will windows 11 become the new vista failure of the 2022s?

[sonyu]

On 12/15/2023 at 8:00 PM, Andromeda43 said:

Yes, Windows ME, Vista and 8.0 were all mistakes, probably released too early.  They all had problems, that as a working PC tech, I had to deal with, even when I'd not run them myself.  Thank Goodness, those OS's are all just History now.

ME & Vista SP1+SP2 & 8.0 were are amazing OSes.

The only problem with Vista was the hardware weren't ready at the time. Lot of difference between XP hardware and Vista hardware starting with XPDM and WDDM gpus... and you need 1-2gb at least to run it properly

ME was better than its fame. you just need to install updates on it.

8.0  it's the best / fastest NT6 MS OS (only feature missing is XPDM, to keep compatibility with old gpus) in my opinion for any WDDM Capable gpu. Faster than 7, proved by MS.

NT6 OSes are based on Windows Server 2003 NT 5.2, which, converted to workstation, is an amazing OS. You can see a bit of the modern memory management (>=Vista) on 2k3.

apart from this, online video playback and cpu & memory management it's great on 11 once you disable tons of things in registry...

but the metrofied gui... it's just... why? it's slow... well in terms of marketing I can understand it's just a way to not release a different OS for a "MS-iPAD" product... so they've made an OS adapted for tablets... but it's currently messed up, at least you can separate metro from the OS in 8.0 / 8.1...

surely it has lot of caches and compression on the fly for memory and files... but the GUI is really overloaded or the way the things work. Even the pagination, standby memory and also spectre, meltdown, CFG control flow guard...

long story short. in one sentence:

we have a powerful hardware nowadays that at the same time loses power when executing 10 / 11 oses

I keep checking this link every so often

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Display_Driver_Model

Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQdApuPGNeE

Edited December 17, 2023 by sonyu

[UCyborg]

Never used ME, there just wasn't the time for it, went straight from 95 to XP. Never fancied Vista, used it long enough to know it's not for me. Confirmed this by messing with it in recent years as well. There were just less oddities with 7, applications on it were a bit more responsive and I liked UI better + more 3rd party support to augment interface further, although going multi-monitor, anything below 8 feels too simple to me.

But 8.1 also felt like another Vista in some ways, don't remember what was wrong with 8.0, just recall that there was something that held me back then.

I very much welcomed the multi-monitor taskbar, per-monitor desktop backgrounds, new file permissions dialog, but at the same, at least in 8.1, had fun with legacy DirectDraw (screens went blink-o-mania), had fun with Explorer going nuts and leaking lots of memory (not normally reproducible though) every time the desktop background changed...though I suspect smaller leaks are still there as-is, at least under certain circumstances, then at some point had an issue with default USB tethering driver, which I solved by updating to the one using newer NDIS version.

Anyway, just few things that come to mind, I won't be too long, they may all have small things that work better in one version or another or one version has that issue, another has another...

I don't know, Windows 10 version 1809 seems like a sweet spot for me, although trying installing 11 recently and using 20H2 for about two years, I'm not really sure where to go from here. Guess I'd get a bit more aesthetics back with 1809 and Big Muscle's Aero Glass, but otherwise, there's not much difference regardless of which version I use. Newer one could prove to be a bit more future-proof.

I still like some bells and whistles there and there, what happens when Microsoft deletes the old taskbar code? Seems they're insistent on keeping some things dumb (default app management anyone?) and making others even dumber. Their reaction when 3rd party entities try improving usability of their OS? Let's recommend against such applications.

[UCyborg]

On 9/22/2023 at 3:36 PM, Tripredacus said:

I can no longer tell whether or not Windows 11 is popular.

At least among Steam users, the Windows 11 usage has increased recently.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Huh, while setting Win11 up, I noticed a setting which at least in Win10 was related to timeline you could see by opening Task View. It's gone...while not recent news, kinda bummed. I didn't use it often, but sometimes it was nice to look at stuff I had opened in the past the way it way presented.

Working on others' computers, the new context menus, very annoying! Why do we have to click more options to get to the old functional context menu to be able to do "Open file location" or whatever? Where did this mentality come from that they're making people have to click through more things to accomplish something?

[66cats]

36 minutes ago, UCyborg said:

At least among Steam users

It's ~27% vs. 68% for W10, going up pretty steadily.

36 minutes ago, UCyborg said:

new context menus, very annoying!

The thinking's "make it less cluttered/more fingerpoky tablet-friendly" i guess. Get the old one back with a registry edit, or by clicking a checkbox in Winaero Tweaker (which also has a bunch of other useful stuff, i'm a fan). 

Edited December 22, 2023 by 66cats

[UCyborg]

You can do that on your home PC, but not on others' computers, especially not on customers' at work. And I presume it's common for work computers at companies to be locked down. Not where I work, got Windows 10 Home there...seriously.

ExplorerPatcher is also pretty capable of restoring useful features, but the problem are dependencies on MS's code, so when they delete it...which they are doing at slow pace...things will get pretty boring I think. Also like the weather widget, at least in theory, well it needs Edge WebView, so typical huge Chromium browser code running in the background, otherwise custom made, but really destabilizes Explorer, at least wherever I try it. Work PC running Win10 version 1809 seems to be holding up best if I turn off auto accent color changes when desktop background changes. But at home, either Win10 20H2 or Win11 23H2, either Explorer crashes after a while or the widget freezes and hogs one CPU core indefinitely. And nobody talks about it, maybe I should ask on GitHub. The only thing I haven't tried, I wonder if moving primary taskbar to a secondary screen could be a factor. That was supposedly considered a bug by Microsoft, who would've thought. ExplorerPatcher brought it back because number of people indeed consider it a useful feature.

Also, Win11 has to hold a record with idle RAM consumption, got almost 2 GB with the usual stuff loaded and just looking at the empty desktop. But what exactly are we getting in return? That's with Microsoft Defender disabled, it's actually still doable, just kinda ugly as it needs more than just the obvious Defender service disabled, because otherwise it's stubborn and just won't turn off by any normal knob (eg. Group Policy).

Another curious observation, Xbox Game Bar has been promoted to system component.

Edited December 22, 2023 by UCyborg

[UCyborg]

I got Task Manager to lock up, consuming over 1,5 GB of RAM and making the system totally unresponsive. Was testing an old InstallShield installer, I basically left Task Manager's dialog that opens after you do "Analyze wait chain" open.

Another random observation in one of the legacy components, Vista totally broke scripting functionality of DirectMusic, observable in the old Unreal II: The Awakening game, they say relevant functions are stubbed, there seems to be something extra wrong in Win11 implementation, which makes even less sense. In Drakan: Order of the Flame, specific music tracks don't play. This one doesn't use scripting (handled by dmscript.dll). No idea what's supposed to be different with the various tracks. But dmusic.dll from Windows XP still seems to function correctly, even on Windows 11. Probably dmscript.dll too, but haven't tried.

DirectMusic was deemed deprecated with Vista, though at least some changes that relevant DLLs contain is anyone's guess. It's curious at least since they didn't throw out DirectMusic completely like they did with some other deprecated components.

[seven4ever]

I bet the next Windows will kick W11 out of the market begining 2025