3 ms·

>I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on. I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things? Can you share specifically what did those OS exac

>I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on. I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things? Can you share specifically what did those OS exactly break back then? And were the breakages more common than competing OSs used in similar fashion? My memory of those OSs things would break due to the drivers and hacks of third party SW, not due to things MS was shipping like today.

krageon 19d ago
They broke: * at "random", during regular use * when installing something, sometimes * when removing something, sometimes * slowly, over time They were essentially just huge steaming piles of shit. What you are describing was true at the time for Linux. It was an absolute bear to set up (at the time of win95/98) if you had anything unusual but once it ran it ran. This has never been true for windows although the reasons why have shifted over time: it used to not work primarily because it was just shit. Now it additionally doesn't work because it is actively malicious. I am writing this from the perspective of someone who is regularly forced to use Microsoft's products for work. I am familiar with the subject matter.
- deleted 19d ago
  [deleted]
- autoexec 19d ago
  Random existing Windows bugs breaking things, third party software breaking things on install/uninstall, and bloat causing problems are very different from Microsoft forcing an update that introduces new flaws in windows and breaks Windows in ways that had been previously working. Windows was always buggy as hell, but windows updates didn't break windows as often and most importantly they were also optional. For decades people would go online on Patch Tuesday to look to see if people were reporting problems with the newest round of Windows updates. Maybe there'd be a problem with an update and a specific network card, or a certain video driver, but Windows didn't usually break Windows. Even if it did, you at least had the option to just not update. These days Microsoft doesn't care about problems with their updates. Even when they are warned ahead of time that there are problems they're happy to shove them down our throats, at any time of the day or night, and break Windows or even delete your personal files (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/microsoft-suspends-distribution-of-latest-windows-10-update-over-data-loss-bug/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/microsoft-suspends-d...) in the process.
  - agumonkey 19d ago
    The irony is that regular and free updates were supposed to help stability .. no consequence no intelligence
- PorciiVorbesc 18d ago
  > at "random", during regular use Out of all the vague and unprovable things that never happened, that one never happened the most. I'm sure you can find users on any OS complaining with "random" breakages but unless you can show any data that proves it was due to the OS and not your HW or third party apps or your own actions, this means nothing.
  - krageon 16d ago
    Very cool. Of course we both understand that this is the case - this is why it is in scare quotes. You are arguing about something I literally acknowledged in my original post. The issue is that it happened due to what is for all intents and purposes bitrot: It breaks during regular use due to small compounding errors that happen due to bad software design. In practical use this means what I wrote, even though to the most pedantic of nerds it means literally what happened. It can in fact mean both things
    - PorciiVorbesc 16d ago
      >It breaks during regular use due to small compounding errors that happen due to bad software design. And where's the proof/documentation for this, if it's as common as you suggest? If it were a design problem as you say, then everyone would have the exact same failures with the same incidence rate, but they don't.
rpdillon 19d ago
This was the era when I had replaced explorer.exe with litestep and had a reminder to reinstall Windows every six months to keep the computer running smoothly. It wasn't MS "shipping" stuff that broke it IIRC (though patches did have that effect), but rather a steady degradation in performance over the months. I tried to hold in abeyance with tools like defrag, but to no avail. http://litestep.net/ http://litestep.net/ I was doing random college kid stuff: * Surfing the web * Using Eudora lite for email * Playing Quake1 and GLQuake, probably some Quake 2 and StarCraft around that time * Using mIRC a ton to chat on undernet * Using Xylinx to do my coursework for CS314 * Using MS Visual J++ do do more coursework (good riddance!) * Writing papers in (I think) StarOffice, but it might have been just "Word" at that point. This was right around the year I switched to Linux because of the issues. Though, I have to admit, it was a memory and DVD drive upgrade that drove me over the edge. I guess MS had a "point" system for each hardware component, and if enough points of components changed, they considered the machine a different computer, and would refuse to boot (since you didn't buy a license for that "different" computer). They told me I had to call them so I could boot my machine, at which point I table flipped, formatted my drive, and asked my buddy to burn a whole bunch of floppies so I could install Slackware. Looking back, the writing was on the wall...

