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412 points conanxin | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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mxwsn ◴[] No.41084928[source]
This essay by Neal Stephenson was first published in 1999. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_...

The analogy of OS as cars (Windows is a station wagon, Linux is a tank) is brought up in the recent Acquired episode on Microsoft, where Vista was a Dodge Viper but Windows 7 was a Toyota Camry, which is what users actually wanted.

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1. throwawaydummy ◴[] No.41089882[source]
I didn’t know myself let alone computers but anyone know why Vista and Windows 8 got such bad reps?
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2. smackeyacky ◴[] No.41090825[source]
They were given “tablet friendly” user interfaces that made navigation extremely difficult. But Microsoft never finished the job so you’d try to find something in the stupid sliding screen interface only to be thrown into a windows 3.1 era control panel. Windows server of that era was even worse, as mostly you administered using RDP but it never played nice with the “hover here to bring up the whole screen menu” required to drive it.

Underneath it was just Windows, but the interface ruined it

3. theandrewbailey ◴[] No.41092587[source]
I'm one of the few people who thought Vista was fine. It mostly got a bad rap because of bad drivers and high system requirements.
4. thfuran ◴[] No.41093831[source]
Vista significantly changed the security model, introducing UAC and requiring driver signing. This caused a bunch of turmoil. It also had much higher system requirements than xp for decent performance, meaning that it ran at least a bit shit on many people's machines when it was new, and that did it no favors.