Microsoft increased prices for all of its Surface PCs this week, with most models priced hundreds of dollars higher than they were when launching. Windows Central highlighted the increases, which now see Microsoft's mid-range models priced above $1,000 and flagship models priced starting at $1,500. A Microsoft spokesperson said the price increase was due to "recent increases in memory and component costs".
You know, Windows 2000 was pretty fucking rock solid. It was a beast. NT kernel but none of the fisher price theming of XP (yeah I know, you could turn that off). XP was pretty good too, tbh.
But hoooooo boy has it been a slow, agonizing shark jump from there.
Even ‘95 was pretty ok
95b… A and C were pretty bad. Different dev team.
98 SE wasn’t bad either.
And XPSP2 Lite is still really nice; community project that stripped out all the stuff not explicitly “operating system” so you could choose on your own what software to run on top of it.
I still run Lite in a VM on my M-series Mac. It runs all Windows software that isn’t locked down to Win10+ DRM.
Doesn’t MacOS have access to translation layers like Wine/Proton in combination with FEX? (I guess a VM would be nice for compartmentalizing things)
That’s a bit tricky right now actually; Rosetta 2 is being removed from the next OS, which kills all WINE/Proton support.
Things are still a bit up in the air about the future of Intel emulation on macOS.
Meanwhile, QEMU/UTM will continue to work just fine, and you can spin up a different Lite instance for each software configuration you want to compartmentalize.
This is incorrect. Apple have said Rosetta 2 support is staying around specifically for games. This has also been confirmed by Codeweavers.
They’ve said that some sort of support is staying around for games, but at the same time that system-wide Rosetta 2 support is being removed. The details about what that means about Intel translation for games is being clarified at WWDC this year. And what that means for WINE still hasn’t been clearly explained one way or the other.
Guess that’ll mean Mac gaming will become even more of a dead end then. I use a Linux Distro on an x86 laptop so the concept was just mostly curiosity. Maybe Asahi Linux on the M-series macbooks could be an option for continued support.
Linux gaming is pretty spectacular right now because of Proton tbh. It’s surprising that Apple hasn’t made it a priority. Not only can I run pretty much everything out of the box now, but I tend to get better performance than on Windows.
Did 7 have some hidden clause or something that’s not apparent to a user without forensic tools? I remember that revision being pretty swell. (Especially the enterprise branches)
The Home editions included hardware restrictions (a maximum of either 8 or 16 GB RAM depending on which of the two versions you got, and you couldn’t change language in any of the commercially available versions. While I can’t remember anything wrong with it, I was also like 10 when I used it and I highly suspect everyone’s memories of it are being biased by just how absolute dogshit 8 was on release.
Ultimate let you change languages, but cost more than Pro
Right, that edition is listed after enterprise on Wikipedia so my eyes just completely bounced over the fact it could be upgraded to from Pro.
Everyother version of windows has been good, the others are shit…
Gotta admit the pattern has held true
Except that implies Windows 12 or whatever is going to be good, which I currently struggle to imagine is possible without major structural changes to Microsoft’s entire corporate structure.
Except compare windows 8 to windows 10 totally different and they changed their entire direction. It’s possible.
I feel like they go “we need something new and fast. Forget quality or what people want just make it new and different.” and then a few years later “that was a mistake, make it work well and listen to the customers”… And repeat
Granted I’m running Debian but…
Rose-tinted glasses. Anyone going back to Windows XP would likely be shocked at how broken and unintuitive it could be at times.
7 was best. Everything after that has been unusable garbage.