5 ms·

There are actually a lot of factors here, although if I had to sum it up in one, it would be "the hardware can support it." But more seriously: 1. There are

There are actually a lot of factors here, although if I had to sum it up in one, it would be "the hardware can support it." But more seriously: 1. There are a lot of security mitigations in modern Windows that add sometimes substantial runtime overhead, but offer significant protection. Writing an exploit for modern Windows is hard compared to XP SP1 and below. 2. The graphics are a lot more sophisticated. Animation and transparency and lots of good stuff. 3. There are a ton more "features" in the OS. Modern Windows is continually running a bunch of things that XP didn't. 4. All software tends to bloat over time. It's really hard and expensive to optimize things, especially in a huge and long-lived OS where the scope is enormous and PMs are constantly wanting things added. When it runs sufficiently on modern hardware, there's also very little incentive to do so. (As an aside, this is one of the reasons I love Linux. There's lots of incentive to optimize there and thus it does happen). Overall I really miss XP. Surely nostalgia is a powerful drug, but damn that was a great OS.

abirch 2y ago
Linux isn't afraid to break backward compatible. I'm pretty sure Win32 is going to outlive me.
- kazinator 2y ago
  In spite of this, GNU/Linux is also getting bloated and slow.
- heavyset_go 2y ago
  Linux makes an explicit effort to not break userspace. I had a weird experience where I had to use a device stuck on a 2.6.x kernel, and I was able to run a modern distribution on top of it. Similarly, running old userlands on new kernels works just as well. The issue with backwards compatibility isn't with the kernel, but ensuring that whatever you want to run is compatible with the surrounding userland environment. Dynamic linking can break backwards compatibility, for example, but that's an issue above Linux.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    While you are technically correct, that turns it into a bit of an apples to oranges comparison with Windows because most of what we consider to be the Windows operating system would in the Linux world live in userspace. Which means that when we're comparing the user's experience of an average Linux distribution with Windows it's definitely fair to say that Linux doesn't prioritize backwards compatibility.
    - fbdab103 2y ago
      Just yesterday, I purchased a game from GOG where the Linux build cannot start, owing to who knows what expected platform profile. Maybe, technically, I could have fixed the problem. The Windows build worked without issue in Wine.
    - Wowfunhappy 2y ago
      However, because the kernel doesn't break userspace, you can use stuff like chroot to run old apps without a performance loss. I do wish the tooling to make this seamless was better.
      - worewood 2y ago
        Assuming you can go through the dependency hell, because you can't use old packages on a new distro - so in most cases you have to compile by source... I've tried to run XMMS and suffered a lot.
        Wowfunhappy 2y ago
        This should be a nonissue if you use chroot.
        jasomill 2y ago
        Better yet, use a container. Distrobox[1] automates the process of installing popular distros released in the past decade or so in containers. For games in particular, Proton[2] (a game-specific Wine fork) or one of the Steam container runtimes[3] (for native Linux games) might also be worth a try. For a non-Steam game: 1. Install and run the Linux Steam client (Steam account required). 2. Add the game to the Steam library: "Add a Game" → "Add a Non-Steam Game…", choose game executable. 3. Right click on the game, choose "Properties" → "Compatibility" → "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool", and choose a version of Proton or container runtime (the most recent non-experimental version is probably a sane default). 4. Make sure the selected Proton or container runtime version is installed. These should be available for installation from the Steam library by default. If you can't find them, click the dropdown above the search box in the Steam library, make sure "Tools" is checked, and make sure the "Show only ready to play games" option ("play" arrow in a circle icon to the right of the same dropdown) is disabled. 5. Launch the game from the Steam library. [1] https://distrobox.it/compatibility/#containers-distros https://distrobox.it/compatibility/#containers-distros [2] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton [3] https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/blob/main/docs/container-runtime.md https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/b...
wepple 2y ago
Plus backward compatibility. They add code but never take it away.
- rchaud 2y ago
  Isn't that going away with the new ARM-based Windows systems?
- RachelF 2y ago
  Windows 11 won't run most DOS or Windows 3.1 or Win16 Windows 95/98/ME programs. XP does.
  - snvzz 2y ago
    It will, but using different methods.
  - fuzzfactor 2y ago
    W10 32-bit will still do this (while W10 is still with us) after enabling NTVDM so it works like XP in this regard.
- ssl-3 2y ago
