Windows 11 is dying....

[PlainName]

Fair enough. I did use it in home environment and considered it being an improvement over 98SE; it went into right direction of unifying the two product lines, but sure enough the transition was not finished at that point. XP being not that different from the 2000 in my opinion shows though they were "almost there" with the 2000.

Another factor that helped XP was that hardware has become significantly faster in time since Win2000 release, so many of performance issues of the 2000 were "fixed" just by brute force alone. And again the same thing happened with Vista/Win7 - Vista was not very performant on the kind of hardware which was typical at a time of it's release, but by the time of Win7 release it has improved to the point that those issues were really non-issues anymore. That's not to claim that "tock" versions in Intel parlance did not actually make any performance improvements - they did, but hardware advances helped a lot for sure.

It is a while back, but wasn't W2K intended to merge the domestic Win98 with the business NT4? I think a significant part of that was moving to pre-emptive interrupts (W3.x was cooperative, can't recall W98 properly but I think it still retained that). Small matter of booting Windows from DOS too, so satisfying both sides of that particular 'feature' was going to be a bit tricky.

[Analog Kid]

When Microsoft has made major changes to Windows (often in the area of new UI "paradigms"), their first attempts have tended to be objectively poor, and they fixed this in the next revision -- with tweaks and sometimes significant back-pedaling. At the same time, users were alienated by the changes in the original release, then to some extent got used to them and accepted them in the next release.

I think this is the most credible explanation by far. In general, it takes a couple of versions - maybe more - for Microsoft to polish their latest marvellous idea.

Windows NT 4.0
Windows 2000
Windows XP
Windows Vista
Windows 7
Windows 8
Windows 10
Windows 11
Windows whatever is next

In terms of this list, there are a couple of things I disagree with. I don't think W2000 should have a line through it.

With this I agree.
I still have an operating computer (my "scanning station") using Windows 2000 Professional. It was the computer + OS that the company I worked for used for their media duplication systems.

The only thing that was/is sub-par about W2K is its SCSI implementation, which was pretty flaky. Everything else about it is solid.

[asmi]

It is a while back, but wasn't W2K intended to merge the domestic Win98 with the business NT4? I think a significant part of that was moving to pre-emptive interrupts (W3.x was cooperative, can't recall W98 properly but I think it still retained that). Small matter of booting Windows from DOS too, so satisfying both sides of that particular 'feature' was going to be a bit tricky.

It was more of attempt to make NT home-user-friendly as it was already established in corporate world. And user world was running Win9x at the time, they needed to make NT more compatible, but since Win9x kernel was very different, that transition was not very smooth. Also like you mentioned, NT kernel does not allow direct access to hardware while Win9x kernel did, so that was another common factor - especially in industrial space, as a result many pieces of industrial equipment were shipped with Win9x long after Win2000 or even WinXp was released. I worked with some car factories a few years ago and there were still a few stations powered by Win9x - and that was in 2020's! It just goes to show that this stuff cost a lot of money, so vendors are extremely resistant to changes because any change requires an expensive QA and re-certification, also users of this equipment tend to use it for as long as possible because they are so darn expensive. I admit it was hilarious to see the cutting edge luxury vehicle built on a line which was powered by 20+ years old software , but apparently this is a par for the course in manufacturing.

With that kind of software you can imagine that changing a kernel it's running on is bound to cause issues, and it did. Of course situation improved over years, and by the time Xp rolled around it wasn't nearly as big of a problem as it was at the time of Win2000 release. But if you visit just about any factory which is old enough, you will see a toxic cocktail of everything from MS DOS to modern Windows, Linux, and everything in-between.

[zepto]

2000 was never a home consumer OS. It was for servers and workstations. The consumer line went 95->98->ME->XP.

Most home users never experienced 2k because it wasn't typically sold to home consumers by companies like dell or preloaded on brick and mortar pcs. 2000 and XP were both good operating systems.

[asmi]

2000 was never a home consumer OS. It was for servers and workstations. The consumer line went 95->98->ME->XP.

Most home users never experienced 2k because it wasn't typically sold to home consumers by companies like dell or preloaded on brick and mortar pcs. 2000 and XP were both good operating systems.

I bought a boxed version of 2000 Pro - back then it was still pretty common. Never had WinME, just heard many anecdotes about it

[Electrodynamic]

2000 was never a home consumer OS. It was for servers and workstations. The consumer line went 95->98->ME->XP.

