1mo ago

How diffrent OSes evolve

191 comments

- Where's RedstarOS?
  
  Redstar os is the best os everyone knows it's the pinnacle of linux engineering
  Sent from my spy-software-free mobile device (verified by my government(TM))
- Real meme is in the comments

Win 10 was definitely an improvement over 8. I'd even argue that 10 as it started out was the best since xp. Of course now 10 has been fully enshitified but it used to be good.
- I would agree that 10 was very good, but i could say similar things about windows 11 which in many ways performs better then 10.
  And yet its shortly after upgrading to 11 that i switched to linux to never look back.
  I think part of the logic in this meme is that it doesn’t matter how good the basic functions of the operating system are but what does is the design philosophy of the company. Loyalty in other systems decreased while Loyalty in windows gained.
  Microsoft force feeding edge, onedrive, burrying the local account option till after the install with Microsoft account.
  Randomly finding an update put a second weather widget on my taskbar that shows a different weather then the one in start. Taskbar icons that cant be closed, only hidden.
  These things don't affect the OS functionality in a big deal but its like i was in an abusive relationship that i finally got out of. No matter how much sweet talking and promises to do better i am not going back.
- I'd even argue that 10 as it started out was the best since xp
  How can you so batantly skip over Win 7? I've heard some argue 10 was better (it wasn't) but that 7 >> XP was pretty undisputed.
  All three are shit compared to Linux, of course (Arch btw).
- 8 wasn't nearly as bad as people think, and there were big improvements to the kernel that make it a definite improvement over 7.
  The problem for most people was the Start screen, which if you could get past, left you with what was a really good OS.
  Less ads and telemetry than 10, too.
  
  8 really doesn’t deserve the hate it gets. It was far better than 10 ever was.
  
  It also had a lot of weird issues that people asked me or mostly techy people around me to fix. People with Windows 7 or 10 had significantly less issues and because of the familiarity (which obviously isn't necessarily a good thing) more people could fix the problem due to having had it themselves.
- I actually loved 8, but only after they allowed the desktop experience to emulate what people were more used to. It was super innovative, though, for the time.
- Relatively speaking yes, absolutely speaking, Windows bad

There isn't an universe where 8 was better than 10.
- 8 was INCREDIBLY fast
  It also used little resources and it was the last time Microsoft pulled a massive dev effort to modernize almost everything in Windows, significantly evolving it's display and rendering pipeline and making a whole different design language
  8 touch interface was also by far the best touch interface I've used
  
  They also forced the touch-like interface onto computers that didn't have a touch screen.
- 8 had a real small install footprint if I recall. It worked on a lot of really shitty hardware that 10 didn't. 8 is definitely not as popular as 10
- There definitely is, I’m posting from there

The only thing I disagree with here is Win8 being apparently better than Win10.
Win8 was really damn annoying to use without a touchscreen, and while Win8.1 did help, Win10 was by far the better implementation of PC Metro IMO.
Having said that, Win11 is exactly where it needs to be. It's all of Win10's worst traits cranked up to 11 with a heaping of it's own bullshit and spyware on top
- Windows 10 should be a dead cat bounce on this chart. Better than 8, worse than 7, better than 11 by a lot.
- Win8 was really damn annoying to use without a touchscreen
  So many people say that but I actually liked the menu. It opened very fast and you could far more quickly find and hit the right tile than that stupid nested programs tree that was the norm in the start menus of earlier Windows versions.
  I'd say considering that telemetry started to creep in primarily with Win 10, 8 was indeed better (meaning less bad).
  
  Personally, I felt like Win8 was an over correction in favor of touch screens vs Win7. Win8.1 was kind of the sweet spot for getting touch screen functionality into Windows while maintaining a consistent UI between tablets, laptops, and desktops. So much so that I would consider it to be separate point on the chart between 8 and 10.
  Win10 did improve the UI a bit over that, but was so much of a step backwards in basically every other regard that I do consider that the point at which Windows started trending consistently downwards. As in, Win10 should be lower then Win7 on that curve, with Win11 lower than that, and no real hope that any future updates or versions will ever improve anything.

Fixed:
- Wait, did you write an actual function for that graph?
  
  Yes
  The Windows function is
  undefined
  
  cos(pix) + 1
  The Linux function is
  undefined
  
  0.05x^2 - 1/2 cos(pix)
- Dude, I am all for people trying and stuff.
  I can tell that you are just starting out in the graph game, and that is cool and all. But compare to OP yours looks terrible. I'm not trying to be mean, I'm just trying to save you from the embarrassment.
  Take another look at OPs graph and pay attendtion to the different thickness in the lines and the unpredictable curves.
  
