratch a x11 replacement during the last 15 years,were employed to bufix and improve x11, we had x11 that required no monitor to show the GUI, like in a SF movie 🙂
Obviously the sentence “hey I’m the developer who invented Wayland” sounds better than “hey I’m the developer who fixed 849 bugs in x11”.
That lead to all the idiocity that infested Linux since the 2005 or so, UDEV over DEVFS, Kde 4+ over Kde3 (TDE now) Gnome 3+ over Gnome 2 (mate now), the systemd cancer over einit/initng/openrc/upstart, and so on.
I can continue for a day.
The result is that we had a perfectly working OS, small compatible and easy to use in 2005 or so, and now we have a bloatware driven mostly by sociopath developers and corporations.
Pretty much, IBM/Redhat decides, and the rest of the community falls in line and adopts it. Systemd and Wayland are both perfect examples of this. It’s not so much developer ego but money throwing it’s weight around. X11 had problems for sure, but rather than address them or make X12, they threw out the entire thing and built a new one from scratch. Redhat is already dropping X11 from GNOME and they wiill completely drop support within 2-3 years. KDE will follow suit so they don’t have to maintain legacy code and that will be the Wayland coup complete.
Yes sure, but don’t make the mistake of forgetting *ALSO* the ego of single developers (or groups of them).
Just remember what happened back in time to ReiserFS, which was way ahead of its time but was kept out of the official kernel for years just because it made looking the other FS of the time like jokes.
P.S. everyone who read the above comment please avoid the usual idiotic jokes on murderfs and alike, here I’m talking about the technical merits of Raiser FS not about the personal behavior of Hans Reiser
Bravo
@the solutor
Let’s not lose sight of the fact that the people working on Wayland were and are the people that used to build Xorg. They started the Wayland project because they were tired of working on X11. We can disagree with them but they saw design problems in X that could not be fixed. Or at least, they decided that starting over was the better path. These devs did not need to stuff their resume. Most of them work at Red Hat.
And while you can maybe blame GNOME/GTK on Red Hat, it does not explain why so many other desktop infrastructure devs are so enthusiastic about Wayland. KDE had nothing to do with Red Hat or Wayland and yet they are rushing to leave Xorg behind. Why? Even niche toolkits like FLTK were all over Wayland. Regardless of our preferences, the people actually building this stuff see Wayland as the way forward. It is no more complicated than that.
For me, the fact that nobody has stepped up to maintain Xorg as the previous devs abandon it says it all. There are no MATE or Cinnamon uprisings here. There are no mainstream distros digging in their heals. Instead, 70% of new desktop Linux installs this year will be Wayland based. It will be 90% soon. We can like X. The rest of the world is moving on.
That said, I do not disagree with your core point. I am also concerned about the overall trend in the evolution of the Linux platform and with the vision being imposed by Red Hat in particular. I very much dislike “systemd for everything” as an example. I do think that the platform needed to be modernized. It is not change that bothers me but rather what we are changing it into. Then again, I find glibc just as overbearing and over-engineered as systemd. They are both Red Hat projects really so no surprise I guess.
But we also get pipewire (clearly better) and I think Wayland will be a good thing in the end (we can disagree).
MATE (Gnome 2) has already made the jump to Wayland. Sadly, I do not believe that Trinity will (KDE3).
LeFantome,
I’m not saying wayland devs are acting selfishly, however working at redhat does not imply there are no self promotional motivations ether. The concepts aren’t exclusive and for better or worse, a lot of corporate structures do end up promote the selfish over the non-selfish. Even within, that’s the way the game is played.
Except that X was already ahead and working all along, it was wayland specifically that needed to step up, not X. Personally I think X11 is bloated & rickety enough to warrant a replacement. However obviously the solution needs to work. Year after year after year my frustration was with wayland, not X. Wayland shot themselves in the foot missing opportunities to make the onramp smooth for more, even mainstream, use cases. And it didn’t have to be this way, listening to user needs earlier on would have saved a lot of suffering and delays. Luckily we’re in the tail end of it now. My next desktop may well run wayland, hopefully without any issues this time.
Unlike for systemd, I’m not against Wayland as a concept.
The initial idea didn’t sound bad “just replace x11 with something light, fast and easy to develop compared to the X11 heritage”.
What I think proved blatantly wrong was how such idea evolved, things moved from be managed by WM to compositor new protocols and alike, this is not replacing x11, this is forcing all other developers and users to bow to that idea.
All we needed was a “glorified” thing like Xwayland, possibly a single “exe” with few dependencies, that fully replaced X11 while still being 100% compatible with it. Possibly that thing would have been developed in 2/3 years.
