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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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Windows has gotten worse in all the ways Software as a Service poisons everything. I get ads directly through my OS now. I fucking hate it. They turned god damned Solitaire into a service, where it serves you ads you have to watch unless you pay for a subscription. I literally installed Windows 3.1 in DOSBOX so I could play good old fashioned Solitaire. Settings are scattered across an odd combination of old legacy menus in Control Panel, and new menus in Settings. I'm under the impression this is still the case in Windows 11. The Screensaver menu is totally unchanged from Windows XP I believe. Start menu search remains bafflingly broken, frequently prioritizing web results over the applications you have installed on your fucking desktop. Although that last one seems maybe marginally better than I remember it? Windows 10 had more updates that needed to be rolled back because they broke shit than I ever remembered happening before, and Windows 11 has even more of that shit than Windows 10 had.

Windows 2000 will always be my favorite Windows. Leaner and meaner than XP, with nearly all the same functionality until you get into some of the really late service packs for XP. Vista was a bit of a resource hog and ruined EAX, but it's Aero skins are here to stay. Windows 7 was more or less inoffensive. Windows 10 however really began the enshitification, and Windows 11 has clearly doubled down on it.