@drq It is not like we have two nations at war here, each with their ideals, religion and glorious leader. It is more about people who are users, developers and other contributors and it is also about evolution.

You'll have hard time evolving if you dismiss everything (or maybe you'll get real good at fleeing and hiding but that's about it).

I mean there were countless times when I saw people asking "how do I do this on Linux which I did in Windows" and getting "YOU DO NOT. WE DON'T NEED THIS SHIT HERE". (for me it was something Samba related and I got a great advice to just use NFS. Yeah, right).

For three or so years using Linux I never had people asking or talking about Windows features that would be cool to have. It is like taboo. Even Mac gets a pass.

It gets a bit better in corporate sector where people care less about tribalism and more about getting things to work. I wonder if Linux would took off to what it is now if corporations ignored it for some reason (e.g. extreme licensing enforcement) and decided to make their own - which is kind of happening btw.

@mittorn 2000 was workstation system.

By the way Server 2000 was pretty nice too. I think it was the first Windows server OS I worked with.

@mittorn In my experience XP had larger set of drivers for older hardware as well. Or maybe it was better at detecting devices. Anyway it was just easier to put it on even older laptops where it was a bit slow but everything worked out of the box.

@drq This sort of flippant fanboyism never helped anything.

Myself I think this is one of those things that really stall FOSS as it just dismisses both competition and coexistence.

@mittorn Well, my experience was clearly the opposite. Notably I worked in refurbished laptop store back then and later in some factory in IT department - and installing XP was the first thing we did. We had 2000 for most workplaces as established standard but it almost always required drivers for everything and it was even worse before with laptops. XP picked up all basic devices most of the time, quite often - all of them including weirder laptop hardware like IR ports and dock stations.

@mittorn I don't care much about interface consistency when I can't run software which worked on '98 :)

Also that consistent interface lacked features. A lot.

But it did crash far less than 95/98/Me family and still was less rigid and soulless compared to NT.

Still I welcomed XP with open arms.

@lritter Yes, this works like that for everything in life.

However it is also the problem. Criminals go for popular things because they go after people using them. Lesser interest to make viruses and exploits goes together with lesser interest to make software, drivers, hardware... Heck, I remember days when a lot of popular websites didn't work too well with anything except Internet Explorer - and it was real security nightmare at the same time with very real zero click exploits.

@teft No, not really. It was stable but lacked versatility. It was nice for business but gave some headaches at home.

Also some people went even further and run Server 2000 on home computers :)

@lritter Yeah, looks like this is what it will take because nothing else works (or everything else is much worse that no amount of enshitification offsets it).

@drq My colleague suspected me immediately so I had to come clean :) The boss wasn't interested as he had habit of blowing up at anyone he saw first no matter the situation and then forgetting (or "forgetting" and sending someone else to mend things he fucked up as people didn't took it well - one time we almost lost our primary ISP as he managed to piss off all their managers because of major outage which wasn't their fault even).

@drq Once I put a CO2 fire extinguisher under my colleague chair. He had a habit to really drop into his chair with all his weight so it was supposed to trigger a partial discharge - which was very loud with the stream of CO2 knocking things around but then it would dissipate without much trace so not much harm done.

The guy always came earlier than everyone else and spent some time watching YouTube before work so he supposed to be alone.

It worked. Except that morning our boss also came very early and was sleeping at his desk right in front of the setup. He also was a very toxic person and was going through his divorce which made him even greater asshole than usual. So the blast startled them both and threw some papers off his desk which resulted in all Hell breaking loose even though no one understood what the fuck happened and my colleague got all the blame in the moment.

@Provider I miss the freedom of the old Internet. It truly was INTERnet as everything was connected to everything. Geoblocks, censorship, blacklists, etc were almost non-existent. It felt like an open global world where everyone was welcome and everyone was free to decide who they wanted to talk to.

I kept thinking "wow, this is what the future is like" and naively expected the offline world to eventually follow. I guess it was very naive.