  Eh? A lot of things have been lost ("taken away") on Windows. I can think of a few off the top of my head: 64-bit versions can't run 16-bit applications (including MS-DOS software), for instance, which broke all kinds of stuff for people who never knew that they still needed this. Ye Olde Windows Help system disappeared starting with Vista, which broke a huge amount of the online documentation that still-functional software had been using (including, maddeningly, my own bought-and-paid-for copy of QuickBooks). Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications is gone. It used to be a thing, and now it is not. 32-bit hardware compatibility: Gone in Windows 11 (and Windows 10 EOLs in about a year and a half). OS/2 binary compatibility: Windows included the ability to run [some] OS/2 software in NT-based versions, up to (and including) 32-bit XP. And that's just some stuff that me, a complete non-expert, can think of straight-away. Maybe it was all cruft, or maybe it was useful. Maybe it's better that these things are gone, or maybe it is not. But these are all things that used to be present, and that are now no longer present.
ip26 2y ago
There are a ton more "features" in the OS Including things you like quite a bit, such as WiFi support, thread scheduling, and suspend modes that are worth a damn. XP could be snappy, but I haven't forgotten how poorly my old XP two-thread laptop multitasked, how the battery didn't last more than an hour, and so on. Also worth remembering everyone always has a browser open today. In the XP days, you were running Firefox 1.0, a 5MB program.
- marshray 2y ago
  "such as WiFi support, thread scheduling, and suspend modes that are worth a damn." Thread scheduling has existed since NT 3.51. Wifi is largely just another kind of network adapter. XP supported the same suspend-to-RAM and hibernate-to-disk modes as todays systems. "but I haven't forgotten how poorly my old XP two-thread laptop multitasked" Despite what certain processor vendors tell you, the number of threads are determined by each running program. Whatever you mean by "poor multitasking", you were probably short on RAM. The OS has made improvements that can help with battery life, but most of any perceived improvement has come from batteries that suck less. "In the XP days, you were running Firefox 1.0, a 5MB program." 5 MB was never a realistic estimate of process RAM.
  - panzi 2y ago
    > 5 MB was never a realistic estimate of process RAM. They probably meant "Firefox Setup 1.0.exe" was 5 MB.
- fbdab103 2y ago
  Sleep has become significantly worse in Windows. Many complaints of how a supposedly sleeping laptop cooked itself to death in a backpack overnight. I also think it would be worth considering changes in underlying hardware. A modern laptop no longer has a spinning HDD, probably a much bigger battery, and a CPU that is better at entering low power modes when possible.
  - freedomben 2y ago
    Indeed. My understanding is that it's a hardware issue with (largely) Intel. Sleep is really bad on Linux too and that is the reason given.
userbinator 2y ago
2. The graphics are a lot more sophisticated. Animation and transparency and lots of good stuff. Strong disagree. Borderless icons floating in a sea of flatness is not "more sophisticated" by any means than the fully-customisable UI which was common in the XP era, and the huge amount of "skinning" that was also very popular. Transparent/translucent effects became common with Vista and that was run on the GPU, which was in general much less powerful than the ones today. I'll add a 5th point: Thanks to a low barrier to entry, the average developer now is much lower quality than the average 20 years ago.
- freedomben 2y ago
  Fair point, it does seem like the modern graphics are less sophisticated than the transparent/translucent of the Vista era. And yes, I would very much agree regarding the quality of the average developer. To devs nowadays who might feel sad about that, I don't think it's most developers fault, rather they/we are the product of a system (such as a scrum) that only cares about quality and performance when it's bad enough to be noticed by many users. Beyond that, you get promoted and good annual reviews by shipping features, regardless of whether they are actually quality/performant or not.
- crummy 2y ago
  I assume Windows 11 handles high DPI monitors a lot better than Windows XP, which must add some complexity to graphics rendering.
  - mldbk 2y ago
    Is it a joke? Today's GPUs are miles and miles away from what we got back then. The is no brainer to compare Nvidia 6600 gt and some 3060. Raw power that we have now in our PCs and laptops are enormous and some better high DPI handling cannot justify why everything nowadays is so sluggish an laggy.
  - hulitu 2y ago
    > I assume Windows 11 handles high DPI monitors a lot better than Windows XP YMMV. I think "a lot better" is an overstatement. You have some fractional scaling which, depending of the program, might do what you need. But the fact that you cannot change fonts and colors is a real issue. Not everybody loves gray on gray.
RachelF 2y ago
I'd add to 4, having seen a bit of the Kernel code. There's a lot of duplication of code, when new developers or teams come on board, they often just re-invent the wheel, rather than using existing Kernel funtions. I would guess that most of the 15 NT developers from 30 years ago have long since left.
- hulitu 2y ago
  > There's a lot of duplication of code, when new developers or teams come on board, they often just re-invent the wheel, rather than using existing Kernel funtions. This is, unfortunately, a trend in SW development. See GNOME or Wayland for examples.
dajtxx 2y ago
Yeah, it's pretty annoying. I could happily live without animation, transparency, and rounded corners in my UI. Not sure what new 'features' I couldn't live without. I don't use the background indexing/search stuff, I switch off Cortana, I try to stop as much of the background stuff as I can. Perhaps there's some pressure from the underlying platform too - modern PCs seem to be more complicated than the ones we used to run XP on.