  I don't think people got the sarcasm :(

10 and 11 are waaaaaaaay better than 8. But meme is meme.
- Maybe out of the box, but with classicshell 8 was better
  
  my dad genuinely preferred Windows 8 with Classic Shell over Windows 7.
- The software I run a 8 figure business with only works in windows and macs. Not a specific title but the software for an entire industry. Linux is nice but still a novelty in my world.
  
  What software is that? Is it something with a really heavy desktop client by nature (e.g CAD, video editing), or could it instead have a browser-based frontend?
  
  Same. Until Linux is supported by scada systems it will only be a service, non-hmi OS, in my world.

Windows 10 on the same level as ME and Vista?.. And worse than 8 with that fucking Metro UI?
Ok. Ok.....oh...kay.
Look I like Linux and want to eventually abandon windows for it, but this is just mindless circle jerking here
- This meme says:
  windows 8 somehow is more beloved than Windows 10 (lmao)
  linux is just one single OS, instead of an agglomerate of hundreds of distributions
  and implies that every single one of them got better with time (lmao)
- Tell me you're new here without saying you're new.

Are you implying that win10 is worse than win8?
- Yea, I'd say Win10/11 is on the same good/shit cycle as always
  Though whether Win12 breaks it and continues the shitty trend is highly likely at this point
  
  Highly disagree, 10 is just worse than 7. Its more like a downward spiral.
- Definitely, yes. Win8 was unusable on desktops but was pretty good on tablets, win10 sucks on both. But the main thing is that spyware/bloatware explosion happened in win10. Xbox services, onedrive, cortana, that weather thing with msn news, fucking candy crush preinstalls, etc, all came with win10.
- Try to install windows 10 on hdd and see for yourself, Linux works fine no matter which device it's loaded from, windows before 10 did too
  
  Windows philosophy is that it comes pre-installed and should be used with recent hardware. You may think of that what you will (environment wise etc), but to me that's a valid design choice to make, in principle.
  
  Can confirm. Win 10 on hdd is torture.
  
  Why would you install Windows 10 on a hard drive? If your computer is that old, you want 7 or XP
  
  I have Windows 10 LTSC installed on an old hard drive and it works fine.
- Which are all significantly better than Mac OS and are especially better than Linux

Saying Windows 10 is worse than Windows 8 is just nonsense. Saying macOS is worse now than 5 years ago is… just dumb? And the colour scheme doesn't make any sense, why is the red at macOS literally higher than the green?
- For the Mac and Linux graphs the color seems to represent the rate. When it's going up it's green and when it's going down it's red.
  
  Yeah, but that's just inconsistent…
- the timeline in the pic is a bit off, but macos is definitely getting worse. I think mavericks was the last version that let you turn off mouse acceleration.
  
  On Sonoma and higher:
  undefined
  
  System Settings > Mouse > Advanced
  On every version:
  undefined
  
  defaults write .GlobalPreferences com.apple.mouse.scaling -1
- maybe because it represents the drop.
- MacOS
- OSX peaked in the 2000s and early 2010s. Apple started walling it off more and more a decade ago.
  Their hardware has gotten better in the past 5 years with the m series chips and getting rid of that terrible keyboard though.

Windows has commited a sin()
- Why? Just cos.
  
  Linux on the other hand gained a lot of exp()

Vista wasn't that bad. The dodgy selling it on computers that couldn't handle it was an issue (much like they still do with selling laptops with only 32gb storage).
I still think it was one of the nicest looking - black taskbar with the start button sticking up, sidebar widgets, aero glass etc
- It was never stable for me. I remember I had a laptop that would always refuse to shut down because "shutdown.exe" was running
  
  Brutal
- You're absolutely right about this. 7 is basically a Vista service pack that got rebranded.
  All of the "good stuff" people credit 7 with came in Vista.
- I remember the hardware situation being very fucked, due to driver authors not updating their shit in time and people trying to get their older stuff working which worked fine under XP, but was incompatible with Vista's new driver model. It took a couple years until the release of 7 for most of those issues to get ironed out.
- I think some of the biggest complaints about Vista were its poor driver support and over-active UAC. You couldn’t hardly do anything on the computer without UAC bugging you for permission when Vista first came out.
  
  "couldn't do anything"
  This was a third-party implementation problem, not an OS issue.
  By the time Third party software stopped being all loosy-goosey like the OS was windows XP, Microsoft had already re-branded the OS to Win7.
  Vista's UAC wasn't any more problematic than sudo is.

