Very (very) longtime user, with just under 10K albums I can peruse. Took me a while to tweak everything in the UI to my tastes, but now I can't imagine using anything else to listen to streaming music.
And yes, I really do have that many albums. Most of them are LP's and CD's, the rest are from places like Bandcamp (https://bandcamp.com/jerhewet).
I installed Windows 11 and Visual Studio 2022 on my Mac Mini M2 and it works like a bloody charm. It's not as fast as my main Windows development machines, but it's 100% functional and operational.
Bonus: I'm running Little Snitch on the OSX side, and it does a brilliant job of stomping all over Microsoft's telemetry.
That's an Arm version of Windows though. The main reasons to install Windows revolve around the need to use Windows only x86/x64 versions of drivers or software.
There is no M2 version of Visual Studio. The version of Visual Studio 2022 I installed was x64. I have some other x64 software installed as well (Notepad++, AWS CLI, git, etc.) and all of them work just fine under the ARM version of Windows 11 running under VMWare Fusion.
You can pry Windows 7 from my cold, dead hands. As long as ESET NOD32 is still being updated, and as long as the half-dozen applications and tools I use on my two desktop machines still works, I will keep using it.
And please, no specious replies about "Oh noes! The botnets!" or "Linux is so much more awesome!". Do not care. Do not want. W7 was the peak Windows OS, and everything after it was varying degrees of a dumpster fire and/or spyware.
Sometimes people really do build treadmills to be more exhausting and costly than you could have sensibly imagined :\
I never did like a treadmill so I always liked to keep PCs having the original Windows version that they were built for, and when a new version came out I would eventually install that to a different partition and go forward from there with the traditional built-in multibooting approach.
I've even still got two XP machines running Windows 11 that can also boot to 10 or 8 or 7 at a moment's notice, and I've got plenty of drive space to spare.
I like Windows 7 for its native ability to play DVDs like you don't get with newer Windows, so I'm always going to want one partition for W7 on every PC that actually still has a DVD player. With W7 I'm just doing office work or watching DVDs, not even doing vintage games.
Windows 11 really is continuing to increase its failure rate on millions more perfectly working hardware items with each revision, in what can only be recognized as a rehash of the old anti-recycling approach. Tonnes of unnecessary e-waste just in the last year. Is it really worth it just to get an incremental bump for a software business which could otherwise be handled as one of the most environmentally responsible companies if they really tried?
There's supposed to be a net advantage to more digital communication and cutting down less trees for paperwork. I don't know how that includes more 18-wheelers full of perfectly operational electronics being scrapped all the time just because "support" was dropped in order to sell something shiny and new. I know, you've really got to pull out all the stops when the shiny and new is not really what people want as much, and one tactic is to put up hurdles to what people actually want. And you need to make money doing it, and once that pays off numerically, the more you keep people from what they really want, the more it pays off and it can be habit forming and difficult to quit.
I'm not one to mindlessly stay connected to the internet at all times, and never allow Windows to connect except one of the fully-updated partitions, but if the trend I see continues it's only going to get easier for Linux to gain ground in the office simply by dropping the ball when it could have been carried so much further.
Kind of a stern warning that some of the major bastions of enterprise value, such as backward compatibility, may be crumbling faster than realized and it may be later than you think already.
Totally cromulent position if it works for you and you can still get hardware that runs it, AND you can keep it offline? No security updates is kind of a big deal.
I don't know. Is it? This is a legit question, even though the tone might come across as sarcastic. But what exactly is the concern?
I guess I don't buy the "outdated operating system will be hijacked" argument, for not having received its security updates and simply being plugged in.
Let's say you have a decent NAT router that doesn't allow inbound traffic. And let's say that you run a reasonably secure web browser and that's pretty much the sum total of your internet traffic. And let's say you're smart and don't download shareware, screensavers, and the like, only trusted applications from reputable vendors. And let's also suggest that you're not using things like Outlook or other vectors for undesirable inbound junk.
What exactly is the threat model here? An operating system isn't going to get hacked over thin air. I don't see the concern, particularly if you are a savvy computer user. I wouldn't want to run grandma on this setup, but still, I feel reasonably safe with this model.
It's the same reason why I don't advocate or believe in running antivirus software. It's just bloatware and introduces an array of vulnerabilities to my computer (c.f. CrowdStrike or any AV vendor hacks).
I think most vulnerabilities you'll see now are not port attacks but browser ones. For example, there was a jpg one a ways back that has probably been in there forever. So any app you run that links with libjpg and opens that image will be vulnerable. If the OS vendor isn't patching those (win7) any more, down you go.
I don't think it's true that "$current_version - 4 is always the best version in people's mind!". It's very clear to me which Windows versions were good and which were crap.
Sibling comment says windows 10 is the new windows 7. Presumably people will be saying "you can take windows 10 from my cold dead hands" in the future, just like people said it about 7 and XP
That works if the code wasn't written by, well, lunatics who decided that clear simple code was The Work Of Satan and if you couldn't have a tower of interfaces or write your own bafflingly complex ORM, what was even the point? Then the people who follow will almost certainly need some "what" commentary (as well as the "why" but IME the lunatics who spurn clear and simple code never think they have to explain "why" either.)
Oftentimes, the reason for that is that 20 years ago stuff like Doctrine, Liquibase or whatever just didn't exist. You know, the time when PHP developers shipped straight mysql_query calls with direct interpolation of $_GET, and most "enterprise" Java application came with a ton of SQL scripts and a dedicated multi page UPGRADE file explaining in which order you had to run the schema migrations, reboot systems, run manual migration scripts and whatnot to get an upgrade done. Some times, upgrades could literally take days.
Naturally, people invented their own stuff to make stuff just suck a little bit less, and it got more and more used in a company, only ever extended in functionality... the dreaded "corpname-utils" JAR dependency (if you're really unlucky, the JAR having been semi-restored from a half-broken decompile because the sources got lost along the way) or util.php that just got copied over from project to project. And that's how you end up in 2024, still maintaining some ORM that has its origins in Perl code written in the 90s by someone deceased in the '00s. (Yes, I've been there, although not that bad)
In my first job, my older colleagues, most of them now managers, had managed to write their own library. It included its own timezone management, a wrapper o top of DEC's OSF/1 AXP concurrency primitives, a realtime memory-mapped database format, a compiler that run not on files but in expressions stored in an Oracle databse, and even their own CORBA-like object sharing over TCP/IP.
These people were wizards, and probably did a lot of stuff just to show their coding prowess, but a decade later when I joined that company most of the younger programmers did not dare to touch that code. I had to do that when the software was being deployed in Brazil, where nobody had expected how DST changes in the south hemisphere.
> Oftentimes, the reason for that is that 20 years ago stuff like Doctrine, Liquibase or whatever just didn't exist.
Sadly I am talking about something written in Perl (blessed with ORMs since at least 2001) around the early-mid 2010s. Not a single reason it should have been written. The only thing it gave us over well established Perl ORMs were code that no-one understood, no support for that code, and a panoply of infuriating bugs that constantly broke production.
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