Measuring total process count seems like a bit of a nonsense metric, it seems more related to how the services are structured or what features you want enabled rather than any measure of "goodness".

From a security and robustness POV, surely /more/ process separation is a good thing?

Of course, and I recall there being a single windows process that pretty much did everything -- but at the same time I knew that there were no other processes acting in the background other than the ones I actively used, and Windows.

So the point is just “shorter list is easier to look through, and remember which processes are supposed to be there”?

In Linux it was usually pretty obvious what daemon did what on a somewhat well curated system, though. No svchost.exe, and no gargantuan system processes or a kernel overstepping its boundaries.

Of course, that’s very different nowadays…

Back then I was not so savvy with what every process did (over the years, of course, one learns). Windows XP had one main process, and everything else was practically userspace apps

Yeah, that makes sense. I think the (slight) backlash you get is from your original statement that that is what makes it the “best OS”, when in reality it arguably rather indicates some problems.

From what I remember a single svchost.exe process instance could be handing multiple "services" - you could see the mapping of service to PID in the Services, and there wasn't a 1:1 relationship.

So did you actually know what services were running based on the processes to support the belief that "there were no other processes acting in the background"?

But they were signed windows services, I didn't have to worry about any nefarious processes coming from the OS itself (at least, not back then...)

There was no signing at that time.

Well, some of these processes did a lot, didn’t they? Sadly, Windows also does or did a lot in the kernel that should actually happen as a process in userspace.

When was this? I used VectorLinux on a 600MHz celeron with 64MB RAM for a year at uni, and I could tell you what every process was doing there - everything else had to go.

Well, okay, puppylinux was pretty good if I recall in that respect. This was ~15ish years ago, and I think that debian and slackware were bloated in comparison to XP back then

Yeah VL was based off slack but they ripped a bunch of things out, and I carefully went over the bootscripts and removed a bit more of things I didn't definitely need.

Blog post please

I don't really blog, and I've forgotten all the juicy details at this point. It was an old thinkpad that just barely booted up windows ME and then couldn't do anything useful. VectorLinux was a really great match for it, I think they claimed to have fiddled with the kde libraries at the source level and ripped out a bunch of things to make it all snappier - I don't know to what extent that's true, but that crappy little laptop allowed me to run firefox, openoffice, skype, matlab and latex (not all at the same time - at most two) for my first year of uni.

Hearing about these esoteric Linux distros and their lore is always interesting.

I'm surprised Skype used to be functional, post Microsoft acquisition I remember constantly fiddling with it to run consistently on fairly recent versions of Ubuntu on a 4th gen i5 latitude.

oh it was a pain in the gluteus maximus, this was before alsa worked properly, so it was using oss, and you could only have one application using the sound card. this means a random flash applet at the bottom of a page on Firefox could easily hold it and Skype would just not work.