Windows Nostalgia

A recent video on Windows 7 as daily driver OS by Brodie Robertson was hilarious but also arguable.

For me, XP is the best OS ever made by M$. However, it has became not so useful nowadays neither for retro gaming (which 98SE is the king) nor for day-to-day usage, due to both hardware and software incompatibility.

The compromise would be Windows 7. I agree there are too much of accumulated unpatched security vulnerabilities, but there are tricks to mitigate most of those either technically or strategically.

What you can get by spending so much of work manually hardening an outdated system, is the peacefulness of privacy, stability of timelessness and the sense of control. Of course, that context is only in comparison of Windows 10 and 11.

A heavily customized Windows 7 is the closest thing you can get to a Linux-like daily driver, if you just can’t leave Windows ecosystem for some reason.

Linux and Its Discontents

Although I have left it for quite a few years now, but I’m willingly to defend for anyone who is still using Windows 7 as their daily driver. I started using PC since MS-DOS era, and had been a long time Windows “power user” at home and sysadmin at work. So there are many complains about Linux that always make me miss the goodness of Windows ecosystem.

The Good

  • Has Restic as Fastcopy alternative (no gui but has exta encryption)
  • Has Typora 0.11.18 since MarkType is buggy
  • Calibre works great with old windows config files
  • KeepAss/Veracrypt works as exact same as windows
  • qdirstat to replace WinDirStat
  • Has keyd as AutoHotKey alternative
  • Has xinput scripts for Thinkpad trackpoint and Kensington trackballs
  • ALT+F2 = Win+R
  • terminator works as good as cmder, can launch with layouts
  • Has Nirsoft Utility / Sysinternals Suite partial alternatives:
    • journalctl -fxb
    • dmesg -T -w
    • bpytop
    • nethogs
    • stacer

The Bad

  • Has inferior Total Commander alternative (Double Commander)
  • Has inferior Foobar2k alternative (Audacious)
  • Has inferior Opera presto alternative (otter browser)
  • Has inferior Everything alternative (fzf)
  • Ark works as alternative to 7zip, better than p7zip and peazip (but not working for some iso/rar)
  • isomaster as inferior UltraISO alternative
  • neofetch/lshw to show sysinfo, inferior to AIDA64/HWiNFO
  • No rufus alternative (etcher doesn’t work with windows iso, ventoy as workaround)
  • KDE crashes or unstable (quick launch/hotkey issue), using MATE/XFCE instead
  • Portmaster as inferior simplewall alternative
  • Edge not has Read Aloud feature and chrome extension is no good alternative (using self-trained VITS model instead)
  • Has easystroke as StrokesPlus alternative but randomly crash the entire X (Gesturefy works great but only within browsers)
  • Has Copyq as Ditto alternative (laggy response sometimes)
  • Has gparted/clonezilla as inferior diskgenius alternative
  • Veracrypt GUI has user interactive issue (fixed in 1.26.14)

The Ugly

  • Can’t make middle click scrolling system-wide
  • mate-screensaver freezes the entire system (manually patched)
  • mouse setting “ctrl key shows cursor position” blocks RIME switch hotkeys
  • ctrl+shift+v in terminal sometimes gets extra characters (bracketed paste workaround applied)