2025-09-11 -- Rose-Tinted Windows (and Clippy) ============================================== At this point, using Windows is nothing but a distant memory. It's be- coming a surreal thing and feels quite weird, nostalgic, melancholic. It'll be 20 years soon since it was installed as the main OS on one of my boxes. I sometimes try to keep those memories alive by booting it in a VM or on my retro PC, but it really isn't the same. And my memory is beginning to get very fuzzy. I recently found a screen- shot of what I first thought was Windows 2000, because it looks like this shot is from 2002. But no, it's Windows 98: http://www.uninformativ.de/desktop/2002-01-01--Windows98-date-unknown.jpg I could have sworn that I was on Windows 2000 by then. Maybe I switched later that year, maybe not, no idea anymore. I'm beginning to see this whole era through rose-tinted glasses. Espe- cially Win2k. I somehow see it as a rock-solid and well-rounded OS now. Was that really the case? I don't know. But there was something very different back then. And this leads us to current events. There was this Louis Rossmann video recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_Dtmpe9qaQ You've probably already seen it. He chose Clippy as a symbol of ... yeah, of what exactly? It's certainly a clever choice, because Clippy was widely known as the ultra-annoying thing that everybody turned off immediately. Nobody needed it, nobody wanted it. And yet, it was harmless. It's no coincidence that I'm focusing so much on Windows 2000: This was the last Microsoft (desktop) OS that did not betray you. XP's "product activation" was the beginning of the end. As far as I'm aware, this was the first widely deployed software that you did not own but just rented and Microsoft could actually enforce that now. Try installing Windows XP today, using the correct, legit product key that you once bought, and you'll see. It doesn't work anymore. Win2k still does. Office 97 and Clippy still work. My Star Office 3.1 CD, my OS/2 CDs and floppies, MS-DOS, you name it, it all still works. And it works *by design*, unlike XP, which was sabotaged by design. (Yes, yes, sure, you can still get XP to work using some tricks. I know that. That is besides the point. More on that below.) I often lament that I switched to Linux too late (2007), should have done that sooner, but the thing is: During that time, proprietary soft- ware *almost* felt like Free Software, because you could just do what- ever you wanted with it. Maybe it wasn't allowed legally, but you could do it. Yes, you didn't have the source code, which made it much harder, but it was still possible to do a great deal of tweaking and hacking. The whole system felt like it was *your* system. This made it pretty easy to just keep using something like Win2k. And that makes it easy today to view it through those rose-tinted glasses. At the point where we are today, using proprietary software or Free Software is not even a "choice" anymore for me. There is absolutely no way that I'm going to install *anything* on my PC that is hard-wired to the decision making of some company. Microsoft (and Apple and Google and virtually any other company) has direct control over that software, because it is connected to the internet all the time -- assuming it even runs on your machine to begin with. That is so completely unacceptable. I don't even have to make a choice here, no pros and cons to weigh. I don't have to decide that I'm going to use Free Software -- it's just a given. There is no alternative. Of course, Win2k then becomes some glorious thing of the past. Compared to the proprietary software that we have today, *everything* pre-XP feels great. Even Clippy. We have lost this old business model: Buy a program on a CD in a box and then it's yours. And it's much more than just a business model. Now, we live in a dark, depressing dystopia, where none of that exists anymore, everything is rented, everything can be taken away from you at any given point in time, everything can be turned against you. On top of that, it spies on you. This is not what personal computing was like 20-30 years ago. And the darkest, worst, most horrible thing about all this is that I can already hear some people saying: "Yeah, but you can just do $foo and then it works again!" Like the Windows XP thing. I recently re-installed it on one of my old boxes. I got it to work, latest service pack and all that. Yes, I know. But this behavior is just boasting about some of your skills. It's what we nerds love to do. But: By doing this, people legitimize what these companies are doing. Nobody really honestly pushed back on XP, because, you know, FCKGW-RHQQ2-..., yes, cool, you found a little secret and it makes you feel smart. I know that all too well, I was the same. Nobody pushed back on Apple. Nobody will push back on Google when they're going to cripple Android by disallowing installation of software (they call it "sideloading"). If we don't stop being so nerdy and self-centered and, frankly, arro- gant, because we are able to work around some of the restrictions of those companies, then it'll get much, much worse: I guarantee you that the PC platform will be just the same as 2026 Android and iOS some day. They *will* lock that platform down. No more Linux, no more BSD, and Windows and macOS will become the worst nightmare you can imagine. Oh, Linux runs an all the servers now, they can't kill it, you say? Trust me, they will. They will find a way to run it in their datacenters and at the same time stop you from doing it at home (and probably also stop you from running it in *your* datacenter, because hey, have you heard about our cool Instrastructure As A Service product that runs in our cloud?). We must reject these efforts on a fundamental level. But of course, that doesn't make you look smart. It makes you look like some hippie. It, in fact, makes you look *dumb*, because, gosh, don't you know FCKGW?