None of this makes sense

This implies that Linux is rising but still worse than the worst windows os 🫣🫠🫤😴🤧🤮🥴
- the graphs are separate, not superimposed. I agree it's confusing
  
  I feel like they should cross. For a long time Linux really was "worse" than Windows in the sense that you needed some computer knowledge and deal with incompatibilities with the OS that most people were using; both have gotten better in recent years and Windows has gotten worse, so for some use cases i'd say we could be at the point that the lines cross.
  Written from my Mint laptop, absolutely perfect but i've only used it for internet and office so nothing fancy
  
  They look together to me

What happened to Mac os
- Nothing, OP just needed to shit on it because it's not linux
- Yeah, I'd say it's the ~~best~~ least horrible it's ever been
- Apple sold out to OpenAI.
  
  You mean the optional feature you can turn off?

This is less how OSes evolved and more a line of your perception of Windows. Guess windows 7 was your last one.

I would put win8 lower and win10 as a slight rise but not up to win 7 territory and then plummet. osx should plummet with the iosification of it.

The colouring is shit, MacOS turns red at its peak. So, was it good or bad at that moment?
- So good, it's bad
- It was the best of OS, it was the worst of OS.
- Yeah, and Linux is green all the way through, even though according to the depicted MacOS scale it should only be hitting bright yellow levels at the peak.
- Made in China moment.
  Red is good in the east, green is bad.

10 was way way better than 8 though.

MacOS should be a flatline
- Nah. Snow Leopard was peak UI and Mojave was the last tolerable version. I really need to make it a winter project to customize my desktop to have some of the UI elements that got lost in Mac.

Are you implying that macOS is the best OS, because its arrow is the highest in the graph?
- Plus why are there no milestones labeled , yet the line has an inflection point so obviously the author has an opinion.
  Any idea why MacOSX would trend down recently? I’ve had no objections nor have I heard any. Of course I’m probably in a fanboi echo chamber so could easily have missed someone raining on that parade
- 3 different graphs. You should superimpose them to read it right.

Linux is so bad it's worse than everything else even when others are enshittifying aggressively? Got it!
- https://www.tableau.com/chart/what-is-line-chart
  
  Very good, I'm happy to see you're learning new stuff!
- Over the years I've tried switching to Linux and it definitely was less user friendly. I think Mint has made huge strides and hopefully will be able to take over.
  
  I tried Ubuntu in 2015 or so, and Mint in 2018, and quit both times. Now i've been using Mint since last July.
  I don't know if it's because Linux changed or i changed, but one way or another something clicked. I'm planning on switching entirely to Mint before Win10 reaches end of life because there's no way i'm installing Win11, so i have to migrate my whole workflow by then.

Graphing failed

I feel personally attacked

If your wondering i paid $1 for it at a swap meet, disks are still mint aswell :D
The features aged like milk

"Its the most secure windows version ever!! "

Windows and even Mac are clearly superior. As shown in the graph eventhough Linux is getting better it never even got close.
- I think the way you worded it doesn't make it obvious that you're criticizing the graph specifically and not the os, hence your downvotes. But yes, that graph is absolute mess.
  
  That wink was somewhat intended ;) The graphs are the intended primary meaning, but Linux usability has actually been complicated in the past.
  I.e. I was unable to get a crappy 300$ Laptop running with Linux as a student (ca. 2016) to be used as a youtube/Netflix machine. But that is way in the past. It worked barely when using Windows and I had the hope to prolong its life with Linux. There were some complicated graphic driver issues.

What's so bad about win 11 as an OS? For me it's the most stable windows. Of course the MS crap they want you to include is bs, but that's not really the OS
- It's part of the OS? All of the telemetry, ads, and strange news thingy is a standard part of the OS - if you try to remove it, it'll just get back with any updates.
  So it is really the OS
  it's the same way ubuntu bad now, forcing snaps
  
  Ok fair. I think win 11 is pretty solid in terms of performance, stability and ui (as long as you have the win11 ui and not 10/7/xp legacy things). But other parts of the OS still make it shit.
- Rule of thumb: If it's included with an install where you're clicking through the defaults, to the average user the distinction doesn't matter, it's part of the OS
  
  Also the problem with not being able to deactivate the things properly. See my other comment, I changed my mind, win 11 is shit. But I don't think it's much worse than 10.

Easy to have a constant upward trend when you start off in your parents basement…

Idk macos has kinda always been the same. I would see them as consistently meh.

