On Friday, 26 June 2015 at 10:40:25 UTC, Dejan Lekic wrote:
> I do not know about others, but I am using XP, and have no plan to move to something else any time soon. However, I am using it rarely, in a VM, whenever I need to test something on Windows. I have no plan of buying a newer Windows. I am sure there are many developers who do the same, or similar. :)

Well, be aware that we don't officially support XP and haven't for a while. Odds are, it'll work in most cases, but there may be functionality in druntime or Phobos which relies on system calls added to Windows in Vista. So, while you're obviously free to use an older version of Windows if you want to, there's no guarantee that it'll work with a current or future release of dmd/druntime/Phobos/etc., and we won't fix it if it doesn't.

- Jonathan M Davis

On 26-Jun-2015 10:35, rsw0x wrote:
> On Thursday, 25 June 2015 at 20:10:30 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky wrote:
>> On 25-Jun-2015 23:06, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>>> On 6/25/15 3:58 PM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>>>> On 25/06/15 18:46, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Heh, that's awesome actually :)  Got a source for that?
>>>>
>>>> Windows 8 was a big failure. Windows 10 is looking much better, I think
>>>> it will get a much higher adaption rate.
>>>>
>>>
>>> With their track record of "every other release" cycle where one is
>>> great (XP, 7, (perhaps) 10) and one is horrid (Vista, 8[.1]), I wonder
>>> if they skipped 9 on purpose :)
>>
>> AFAIK they found that way too many apps do checks like:
>> if(windowsVersion.startsWith("Windows 9"){
>> // use crappy legacy-compatible code
>> }
>> else{
>> // 2k/XP+ etc.
>> }
>
> http://searchcode.com/?q=if%28version%2Cstartswith%28%22windows+9%22%29

Wo-hoo OpenJDK, LOL. And that's given the exact words and only in open-source...

-- 
Dmitry Olshansky

On 06/26/2015 07:34 AM, Dmitry Olshansky wrote:
> On 26-Jun-2015 10:35, rsw0x wrote:
>> On Thursday, 25 June 2015 at 20:10:30 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky wrote:
>>>
>>> AFAIK they found that way too many apps do checks like:
>>> if(windowsVersion.startsWith("Windows 9"){
>>> // use crappy legacy-compatible code
>>> }
>>> else{
>>> // 2k/XP+ etc.
>>> }
>>
>> http://searchcode.com/?q=if%28version%2Cstartswith%28%22windows+9%22%29
>
> Wo-hoo OpenJDK, LOL. And that's given the exact words and only in
> open-source...
>

Heh, yea, I was gonna say it seems telling that most of that appears to be Java stuff.

On 06/25/2015 04:06 PM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> On 6/25/15 3:58 PM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>> On 25/06/15 18:46, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>
>>> Heh, that's awesome actually :)  Got a source for that?
>>
>> Windows 8 was a big failure. Windows 10 is looking much better, I think
>> it will get a much higher adaption rate.
>>
>
> With their track record of "every other release" cycle where one is
> great (XP, 7, (perhaps) 10) and one is horrid (Vista, 8[.1]), I wonder
> if they skipped 9 on purpose :)
>
> I'm definitely looking forward to upgrading to 10 to try it out for
> free, that alone is going to foster huge adoption.
>

(Keep in mind, I'm saying all this as someone who was primarily a Windows guy all the way from 3.1 up to...well, last year: )

No, every other release is *less horrible* than the clusterfuck immediately before.

Pundits and techies thought 7 was great because they were only comparing it to Vista, not to XP. They will likely think 10 is great, because it's what 8 tried to be, not that what 8 tried to be was ever anything worthwhile. Yes, granted, 7 > Vista, and 10 > 8.1. But aside from kernel improvements, XP > 7 > 10. Hell, the supposedly "great" Win7 is what finally pushed me over to Linux. (If I want my OS constantly patronizing me *and* trying to dictate every detail of how my computer is set up, I can just get a Mac...or Ubuntu...or Gnome 3...or any tablet...)

I've been saying for years, all MS ever needed to do was let people have an "XP with updated kernel". But they're too busy screwing with everyone's UIs to ever be willing to offer that, and I'm convinced that's a big part of why XP still exists despite deprecating it and even giving away the newer OSes. Outside of fashion-ville silicon valley, nobody wants MS's brilliant new UI ideas. MS keeps reinventing the steering wheel, and then wonders why fewer and fewer people are biting.

