What you’re refering to as Windows, is in fact, GNU/Windows, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Windows. Windows is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another closed component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “Windows”, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.

There really is a Windows, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Windows is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Windows is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Windows added, or GNU/Windows. All the so-called “Windows” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Windows.

    • silly goose meekah
      8•24 days ago

      I hate windows as much as the next linux user but I have to admit windows has been very stable for me despite having uptimes in the months with my work laptop.

      • @ForgottenUsername@lemmy.world
        2•24 days ago

        Your preaching to the wrong crowd.

        No Linux user is gonna go “perhaps your right, I should switch to windows for its stability”

        You’ve had your work laptop run well for a few months with your on off daily usage. I’m sure there’s many ppl here with various distros running for years without a single reboot.

        Personally I have one running as a mediaserver that hasn’t been offline in two years, and I’m sure that that’s young in this forum.

        • silly goose meekah
          3•24 days ago

          I don’t expect anyone to switch to windows, I’m just saying this myth about windows being unstable does not align with my experiences at all. I haven’t even seen a blue screen since windows 7. All the weird behavior I encountered was fixed by replacing hardware, and without reinstalling windows. Sure, linux might run even longer without rebooting, but saying windows can’t go past 2 days is just a gross exaggeration.

          • @ForgottenUsername@lemmy.world
            2•24 days ago

            I literally turned on my work laptop yesterday and it blue screened on boot. (Win10). Didn’t even get an uptime of 5 minutes. Its not a myth that windows is unstable (in comparison with Linux and macOS).

            And B. Take a joke, clearly my initial post is taking the piss. Windows is less stable than Linux, simply a fact. Hence the comment so people can have a laugh.

    • LimconOP
      18•26 days ago

      I use msys2 (https://www.msys2.org/), it uses pacman as its package manager and has a lot of developer packages (so i can compile fortran and integrating it to python). It comes with bash and a terminal, but I used windows terminal and made a profile for using msys2’s bash, the same on vscode. Then I installed neofetch (https://packages.msys2.org/base/neofetch) and just saw this hahaha.

    • palordrolap
      8•26 days ago

      Someone else already said WSL, but before WSL there was Cygwin, and before Cygwin it was probably the DOS era tbh, but you could definitely get pdksh as a DOS executable back then. (I was never quite brave enough to make pdksh the SHELL in CONFIG.SYS, but I could have.)

      As for Windows’ WM being Explorer, yeah, that’s basically been the case since Windows 95. The desktop itself is a special instance of a folder and the taskbar, at least up to Windows 7 (I’ve been out of touch since then) was a heavily modified partially-floating menu bar.

      Prior to that, Windows 3.x had something called Program Manager which Windows 8 kind of, sort of, went back to (but not really) and everyone hated it. The original Program Manager would have been better, honestly.

      Makes me wonder if the setting is still there in modern Windows to change the WM to something else. It used to be in WIN.INI, so it’s probably a registry key now. No doubt deep instability will result if it’s set to anything other than explorer.exe because of the deep integration that explorer.exe has with literally everything, so probably not worth trying. Also, if you start Explorer when it isn’t the WM, it’ll probably try to do WM things anyway and break whatever else is running.

      • @friend_of_satan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5•25 days ago

        DOS was ok, but when I found Linux with its cli multiprocessing, &, bg, fg, jobs, and alt-f#, my head exploded and I thought about all the time I could have saved in my years of using DOS with its single process terminal interface.

      • @davidgro@lemmy.world
        3•25 days ago

        As far as switching out Explorer goes, it’s not actually the window manager, that’s Aero since Vista - but it is the shell on desktop editions of Windows… But not all editions. Some server editions (“core”) and some specialized other ones have the shell set to literally just a cmd window. There’s no taskbar, no Start, no desktop icons, etc. There’s a cmd window that if closed triggers a reboot. Of course other things can be started from it.

        I’m not sure if there’s a setting that could be changed to make a desktop edition behave like that or vice versa.

    • MadelineEnglish
      3•23 days ago

      they forgot how to make an operating system 12 years ago, it’s all windows 7 leftovers

    • @0ops@lemm.ee
      3•26 days ago

      Git bash, also that screenshot looks like the Windows terminal app

  • astrsk
    18•26 days ago

    +1 for using LTSC with MAS activation. It’s about the only acceptable way to run windows at home, other than doing the same thing but in an isolated VM.

      • @Petter1@lemm.ee
        4•25 days ago

        😄 I just got a GTX 980 out of pity for free from a friend 🥳 first time 4k60Hz gaming in my live, lol

        Now I just need to get wine/proton working. Steam titles already work 😍 but I have not get bottles (installed using yay) to work yet.

          • @Petter1@lemm.ee
            1•24 days ago

            🥳have you tried Wayland with it? (Running Arch GNOME with proprietary drivers, but mostly Xorg due to gaming)

            • @olutukko@lemmy.world
              2•24 days ago

              I have a little bit, but due to gaming I stick with Xorg. also I just use i3wm nowadays which helps me get better performance in some games

                • @olutukko@lemmy.world
                  2•24 days ago

                  baldur’s gate 3 was really unstable with gnome for me, and the fps was like half of what it’s supposed to be. but with i3 I get decent fps and it’s really stable! I’m not that sure about other games because I havent been paying attention to the fps but I feel the performance is generally better. no other game has shown that drastic change though :D

              • silly goose meekah
                1•24 days ago

                Any idea why that would be? I mean RAM limitations could be the issue but otherwise im pretty confused as to why this might happen.

                • @olutukko@lemmy.world
                  1•24 days ago

                  I have no clue. I’ve been wondering the same thing, since I have 16gb ram so ram shouldn’t be the issue

  • bruhduh
    9•25 days ago

    iot version of windows using 4gb of ram on startup!!! Oh fu… Looking at antix linux ram consumption and wiping sweat from forehead