Most home users never experienced 2k because it wasn't typically sold to home consumers by companies like dell or preloaded on brick and mortar pcs. 2000 and XP were both good operating systems.

I bought a boxed version of 2000 Pro - back then it was still pretty common. Never had WinME, just heard many anecdotes about it

Ah, I remember the complete train wreck called WinME.

It was a crashing machine and I came to know the blue screen of death quite well. It smoked my HD master boot record twice which took hours to repair. Smoked one HD when it crashed and lost many files which just randomly disappeared. I believe it was the first OS with system restore which I had to use almost weekly.

Been running windows 7 and 10 with classic shell XP for years and have had basically no real problems.

[ejeffrey]

It is a while back, but wasn't W2K intended to merge the domestic Win98 with the business NT4? I think a significant part of that was moving to pre-emptive interrupts (W3.x was cooperative, can't recall W98 properly but I think it still retained that). Small matter of booting Windows from DOS too, so satisfying both sides of that particular 'feature' was going to be a bit tricky.

Originally that was the intent, but it fell considerably short and MS stopped pushing for that.

Also, "business" NT4 is a bit misleading.  NT was heavily used in engineering, and in industries that were migrating from other centrally managed systems like mainframes or UNIX servers.  But a lot of general business desktops for office workers were Win311/Win95/Win98.  Windows 2000 saw considerable success in replacing Win98 for business users, as it has much better and more secure file sharing.  Sneakernet was still very much the default but people were moving towards file sharing, and Windows2000 clients made that much more attractive.

Win95 was mostly pre-emptive for 32 bit applications, but used cooperative multi-tasking for 16 bit windows 3.11 apps, and also still had a significant amount of 16 bit code in the core OS.

[SteveThackery]

It is a while back, but wasn't W2K intended to merge the domestic Win98 with the business NT4? I think a significant part of that was moving to pre-emptive interrupts (W3.x was cooperative, can't recall W98 properly but I think it still retained that). Small matter of booting Windows from DOS too, so satisfying both sides of that particular 'feature' was going to be a bit tricky.

It's important to emphasise that the NT family never booted from DOS, and always had pre-emptive multi-tasking. It began as a brand new, clean sheet design. The "merging" you describe was only about two things: the UI and application compatibility.

W2K was supposed to look and feel like W98, in an attempt to attract non-professional users because Microsoft wanted to end-of-life the DOS/3.1/95/98/Me development stream.

I recall that W2K had some (slightly controversial) work under the hood to handle application incompatibilities. MS did a good job of ensuring the APIs of the two different operating systems were compatible, but various applications running on the DOS-based versions played a bit fast-and-loose with the APIs. As a result W2K had a few workarounds built in, in order to provide continuity for those wayward 16-bit applications. I recall someone (probably Microsoft?) published a very long list of Windows applications, showing which versions of Windows they would run on. Thank goodness that stuff is pretty much in the past now.

[DimitriP]

2000 was never a home consumer OS. It was for servers and workstations. The consumer line went 95->98->ME->XP.

Most home users never experienced 2k because it wasn't typically sold to home consumers by companies like dell or preloaded on brick and mortar pcs. 2000 and XP were both good operating systems.

win95 to XP SP2 were the original "windows" codebase different from NT, 2000.
Windwos XP SP3 used the same codebase as "NT" . After XP SP3, to today 2026 W11... "It's all NT"

.permissions, registry entries/product keys   determine home/ pro/server flavor;  "rauch und spiegel" as they say in my village  

[BrianHG]

Another note about NT and Win2k, the other versions of windows, w95/98... limited the amount of ram you could have and only supported 1 cpu, 1 core.  Kinda pissed me off, I went from my Amiga4000 to a PC with a dual socketed 500MHz PIII (hope memory serves correctly) with 512mb ram and Win98 couldn't do shit, couldn't even run my raid correctly.

NT4 only had software compatibility issues because of my 2 CPUs, but Win2K pro was really stable except for 2 programs, however, this was poor coding, not the fault of the OS.  (Here's looking at you Protel98's PCB software, when drawing too many arcs and accidentally hitting that radius of 0 causing a divide by 0 error....)

[BrianHG]

Cold Fusion has commented on this as well.

