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Would you mind if I break it in parts? > Windows 98 Second Edition is terrible in many ways. I could probably hit the comment limit listing them. Strong evide

Would you mind if I break it in parts? > Windows 98 Second Edition is terrible in many ways. I could probably hit the comment limit listing them. Strong evidence it was not that good. > Yet it remains my favourite operating system of all time, because everything else (yes, even precious Debian!) is just worse. Worse UI, worse memory use, worse hackability… In terms of UI, yes, very clean UI by default. You can reach that level today but not out of the box. On the other side, it came with very few programs installed, so you had to install third party apps and consistency went to the trashcan once o did that. Memory management... we have memory control groups today, I can install and remove swap files and devices with the system running, oomd saves my desktop virtually crashing when under memory pressure, I can use compressed memory... I have to admit that amount memory usage is way larger today and, albeit with third party apps, you could have compressed in win9x but it didn't went far. Now, there's no way win9x comes even close to debian in terms of hackability. You can easily install compilation dependencies and sources of most packages, modify, compile... I don't even want to argue about this. > In Windows 98 SE, there was a button next to “minimise” that would give every widget a tooltip explaining what it did and how to use it; most programs came with a built-in, GUI instruction manual. Nobody else does this! (The best help UI ever made, and Microsoft just dropped it…) Current tool-tips in clickable items removes the need of such feature. Self explainable text boxes also. If you need a '?' widget to get help on other widgets, I'd consider the UI is not obvious enough and should be fixed. > Windows 98 SE included its own kernel-based virtual machine system, which it used for multi-tasking DOS and “sandboxing” DOS drivers. (They had a global lock and full privileges, though, so it's not really much of a sandbox.) Extremely unsafe and unstable! No separation between processes' memory and hardware access. UNIX had that since the 70's. The 80386 had such features since early 80's. It is hard to find a good reason why a popular OS in late 90's had no such feature. It was fixed when xp was released by using the nt kernel, but it was 3 decades too late. > Windows 98 came with Active Desktop: you could display bits of website on your desktop as widgets (e.g. a weather service). It also came with mshta.exe, for HTML Applications; HTAs were basically like Electron, but built into the OS, so you didn't have loads of insecure Chrome versions clogging up your RAM and hard drive. (It was Internet Explorer, but iirc Internet Explorer was actually good around about that time.) By "widgets on the desktop" it meant "ads". Most people simply disabled active desktop, it was a major waste of resources and minor source of instability. I admit that electron apps eat too much memory, but I think it is proportional to the amount of RAM available these days. I don't think things got worse in this area over time. Also, IE had its fair share of memory leaks, vulnerabilities and instabilities. > Yes, it was DOS-based. Yes, you could log in as the system user by clicking “cancel” on the “enter your username and password” box. It should be simple to beat that… so why hasn't anyone? It was beat. Just read above.

