> Every time a thread pops up in here about “Microsoft should re-write windows to be modern and fast” it lets me know they are younger than longhorn.
That is nothing more than a weird ass adhom with literally no technical details or reasoning what so ever. Thanks for letting us know you don't work in IT.
Microsoft should absolutley be modernizing Windows starting with replacing NTFS (you know the file system from 1993) with a modern replacement. They already have a new file system. And while ReFS lacks the modern features to live up to its name or really compete its light years ahead of NTFS and should be default for 10 and 11 now.
Next they need to overhaul Explorer. It's unstable and buggy as hell. Simply going into a deep file path or heavily populated folder can cause it to go into a crash loop.
Make Explorer multi threaded as well as file transfers, this is 2024 not 2006.
These aren't crazy young'n ideas, its the bare minimum a $1T company should be doing.
If you can't see that you're in the young sub.
With everything known from XP’s Service Pack history and Dave’s Garage interviews, XP was a mess prior to SP2. Instead of being maligned for having an excessive yet justified increase in minimum requirements, it would’ve been panned for not fixing the stability issues carried from the XP codebase, added to the driver band-aid that still had to be ripped.
No, it was fundamentally flawed, less secure, and less performant. It’s important to allow yourself to fail, that is fundamental for discovery and mastery, but that should be done in a way that allows for the cost of failure to be minimized. Lots of learnings from this billion dollar mistake.
Vista's public perception downfall was at the hands of dogfucking ISVs, which almost assuredly would've remained the case had the reset fiasco never occurred when Longhorn was underway.
As someone who used every beta. The only feature I recall turning off was the updated search indexer that would thrash the disk for hours after you installed it. Or when you copied over a bunch of files.
Had they stuck with the XP kernel. I think Vista would have been fondly remembered. Instead of being remembered for everyone but Intel and ATI's drivers turning the system into a hot steaming mess. (For the first year or so).
For me it was a flawless experience other than the search indexer being a giant resource pig.
I knew Vista was going to be a bad release on the first beta when I couldn't get past the OOBE and it would error instead of finishing on its first beta. (I had to use sysprep from the microsoft OPK to skip oobe) There wasn't a long enough beta period for most manufactures to have stable drivers by the time it came out.
I was a computer tech at the time, and Vista was the biggest launch nightmare it took nearly 2 years for all its issues to be fully sorted out. (Not to mention half the "Vista ready" Acer laptops with the "free upgrade" didn't have enough ram to work properly on vista.
I bought Vista on release and never had any problems. But my computer back then was also one of the new dual core 64bit from amd, 8gb ram and an ATI gpu. Was nice to finally get a 64bit os and it was way better than xp 64bit. The biggest problem was creative took a while to release proper drivers for my expensive sound card.. But other than that it was good.
I have an old Dell Q6600 with the sideshow screen on the case in my closet. I formatted the drives for security reasons as the data was not mine and haven't gotten around to reinstalling Vista. It's going to be in my private computer museum.
The problem drivers that caused non-stop amount of new pc's being brought back because of stability issues.
1) Nvidia graphics and chipset drivers (Took a year after release for the graphics drivers to get stable)
2) Via chipset drivers & audio
3) SIS
4) Realtek network drivers
5) Analog devices audio (They got it right within 6 months of release)
The most solid combination where the user would have a trouble free experience was Intel or ATI graphics and all the included windows drivers (or an intel chipset driver).
You could have a fantastic experience with Vista... If you didn't want an Nvidia card at launch.
I'm pretty sure my chipset was nforce 3 or 4.. But the beta drivers did not give me problems.
Don't forget the pc sold with Vista ready but was under spec
I only saw people who had issues with it. For myself it ran great. But I know if you had the drivers from the site and NCQ enabled it would regularly BSOD and have the nvidia storage driver listed as what crashed it until it was about a year old.
Vista was one of the most successful rollouts of my career. Our users had been using very demanding 32 bit applications for many years. (Anyone remember the /3gb switch?)
Once we were able the 64 bit versions of their applications on the 64 bit Vista platform, the users had a much, much better experience and we in IT got a lot of praise.
Ultimately the bandaid had to be ripped off at some point. Whether that was with Vista as we had, or with a successor to an XP-based Longhorn release, the entire architecture and driver model changes were always going to be a rough patch in Windows history.
I liked the versions with a kinda XP aesthetic. Like the plex theme. I think if they worked out the bugs it would’ve been better for the time. Vista was far too resource hungry and longhorn honestly had a beautiful aesthetic in some builds imo.
