Oh man, this brings me back. I used to love making those streamlined XP installs where I stripped out as much as posisble. Was insane how fast you could get XP.<p>Don't even get me started on when Longhorn leaked. OS ended up sucking but the Longhorn leak was amazing.
It might just be nostalgia but I really liked the GUI for Windows XP. The Start Menu was a clean and intuitive interface to find things you've installed. Windows 10 seems to be a huge step backwards in terms of usability. I tend to use xfce or lxqt on all my Linux systems. These days, all the action is happening in the web browser and I want my operating system is just work.
Yes, one shouldn't use Windows XP. But it's still handy to keep a working XP virtual machine with some basic tools to run ancient programs that one encounters from time to time get the job done...
I have very good memories from Windows XP. I moved from Windows ME (which was absolutely terrible) directly to XP and it was so much better. I even liked the overall appearance. But then I guess nostalgia and being less critical myself back then plays a role...
Ah, POSReady! The special version of Windows XP for point-of-sale systems and ATMs. They have a service life target of something like 15 years, since the companies using them don't want to go through huge replacement cycles if they can possibly help it.
I wonder if ReactOS is by now more lean and mean then XP_SP4, would be nice to run Office2010 in Parallels as I don't really grok the MacOS Office365
I stayed on Windows XP-64 for a very long time. It shared code with the Server 2003 if I remember right. Drivers were solid... if you had them. God help you if you did not. (most of the quality parts did, however) I miss the days of nlite tuning an ISO.<p>As an OS, it did what I'd hope an OS would do - just stay out of the way and let me run my apps.
How hard is it to write your own OS ? Based on experience of Gates and Torvals, I think someone will eventually write an owesome Operating System that will be beautiful abd flashy yet yseful and wont steal user data to make extra money.