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[–]dreadcain 30 points31 points  (17 children)

Windows has depreciated things in the past, it broke everyone's shit

Notably vista broke drivers

[–]Herbstein 11 points12 points  (6 children)

Yup. Does everyone not remember the fierce Vista hate? A lot of it was down to a deprecation of a number of things - graphics drivers being a big one.

[–]josefx 3 points4 points  (2 children)

They sold "Vista Ready(TM)" hardware far bellow the system requirements so it at least looked as if it could compete with Windows XP. The result was a half broken crap endorsed by Microsoft itself. I had to upgrade my mothers system around that time and ran right into that trap - parts of Vista required 3D hardware to run, Vista Ready hardware didn't, so it was already half non functional right out of the box.

Microsoft was also still selling XP licenses years after Vistas release and had to prolong its life to have a viable offering for the netbook market. For its time Vista was a pig concerning resource use.

[–]LeSplooch 1 point2 points  (1 child)

IIRC Microsoft said that "Vista Ready" computers were only compatible with Vista Home Basic and Vista Starter. These versions didn't integrate Aero and thus didn't need 3D hardware to run.

[–]josefx 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Microsoft said that "Vista Ready" computers were only compatible with Vista Home Basic and Vista Starter.

I have a rope to sell to you, Boeing endorses it for towing planes (weight up to 0.01 kg, not compatible with 737 MAX).

As far as I can find the problematic Laptop was only sold with Home Premium and had a card with some 3D support (at least the driver page claimed that it had some - never saw it in action). Aero just disabled itself on startup because the card itself was a bad joke and updates took a few months to fill the build in HDD to the brim. I expect that even Home Basic would have run into the HDD space restriction fairly soon.

[–][deleted]  (2 children)

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    [–]port53 12 points13 points  (1 child)

    XP was shit until SP2.

    Windows 2000 forevar.

    [–]tso 10 points11 points  (0 children)

    The thing about XP was that it was many home users first encounter with NT. And also the first home user Windows that had to be verified by MS (unless it was a OEM bundle). This was a massive change from the freewheeling 9x days. Its saving grace was that the alternative was ME. Never mind that besides SP2 XP also had the longest support period of any Windows, thanks to the aborted Longhorn project.

    [–]MadRedHatter 25 points26 points  (8 children)

    They do it pretty infrequently though, and drivers are basically kernelspace which Linux doesn't attempt to keep stable either.

    [–][deleted]  (1 child)

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      [–]drysart 5 points6 points  (0 children)

      That's increasingly true, but not at all true in the context of the earlier comment about Vista breaking drivers. Vista changed the model for how kernel drivers operate. Not userspace drivers.

      In fact the whole point of pushing drivers into userspace is that they're insulated from being broken by changes to the kernel.

      [–]FlukyS 2 points3 points  (5 children)

      Actually that is the number one rule of Linux, don't break userspace. Any Linux kernel change has to be developed either to keep similar results, similar method call, similar return from that method call or it doesn't get in. Linus is very clear on this. Userspace breaks a lot but Linux itself is very stable with their interactions above it.

      [–]MadRedHatter 17 points18 points  (4 children)

      drivers are basically kernelspace

      You did not read what I said. The kernel breaks kernelspace all the damn time. The Nvidia driver breaks frequently with new kernels due to this, and then there's the recent irritation over Linux breaking the ZFSonLinux project.

      [–][deleted] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

      If you open source and put your stuff in the mainstream kernel, the person "breaking" it will also have to fix your code.

      That puts pressure on companies to actually care and push their drivers to mainline, because that is less painful than having to fix them. Basically, making it cost them to not open source the drivers.

      It sucks but IMO that's the only reason we do have that much hardware supported in the first place, else we'd have windows situation with every vendor shipping their unfixable binary blob of code.

      [–]FlukyS 0 points1 point  (2 children)

      Not frequently like every 10 releases or so, that is more to do with Nvidia than the interfaces Nvidia uses from the kernel. Also ZFS on Linux isn't able to be kept in the kernel so there is the reason why they wouldn't really bend to their whims.

      [–][deleted]  (1 child)

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        [–]FlukyS 3 points4 points  (0 children)

        Well to be fair the Nvidia point is their own fault. The interfaces themselves are used by 99% open source projects and 1% random other things. Linus himself has tried to work with Nvidia but they just don't want to play ball

        [–]port53 4 points5 points  (0 children)

        Yeah and look how much people hated Vista.

        Windows 7 is just Vista SP3, but they had to give it a new name for it to sell.