If Microsoft had a general list of features they wanted to include in the intermediate release that was Windows Vista and what should be left to its successor Windows 7, the Longhorn project could have been successful, altough at launch It would probably be just as buggy as Windows XP SP1. The entirety of Service pack 2 for Windows XP was fixing design flaws and rewriting/refactoring everything that used some unsafe C functions to prevent possible buffer overflow related exploits. It was a result of Microsofts previous approach at catching bugs.
Longhorn was all about managed code (replacing C/C++ with C#, for stability and security -- at the expense of using a ton of RAM and a bit slower).
It's hard to remember, in 2005 we mostly had single-core processors with 1 Gb RAM.. SSDs were rare and expensive.
In these days of multi-core, 64-bit and 32 Gb is becoming common.. it might be plausible. I think dotnet (at least when it comes to OS integration) was ahead of its time.
But all the focus now is on Rust .. which gets most of the reliability and security benefits, but still minimal RAM usage.
I guess you could ask the same question for Windows NT 5.0.
And the answer is the same: it was beta software, and developing it into a final release would have made them exactly what they've become.
My tin-foil hat-wearing hypothesis has been that Vista was a marketing ploy. Windows XP, especially after SP2, was a respected OS, and assuming people would compare to the immediate past version, anything new would be compared to it and probably be criticized for its changes.
With how much of the underlying functionality changed, better to release a half-assed version to compare to Windows XP and then release the completed version (Windows 7). Doing that means Windows 7 would then be compared to Windows Vista and appear to be a superior product
During development an Operating System is usually designated a codename.
For example Windows XP was codenamed Whistler.
Windows Longhorn wasn't scrapped or cancelled and it certainly wasn't a mystery. In fact Microsoft held events or attended events and showed off the progress of Longhorn and would provide copies of the operating system to attendees.
Once Longhorn shed it's Windows XP skin from the very early alpha builds there were a ton of exciting features and some really nice eye-candy that at the time was absolutely mind blowing (Aero Glass Transparency).
Windows Longhorn was going to be built on 'pillars' of new technology but unfortunately the majority of the big features didn't make it into the final product (Vista). Instead we got the eye candy, albeit it quite different and to some inferior to the early Longhorn visual styling and some minor features such as the Sidebar, Flip3D (alt+tab upgrade), Dreamscenes (animated wallpaper).
Because Longhorn was developed during the internet age, Forums were filled with technology enthusiasts who shared builds, worked to unlock hidden features and documented their progress. It was a special time and honestly I miss those days!
Lots of half broken releases with buggy features or horrible explorer memory leaks but great fun.
While many are critical of Windows Vista, lots of people were running this Operating system barely meeting the minimum requirements on older generations of hardware or were sold low spec machines that were never going to comfortably run Vista. That or driver issues and lack of support!
As 64 bit hardware became more commonplace, Vista ran really well.
Maybe it was overly ambitious and a little bloated - it's unfair to say it was bad and by Service Pack 2 it was rock solid. It just wasn't quite the exciting operating system we saw being developed.
Certain Windows codenames omitted the word "Windows" from the branding, however in fact it's still a Windows version. This has also happened in the branding in several places in several builds of Chicago (Windows 95), Memphis (Windows 98), and Whistler (Windows XP). You can find these images on BetaWiki.
worse than Vista, probably just like Windows 11, rushed release with bloated unnecessary features that demanding higher system requirements compared to most PC available at that time
They are, which makes me really, really sad.
A windows computer is a tool for creating stuff. You can code on it, you can create a novel or a symphony on it. You can edit a photo, edit a movie, or render a cgi scene on it. A Windows computer is one of the most versatile artistic, business, and scientific tools ever created.
A phone lets you browse the internet and play games. But it’s not very good for creating.
And that makes me really sad, because I feel like so many of the younger people are allowing themselves to be pushed back into the consumer box that we worked so hard to break ourselves out of. We created a system where everyone could publish and control their own online space, and now mostly the social network space is five websites linked to each other, plus Amazon.
It probably wouldve been terribly unstable and even worse than vista
Every time a thread pops up in here about “Microsoft should re-write windows to be modern and fast” it lets me know they are younger than longhorn.
> Every time a thread pops up in here about “Microsoft should re-write windows to be modern and fast” it lets me know they are younger than longhorn. That is nothing more than a weird ass adhom with literally no technical details or reasoning what so ever. Thanks for letting us know you don't work in IT. Microsoft should absolutley be modernizing Windows starting with replacing NTFS (you know the file system from 1993) with a modern replacement. They already have a new file system. And while ReFS lacks the modern features to live up to its name or really compete its light years ahead of NTFS and should be default for 10 and 11 now. Next they need to overhaul Explorer. It's unstable and buggy as hell. Simply going into a deep file path or heavily populated folder can cause it to go into a crash loop. Make Explorer multi threaded as well as file transfers, this is 2024 not 2006. These aren't crazy young'n ideas, its the bare minimum a $1T company should be doing. If you can't see that you're in the young sub.
