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One of Microsoft's most hated operating systems (Windows ME is difficult to beat on that front) is destined to die in less than a month.
Windows Vista, launched to a less-than-stellar reception on January 30, 2007, saw most of its support stopped back in 2012. On April 11 this year the hammer finally falls. Microsoft warned Vista users that their systems could be compromised by an attacker in the future, especially as Security Essentials support has also now ended for the operating system.
"Windows Vista customers will no longer receive new security updates, non-security hotfixes, free or paid assisted support options, or online technical content updates from Microsoft," Redmond said.
"Microsoft has provided support for Windows Vista for the past 10 years, but the time has come for us, along with our hardware and software partners, to invest our resources towards more recent technologies so that we can continue to deliver great new experiences."
My heart does ache for our brethren, the poor, huddled Windows masses.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Monday March 20 2017, @02:01AM (10 children)
I still have a soft spot for Windows Vista. It's the release that pushed me to be a full-time Linux user.
I think the final push was catching their desktop search utility sending anything that looked like a URL back to Microsoft.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @03:43AM
Vista wasn't bad after the second Service Pack.
I first tried it in early 2006 and it made my laptop slow to a crawl. Completely unusable, even for simple tasks like file copies. By 2010, Vista had improved to be a somewhat decent Operating System, at least as stable as Windows 7.
I used Vista until I got a free (legit) copy of 7 back in 2013. Looking back, it's easy to see that 7 was the final product and Vista was just released to get out of development hell.
I remember all the hype for Longhorn, which ended up being Vista. New Aero effects, new security subsystem, improved stability, new BeOS-style WinFS filesystem. I think Microsoft really tried to do too much and just shipped what they had after five years to get _something_ out the door. It was a mess at first, and I know a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise have tried, switched to Ubuntu for a bit.
What Vista really showed was how disorganized and bureaucratic Microsoft had become. Nothing they've done in the past fifteen years has made me think otherwise, or made me at least think, "Microsoft might actually be recovering." 7 was a decent product, but not really exciting when framed as what Vista was supposed to be. MSFT can not innovate, and they can barely even respond to market trends. Microsoft is directionless and only riding on their legacy of not fucking up Office and Active Directory too terribly. That, and they're in everybody's 401k portfolio over the age of 40. Give those guys another two decades to retire, and they will ride off into the sunset taking Microsoft with them.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Monday March 20 2017, @09:30AM (4 children)
I think the final push was catching their desktop search utility sending anything that looked like a URL back to Microsoft.
And it's only worsened with Windows 10...
What surprised me was when Ubuntu pulled the same bullshit with Amazon.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday March 20 2017, @09:50AM (1 child)
Yep. At least they fixed it eventually and didn't actively fight disabling it. Their mistake was defaulting it to "on".
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Monday March 20 2017, @01:30PM
Agreed. The Tyranny of the Default [pagefair.com] in action.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @01:31PM (1 child)
However unlike Windows, with Linux you have the option to just use another distribution, without completely changing the OS.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday March 21 2017, @09:01AM
Yes, of course. Still seriously disappointing of Canonical to try it though.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 20 2017, @09:51PM (3 children)
Vista wasn't so bad - a lot like ME, if you just took a couple of hours to scour the internet and find a "how to make your Windows Vista/ME work just like XP/98" guide, you could type all those configurations in by hand (mostly registry settings) and then your newly crippled computer would have 97.44% of the comforts of the old OS, plus one or two nifty new features that - well, weren't really that great, but - could be called actual improvements/advancements.
Or, in those days, you could get Linux and spend twice as long trying to get functional drivers working for your hardware - things like the sound output, printer, advanced graphic display, mice and keyboards mostly "just worked" in Linux, but not much else.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday March 20 2017, @10:48PM (2 children)
I must have llucked out. I've only every had pronlem with one computer aout of 18 so far. It was an RTLink wireless crd that I neede to manually rebuild a driver for. Still worked, but very inconvenient, especially for a newb. In general, a better hardware support record than I've had with Windows, and this is with mostly *laptops*.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 21 2017, @03:02AM (1 child)
Ubuntu, since roughly 12.04, has been a good experience for most things. Still a tiny bit wonky on the sound, medium wonky on the OpenGL - but improving. All in all, starting to surpass Windows in terms of ease of installation and use, and Debian package management beats the hell out of installing software for Windows.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @05:03AM
You hit a sore point with me. I don't have a lot of experience with Debian, but my long experience with Fedora/Redhat/CentOS makes me scream with respect to package management.
Biggest issue is when I need a newer version of a program than is supported in the repositories. Just tonight I needed "sar" 10.1.5 on a Redhat 6 box where the latest version in the repo is 9.x.x. I got lucky and was able to build out from source, but many times that is not even an option because of library dependencies.
With windows I can almost always install the latest software without doing a full OS upgrade. I run Fedora 20 on a home box and lots of newer versions of packages can no longer be installed. Upgrading to Fedora 25 will take at least a weekend and probably longer. Meh to Linux package management.