Recent related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46566465 "I installed a KDE Plasma theme that makes it look like Windows XP"
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.
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.
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
Your mileage may have varied, and all that.
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.
Ah yes! The old "Linux doesn't get viruses" argument. Thanks for sharing this bit of history with the class.
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.
Unless you have gone through hoops to remove it, you most likely were still running Windows Defender Antivirus.
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.
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.
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&...
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)
righthand•5h ago