Instead we have a monster that after 15 years of development and a zillion of coding hours wasted by the impacted developers of other programs, Wayland isn’t still really here, I tested just few days ago the upcoming Q4OS 6.x (based on Debian trix) and I got an invisible mouse cursor. Which is simply incredible after 15 years of developement. At that speed how much time would be needed to develop the whole Linux or FreeBSD? 100 Years?
@Alman
> working at redhat does not imply there are no self promotional motivations
For sure
> My next desktop may well run wayland, hopefully without any issues this time
I hope it goes well. My heart sank a bit when I saw that Debian 13 will ship with the NVIDIA drivers from January 2024 (version 535). Version 555 in June 2024 added explicit sync which was a watershed moment for Wayland on NVIDIA. The only box I have with a newish NVIDIA card uses EndeavourOS which has moved to the 575 drivers already. I sure hope that Debian does not wait until Debian 14 to migrate to explicit sync.
> Except that X was already ahead and working all along, it was wayland specifically that needed to step up
Wayland was created by the Xorg devs because it was what they wanted. Red Hat backed Wayland because it fit their agenda. Wayland is meeting their needs.
The question is how the rest of us respond(ed). My observation is that, forum discussion aside, none of the desktops environments, GUI framework devs, or even distros seem to want to stay on Xorg. It appears that most prefer Wayland. We are all moving to Wayland because that is what the non-Wayland devs are choosing for us. The only gun Wayland put to our head was that all the Xorg devs left the project. And nobody appears to care enough about Xorg to take over (we will see what the BSD world does I suppose).
People say that Xorg is “done” but that is not true. Ask people who have switched to Wayland what it is like to move back to Xorg. HDR, fractional scaling, multi-monitor scaling, app compatibility, touch screens, screen tearing, ghosting, screen sharing, variable refresh, clipboard, sandboxing, and overall performance are all generally worse on Xorg. You could write an “Xorg breaks everything” post at this point. And nobody is addressing these issues on the Xorg side. At this point, Wayland is improving and Xorg is not. Xorg is falling behind and the list is getting longer.
LeFantome,
That doesn’t really change the fact that X11 works and wayland is the one that needed to catch up. Wayland _needed_ them more than X11 did, it’s funny to think of it that way, but it’s true. Once wayland is completely working, wayland won’t need them much anymore either and it’s not inherently bad for the work to reach that state so we can move on. I certainly hope wayland devs see it through to the end, by which I mean working for everyone and not just those on gnome.
Well, no few of us, devs and users alike, are actively against wayland. I think it misses the point to interpret things that way. Most of us are ok moving beyond X11…but the reason desktops and users haven’t completely done so is simpler: wayland just needs to work, that’s it.
@Alfman
First, let me apologize about the typo in your name above. The site went unresponsive for me and I could not edit before everything froze in place.
I was also going to edit my post to make it sound a bit less like Wayland shilling. So I can apologies for my tone as well. It really is not meant to be so argumentative. I think I need to take a break from responding to Wayland stuff after this.
It seems that I may have an opportunity to have egg on my face in terms of active Xorg development though and nothing would make me happier.
Xorg has been forked:
https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver
Not only that but there are a large number of PRs posted to that repo already and they plan a release soon. The claim being made by Xlibre is that the Xorg maintainers were actively resisting Xorg development.
The dev behind the fork is a bit of a controversial figure and I am not sure I buy some of his origin story here. But I would love a vibrant X11 server project to exist. I wish the project luck.
> I certainly hope wayland devs see it through to the end, by which I mean working for everyone and not just those on gnome
In my view, Plasma 6 is the most advanced / complete Wayland environment (compare global hotkey support between Plasma and GNOME for example). COSMIC is getting close. I am told that Hyperland is quite good now. All the wlroots stuff is usable. It is not just GNOME.
More to your point, the way that Wayland is implemented allows smaller compositors to leverage features developed by larger projects. For example, due to the sandboxed nature of Wayland, many features are implemented via things like XDG Desktop Portal. This is how a Wayland client requests the server to take a screenshot or screen recording for example. A smaller compositor can simply leverage xdg_desktop_portal_gnome to get all the same functionality that GNOME has. Consider that Satellite can add Xwayland support to any compositor or that Waypipe is compositor agnostic.
Incidentally, there is no standard way for an X11 app to request a screen capture from the server. Every app has to implement it themselves. Same with accessibility stuff and lock-screens. As this is all “security” stuff that Wayland disallows, Wayland results in a much more modular and better defined system that will eventually make it much easier to create a feature-rich Wayland compositor (compared to an X11 window manager or desktop environment).
