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"By Carla Schroder - April 8, 2014". I am all for replacing MS products with Linux, but the article is old. We are not in a time travel capsule; at the least n

"By Carla Schroder - April 8, 2014". I am all for replacing MS products with Linux, but the article is old. We are not in a time travel capsule; at the least not most of us. I would more expect current topics to match, e. g. replacing Win11 with Linux. Also, I found WinXP actually better than Win7, Win10, Win11. At the least simpler to use.

eimrine 9mo ago
XP was inevitably not very stable, but I love it's sound stack.
- nullpoint420 9mo ago
  What was unique about it? (genuinely curious, I'm coming from the Linux side of the pond)
  - eimrine 9mo ago
    Direct access to the sound hardware makes possible using huge discretization value, that's why Windows XP along with Mac the only OS able to produce a typical pop album. If you are doing music on your Linux PC, I would like to know your best ping from some MIDI instrument to the headphones. Last time I tried to do that I could not make it faster that 20ms but it was in 2010. So, I do not use Linux for any multimedia.
    - __del__ 9mo ago
      should be quite a bit faster than that now. 1-2ms would be normal
    - esseph 9mo ago
      "I run the Real-Time kernel and get a 7.06ms round-trip latency @ 48kHz with a 64-sample buffer, measured through Ardour using a loop-back from my SSL Alpha MADI AX." https://gearspace.com/board/music-computers/1458002-linux-pro-audio-workstation-2025-complete-no-nonsense-guide.html https://gearspace.com/board/music-computers/1458002-linux-pr...
    - nullpoint420 9mo ago
      Neat! It makes sense how more kernel/userspace abstractions would add more latency. > If you are doing music on your Linux PC, I would like to know your best ping from some MIDI instrument to the headphones. I am not, unfortunately. I've always wanted to get into digital music production, but sadly DAWs have always been elusive to me.
aruggirello 9mo ago
WinXP in a (properly configured) VM boots, runs faster than Win7, Win10 - at least under Linux. It is plagued by compatibility issues though - eg. no modern HTTPS, no modern browser, .NET issues, insecure SMB... you really need to know what you're doing. But armed with TuneXP 15, a recent AVG, CCleaner XP 1.38, sdelete, and WinKeyFinder175 (to be used together with UMSKT, basically the only way to reactivate it when your tweaking efforts inevitably trigger the - now broken - activation), you can start your adventure. No modern browser, mind you, though eg. "supermium 122" works, and don't forget read-only VMs or snapshots are your friends. I couldn't get virtio working, because VirtualBox 7 had a regression with it, so stick with emulated AHCI since VirtualBox 6 is so ...passé
ch_123 9mo ago
I remember switching my Windows computers from XP to the alpha releases of Windows 7 (back around late 2008/early 2009), and noticing improved stability. I remember needing to reinstall Windows at least once a year with XP, which was something I never needed to do with Windows 7 and onwards. This may have been true for Vista once it stabilized, but I had a very poor experience with Vista around the time it first came out (particularly with BSODs relating to Nvidia drivers), and ended up skipping over it. Your mileage may have varied, and all that.
- theandrewbailey 9mo ago
  > This may have been true for Vista once it stabilized, but I had a very poor experience with Vista around the time it first came out (particularly with BSODs relating to Nvidia drivers), and ended up skipping over it. I remember buying one of the first AMD Turion X2 laptops with an ATI GPU (Acer Ferrari 5000?). Initially came with XP, but I installed Vista 64-bit on it (courtesy of my college's MSDN subscriptions) several months after release. XP BSODed about once per month under normal use, but with Vista, it never did. Everything I tried to use it with worked, it was fast enough and looked great! (The start menu's search bar was a killer feature for me! back when Windows search worked...) My college issued everyone Thinkpads, and when they had a Vista-based image, I got it, and my experience with Vista on that was likewise. I built a gaming desktop a while later and put Vista on it, and it had occasional BSODs. I also suspect the Nvidia drivers, but I recall that stability improved with Windows 7. For those reasons, I seem to be 1 of about 3 people on earth that has a mildly positive opinion about Windows Vista.
  - ch_123 9mo ago
    That's fair, and I suspect that if I either A) had a different hardware configuration at the time or B) had tried Vista about a year later than I did, I may have ended up with an entirely different opinion of it.
pjmlp 9mo ago
Which goes to show how often this comes up, yet Steam hardware survey is now about 3%, a decade later.

