UCyborg

Hm, apparently what I read was just the comment on Reddit saying to search YouTube for "Cinema Therapy, radical acceptance". Nice find, though some situations are just beyond messed up that one shouldn't have to just accept. Sigh, back at wrong thought patterns, huh?

Well, I certainly found number of reasons that still makes me prefer it over Chromium flavors. @VistaLover Sure, I generally don't like the number of things in this world, including the way a number of websites are designed. I've got a hint from another place to look into radical acceptance, a specific video or podcast about it...not sure as I can't find it again...but yeah, that was the main thing - "radical acceptance".

Ugh, every once in a while I need a printer and Windows goofed up...again! Just nothing happened when I tried to print, no error, just nothing. I'm so fed up with darned OS corrupting itself in random ways, no matter how careful I am to not goof it up. On Linux, I've been able to print/scan consistently without a single fail. I'm also considering going Linux full-time for normal everyday tasks, maybe keep Windows around for some specifics. I don't need much these days, a web browser, a media player, password manager, maybe a virtualizer and office suite (just for viewing). Just not sure on what distro to settle. I'm sure I don't want rolling-release distro. I'm most familiar with Ubuntu. Edit: Or maybe just more time...

Which was released in August 2020, a long time ago in IT world. I don't think Firefox would look like it does today if that was the case. It's not a Chromium fork.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23618214/microsoft-windows-11-update-bing-ai-taskbar-touch-improvements-screen-recording-features

How empty it has become here after the recent turn of events. This track seems fitting:

https://hackaday.com/2022/04/15/javascript-is-everywhere-even-msdos/ https://github.com/SuperIlu/jSH For writing DOS applications using JavaScript programming language.

WOW, this is from the opening of this year's Nordic world ski championship in Planica, Slovenia, an adaptation of old Slovenian song Oj, Triglav, moj dom (Oj, Triglav, my home):

Indeed, it already happens. I'm the youngest in my family, yay... This bit reminded me of Doctor Who series, where protagonist is the Time Lord, he travels with human companions. Time Lords live for a long time, several centuries at least. I remember there was a scene about this issue of losing people.

That said, perhaps this thread should be left alone until something develops? Or at least the title should have been reworded to indicate extended kernel for Windows 8.1 is not actually a thing yet? Just my two cents.

Agreed, things can get out-of-hand easily as it is with official files, which guys at MS have much easier time modifying than someone poking around in disassembler. I've seen some unexplainable oddities throughout various Windows versions with updates, no updates, keeping it clean by only ever installing only programs deemed essential that I'd never uninstall, keeping it a bit less clean and everything in between. Whether it was due to bizarre hard-to-repro bugs that maybe could have been avoided by just deep freezing Windows partition or maybe hardware glitching while being otherwise undetectable I'll never know, but I do know I don't want to add more risk factors by applying such modifications. I only ever tried some such mods as Sunday curiosity safely within the constraints of a virtual machine, never on a production system. Yeah, fiddly. Plus, in a rapidly changing software world, such development seems like a waste of time, but it's not my time and if that's what they want to do...

Yay, bugs: If there's something I learned working in IT, it's that things never work as expected. It's an endless cycle of trying to get basics to work right, then there's constant want of new features while the basics still don't work and then there are regressions when either implementing or fixing older flaws...rinse and repeat. Windows...I ran them all from 95 to 10, except ME. Still can't say I have a favorite in 2023. But I've grown to accept the flaws so they don't get to me as much as they used to. Some relatable reading: https://www.bruceb.com/2016/05/personal-computers-are-just-too-hard-to-use-and-it-isnt-your-fault/ https://www.bruceb.com/2019/01/its-not-just-your-computer-everything-is-too-hard-to-use-and-its-not-your-fault/

Edit: Oops, wrong thread...

Curse, especially in this toxic and violent society. And you'd have to trick yourself to prevent things from getting old, which can be a problem as it is. Working the same old boring job forever? Living with anhedonia forever? Etc etc. That said, the process of getting to the other side...nobody knows how it'll go...nobody comes back to tell the tale. https://time.com/6246864/reverse-aging-scientists-discover-milestone/

Did things ever make sense? Ugh, it would be awful if that happened, due to how dependency on electricity developed, everything would collapse and since people are insane as it is...

You seem like you can't decide what you really want. I guess I was a bit like that in the past when it comes to operating systems. Now I just don't...give...a damn...anymore.

I figured that part would be open for interpretation and exemptions. Funniest thing IMHO, a bunch of Windows releases were considered crap when new, but then suddenly became great with passage of time. In that light, it also seems unfair to consider early adapters brainwashed sheep (eg. this thread gives such vibes - https://msfn.org/board/topic/182631-why-do-so-many-people-say-staying-on-older-versions-of-windows-is-stupid/). I'm sure if the world still stands by 2040 and computing in current form will still be relevant by then, Windows 10 extended kernel will be all the rage. Even today, it's pretty much like XP of current era and 8.1 seems like Win2000.