Win10 compared to straight win8 (not 8.1 or whatever it was that fixed 8) is far superior in some ways. I get people don't like either (I'm a dedicated win8 hater myself), but I would gladly take the win10 UI any day over the horrible failed experiment that was whatever the whole "Everything As An App! No Start Menu!" bullshit they tried in 8. Having your start menu replaced by a full screen app list is the absolute dumbest thing ever and I am so glad we've moved on from that dark age.
Also, what was so bad about Vista? I may have some rose tinted glasses, but I don't remember it being that bad
- Vista was extremely laggy
  Most of win7 was just "vista but when you click on something, something actually happens"
- Me too, Vista was alright for me.

Windows 10 is good, so I don't trust the rest of this now.

Probably an unpopular opinion, but I think 11 is pretty great from a technical standpoint. The only real issue I have is modern standby...I miss having laptops that actually go to sleep and aren't dead a day later. But that's a fight I've given up on.
Now...the ads, MS accounts requirements, tracking and telemetry, the pre-installed bloat like News (a glorified clickbait aggregator), Movies and TV, Office, etc. make what is technically fine into a garbage experience.
- Used to be able to create a list of file path shortcuts that are visible when you right click the file explorer icon pinned to the taskbar. The shortcuts I made in a previous version of windows are still present and functional. But it can't add new ones. Best it can do is add another file explorer icon for each new shortcut.
  You can still drag excel files to an Excel icon pinned to the taskbar, and it adds them to the single list of individual Excel files "pinned" to Excel.
  It just doesn't let you add shortcuts to the pinned file explorer icon anymore. I had a whole workflow based on being able to quickly and easily access a handful of commonly used folders and ms office files. Makes no sense to remove useful functions that already worked.
  
  Afaik you can still download tools to revert to win10 taskbar. Not that I disagree it's super dumb, I didn't update for a long time due to the force merged taskbar icons. If I wanted to use gnome I'd use gnome. I want my 27 inches of real estate used, not to dick around with animations.

Linux is fun! I installed mint ln, everything went well except my wifi wasn't working, spent a while downloading drivers, installing them, turns out I just had the wifi pw wrong. How embarass 🫢

Wasn't 98 the precursor to ME? I thought 2000 was the server version (or something like that)?
- Windows 2000 sold as both a server OS and a workstation OS, but there was no home edition of 2000. There was also no professional version of Me. It would probably be more accurate to say there were two separate paths of evolution that converged with XP.
  NT -> 2000 -> XP
  98 -> ME -> XP
  Though, XP is built off of the NT kernel, so you could also argue that the 9X line ended with ME.
- Yep. In the beginning there were two threads of Windows garbage: Win NT (for companies, with NT kernel) and (MSDOS-based) Win 9x for peasants. Win 2000 was the "last" Win NT and Win Me was the last Win 9x.
  That's not 100% true as Me used something called "Real mode DOS" which limited the OS interactions with DOS and Windows XP was an evolution of the NT kernel, and all subsequent windowses come from that kernel (Vista, 7, 8, etc.. and the Server variants).
  Win Me was the "Mistake Edition" because it was half-baked, most of Microsoft was focusing by then on the next iteration of NT and they even didn't ship to developers the Me version but rather Windows 2000.
  And probably Windows Me was on the knowing about 9/11:
  "System Restore suffered from a bug in the date-stamping functionality that could cause System Restore to incorrectly date-stamp snapshots that were taken after September 8, 2001. This could prevent System Restore from locating these snapshots and cause the system restore process to fail. Microsoft released an update to fix this problem."
- 2000 was the first Windows with an NT kernel that was really usable on the desktop. Some may argue NT 4 but in 2000 almost everything worked as expected. XP was clearly better of course.
  But you're right - ME was actually a successor to 98 and XP was the joint successor to 2000 and ME.
- OP wasn't yet born in the late second millennium, they didn't suffer through monthly reinstalls.
  /j!!
  But yes, for home users NT Windows came with XP.
  
  Can't believe they missed out on the glorious days where to make your product sound futuristic you just stuck the number 2000 somewhere in its name

People forget XP was pretty bad at first just like Windows 98 and like Windows 98 people became less critical after a bunch of major fixes. For Windows 98 this became Windows 98SE and for XP this became XP SP2 (and eventually 3).
Both Vista and 7 had problems before they were fixed after awhile. The most common issue I can remember was UAC and everyone just told you to turn it off to install and use their software and games. There were also a bunch of breaking Win API stuff and a lot of software made for XP just didn't work anymore in Vista+.
People mainly just remember them after they were fixed, except for Vista because 7 came out fairly quickly (just 2 years later). Microsoft does not have a good track record for initial Windows releases but eventually everyone forgets and even some of the bad ones are remembered as the good ones.

