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At least Grandma's cookies are yummy.
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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"Why are you looking at a cat picture on your computer, when you could admire a real feline beauty right here?" - That cutie pie there.
YOU'RE STILL USING WINDOWS XP!? AWESOME! THAT WAS ALWAYS MY FAVOURITE VERSION! It was peak Windows, I swear. 7 might have been the last good one, but only barely, and XP was better. (Though I always preferred the Luna theme. Can't go wrong with the classics. Those iconic blue window borders and all the sounds that went with manipulating windows were just such a perfect sensory combination. I'm not sure anymore if I really liked using a computer at 4 years old, or if Windows XP specially was just a really good sensory experience that I liked more than any of my toys.) Haven't actually liked any Windows version since. Highly doubt there will ever be another version I'll like. Leaving aside the sheer bugginess and user hostile system design, modern UI design is just fundamentally broken and can't make interfaces I actually want to use anymore. The sensory experience of modern graphical software is usually infuriating. It's like there's no testing anymore. Of the interfaces, or the code, or anything.
Not my picture
just an image that the kitty and old school icons made me think of.
Also I don't think it would be safe to go online on a win XP computer today unless Microsoft are still doing security patches, which I doubt they are.
Ah. Well, the cat is still adorable and I wanna pet himbs.
Yeah, you definitely shouldn't use it as a primary system and if you're going to use it for retro software and games, airgap the machine. It's definitely not secure anymore. If it was, I would still be using it. It worked most of the time, which is a claim that Winblows 11 can't make. If they remade it, with no modern crap, just the original XP design and modern security and software support, it'd be their best selling and highest market share product ever.
Windows XP was still bad, Linux was an overall better experience even in its day.
I didn't say it was objectively good. Just that modern Winblows is a lot worse.
(And I wouldn't know myself if Linux would have been a less frustrating and generally better experience for me at that time - I'd never even heard of it back then, hadn't used it, and I've heard a lot of horror stories of it being... a lot more fiddly to get working for certain stuff back then. Sure as heck like it better than Winblows nowadays though, but beating Winblows 11 ain't that high a bar...)
Gaming was in a sorry state, and there were driver problems with Broadcom wifi modules specifically that were so bad the recommended fix if your laptop had a Broadcom wifi module was to buy a usb wifi dongle and leave it plugged in at all times, but it was still a lot more pleasant to use for non-gaming tasks than Windows was.
I loved Compiz-fusion.
I definitely didn't play a lot of games back then. (Though the ones I did play, mostly Winnie the Pooh kiddie games... six year old me probably would have strangled anyone whose advice or actions led to her not being able to play any of her Pooh games. But she also might have had a surprising amount of patience to troubleshoot them...) The main things I eenjoyed doing on the computer back then were tinkering with the system, essentially the digital equivalent of taking apart your toys (or your dad's toys...) to see how they worked (which I know lots of our type of folks probably did as kids), and drawing stuff in Paint.
Honestly? Me now would not have the patience for 00s/early 10s Linux. But little me at the time would probably have loved it. But of course, I didn't know enough about computers to know the questions to ask that would have led me there.
Ooh, I've heard of Compiz... That was the thing that could display your virtual desktops as a rotatable cube, make all the windows wobbly, and set them on fire when you closed or minimized them, right? I like to think I'm mature enough nowadays to not be too miffed I missed out on that time or that such things don't really exist anymore, but gosh, I kinda want flaming windows... and little kid me would have had so much fun with the cube thing and wobbly windows. (One of my favourite Winblows features at the time was the cursor trails... and custom cursors were neat too. Never did find the set of teddy bear ones I'd always hoped existed somewhere out there.)
I was a teen at the time, so I turned on every possible Compiz effect to the maximum and felt very smug when several years later windows introduced slightly transparent window decorations that tanked system performance.
Yeah... the glass effect was kinda cool, I really liked it. But it's got nothing on the stuff Compiz could do. I wasn't into Linux in that thing's heyday but I really wish you could still get some of those effects. I've seen videos and there was cool shit in there.
My favourite fun graphical effect I've seen on a modern Linux DE, though, has gotta be the KDE scaling cursor thing. What can I say, I still find cursor effects stupidly funny after all these years. (I remember a browser game I used to play as a child, that had a loading screen gimmick with a little monster that'd chase and eat your cursor, complete with the most delightful chomp noise. I kinda want one of those as a little desktop panel.) Yes, I do realize that I'm a very childish adult at times, especially while using a computer.
Gnome extensions has the cube of desktops, the wobbly windows, and even the burn on close available
But then, I'd have to use GNOME. Which I guess isn't necessarily a bad DE, but I don't think I want it.