The Wayland devs did themselves no favours over the years, and I get the frustration for sure. One thing I have come to appreciate though is that a lot of the stuff that people say “just works” on Xorg was never really implemented there either (see my comment on screenshots above).. On Xorg though, it was not so hard to just do things yourself as Xorg did not stop you. On Wayland, you are often not allowed to and so you are stuck waiting years for the “committee” to agree on a design and fix it. It was a lot easier to program a Commodore 64 where you could just read and write directly to the video or the hardware. A modern OS will not let you do that and so needs a lot more “design” and support libraries. I have come to see Wayland the same way.
Thankfully, I think we are very near the point where most of what most of us want exists. We just need to get it to everyone.
> wayland just needs to work, that’s it.
I cannot disagree with that. Plasma 6 has been working well for me. I hope Debain 13 works well for you (fingers cross on those NVIDIA drivers).
LeFantome,
You’re fine. I can be overly stubborn at times. I agree new topics would be a refreshing change.
Yes, this is interesting!
Arguably that’s because screen capturing it’s already part of the X protocol, which lets you retrieve pixels from arbitrary windows. People have made the case that X11 isn’t designed with much security, screen capture could be a good example of that. Regardless, the reason X doesn’t need an explicit screen capture API is because it’s already baked into X.
https://gist.github.com/richard-to/10017943
https://tronche.com/gui/x/xlib/graphics/XGetImage.html
I’d be curious to test this X11 code on unix workstations from the 90s,
Software that used the X protocol like XVNC can be desktop agnostic be it gnome, kde, XFCE, cinnamon, mate, etc. Wayland broke with this tradition of cross desktop compatibility requiring compositors to individually implement features. As a result, the features available to wayland users are more likely to depend on the desktop they are using. For example the inability to screen share on KDE was one of the features that held wayland back for me, even though it worked on gnome. I still feel this is a con for wayland next to X. Anyway, they did what they did. I hope the different implementations can all reach feature parity.
I hope so too 🙂
I’m not sold on Wayland yet. I’ve tried running it recently on Void Linux with KDE Plasma 6, and it’s glitchy as hell with fonts and scrolling in Firefox and even KDE native apps like Kate. I had to go back to X11 to keep from going cross-eyed.
I really want Wayland to succeed, but at the same time I want X11 to stick around and continue to be maintained. It seems that my only hope for the latter is for OpenBSD devs to continue to maintain their X11 fork Xenocara.
Morgan,
I tried it in a VM recently with gnome desktop for a test that had nothing to do with wayland, and for the brief time I used it I didn’t see any issue under gnome. But I don’t like gnome any more. Gnome 2 was once one of my favorites but IMHO it’s changed for the worse and now it’s KDE or XFCE for me. I’m going to give KDE6 a go sooner or later, but it’s concerning to hear you say that KDE 6 still has issues with wayland since I was hoping all that would be fixed by now.
*slow clap*
I will keep using xorg for a long, long time. It currently handles my weird dual monitors infinitely better than any wayland compositor and all I have tried. It’s kinda sad.
For reference, I am running dual Eizo FlexScan EV2730Q 26.5″ LCDs that are 1920×1920 (1:1) on an Intel ARC A770 😛
Wayland: a solution in search of a problem.
Greetings!
I myself have zero interest in Windows other than being forced to run it inside a VirtualBox for proprietary VPN clients.
From that perspective, I found Windows 10 Tiny least painful once de-bloat scripts applied and auto-updates disabled and proper menu/taskbar application installed. It is running literally for months now and I can suspend the VirtualBox client within seconds.
That said, I always find it hilarious how much time and effort people spend on running Windows achieving nothing. “I can’t open this document”, “My system just froze”, “I can’t see your screen”, “Let me try a different browser”, “I need to reboot”.
“dreadfulness of Windows XP” – bad take! XP was a fantastic version of Windows for it’s time, the first consumer OS based on NT Kernel.
Yes, calling it dreadful is ridiculous. XP is widely considered one of if not the best versions ever released.
Depends what you compared it to.
Horseshit is pretty dreadful, but it’s much better than dogshit – one of the best versions of shit you could say, but it’s still shit.
IMO it’s Win2k. If MS had given me a Win11 Super Pro (say, $200? $250?) that was basically the start menu and stripped down shell of a GUI, whose focus was being a launcher for applications, I’d still be on Windows. Sure, the bells and whistles of sidebars, search bar on the bottom (if you like that sort of thing), all those bits are fine. But no force-feeding stuff from the Store, not having all the O365/OneDrive/etc crap to start with. No cortana/ai stuff either.