krageon 19d ago

They broke: * at "random", during regular use * when installing something, sometimes * when removing something, sometimes * slowly, over time They were essentially just huge steaming piles of shit. What you are describing was true at the time for Linux. It was an absolute bear to set up (at the time of win95/98) if you had anything unusual but once it ran it ran. This has never been true for windows although the reasons why have shifted over time: it used to not work primarily because it was just shit. Now it additionally doesn't work because it is actively malicious. I am writing this from the perspective of someone who is regularly forced to use Microsoft's products for work. I am familiar with the subject matter.

deleted 19d ago
[deleted]
autoexec 19d ago
Random existing Windows bugs breaking things, third party software breaking things on install/uninstall, and bloat causing problems are very different from Microsoft forcing an update that introduces new flaws in windows and breaks Windows in ways that had been previously working. Windows was always buggy as hell, but windows updates didn't break windows as often and most importantly they were also optional. For decades people would go online on Patch Tuesday to look to see if people were reporting problems with the newest round of Windows updates. Maybe there'd be a problem with an update and a specific network card, or a certain video driver, but Windows didn't usually break Windows. Even if it did, you at least had the option to just not update. These days Microsoft doesn't care about problems with their updates. Even when they are warned ahead of time that there are problems they're happy to shove them down our throats, at any time of the day or night, and break Windows or even delete your personal files (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/microsoft-suspends-distribution-of-latest-windows-10-update-over-data-loss-bug/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/microsoft-suspends-d...) in the process.
- agumonkey 19d ago
  The irony is that regular and free updates were supposed to help stability .. no consequence no intelligence
PorciiVorbesc 18d ago
> at "random", during regular use Out of all the vague and unprovable things that never happened, that one never happened the most. I'm sure you can find users on any OS complaining with "random" breakages but unless you can show any data that proves it was due to the OS and not your HW or third party apps or your own actions, this means nothing.
- krageon 16d ago
  Very cool. Of course we both understand that this is the case - this is why it is in scare quotes. You are arguing about something I literally acknowledged in my original post. The issue is that it happened due to what is for all intents and purposes bitrot: It breaks during regular use due to small compounding errors that happen due to bad software design. In practical use this means what I wrote, even though to the most pedantic of nerds it means literally what happened. It can in fact mean both things
  - PorciiVorbesc 16d ago
    >It breaks during regular use due to small compounding errors that happen due to bad software design. And where's the proof/documentation for this, if it's as common as you suggest? If it were a design problem as you say, then everyone would have the exact same failures with the same incidence rate, but they don't.

rpdillon 19d ago

This was the era when I had replaced explorer.exe with litestep and had a reminder to reinstall Windows every six months to keep the computer running smoothly. It wasn't MS "shipping" stuff that broke it IIRC (though patches did have that effect), but rather a steady degradation in performance over the months. I tried to hold in abeyance with tools like defrag, but to no avail. http://litestep.net/ http://litestep.net/ I was doing random college kid stuff: * Surfing the web * Using Eudora lite for email * Playing Quake1 and GLQuake, probably some Quake 2 and StarCraft around that time * Using mIRC a ton to chat on undernet * Using Xylinx to do my coursework for CS314 * Using MS Visual J++ do do more coursework (good riddance!) * Writing papers in (I think) StarOffice, but it might have been just "Word" at that point. This was right around the year I switched to Linux because of the issues. Though, I have to admit, it was a memory and DVD drive upgrade that drove me over the edge. I guess MS had a "point" system for each hardware component, and if enough points of components changed, they considered the machine a different computer, and would refuse to boot (since you didn't buy a license for that "different" computer). They told me I had to call them so I could boot my machine, at which point I table flipped, formatted my drive, and asked my buddy to burn a whole bunch of floppies so I could install Slackware. Looking back, the writing was on the wall...