At home, while I have a Mac Mini 4, a MacBook Air, and several Linux boxes, I still use an old PC on Win7 as my primary machine. Is it insecure? Probably. But today "insecure" feels more like a feature than a limitation. No forced updates of anything => everything that works, keeps working indefinitely.
Why do modern OSes need so much power and RAM anyway? I used to produce documents on an Amstrad PPC640. 640 stood for 640k of RAM (no hard disk). It was fine.
I understand the above makes me sound like an old fart (or fool), and we have moved on from DOS. But what does Windows 11 do that Windows 7 couldn't?
In some ways it's a bit like having to customize a Mac to feel comfy (AutoRaise, Rectangle, DiscreteScroll, ...), except in Apple's case it's because they believe that they know better what my computing experience should be like, and in Microsoft's, it's some enshittification and pushing me towards features that I don't really want or need.
At the same time, games work (even the shitty rootkit anti-cheat), lovely software is all there like Notepad++, MobaXTerm, SourceTree (though GitKraken is really good if you want to pay for it), SteelSeries Sonar (the only experience of managing audio devices that wasn't unnecessarily messy or complex, tbh even VoiceMeeter has weird UI/UX), oh and FreeFileSync and ofc all of my dev tools and other software. It's just passable in most categories.
I still believe that something like Linux Mint would give me the best desktop computing experience, cause it almost never is actively hostile to me as a user - all of the instances of it sucking and being broken are either growing pains, ecosystem fragmentation, insufficient development effort (given that there isn't a multi-billion dollar org behind it, or at least not really the DEs or most userland software, or that the drivers don't always get as much love from vendors), or circumstances outside of their control (e.g. the anti-cheat situation with games), rather than a conscious choice on the part of the developers.
for windows 8 on linux, there's this: https://github.com/er-bharat/Win8DE
I hope it comes back
If you think, "I should try this", Any reason why? I'm really curious to know
vintagedave•1h ago
tomaytotomato•1h ago
The repo is only 8 months old, which could be seen as good or bad.
datfrojo•57m ago
izacus•3m ago