Of course allow them all to be installed easily, because some folks will want that, even if I don’t.
Windows 2000 was my favourite version of Windows. However, Windows XP was certainly much more ready to receive the Windows 95 diaspora. Windows XP brought the convergence of 95 and NT. We have to be honest about that.
And by today’s standards, Windows 2000 is pretty lacking. It is 32 bit only. No UEFI. It lacks many modern APIs (including .NET).
Even if security updates were not a concern, you could not use Windows 2000 as a daily driver in 2025.
My next favourite after Windows 2000 was Windows 7. You could almost get away with running that today. Limited unicode support is why the browsers dropped it. But most of what you need is still in there.
Windows 10 is probably the best Windows kernel. Too bad they layered so much garbage on top.
@garybuk Win XP SP3 is still functional, I service and support many systems still running it for critical functions, it’s a stable solution for old hardware that never saw a 7 upgrade.
Rose tinted…
You’re running an old OS in a VM on hardware significantly more powerful than what was around at the time. An SSD makes a huge difference, plus the faster CPU and more/faster RAM that you nodoubt have today.
Installing from an ISO image on an SSD instead of physical media.
The drivers for the hypervisor will be well debugged because it’s a very common configuration, compared with whatever frankenstein mess of random components and drivers for physical hardware it ran on before.
Try it on a vintage machine and it won’t look so rosy.
Quite frankly, as I already stated before, Windows XP got me everything I needed to “operate” my computer. Office, game, internet, Flash, whatever. It worked. With a few quirks here and there, but nothing a SP wouldn’t solve.
If the default “Fisher Price” theme was not to your liking, you could always switch to a more tamed “Olive” or “Silver”. Or completely turn it off and go back to “Classic”.
Anyhow, XP was just 2000 on steroid, with updated CPU support (multicore, 64 bits at the end) and new DirectX drivers. With SP3, it was rock solid and performed very well on the hardware of its era.
Then Vista came in and tried many ,new things. UAC, glass interface, etc. What the hardware of the era could hardly cope with, plus the new driver interfaces that many hardware suppliers took time to master (NVidia drivers *cough*).
And then 7 was out. It was mostly back on XP stability, yet with Vista “features”. And pretty much supported by the hardware of the era. It all made sense again.
Everything could have stayed that way for a while longer, but Microsoft had to keep up with the smartphone stuff they completely missed, so buying Nokia (the Elop fiasco) and unifying the “interface” led to Windows 8.
At least Vista’s GUI had the same root than XP and before. 8 really put the feet in the plate, stomping, trying to shove down users’ throat their “revolution”. But Microsoft is not Apple.
I don’t think putting a layered stack of “utilities”, like Classic Shell, to recover the lost usability is a nice way to do things. Be it for Windows 8, 10 or 11. There was a way to do things that everybody got used to since Windows 95 and was of no need to be changed. At least on the desktop.
Kernel wise, of course the later incarnations are more modern, future proof and so on. But also added a lot of unrequested and unwanted telemetry and stuff. At least you get the Tiny and Debloat scripts to help you reduce the burden, though.
And if you *really* care, there are always alternatives like the Nux and BSD out there. But you’ll need to adapt.
Just once.
And then you’re free.
Matter of perspective… for me Win2k was just the beta of XP, exactly as Vista Was the beta of Seven.
And be honest Win2K RTM was as terrible as Vista RTM, both of them became usable after a number of Service packs (and after the average HW was updated to REALLY meet the requirements)
Then, they’ll change the default file system, you’ll need to adapt again. Then they’ll ditch x and move some other way, you’ll need to adapt again. Then, with a major update gnome will change how your windows (the boxes on the screen, not the os) look, and you’ll need to adapt again. Then your distro will decide to more closely imitate apple thingies, and you’ll need to adapt again. Then your distro will stop existing, and you’ll need to adapt again.
Let’s face it. Computer technology is changing, and users are expected to adapt again and again.
There’s no complete avoidance of that forced adaptation. We can only skip some of them if we dig our heels well. Put your computer behind a secure router and set the connection to metered, and windows (the os, not the boxes) will stop bothering you about new enshittifications plus the option to change the background of notepad.
But then again, you’ll want to play the next paradox title, which demands dx5, and you’ll have to leave your beloved nt4 installation behind, and move on to XP, 4 years after its release. Yeah, you managed avoiding adapting to the newest and shiniest for so long. Moving on to XP will be a bother, but not a very trying one. The only thing is that, you now need ram measured in GB instead of MB, for doing the same things (plus playing europa universalis) you have been doing on your old NT4 box.