Linux isn't an upward curve, either. It mostly is, but those krackle-pops have to put a dent in the curve.

That's not completely true, in Linux there are many points where old software sucks and new software isn't ready for mass adoption. Like when everyone knew x11 was deprecated but nothing supported Wayland (to this day major WMs like cinnamon and xfce still haven't switched over and most small wms never will). It gets better over time but there are dips in quality and Linux devs do sometimes make mistakes.
- A lot of stuff has Wayland support in the works or is totally getting replaced by something better.
  It wouldn't make any sense to try to modify small Window managers as you would end up replacing pretty much all the code.
  
  That's true but for the time being choices are limited (especially on the WM), yes it will be better but that could be years away (although I will admit Sway is a pretty good i3 replacement).
- True, Linux is both the best and the worst at the same time.
  The Base OS is great, but the apps are mostly terrible, with a few notable exceptions.

I liked Vista (I was never a RAM peasant & I liked the glass theme) and hated XP.
I was also always sad how Me was brutally sodomised by shitty third party drivers (who just renamed 98 drives).
I considered W8 and 11 just as mediocre moneygrabs or maybe a marketing stunt.

time just startend standing still for Windows after 10
- Win10 was the last good version of Windows.
  
  i was joking 'Bout the graph, but youre also wrong. Windows XP Was the last good, or 7 maybe.
  
  NT 3.5 was the last good version. Fight me.

Great meme post! This comment section is a scorching hot dumpster fire that beamed carcinogens directly into my retinas. Thanks I hate it.
- Appreciate the warning, I will therefore skip this post o7

Windows Vista was better than 8 and 10, a lot of legacy devices in industry kept extended Vista support for years and years.
- Yes, this is my experience also, it was stable and only a few (at the time) legacy bs didn't work out of the box.
  
  Charting is ops passion!!
- Having used both, Windows Vista was much worse than windows 8.

Win10 is not that bad. And Me was never as bad as Vista or (especially) 8. Also, Linux is not a linear curve, it's stepped.
- In my experience, Me was far worse than Vista, and 8 was more just annoying than anything. Sound cards were nearly impossible to use in Me.
  
  Yeah, me was an unusable dumpster fire.
- ME was the worst. DOS based windows 9x in a world with Win2k and XP launched only 1 year later
  ME Was DOA even if it had been a "flawless" continuation of 98SE
  
  At the time it released, 99% of my software was DOS-based, and in fact I had 1 game that I distinctly remember (Sonic CD) which only ran on Win9x, and could not run on any version of NT. I had no problems with Me, and kept a copy of it on my main PC until XP SP2.

I would rather describe Windows as a dampened oscillation with an undefined steady state.

comparing macos to gravity's rainbow just smells right

y'all it's supposed to be a timeline, a hand drawn one too, that's why 8 is where it is. you guys are taking this way too seriously

So what you're saying is that there has only ever been one Mac OS and one Linux OS?
How about adding some distros?
- How about adding some distros?
  I ain't gonna stop you.

Ummm which 1337 distro we talking about, friend? There’s only one line.
- Linux itself general
- The Linux, GNU/Linux, and BSD ecosystem in general. Since most applications are portable between distributions, an improvement made by one vendor will eventually propagate through everything. A new feature in KDE Plasma will appear both in EndeavourOS and Kubuntu. A security fix in OpenSSH (which is maintained by OpenBSD) will appear in literally all distributions and even Windows.
  (edit) This obviously doesn't include technically Linux/BSD systems like MacOS and Android. Their existence is sacrilege, and while they are on the council, we do not grant them the rank of Linux or BSD distribution.

finally someone realizes windows 8 is better than windows 10
...these comments don't seem to share the same opinion
- *8.1
  8 was an usability nightmare

Linux brainrot

Why is Linux on there? What sense does it make to compare a kernel with an entire system?
Android is Linux. Raspberry OS is Linux. Caldera Open Linux is Linux. Ubuntu is Linux. Debian is Linux. etc.
My experience: Linux is really good on mobile devices (Android). It is really good for affordable hobby projects (RaspberryOS). There are hardly any alternatives on servers and super computers. On my Laptop and my Desktop PC I prefer Windows. Macs are too expensive and Linux tends to be shit there whenever your hardware is brand new and that's exactly when you want to install the OS.
- You’re speaking to a wall on this community
- This literally got posted on "linuxmemes" — people will have the tendency to disagree with you...

191 comments