How about they don’t? Open-source Linux, with contributions from gaming companies like valve, will always better for the consumer than a proprietary OS like Windows, that is designed by committee to show the most ads.
Linux is the new gaming os, Microsoft had too many Windows 8 moments.
Thing is, ME as an idea made sense. Win2K wasn’t targeted to consumers, XP was in the pipeline for that, but they needed an interim version until it was ready. It looked like Win2K, but ostensibly compatible with the Win9x line. They just fucked up the execution on the internals, so it was terribly unstable.
Windows 8 had the opposite problem: it improved on Win7 internals, so it was solid, but had a terrible UI that no one asked for.
One could argue that the reason ME failed was very possibly because it was rushed. Win8, on the other hand, looks very much like designed by comitee with either very misguided designers or marketing people at the helm. Because of that, Win8 feels like a much worse failure to me.
It is my understanding that ME was the last DOS-based Windows. My understanding is you can find “MS-DOS 7.0” ISOs floating around out there which IIRC is the DOS version ME is based on that was never released separately but for some reason it happened in China? Like it was used in Chinese computer factories or something? Half remembering an LGR video or something?
I didn’t actually mind the UI once I got used to it. If they had just made some things optional UI wise they would have been fine I think. I hated vista because of all the random things they changed for no real reason that I could understand. They fixed a lot of that with 7, but 8 was a jump too far. It made some sort of sense on touch screens, but given that most devices running windows at the time weren’t touch screens it was problematic for long time users.
But around the same time they began pushing their hybrid surface devices and those all did have a touch screen so as a hardware decision I can still understand why they tried it.
I also kind of feel like it dumbed down a lot of the power user facing controls that most people coming from previous windows versions (especially XP) used pretty frequently. People talk a lot of trash about younger gens not being tech savvy and I feel like this is part of the reason. They couldn’t tell you what control panel was, wouldn’t know what to do with those settings if you told them, let alone using the run command to open msconfig, or the command line. They never had to do that because for them computers and phones just work (most of the time).
It’s frustrating the number of things I feel like Microsoft could have done to make 8 better that didn’t involved the adpocalypse nightmare that they have become with both 10 and especially 11.
There used to be two types of “Windows” in existence. The one based on NT which we use today, and the Win9x line that was basically just an advanced GUI on top of aging MS-DOS. Windows ME was the last of that line, where they tried to pack it full of modern features we’ve come to expect, but still on top of the unstable DOS core. It was an abomination.
I remember just skipping it and going from Win98SE straight to XP. That was the day 80s-style computing died for me, in 2002.
It was notoriously buggy and didn’t offer any reason to upgrade. Everyone stayed on 95, 98, 98se or migrated to Windows 2000. XP offered a compelling reason to upgrade with improved directx support and the rebase onto 2000 tech.
I beta tested 98, 98SE, ME, 2000, XP and a few other things.
My usage lead to 3-4 blue-screen crashes every single day. Keep in mind a system reboot took up to 10 minutes, and there was no such thing as autosave. Back then Microsoft’s victims were conditioned to think this was quirky and unavoidable. This was on a vertically integrated, pre-built product from Gateway (covered in cow-print but that’s a cultural peculiarity from a different time) so there was no unsupported hardware to blame.
No they really dont. Let windows die thw death its always deserved.
They don’t “need” to. There are games that companies refuse to let people run on Linux, so there will be a market for Windows, no matter how shit the experience is.
For now. If enough of the market shifts to Linux those companies will support Linux. Particularly since the CrowdStrike fiasco has spurred Microsoft to crack down on kernel level access which means the days of anti-cheat rootkits are numbered. It’s not going to be long before there’s no functional difference between gaming on Windows and gaming on Linux.
The ace in the hole though is that while Steam is effectively cutting down what Windows OSes it decides it’ll continue supporting, people will want an alternative to go to instead of feeling cornered with Windows 10 and 11. Because that’s all that they have right now for gaming, with Linux being optional, but gamers can be awfully picky about what they want to run.
SteamOS is based on Arch with customization by Valve to make it immutable and a few other tweaks. In theory Valve will release SteamOS Holo (the version used on SteamDeck) for usage on Desktop at some point, but that hasn’t happened yet. In the meantime you can achieve very similar results to SteamOS a variety of ways. Depending on if you care about immutability or not there’s a number of non-Arch distros and even a install script (astOS) that can install Arch configured in an immutable fashion similar to what SteamOS does. There’s also a number of non-immutable gaming focused distros the most prominent of them being Manjaro. Any of them once you install Steam will function very similar to each other and SteamOS.
TIL Microsoft has a handheld gaming platform.
Microsoft flamed out of the mobile OS space precisely because they insisted that Windows not fork, but be identical software running on all devices.
So now, there is no such thing as a windows phone, but every time I wake up my computer I see a vestigial lock screen that I have to dismiss before I log in.
They designed their phones like a company entitled to 85% of the market share. Something tells me they’re not going to reform just to capture that mobile game space.
That Lock Screen is not vestigial, it still loads and displays bing ads. You are the product, not the customer.
I have never seen an ad on my lock screen. Possibly because of all the stuff I have disabled and the fact that I use windows 10. I have some questions.
What does the login screen have to do with mobile? They’ve had them since at least Windows 95 (I forget if 3.1 had one), and they’ve been evolving every release.
If you mean the screen before the login, that’s been around since at least Windows 95 too, though it didn’t used to be default and required you to press Ctrl+alt+del to dismiss (which before win95 would reboot your computer)