abirch 2y ago

Linux isn't afraid to break backward compatible. I'm pretty sure Win32 is going to outlive me.

kazinator 2y ago
In spite of this, GNU/Linux is also getting bloated and slow.
heavyset_go 2y ago
Linux makes an explicit effort to not break userspace. I had a weird experience where I had to use a device stuck on a 2.6.x kernel, and I was able to run a modern distribution on top of it. Similarly, running old userlands on new kernels works just as well. The issue with backwards compatibility isn't with the kernel, but ensuring that whatever you want to run is compatible with the surrounding userland environment. Dynamic linking can break backwards compatibility, for example, but that's an issue above Linux.
- lolinder 2y ago
  While you are technically correct, that turns it into a bit of an apples to oranges comparison with Windows because most of what we consider to be the Windows operating system would in the Linux world live in userspace. Which means that when we're comparing the user's experience of an average Linux distribution with Windows it's definitely fair to say that Linux doesn't prioritize backwards compatibility.
  - fbdab103 2y ago
    Just yesterday, I purchased a game from GOG where the Linux build cannot start, owing to who knows what expected platform profile. Maybe, technically, I could have fixed the problem. The Windows build worked without issue in Wine.
  - Wowfunhappy 2y ago
    However, because the kernel doesn't break userspace, you can use stuff like chroot to run old apps without a performance loss. I do wish the tooling to make this seamless was better.
    - worewood 2y ago
      Assuming you can go through the dependency hell, because you can't use old packages on a new distro - so in most cases you have to compile by source... I've tried to run XMMS and suffered a lot.
      - Wowfunhappy 2y ago
        This should be a nonissue if you use chroot.
        jasomill 2y ago
        Better yet, use a container. Distrobox[1] automates the process of installing popular distros released in the past decade or so in containers. For games in particular, Proton[2] (a game-specific Wine fork) or one of the Steam container runtimes[3] (for native Linux games) might also be worth a try. For a non-Steam game: 1. Install and run the Linux Steam client (Steam account required). 2. Add the game to the Steam library: "Add a Game" → "Add a Non-Steam Game…", choose game executable. 3. Right click on the game, choose "Properties" → "Compatibility" → "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool", and choose a version of Proton or container runtime (the most recent non-experimental version is probably a sane default). 4. Make sure the selected Proton or container runtime version is installed. These should be available for installation from the Steam library by default. If you can't find them, click the dropdown above the search box in the Steam library, make sure "Tools" is checked, and make sure the "Show only ready to play games" option ("play" arrow in a circle icon to the right of the same dropdown) is disabled. 5. Launch the game from the Steam library. [1] https://distrobox.it/compatibility/#containers-distros https://distrobox.it/compatibility/#containers-distros [2] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton [3] https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/blob/main/docs/container-runtime.md https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/b...

wepple 2y ago

Plus backward compatibility. They add code but never take it away.

rchaud 2y ago
Isn't that going away with the new ARM-based Windows systems?
RachelF 2y ago
Windows 11 won't run most DOS or Windows 3.1 or Win16 Windows 95/98/ME programs. XP does.
- snvzz 2y ago
  It will, but using different methods.
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  W10 32-bit will still do this (while W10 is still with us) after enabling NTVDM so it works like XP in this regard.
ssl-3 2y ago
Eh? A lot of things have been lost ("taken away") on Windows. I can think of a few off the top of my head: 64-bit versions can't run 16-bit applications (including MS-DOS software), for instance, which broke all kinds of stuff for people who never knew that they still needed this. Ye Olde Windows Help system disappeared starting with Vista, which broke a huge amount of the online documentation that still-functional software had been using (including, maddeningly, my own bought-and-paid-for copy of QuickBooks). Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications is gone. It used to be a thing, and now it is not. 32-bit hardware compatibility: Gone in Windows 11 (and Windows 10 EOLs in about a year and a half). OS/2 binary compatibility: Windows included the ability to run [some] OS/2 software in NT-based versions, up to (and including) 32-bit XP. And that's just some stuff that me, a complete non-expert, can think of straight-away. Maybe it was all cruft, or maybe it was useful. Maybe it's better that these things are gone, or maybe it is not. But these are all things that used to be present, and that are now no longer present.