You’ll have a nice run with XP SP3. For a decade perhaps. But then, your browser with 30 tabs will begin trying your nerves on just 2.5 gigs of ram. And Office 2007+ will be a problem with its ram eating ribbon. If only they left you alone with that good old office 2003 (I loved it, I still use alt-i-b for adding a break in word. almost 20 years later, I still don’t know what is on which ribbon)… But ever more frequently, files sent by your clients began to exhibit weirdness and glitches, so you had to update to office 2013, and that’s another ram sinkhole. Let’s face it. 2.5 GB of ram won’t cut it anymore, and let’s move on to win 7. Now, I’m no longer in my 20s, so adapting to it took a little longer. But the underlying system was more or less the same, everything could be fixed via registry, and I was still the owner of the box.
A US president and a lunatic later google will decide to stop supporting chrom* on windows 7, And your bank is full of idiot software managers who think electron is an amazing thing. They will certainly hear about looming doom, and will block you from logging into your account (the bank account, not the user account) if you insist on using 7. Then you’ll be forced to leave that working installation behind and move on to the next one.
Now, as someone in the second half of his voyage through this planet, adapting really takes time. Learning new things is a pain, and is often a futile exercise. And now it seems that I’m no longer the owner of my computer. Microsoft believes that it has the right to run updates on it, without my consent. I paid for this box. I built it. I installed the os. I customized it. But now, I’m forced to run updates on it. THAT’S NOT HOW IT WORKS.
So, *nux, BSD, windows, or mac or whatever. They all force some change on you, sometime. The computer industry as a whole needs to learn that these are our machines. Imagine buying a house, and 15 years later the constructor coming and brick-walling one of the doors. Imagine buying a car and 5 years later the manufacturer changing its sunroof color. Imagine buying a wardrobe and 8 years later IKEA pushing new door handles to it.
At least with Nux and BSD, it’s not a corporation forcing you to update, it’s technology. That venerable 32 bit Intel CPU aren’t supported is another problem. But at least you’re in charge of and control what you own, you can “lag behind” if you want.
You’re very wrong here
You’re way more forced to update using Linux than using Windows.
As a matter of facts in 2025 you can still use proficiently XP or Vista or Seven.
Even in Win 11 you can use 16 years old drivers, usually, w/o any major problem and so on.
While using a 2009 Linux distro is next to useless you can’t use an old browser because the TSL/SSL problem, you can’t simply install a new package in binary form, and practically even building something modern from git is out of question because an endless chain of dependencies.
Many notebook require “quirks” to fix hybernation issues, vga issues and so on, but those quirks are mostly not working with KMS setups, and UMS was stupidly removed in 2013 or so, so as a challenge you can use a recent distro on a 2009 notebook but that requires days of work and skills that are out of reach for most “common” users.
In the same notebook you may probably install anything from win 2K to Win 11 with very little effort, depending your needs or your mood.
In short Linux is a good thing, and I use it since ’98, but the myths about it are countless.
I have been running Windows 7 for years on our “kitchen computer”. I see no reason to stop anytime soon. It runs Office 2010 fine. It prints fine. It views PDFs fine. It is running up-to-date Chromium based browsers and Firefox fine. It is running full adblocking and what not. It streams and does email without any issues.
People overblow “security” concerns on “out of date” systems. Is it more of a risk in theory? Yes. Can you safe guard as well as on any newer OS if you aren’t an idiot? Yes.
At home, on a separate VLAN, with a good quality and up to date router, that’s probably just fine from a security point of view. Every mitigation makes you less of a target, though there’s no such thing as perfect security.
With that said, I wouldn’t do it at work no matter what mitigations I put in place, as the liability is far greater than the chance of being hacked.
Morgan,
I agree, not a big deal if you keep a gap between it and the internet and other important systems. But in practice I’m not sure how many users will actually protect the perimeter? Given the way most home networks are setup, there are no inbound connections. The main way to get in would be through downloaded malware or vulnerable software making outbound connections. I’d like to say this shouldn’t be a problem as long as people are careful, but I was with a client and after I instructed him to install software he accidentally opened a malicious google ad pretending to be a legitimate software download link. Fortunately the AV caught the mistake. I was operating on autopilot and evidently wasn’t sufficiently alert to catch it myself 🙁
The risk of this is sufficiently high that IMHO google should expressly disallow google ads on download pages altogether. Although of course it would mean google has to turn away the ad revenue they make on download pages, so it will probably keep happening.
For Aero enjoyers, there are ways to get the same look on current Windows versions. It requires running specialized tools, though.
Yeah
No one is forcing you to use Wayland…..
Today news:
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-25-10-drops-support-for-gnome-on-xorg/62538