I'll likely be upgrading my Win8.1 partition to 10 (but not my Win7 installations). But not right away, I'm waiting for the reports to roll in on whether the Win10 updater clobbers the linux bootloader (most likely, when have Windows installers not done that?) and then look at the best practices for avoiding/unfucking that.

Judging purely by feature set, Win 10 looks first Windows ever which will actually be usable for work. At least it will have multiple desktops and primitive package management. And no, Windows XP was not usable by any means.

It isn't a good enough reason to switch back to Windows though :)

On Thursday, 25 June 2015 at 19:58:14 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 25/06/15 18:46, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>
>> Heh, that's awesome actually :)  Got a source for that?
>
> Windows 8 was a big failure. Windows 10 is looking much better, I think it will get a much higher adaption rate.

Off-topic, but Windows 10 release will be rather questionable I think. It's only a month away and the preview is still very buggy. Start menu crashing and disappearing or just freezing, search being slow, random hangs, settings resetting, weird issues like the lock screen just disappearing and showing your windows underneath it on one monitor, explorer opening up new windows randomly, and various other issues. And that's only the ones I've found while using the preview, not even considering some of the design decisions. With less than a month to get it finished, it may be rather hit or miss upon release, especially for such a critical update needed to restore faith after Windows 8... (Though, I actually particularly liked Windows 8.1, it improved performance in a lot of ways and added some nice built-in features)

And of course, some decisions that are guaranteed to annoy people, such as the Windows Defender real-time protection setting: "You can turn this setting off temporarily, but if it's off for a while we'll turn it back on automatically". Still, it is an improvement if you didn't like 8, so we'll see how the release goes.

On 06/26/2015 07:26 AM, weaselcat wrote:
>
> Might as well just use wine, it's pretty darn good nowadays.

Relatively speaking. I'm definitely glad to have it, but I still have occasional problems with it, with various programs. For example, I had to give up my favorite code editor because of problems under wine. And wine isn't gonna help at all with stuff like TortoiseGit or Hard Disk Sentinel.

And then a lot of windows stuff needs to be run under mono rather than wine, and mono has occasional problems, too. GitExtensions, for example, absolutely loves to crash (and integrates with the system GUI even more badly than wine). Although I admit I don't know if GitExtensions's crashiness is due to mono's implementation of winforms, or just GitExtensions itself, since I haven't tried it within windows.

On 06/26/2015 07:31 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>
> Well, be aware that we don't officially support XP and haven't for a
> while. Odds are, it'll work in most cases, but there may be
> functionality in druntime or Phobos which relies on system calls added
> to Windows in Vista. So, while you're obviously free to use an older
> version of Windows if you want to, there's no guarantee that it'll work
> with a current or future release of dmd/druntime/Phobos/etc., and we
> won't fix it if it doesn't.
>

Considering that, according to that link Steven posted, XP still has nearly 10x the desktop market share of even Linux (1.57%? Can that even be right?), I think that policy is quite premature and rooted more in excuses rather than reason.

On 06/26/2015 12:09 PM, Dicebot wrote:
> Judging purely by feature set, Win 10 looks first Windows ever which
> will actually be usable for work.

It'll still look like unicorn vomit, though. And they don't let you change that anymore. And MS doesn't let you reconfigure much these days, so you may as well just be using Ubuntu or even OSX.

> At least it will have multiple
> desktops and primitive package management. And no, Windows XP was not
> usable by any means.
>

I'll take a present-day Linux over XP anyway, but:

I used Linux back around that time, in 2001/2002. It wasn't remotely "usable" either:

- Just installing one program meant hours of fucking with manual .deb/.rpm dependency resolution, IF you were lucky enough to even get a .deb/.rpm so you could benefit from actually being told "no, those versions of those two packages are incompatible" in the first place.

- KDE and Gnome were absurdly sluggish bloatware (XP, even with it's higher-than-9x requirements, still just zipped along on the same hardware that KDE/Gnome would bring to a crawl). And the other GUIs were either outright garbage or required days of configuring just to make them usable, let alone anything resembling "nice" or "professional" or "reasonably well thought out.

- And X would literally destroy itself after about a week or two and need a complete reinstall - unless you actually *understood* X's configuration file mess, in which case: god help you ;).

I'd take XP over that any day ;)

Of course, modern-day Windows and Linux are entirely different stories.

On Wednesday, 24 June 2015 at 16:10:44 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
>
> [...]

Win Xp, 7, 8, 10, ...

ReactOS - This Is The Future! :-)
http://reactos.org