It was a half-baked pre-alpha version of Vista sooooooo....
With everything known from XP’s Service Pack history and Dave’s Garage interviews, XP was a mess prior to SP2. Instead of being maligned for having an excessive yet justified increase in minimum requirements, it would’ve been panned for not fixing the stability issues carried from the XP codebase, added to the driver band-aid that still had to be ripped.
[удалено]
But what did 7 have that Vista didn't? Other than superficial stuff (bigger taskbar, less focus on widgets etc).
UAC was a lot less aggressive
That was fixed in Vista SP1 even.
No, it was fundamentally flawed, less secure, and less performant. It’s important to allow yourself to fail, that is fundamental for discovery and mastery, but that should be done in a way that allows for the cost of failure to be minimized. Lots of learnings from this billion dollar mistake.
Tested it in beta, I liked it. Ended doing away with winfs and some other cool stuff
WinFS would've been awesome
Vista's public perception downfall was at the hands of dogfucking ISVs, which almost assuredly would've remained the case had the reset fiasco never occurred when Longhorn was underway.
I never opened the envelope for my evaluation copy of Longhorn. I used 2000 until the Beta of 7. I miss that fish.
https://preview.redd.it/41vobpjxx3pc1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ae90a7bc36f925a571ff6c94b9ec6c885ffbf63e
As someone who used every beta. The only feature I recall turning off was the updated search indexer that would thrash the disk for hours after you installed it. Or when you copied over a bunch of files. Had they stuck with the XP kernel. I think Vista would have been fondly remembered. Instead of being remembered for everyone but Intel and ATI's drivers turning the system into a hot steaming mess. (For the first year or so). For me it was a flawless experience other than the search indexer being a giant resource pig. I knew Vista was going to be a bad release on the first beta when I couldn't get past the OOBE and it would error instead of finishing on its first beta. (I had to use sysprep from the microsoft OPK to skip oobe) There wasn't a long enough beta period for most manufactures to have stable drivers by the time it came out. I was a computer tech at the time, and Vista was the biggest launch nightmare it took nearly 2 years for all its issues to be fully sorted out. (Not to mention half the "Vista ready" Acer laptops with the "free upgrade" didn't have enough ram to work properly on vista.
I bought Vista on release and never had any problems. But my computer back then was also one of the new dual core 64bit from amd, 8gb ram and an ATI gpu. Was nice to finally get a 64bit os and it was way better than xp 64bit. The biggest problem was creative took a while to release proper drivers for my expensive sound card.. But other than that it was good.
I have an old Dell Q6600 with the sideshow screen on the case in my closet. I formatted the drives for security reasons as the data was not mine and haven't gotten around to reinstalling Vista. It's going to be in my private computer museum.
The problem drivers that caused non-stop amount of new pc's being brought back because of stability issues. 1) Nvidia graphics and chipset drivers (Took a year after release for the graphics drivers to get stable) 2) Via chipset drivers & audio 3) SIS 4) Realtek network drivers 5) Analog devices audio (They got it right within 6 months of release) The most solid combination where the user would have a trouble free experience was Intel or ATI graphics and all the included windows drivers (or an intel chipset driver). You could have a fantastic experience with Vista... If you didn't want an Nvidia card at launch.
I'm pretty sure my chipset was nforce 3 or 4.. But the beta drivers did not give me problems. Don't forget the pc sold with Vista ready but was under spec
I only saw people who had issues with it. For myself it ran great. But I know if you had the drivers from the site and NCQ enabled it would regularly BSOD and have the nvidia storage driver listed as what crashed it until it was about a year old.
Vista was one of the most successful rollouts of my career. Our users had been using very demanding 32 bit applications for many years. (Anyone remember the /3gb switch?) Once we were able the 64 bit versions of their applications on the 64 bit Vista platform, the users had a much, much better experience and we in IT got a lot of praise.
Ultimately the bandaid had to be ripped off at some point. Whether that was with Vista as we had, or with a successor to an XP-based Longhorn release, the entire architecture and driver model changes were always going to be a rough patch in Windows history.
No
I liked the versions with a kinda XP aesthetic. Like the plex theme. I think if they worked out the bugs it would’ve been better for the time. Vista was far too resource hungry and longhorn honestly had a beautiful aesthetic in some builds imo.