eimrine 9mo ago

XP was inevitably not very stable, but I love it's sound stack.

nullpoint420 9mo ago
What was unique about it? (genuinely curious, I'm coming from the Linux side of the pond)
- eimrine 9mo ago
  Direct access to the sound hardware makes possible using huge discretization value, that's why Windows XP along with Mac the only OS able to produce a typical pop album. If you are doing music on your Linux PC, I would like to know your best ping from some MIDI instrument to the headphones. Last time I tried to do that I could not make it faster that 20ms but it was in 2010. So, I do not use Linux for any multimedia.
  - __del__ 9mo ago
    should be quite a bit faster than that now. 1-2ms would be normal
  - esseph 9mo ago
    "I run the Real-Time kernel and get a 7.06ms round-trip latency @ 48kHz with a 64-sample buffer, measured through Ardour using a loop-back from my SSL Alpha MADI AX." https://gearspace.com/board/music-computers/1458002-linux-pro-audio-workstation-2025-complete-no-nonsense-guide.html https://gearspace.com/board/music-computers/1458002-linux-pr...
  - nullpoint420 9mo ago
    Neat! It makes sense how more kernel/userspace abstractions would add more latency. > If you are doing music on your Linux PC, I would like to know your best ping from some MIDI instrument to the headphones. I am not, unfortunately. I've always wanted to get into digital music production, but sadly DAWs have always been elusive to me.

aruggirello 9mo ago

WinXP in a (properly configured) VM boots, runs faster than Win7, Win10 - at least under Linux. It is plagued by compatibility issues though - eg. no modern HTTPS, no modern browser, .NET issues, insecure SMB... you really need to know what you're doing. But armed with TuneXP 15, a recent AVG, CCleaner XP 1.38, sdelete, and WinKeyFinder175 (to be used together with UMSKT, basically the only way to reactivate it when your tweaking efforts inevitably trigger the - now broken - activation), you can start your adventure. No modern browser, mind you, though eg. "supermium 122" works, and don't forget read-only VMs or snapshots are your friends. I couldn't get virtio working, because VirtualBox 7 had a regression with it, so stick with emulated AHCI since VirtualBox 6 is so ...passé

ch_123 9mo ago

I remember switching my Windows computers from XP to the alpha releases of Windows 7 (back around late 2008/early 2009), and noticing improved stability. I remember needing to reinstall Windows at least once a year with XP, which was something I never needed to do with Windows 7 and onwards. This may have been true for Vista once it stabilized, but I had a very poor experience with Vista around the time it first came out (particularly with BSODs relating to Nvidia drivers), and ended up skipping over it. Your mileage may have varied, and all that.

theandrewbailey 9mo ago
> This may have been true for Vista once it stabilized, but I had a very poor experience with Vista around the time it first came out (particularly with BSODs relating to Nvidia drivers), and ended up skipping over it. I remember buying one of the first AMD Turion X2 laptops with an ATI GPU (Acer Ferrari 5000?). Initially came with XP, but I installed Vista 64-bit on it (courtesy of my college's MSDN subscriptions) several months after release. XP BSODed about once per month under normal use, but with Vista, it never did. Everything I tried to use it with worked, it was fast enough and looked great! (The start menu's search bar was a killer feature for me! back when Windows search worked...) My college issued everyone Thinkpads, and when they had a Vista-based image, I got it, and my experience with Vista on that was likewise. I built a gaming desktop a while later and put Vista on it, and it had occasional BSODs. I also suspect the Nvidia drivers, but I recall that stability improved with Windows 7. For those reasons, I seem to be 1 of about 3 people on earth that has a mildly positive opinion about Windows Vista.
- ch_123 9mo ago
  That's fair, and I suspect that if I either A) had a different hardware configuration at the time or B) had tried Vista about a year later than I did, I may have ended up with an entirely different opinion of it.

pjmlp 9mo ago

Which goes to show how often this comes up, yet Steam hardware survey is now about 3%, a decade later.