ip26 2y ago

There are a ton more "features" in the OS Including things you like quite a bit, such as WiFi support, thread scheduling, and suspend modes that are worth a damn. XP could be snappy, but I haven't forgotten how poorly my old XP two-thread laptop multitasked, how the battery didn't last more than an hour, and so on. Also worth remembering everyone always has a browser open today. In the XP days, you were running Firefox 1.0, a 5MB program.

marshray 2y ago
"such as WiFi support, thread scheduling, and suspend modes that are worth a damn." Thread scheduling has existed since NT 3.51. Wifi is largely just another kind of network adapter. XP supported the same suspend-to-RAM and hibernate-to-disk modes as todays systems. "but I haven't forgotten how poorly my old XP two-thread laptop multitasked" Despite what certain processor vendors tell you, the number of threads are determined by each running program. Whatever you mean by "poor multitasking", you were probably short on RAM. The OS has made improvements that can help with battery life, but most of any perceived improvement has come from batteries that suck less. "In the XP days, you were running Firefox 1.0, a 5MB program." 5 MB was never a realistic estimate of process RAM.
- panzi 2y ago
  > 5 MB was never a realistic estimate of process RAM. They probably meant "Firefox Setup 1.0.exe" was 5 MB.
fbdab103 2y ago
Sleep has become significantly worse in Windows. Many complaints of how a supposedly sleeping laptop cooked itself to death in a backpack overnight. I also think it would be worth considering changes in underlying hardware. A modern laptop no longer has a spinning HDD, probably a much bigger battery, and a CPU that is better at entering low power modes when possible.
- freedomben 2y ago
  Indeed. My understanding is that it's a hardware issue with (largely) Intel. Sleep is really bad on Linux too and that is the reason given.

userbinator 2y ago

2. The graphics are a lot more sophisticated. Animation and transparency and lots of good stuff. Strong disagree. Borderless icons floating in a sea of flatness is not "more sophisticated" by any means than the fully-customisable UI which was common in the XP era, and the huge amount of "skinning" that was also very popular. Transparent/translucent effects became common with Vista and that was run on the GPU, which was in general much less powerful than the ones today. I'll add a 5th point: Thanks to a low barrier to entry, the average developer now is much lower quality than the average 20 years ago.

freedomben 2y ago
Fair point, it does seem like the modern graphics are less sophisticated than the transparent/translucent of the Vista era. And yes, I would very much agree regarding the quality of the average developer. To devs nowadays who might feel sad about that, I don't think it's most developers fault, rather they/we are the product of a system (such as a scrum) that only cares about quality and performance when it's bad enough to be noticed by many users. Beyond that, you get promoted and good annual reviews by shipping features, regardless of whether they are actually quality/performant or not.
crummy 2y ago
I assume Windows 11 handles high DPI monitors a lot better than Windows XP, which must add some complexity to graphics rendering.
- mldbk 2y ago
  Is it a joke? Today's GPUs are miles and miles away from what we got back then. The is no brainer to compare Nvidia 6600 gt and some 3060. Raw power that we have now in our PCs and laptops are enormous and some better high DPI handling cannot justify why everything nowadays is so sluggish an laggy.
- hulitu 2y ago
  > I assume Windows 11 handles high DPI monitors a lot better than Windows XP YMMV. I think "a lot better" is an overstatement. You have some fractional scaling which, depending of the program, might do what you need. But the fact that you cannot change fonts and colors is a real issue. Not everybody loves gray on gray.

RachelF 2y ago

I'd add to 4, having seen a bit of the Kernel code. There's a lot of duplication of code, when new developers or teams come on board, they often just re-invent the wheel, rather than using existing Kernel funtions. I would guess that most of the 15 NT developers from 30 years ago have long since left.

hulitu 2y ago
> There's a lot of duplication of code, when new developers or teams come on board, they often just re-invent the wheel, rather than using existing Kernel funtions. This is, unfortunately, a trend in SW development. See GNOME or Wayland for examples.

dajtxx 2y ago

Yeah, it's pretty annoying. I could happily live without animation, transparency, and rounded corners in my UI. Not sure what new 'features' I couldn't live without. I don't use the background indexing/search stuff, I switch off Cortana, I try to stop as much of the background stuff as I can. Perhaps there's some pressure from the underlying platform too - modern PCs seem to be more complicated than the ones we used to run XP on.