End of life for Windows Server 2003 R2 is July 14, 2015

[Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d]

On 06/26/2015 12:09 PM, Dicebot wrote:
> Judging purely by feature set, Win 10 looks first Windows ever which
> will actually be usable for work.

It'll still look like unicorn vomit, though. And they don't let you 
change that anymore. And MS doesn't let you reconfigure much these days, 
so you may as well just be using Ubuntu or even OSX.

> At least it will have multiple
> desktops and primitive package management. And no, Windows XP was not
> usable by any means.
>

I'll take a present-day Linux over XP anyway, but:

I used Linux back around that time, in 2001/2002. It wasn't remotely 
"usable" either:

- Just installing one program meant hours of fucking with manual 
.deb/.rpm dependency resolution, IF you were lucky enough to even get a 
.deb/.rpm so you could benefit from actually being told "no, those 
versions of those two packages are incompatible" in the first place.

- KDE and Gnome were absurdly sluggish bloatware (XP, even with it's 
higher-than-9x requirements, still just zipped along on the same 
hardware that KDE/Gnome would bring to a crawl). And the other GUIs were 
either outright garbage or required days of configuring just to make 
them usable, let alone anything resembling "nice" or "professional" or 
"reasonably well thought out.

- And X would literally destroy itself after about a week or two and 
need a complete reinstall - unless you actually *understood* X's 
configuration file mess, in which case: god help you ;).

I'd take XP over that any day ;)

Of course, modern-day Windows and Linux are entirely different stories.