[ejeffrey]

win95 to XP SP2 were the original "windows" codebase different from NT, 2000.
Windwos XP SP3 used the same codebase as "NT" .

What?  No of course not.  Every version of XP was primarily based on the windows 2000 (and windows NT) operating system.  They all used NTLDR and booted directly into 32 bit protected mode with no underlying "DOS" startup phase. They all had versions of the NT kernel, and they all used vm86 mode to run dos applications in a sandbox that couldn't directly access the hardware.   

Thats not to say there was no code sharing, especially with application level code such as Windows explorer. But the idea that XP SP3 was when they changed to the NT kernel is completely wrong.

[Siwastaja]

I recall that W2K had some (slightly controversial) work under the hood to handle application incompatibilities. MS did a good job of ensuring the APIs of the two different operating systems were compatible, but various applications running on the DOS-based versions played a bit fast-and-loose with the APIs. As a result W2K had a few workarounds built in, in order to provide continuity for those wayward 16-bit applications. I recall someone (probably Microsoft?) published a very long list of Windows applications, showing which versions of Windows they would run on. Thank goodness that stuff is pretty much in the past now.

And, to be fair, and this is coming from someone who definitely isn't a Microsoft fan, MS has done stellar job on userland application compatibility. You can mostly still run ages old 16-bit Windows 3 software many of which definitely do all sorts of hack with APIs and direct hardware access. For a such massive under-the-hood rewrite / complete redesign, I have little to nag about Win2000's software compatibility. Like, probably more than 99% of software just worked. 1% can be annoying, sure, still.

[PlainName]

You can mostly still run ages old 16-bit Windows 3 software

If only

W7 on basically killed off the 16-bit stuff. Be good if nlsnipes would work again.

[Ranayna]

Fair enough. I did use it in home environment and considered it being an improvement over 98SE; it went into right direction of unifying the two product lines, but sure enough the transition was not finished at that point. XP being not that different from the 2000 in my opinion shows though they were "almost there" with the 2000.

Another factor that helped XP was that hardware has become significantly faster in time since Win2000 release, so many of performance issues of the 2000 were "fixed" just by brute force alone. And again the same thing happened with Vista/Win7 - Vista was not very performant on the kind of hardware which was typical at a time of it's release, but by the time of Win7 release it has improved to the point that those issues were really non-issues anymore. That's not to claim that "tock" versions in Intel parlance did not actually make any performance improvements - they did, but hardware advances helped a lot for sure.

It is a while back, but wasn't W2K intended to merge the domestic Win98 with the business NT4? I think a significant part of that was moving to pre-emptive interrupts (W3.x was cooperative, can't recall W98 properly but I think it still retained that). Small matter of booting Windows from DOS too, so satisfying both sides of that particular 'feature' was going to be a bit tricky.

As far as i remember that was Windows ME. ME was a hybrid of the old DOS based Windows 95/98, with several Features of NT added on.

2000 was never a home consumer OS. It was for servers and workstations. The consumer line went 95->98->ME->XP.

Most home users never experienced 2k because it wasn't typically sold to home consumers by companies like dell or preloaded on brick and mortar pcs. 2000 and XP were both good operating systems.

win95 to XP SP2 were the original "windows" codebase different from NT, 2000.
Windwos XP SP3 used the same codebase as "NT" . After XP SP3, to today 2026 W11... "It's all NT"

.permissions, registry entries/product keys   determine home/ pro/server flavor;  "rauch und spiegel" as they say in my village  

No. Windows XP was always, from the beginning, a full fledged Windows NT. Essentially XP was Windows 2000 Part 2.
How little the Kernel changed was back then still visible looking at the Kernel version number.
Windows 2000 was NT 5. Windows XP was NT 5.1. Windows Vista was NT 6.0, Windows 7 was 6.1, Windows 8 even stayed on NT 6.1. Only with Windows 10 they upped the Kernel Version to 10.0, only to abandon this again with Windows 11, which is still identifying as NT 10.0

You can mostly still run ages old 16-bit Windows 3 software

If only

W7 on basically killed off the 16-bit stuff. Be good if nlsnipes would work again.

32-bit Versions of Windows 10 should also still be able to run 16bit applications.

[PlainName]

32-bit Versions of Windows 10 should also still be able to run 16bit applications.

