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Off the top of my head: Windows Vista was slow and unstable on a lot of hardware of the time due to significantly higher system requirements than XP and a new display driver model that worked poorly at first, had a very polarizing look, and had quite overbearing UAC -- where XP would just let you do the thing, Vista would ask you three times if you're really really sure you wanted to authorize it.

It had decent bones though -- arguably a lot of its bad reputation was due to hardware/third party driver issues and people trying to run it on old hardware that just couldn't hack it. Windows 7 was well received and is basically the same thing with small improvements and some of the UX issues smoothed over (i.e. less annoying UAC)


Windows Vista was also notorious for going overboard with translucency effects in the default "Aero" style

My memory is that it was named "Aero Glass" which heightens the irony of "Liquid Glass" sucking.

But I see many references to it being called just "Aero", but some call it "Aero Glass" [1]

Does anyone know the truth?

[1] https://www.pcmag.com/archive/rip-aero-glass-windows-8-stick...


Microsoft marketing maybhave had a specific preference, but "Aero" and "Aero Glass" are interchangeable. From the same article you linked:

> "Rest in peace, Aero. I liked you, a lot. Still do. And I'll miss you," Thurrott writes


I don't think it's sentimentality, exactly. Who picks Azure or OneDrive or AD or Office 365 or Sharepoint or Teams or any Microsoft product or service if they're not already running Windows? The desktop operating system, "legacy" though it may be, has near universal reach and has therefore been key in pushing people to their more lucrative services. But they pushed too hard, it's too obviously shit, and now people and enterprises are looking for an exit. What then?

Meanwhile they have very cool tech like .NET, VS C++ debugging/hot reload, that gets overshadowed by Microsoft being Microsoft.

Then the .NET team asks why there isn't more uptake outside Windows, in spite of all open sourcing efforts, this is why.


Microsoft slowly becomes IBM.

That's "what then".


Music production is indeed still a blocker. I used to use Windows for that; I am now on macOS for work and music (much better than Windows in every way! I use an old trashcan Mac Pro with Monterey for my studio computer) and Debian for my personal machines.

They simply do not care about trust or anything else you think they should care about. The scam ads get probably get clicked ten or a hundred times more than legit ads. This makes money, therefore it is good and should be encouraged. They do not care how much worse the platform gets or how many people get scammed.

There were zero multi-core x86 CPUs, server or otherwise, back in those days.

This board is based on an NXP QorIQ SoC which is designed for networking hardware, not really intended for general purpose computers. It is to my knowledge, and has been for years, the only game in town if you need to be compatible with the PowerPC ISA (IBM POWER processors, while part of the same lineage, cannot run PowerPC code)


…and you are implying that Microsoft Windows 11 is a better example of ”great user experience”?


If you have anything less than perfect vision and need any accessibility features, yes. If you have a High DPI screen, yes. In many important areas (window management, keyboard shortcuts, etc.), yes.

Here's one top search result that goes into far more detail: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1ed0j10/the_state_of...


For the general user, yes absolutely.

Linux DEs still can't match the accessibility features alone.

yeah, there's layers and layers of progressively older UIs layered around the OS, but most of it makes sense, is laid out sanely, and is relatively consistent with other dialogs.

macOS beats it, but its still better in a lot of ways over the big Linux DEs.


Start menu in the middle of the screen that takes a couple seconds to even load (because it is implemented in React horribly enought to be this slow) only to show adds next to everything is perfect user experience.

Every other button triggering Copilots assures even better UX goodness.


You can move the menu to left and disable the animations so it opens instantly.


I prefer it. Linux desktop feels a lot more laggy to me on the same hardware.

Of course that is minus all the recent AI/ad stuff on Windows…


This probably has to do with what kind of Internet milieu you grew up in because to me — grown up on IRC and certain late 90s/early 00s web forums — lowercase everything signals a sort of chill, easygoing humility while properly capsing in a casual setting like chat can feel overbearing, pretentious and self-important.


I turn off autocapitalization on my phone so I can be consistent with my computers where it IS more effort to use capitalization. I also believe quite dogmatically that computers should not try to be smarter than me, I can press the buttons I intend to press, including the shift key on a phone keyboard.

This is not because I’m super cool, it’s because I’m an old man and I’m still typing in 2025 like I was typing on IRC in 1998 when nocapsing was absolutely dominant.

But if I type in a space where proper capitalization is expected, like HN, I do it (this was typed on my phone with no autocorrect, suggestions or autocapitalization — I know, I’m dumb and my opinions and settings are wrong). If it was my personal blog however I would do whatever I felt like doing.


Of course you are free to do what you want on your blog, but some choices make it harder to read. IMO not capitalising is similar to using hard to read fonts or colours.


It's both. Musicians and music nerds buy CDs and LPs and tapes and Bandcamp files and they "pirate" music both because they care about ownership and quality and rare or substantially different editions of records that aren't available legally, and because they've seen the sausage factory from the inside and know that "stealing" $0.02 from an artist who's starving like them anyway isn't really that far up on the list of heinous crimes. Buy the shirt, download the album. No one cares.


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