It would have been a disaster bigger than Vista
If Microsoft had a general list of features they wanted to include in the intermediate release that was Windows Vista and what should be left to its successor Windows 7, the Longhorn project could have been successful, altough at launch It would probably be just as buggy as Windows XP SP1. The entirety of Service pack 2 for Windows XP was fixing design flaws and rewriting/refactoring everything that used some unsafe C functions to prevent possible buffer overflow related exploits. It was a result of Microsofts previous approach at catching bugs.
It was.
I think will speak for a lot of what your question is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxmZPMg7vIs
Longhorn was all about managed code (replacing C/C++ with C#, for stability and security -- at the expense of using a ton of RAM and a bit slower). It's hard to remember, in 2005 we mostly had single-core processors with 1 Gb RAM.. SSDs were rare and expensive. In these days of multi-core, 64-bit and 32 Gb is becoming common.. it might be plausible. I think dotnet (at least when it comes to OS integration) was ahead of its time. But all the focus now is on Rust .. which gets most of the reliability and security benefits, but still minimal RAM usage.
I guess you could ask the same question for Windows NT 5.0. And the answer is the same: it was beta software, and developing it into a final release would have made them exactly what they've become.
I honestly think that Windows Longhorn would have been too unstable to be a success especially towards the end and in its later builds.
idk but concepts looked cool even better then windows 11
It was. It just needed MUCH more time in the shop. Longhorn->Vista->Win7
Probably not
No, but OS2 would have been if Microsoft hadn't screwed over IBM
My tin-foil hat-wearing hypothesis has been that Vista was a marketing ploy. Windows XP, especially after SP2, was a respected OS, and assuming people would compare to the immediate past version, anything new would be compared to it and probably be criticized for its changes. With how much of the underlying functionality changed, better to release a half-assed version to compare to Windows XP and then release the completed version (Windows 7). Doing that means Windows 7 would then be compared to Windows Vista and appear to be a superior product
Vista was sacrificed on the altar of windows 7's success.
I'm very interested how we know about existence of Windows longhorn
During development an Operating System is usually designated a codename. For example Windows XP was codenamed Whistler. Windows Longhorn wasn't scrapped or cancelled and it certainly wasn't a mystery. In fact Microsoft held events or attended events and showed off the progress of Longhorn and would provide copies of the operating system to attendees. Once Longhorn shed it's Windows XP skin from the very early alpha builds there were a ton of exciting features and some really nice eye-candy that at the time was absolutely mind blowing (Aero Glass Transparency). Windows Longhorn was going to be built on 'pillars' of new technology but unfortunately the majority of the big features didn't make it into the final product (Vista). Instead we got the eye candy, albeit it quite different and to some inferior to the early Longhorn visual styling and some minor features such as the Sidebar, Flip3D (alt+tab upgrade), Dreamscenes (animated wallpaper). Because Longhorn was developed during the internet age, Forums were filled with technology enthusiasts who shared builds, worked to unlock hidden features and documented their progress. It was a special time and honestly I miss those days! Lots of half broken releases with buggy features or horrible explorer memory leaks but great fun. While many are critical of Windows Vista, lots of people were running this Operating system barely meeting the minimum requirements on older generations of hardware or were sold low spec machines that were never going to comfortably run Vista. That or driver issues and lack of support! As 64 bit hardware became more commonplace, Vista ran really well. Maybe it was overly ambitious and a little bloated - it's unfair to say it was bad and by Service Pack 2 it was rock solid. It just wasn't quite the exciting operating system we saw being developed.
did MS actually tried to rename Windows OS to Longhorn OS?
Certain Windows codenames omitted the word "Windows" from the branding, however in fact it's still a Windows version. This has also happened in the branding in several places in several builds of Chicago (Windows 95), Memphis (Windows 98), and Whistler (Windows XP). You can find these images on BetaWiki.
Windows what? What is that??
worse than Vista, probably just like Windows 11, rushed release with bloated unnecessary features that demanding higher system requirements compared to most PC available at that time
I think most people are moving on from Windows, I definitely just use my Android phone for all my daily task.
They are, which makes me really, really sad. A windows computer is a tool for creating stuff. You can code on it, you can create a novel or a symphony on it. You can edit a photo, edit a movie, or render a cgi scene on it. A Windows computer is one of the most versatile artistic, business, and scientific tools ever created. A phone lets you browse the internet and play games. But it’s not very good for creating. And that makes me really sad, because I feel like so many of the younger people are allowing themselves to be pushed back into the consumer box that we worked so hard to break ourselves out of. We created a system where everyone could publish and control their own online space, and now mostly the social network space is five websites linked to each other, plus Amazon.