Fair enough. Trade-off of nostalgia vs no RAM limit 

[SteveThackery]

win95 to XP SP2 were the original "windows" codebase different from NT, 2000.

That is completely wrong.

The DOS-based stream went: 1, 2, 3, 3.1, 95, 98, ME (ignoring service packs)

The NT-based stream went: NT3.1, NT4, W2K, XP, Vista, W7, W8, W8.1, W10, W11 (ditto)

This is such basic stuff, DimitriP. You can read all about it in Wikipedia.

[themadhippy]

ME and Xp, operating system or virus?

[SteveThackery]

ME and Xp, operating system or virus?

<YAWN>

[madires]

As a side note, Windows 2000's original name was NT 5.0 and it was meant as a continuation of NT, not as an OS for home users.

[asmi]

As a side note, Windows 2000's original name was NT 5.0 and it was meant as a continuation of NT, not as an OS for home users.

As history has shown us, those two things are not mutually exclusive.

[SiliconWizard]

As a side note, Windows 2000's original name was NT 5.0 and it was meant as a continuation of NT, not as an OS for home users.

Yes, for most of the development period it was NT 5.0. They renamed it Windows 2000 really late in the project and while it was targeted at professionals, their goal was already to gather a wider user base than what NT 4.0 workstation had.

And that's what happened. Many PC manufacturers started to ship with Windows 2000 even for their "non-pro" machines. At work we were using NT 4 at the time and we switched to Win 2000 very quickly as it supported USB natively, which NT 4 did not. But I also installed it on my home machines around the same time and I remember many people had it on their home machines before XP got released, but it was short-lived in the "home" market.

MS decided to develop XP for the home market as the 9x line was clearly EOL, but I think it was a fierce fight within MS. IIRC, Dave Plummer has a video talking about that with some guests from MS.

[DimitriP]

win95 to XP SP2 were the original "windows" codebase different from NT, 2000.

That is completely wrong.

The DOS-based stream went: 1, 2, 3, 3.1, 95, 98, ME (ignoring service packs)

The NT-based stream went: NT3.1, NT4, W2K, XP, Vista, W7, W8, W8.1, W10, W11 (ditto)

This is such basic stuff, DimitriP. You can read all about it in Wikipedia.

...the comment was in the vain of consumer vs server , not whether the OS was loading dos or NT.
As for reading it up on Wikipedia...we have an emoji for that ... 
Thanks!

[SteveThackery]

win95 to XP SP2 were the original "windows" codebase different from NT, 2000.

That is completely wrong.

The DOS-based stream went: 1, 2, 3, 3.1, 95, 98, ME (ignoring service packs)

The NT-based stream went: NT3.1, NT4, W2K, XP, Vista, W7, W8, W8.1, W10, W11 (ditto)

This is such basic stuff, DimitriP. You can read all about it in Wikipedia.

...the comment was in the vain of consumer vs server , not whether the OS was loading dos or NT.

No it wasn't. You specifically referred to the codebase for versions up to and including XP SP2, saying it was "original Windows" and "different from NT, 2000".

That's wrong. XP was built on the NT codebase.

It's much better to own your mistakes - people will respect you more.

[SteveThackery]

OK, Linux fans and users: in my quest to switch to Linux I need help choosing a photo and bitmap graphics editing app. I expect this is a question several ex-W11 users would like advice on.

I've done the usual searches but keep coming back to GIMP. I tried it out this afternoon, confident I was smart enough to eat the learning curve for breakfast. WRONG!! WOW, that is one seriously steep curve! I think it would take days of working through tutorials and wrestling with the user interface to get properly up to speed with it.  Also, it doesn't seem to handle high resolution displays properly - it appeared on my screen in miniature, like it doesn't do scaling.

Now, like you all, I've used loads of different graphics editors in Windows; there is a great choice, from simple stuff like Paint up to fully professional tools like the Adobe range. Between those levels are probably dozens of intermediate-level applications which vary in their work flow, their UI, their capabilities.... When it comes to photo and bitmap graphics editing almost everyone will find their needs met by one of the numerous choices.  My choice for now is Paint Shop Pro, because I've been using it since version 3.

So, Linux: is it really all about GIMP? Is there not something intermediate-level with a clean, modern and easy UI that would feel familiar to a Windows refugee?