wizzwizz4 5y ago
Oh, I also disabled Active Desktop. :-) But in retrospect, had I been a power-user at the time, I would've used it for all sorts of cool stuff. It's mostly the UI I remember fondly. Technically, of course, it was a garbage fire.
wizzwizz4 5y ago
> Now, there's no way win9x comes even close to debian in terms of hackability. True… though not for the reasons you've listed. It's hackable because half the programs are written in Python or Perl, and because it has man pages; your average 6 year old mucking about with the system will eventually stumble across them. Also, environments like LXDE are fairly customisable, providing insight into how the system works. The ability to download sources with `apt-source` (or whatever the command is) isn't useful if the guts aren't exposed for you to play with; you'll never want to do something if you don't know it's possible in the first place. (A bad thing about Windows: I could never make .EXE files. A good thing about Windows: I learnt what .EXE and .DLL files were, and that they could contain icon resources, just by mucking around with the GUI interface.) But yes, had I grown up with Debian, I probably would've had more fun. :-P
- marcodiego 5y ago
  I had grown up on win9x and had lots of fun! I had contact with other computers/architectures/OSes before, during and after it; so I always wanted to get free of wintel, but that didn't prevented me from having lots of fun. I tried linux on my first computer. Minilinux was very limited, mostly a toy on that machine. Debian didn't had support for my keyboard at the time, so I never installed it. I tried a RedHat based distro later just to discover it had no support for my soundcard and winmodem, so I had to go back to windows. Since the machine was somewhat limited for a late 90's early 2000's, I had to take some care when using it. I discovered that regedit could be run from DOS and that it could backup and recover the register without needing to boot windows. I simply stopped uninstalling programs: just deleted them and recovered a previous register state. With a bit of care I could use the same machine from 1998 to 2001 without ever reinstalling windows. Friends were impressed because of that. I could use that machine to run video game emulators, abandonware, delphi and c++ builder 5, turboc, IRC, p2p, browsing the web, listened to mp3 and watched webstreams with realplayer. When the matrix movie arrived I could watch it using xvid/divx with some special configurations to make it run fast enough on my machine. The software was well optimized to do so much with a 200mhz mmx processor with 32MB RAM. Later, the soundcard gained support in 2007 and I replaced the modem with a network card, got 2 floppy drives units, 2 HDDs a cdrom drive and a cdrw-recorder. It became a capable linux box, but it was too late and I already had a new machine which had better compatibility with linux than with windows. But I still have some fond memories of that machine, I repent throwing it away.

wizzwizz4 5y ago

Oh, I also disabled Active Desktop. :-) But in retrospect, had I been a power-user at the time, I would've used it for all sorts of cool stuff. It's mostly the UI I remember fondly. Technically, of course, it was a garbage fire.

wizzwizz4 5y ago

> Now, there's no way win9x comes even close to debian in terms of hackability. True… though not for the reasons you've listed. It's hackable because half the programs are written in Python or Perl, and because it has man pages; your average 6 year old mucking about with the system will eventually stumble across them. Also, environments like LXDE are fairly customisable, providing insight into how the system works. The ability to download sources with `apt-source` (or whatever the command is) isn't useful if the guts aren't exposed for you to play with; you'll never want to do something if you don't know it's possible in the first place. (A bad thing about Windows: I could never make .EXE files. A good thing about Windows: I learnt what .EXE and .DLL files were, and that they could contain icon resources, just by mucking around with the GUI interface.) But yes, had I grown up with Debian, I probably would've had more fun. :-P

marcodiego 5y ago
I had grown up on win9x and had lots of fun! I had contact with other computers/architectures/OSes before, during and after it; so I always wanted to get free of wintel, but that didn't prevented me from having lots of fun. I tried linux on my first computer. Minilinux was very limited, mostly a toy on that machine. Debian didn't had support for my keyboard at the time, so I never installed it. I tried a RedHat based distro later just to discover it had no support for my soundcard and winmodem, so I had to go back to windows. Since the machine was somewhat limited for a late 90's early 2000's, I had to take some care when using it. I discovered that regedit could be run from DOS and that it could backup and recover the register without needing to boot windows. I simply stopped uninstalling programs: just deleted them and recovered a previous register state. With a bit of care I could use the same machine from 1998 to 2001 without ever reinstalling windows. Friends were impressed because of that. I could use that machine to run video game emulators, abandonware, delphi and c++ builder 5, turboc, IRC, p2p, browsing the web, listened to mp3 and watched webstreams with realplayer. When the matrix movie arrived I could watch it using xvid/divx with some special configurations to make it run fast enough on my machine. The software was well optimized to do so much with a 200mhz mmx processor with 32MB RAM. Later, the soundcard gained support in 2007 and I replaced the modem with a network card, got 2 floppy drives units, 2 HDDs a cdrom drive and a cdrw-recorder. It became a capable linux box, but it was too late and I already had a new machine which had better compatibility with linux than with windows. But I still have some fond memories of that machine, I repent throwing it away.