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Re:Make Tmux the OS by dpark on Saturday October 03, 2026 @12:09PM (#49945460)
> Windows XP and earlier was a horrible era for stability and security

Huh? Windows XP was the first NT-based release for home users. It was a milestone in stability.

Re:Make Tmux the OS by sporadicism on Saturday October 03, 2026 @12:20PM (#49945566)
XP was godawful for years security- and stability-wise until the release of SP2.
Re:Make Tmux the OS by dpark on Saturday October 03, 2026 @12:51PM (#49945836)
No it wasn’t. XP was quite solid in terms of stability, miles beyond its predecessors. You have to remember that its mediate predecessor was Windows ME.

It was also far more secure, but it was still not nearly secure enough.

> ”Upon its release, Windows XP received critical acclaim, noting increased performance and stability (especially compared to Windows Me)…”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP

Re:Make Tmux the OS by sporadicism on Saturday October 03, 2026 @01:30PM (#49946111)
It definitely was.

> It was also far more secure, but it was still not nearly secure enough.

That's one way to say "plagued by a decade of botnets."

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP

Now google XP blue screen of death. Still alive and well then.

If the bar is Microsoft's most loathed release, then I guess you could call it stable and secure.

Re:Make Tmux the OS by dpark on Saturday October 03, 2026 @01:46PM (#49946236)
> It definitely was.

Weird that contemporary articles praised its stability then.

> That's one way to say "plagued by a decade of botnets."

No, it’s a way of saying that it introduced real identity-based security isolation to the OS. Prior to this every user had full access to the entire system incisions everyone else’s data who shared the system.

Unfortunately Windows XP was not hardened to the reality of the internet. (Nor were any of its predecessors.)

Re:Make Tmux the OS by anthk on Saturday October 03, 2026 @03:23PM (#49946972)
Compared to W98SE, the actual OS for home users (almost no one used ME), Windows XP was a godsend.
Re:Make Tmux the OS by bigstrat2003 on Saturday October 03, 2026 @12:28PM (#49945622)
Security maybe, but not stability. XP SP1 was rock solid, and even RTM was nowhere close to "godawful".
Re:Make Tmux the OS by kergonath on Saturday October 03, 2026 @01:20PM (#49946052)
It was more stable after the SP2, but initially it was undermined by buggy drivers and rampant malware, NT kernel or not. True, it was better than ME…

What most people remember of XP now is what it became after a couple of years of fixes and improvements, and the contrast with Vista.

Re:Make Tmux the OS by dpark on Saturday October 03, 2026 @01:38PM (#49946162)
It was hailed for its improvements in stability from the time it was released. My recollection was that it was a massive improvement over 98/ME lineage. It was mostly a wash vs Windows 2000.

Yes, it became more stable with the service packs, but it was a significantly more stable OS out of the gates than anything consumer users had been getting.

Rampant malware was a separate (and very significant) issue.

Re:Make Tmux the OS by tehologist on Saturday October 03, 2026 @08:59PM (#49949505)
I was a windows 2k user during that time because win xp was horribly unstable till sp3. It was rock solid after that, finally as good as windows 2k. Though I never liked the Fisher price color scheme.
Re:Make Tmux the OS by kergonath on Sunday October 04, 2026 @07:53AM (#49953083)
> My recollection was that it was a massive improvement over 98/ME lineage.

That much is true.

> It was mostly a wash vs Windows 2000.

No, not really. They did some empirical testing at the university I went to and the conclusion was that they kept the Windows boxes on 2k almost until Vista.

Re:Make Tmux the OS by dpark on Sunday October 04, 2026 @12:44PM (#49955483)
My university switched pretty quickly. But I do not know how empirical that decision was. Anecdotally all of my friends made the switch from 2k and were fine with XP. But again, anecdote. Your university apparently found that 2k was meaningfully more stable for them.
Re:Make Tmux the OS by gizajob on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @05:29AM (#49976165)
IMO Windows 2000 is the platonic ideal Windows and everything else since has been a mis-step.
Re:Make Tmux the OS by orbital-decay on Saturday October 03, 2026 @02:37PM (#49946613)
Sure, but there were also multiple points in time (even after SP2) when you had to unplug the network to install it, because in a couple minutes of being online or in a large LAN it would get infected during the setup and shutdown. You also needed all updates and a third-party firewall on a CD. Win+R shutdown /a is still in my fingertips after all these years.