This fits in any "extended kernel" thread, but since I happened to notice it was brought up here and due to all "extended kernel" talk... Projects like ReactOS and WINE have to follow some rules, like relying only on published documentation and only clean-room reverse-engineering may be done. Has any "extended kernel" followed such rules? The whole concept of "extended kernel" seems to be in direct violation of MS's EULA. An excerpt from Vista/7 EULA: Revised in 8.x: 10 version from 2015: And for some reason, "extended kernels" may be discussed, but activation bypasses may not be? Sorry, doesn't compute here.

Laibach - Final Countdown

I only started using Win10 seriously with version 1809, though I ended up with 20H2 on home desktop, mostly 'cause I was curious about 1909, then installed it, then later I got curious again about 20H2, now I'm just holding position here. Besides MS continuing to make questionable changes that are either difficult or impossible to undo, just overall less time that I'm willing to spend messing with Windows. I suppose there were the least surprises with 1809, after it got some patches. Interestingly, a bit off-topic, but another MS product from the time, SQL Server 2019, is supposedly very popular version of SQL Server these days and it will also be supported for the longer period. I ended up turning off a bunch of scheduled tasks, so things don't get fired left and right, reducing disk activity. Bells and whistles should still be functional. Still using plain HDD, interestingly, the one data disk being written to the least was the one that ended up developing few bad sectors there and there while the other two disks are OK for now. SuperFetch behavior seems to be a lot like Vista's, I don't remember Windows 7 preloading as much data. Loading user profile takes several seconds though, significantly slower compared to previous versions, all seems good when things settle.

There are instructions out there how to patch latest Flash to disable EOL restriction. I was the first to bring it up on MSFN. Some even opt to use Flash version that continued to be developed for Chinese market (only security fixes I guess) after it was EOL for the rest of the world, but I didn't follow that. In my most recent experience, NPAPI version for Mozilla-based browsers and other browsers implementing NPAPI was most performant, the worst was ActiveX in Internet Explorer, though for some reason it was much better in the pre-Chromium Edge, a bit better than NPAPI even. Of course, standalone version keeps it simple by not being tied to the web browser's plugin architecture.

I see nothing shocking regarding native Web Components as far as YouTube load speed is concerned, it's about as fast as with Firefox 42 user agent that gives polyfill. Trying out official Pale Moon 32.0.1b3, it's actually a bit slower, comparing 32-bit vs 64-bit though since official beta is only 64-bit. 64-bit Pale Moon was always slower on my PC. Not related to current developments, but I suspect we're still far away from decent scores on Speedometer 2.0.

Yeah, that's not normal I think. On my end, Prt Scr works even with fullscreen D3D (at least D3D8 and later) stuff, which is expected since MS tweaked their compositor and related stuff (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/demystifying-full-screen-optimizations/). D3D8 was tried with d3d8.dll from an older Win10 build 17134 with "fullscreen maximized windowed mode" disabled - it takes tweaking internal variable inside the file, the one modified by exported function Direct3D8EnableMaximizedWindowedModeShim, the variable must be set to 0. It's interesting they deleted the code for the old behavior from D3D8...I think maximized windowed mode is just one part of the equation for making old stuff more compatible with compositor, historically, it caused massive performance degradation in DirectDraw based applications/games in Windows 8, which was fixed in Windows 10, but this mode may still show window borders of fullscreen games that don't tweak their window styles because it wasn't really expected to be done by devs, was supposed to be handled internally, so you could create normal window with borders and toggle between fullscreen and windowed mode via D3D and not worry about window styles - workings of fullscreen mode made them disappear anyway...until they came up with "fullscreen maximized windowed mode". But what we're seeing with more performant alt-tabbing and ability to PrtScr fullscreen stuff etc. - that's on their tweaks in other places it seems, not this "fullscreen maximized windowed mode" as exposed by ddraw.dll, d3d8.dll and maybe d3d9.dll. Though going from my memory, I think intro videos in GTA III era games don't work if it's forced-off for DirectDraw, so yeah, might be done just for compatibility. Easier to just have this mode always enabled rather than putting entries in the compatibility database only for games that need them, since that's a lot of work and needs feedback from customers, but only enterprise customers matter to MS and folks playing old games have community developed solutions for such issues. Anyway, regarding videos in the browser, they work quite well on my end in Firefox in software mode. Unknown if Chromium still has massive performance hit with videos in software mode. https://i.imgur.com/NGJJCM3.png (the screen on the right has graphics info indicating software mode is enabled - WebRender (Software)) But there's a bit of slowness in other aspects, immediately apparent with animations on web pages. It also seems Mozilla did some changes/fixes between Firefox 96 and 110 regarding notifications. Enabling alerts.useSystemBackend in about:config to use OS' notification system no longer causes notifications to just disappear after few seconds.

It depends on the license, open-source software may still have a license with certain restrictions, hence all the drama in the past with Mozilla-based browsers discussed on the forum. I don't know the specifics/quirks in this case, lawyers are better address for those. The less you need lawyers in life, the better...

Yeah, Chromium can't use GPU for rendering on XP. Mozilla-based browsers may be able to use Direct3D 9, but get this, it's rarely mentioned, Direct3D 9 on XP DOES NOT WORK WELL ACROSS MULTIPLE MONITORS...well, it only does with A LOT OF LAG, the performance is only as it should be (within drivers'/OS capabilities) as long as the browser window is entirely on the primary monitor. Talk about waste of good hardware!