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Comment by Maakuth | Hacker News Reader

Windows 2000 was a great OS, I preferred it over XP for as long as it was feasible. Back when Windows XP was released, activation was considered quite intrusive in privacy sense and Windows 2000 was the last release without it. Oh have times changed.

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to the point that whenever I run post win nt machine without theming or compositing I get happy. Seeing that old UX brings all kinds of good memories.

Same goes for classic Mac OS.

true

I never had a lot of love for the System 7 style, but the Copland/MacOS 8 style was gorgeous

I always loved how Mac OS X Server 1.0 (aka Rhapsody) looked. I never got to use it, but it looked like Copland and NeXTStep had a kid (which is basically what it was).

I'm pretty sure at some point I used a Rhapsody Kaleidoscope theme on my PowerMac G4...

fvwm4lyfe

Actually XP was a slight modification over 2000, specially graphically. Hence the version naming 5.0 and 5.1.

I remember Microsoft held back updates to Windows 2000 to force people to upgrade.

I remember USB and wifi support in particular being painful. When I finally had to cave in, I was not happy.

How times have changed indeed :)

Still Windows 2000 was more oriented to servers (which btw was the main business for the NT line until XP). You could easily mistake an XP for 2000 if you removed the skinning.

I removed all the graphical changes for performance reasons on older boxes. People thought it was Windows 2000 as you said.

I ran 2k until i wanted to do a hardware upgrade, and the install didn't like the new motherboard (yes i switched the driver on the disk controller). Tried to get XP going, and ran into some complications. Said "fuck this!" and reached for a Linux distro...

I think situation was kind of the same with Vista and 7. Lots of the groundwork was laid in the first release but the later one was the more polished one that got the big sales.

Nope, Vista is 6.0 and 7 is, well, 7.0.

It's 6.1, you can look at the build version. The same thing as 2000 and XP

You're right, sir, I remembered wrong. In fact I was even stunned back then lol.

Windows 2000 + security updates + WiFi support would be my perfect operating system.

Security updates would only be patches against coding errors and the like, but the architectural security until Vista was defective, and no amount of patches (without changing the OS so much it would have to be considered another one anyway) could fix that.

That sounds pretty close to ReactOS

I seem to recall a rumor that the XP activation system came to be because the BSA threatened to exclude Microsoft unless the latter implemented it.

i skipped winXP completly, at the end ran a highly customized version (got it from kazaa and then improved on it). even managed to install lot of winxp only software on 2000 (thx to massive registry editing) then directly to mac.

Architectural security until at least Vista was, hm, let's say weak.

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