Different kernel. 95 was still DOS based. I believe a significant amount of stuff (especially drivers of course) which worked on one side didn’t work on the other.
XP was the “merger” - the first NT based system for the consumer market.
XP was the “merger” - the first NT based system for the consumer market.
You're thinking of Windows 2000. Win2K was released before Windows ME, and was widely sold on consumer market computers. When ME came out, and was pretty terrible, Win2K remained as the popular consumer option.
A lot of people did use it on home computers (myself included) but the target was still businesses. XP had TV ads and colorful themes, and all that, while Windows 2000… Didn’t. (Well maybe on C-SPAN or something) And the most basic (major) edition was “Professional” instead of something like “Home” as XP had.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the big box computer makers did ship with it to home users, but it wasn’t “meant” for them.
The googles tells me that Win2K was released Feb 17, 2000, and that ME was released Sep 14, 2000. Plenty of time for word to get out about how much better 2000 was than 9x even for home use.
Ah but in reality that wasn’t entirely the case, direct X compatible drivers were a big sticking point basically until XP came along. Windows 2000 was fantastic as a productivity OS, but it wasn’t fully there for the home user yet
I do recall that for some heavier (in 2000 lol) gaming, people stuck with 9x for a while longer, until better gaming support for 2K came around at least.
It was also a lot more expensive than Windows 9x/me, so most consumer desktops went that way. The only people running 2000 were professionals and nerds that weren’t running Linux.
Oh sure - the intent was for it to be a business-centric OS, it definitely was not flashy, but it was just so much better than 9x that plenty of computer makers made it available, and lots of people chose it over 98SE.
NT was a parallel line of “professional” windows. It had a different kernel or something. There were equivalent versions to most of the home releases.
The first release was NT 3.1, to match version numbers with the home OS.
NT 4 was the professional version of win 95/98.
In the year 2000 Microsoft released both Windows ME, and Windows 2000. ME for the home, 2000 was the NT release for the workplace.
The products were merged with windows XP, now all windows is windows NT.
The version numbering makes sense if you count by the NT version numbers. 2000/ME is version 5, therefore XP is 6, and if you pretend Vista never existed (as you should for your own sanity) you get to windows 7 and it all starts to make sense.
I’m partial to semver where it makes sense and date based releases where it doesn’t. At my work we use <year>.<month>.<version> like 2023.7.v2 for template releases but semver for apps with APIs and such
Gotta know, are you serious or joking here? Follow up question: are you a developer and have you ever worked on a medium+ sized project? The amount of dependencies you end up with is astounding, you can’t just “know” when all those APIs changed, that would be a full time job just to stay on top of. And that’s not even taking into consideration transitive dependencies. If a library doesn’t use semantic versioning, 99% of the time it’s correct to avoid it just to save yourself the headache.
Semantic versioning. If I have 1.0.0 and you release 1.1.0 I can be pretty confident it’s safe to update. If you release 2.0.0 I need to read the release notes and see what broke.
If I have version July2023 and you release August2023 I have no information about if it’s safe to update. That’s terrible. That’s really bad.
This is for dependency management and maybe apis more than OSs, but in general semantic versioning is a very good system. It should be used often.
X is for major overhauls. Y is for a new individual feature added or dramatically reworked, Z is for bug fixes, updates and polish.
Like Blender is currently on 3.6. They had a dramatic major program wide overhaul a few years ago. And since then have been adding new features and reworking old ones in major 3.X releases, and occasionally have smaller updates and fixes in between, giving us 3.X.Y updates.
The only thing I don’t like about that versioning system is the ambiguity that can sometimes arise due to different interpretations of what the numbers after the first dot mean.
You could either say: It’s a decimal system, therefore 3.4 is bigger (comes after) 3.13. (3.4 > 3.13) or, The numbers after each dot are independent, therefore 13 is bigger than 4, so 13 is the newer release.
It’s usually fairly obvious from changelings but every now and then I get tripped up.
I thought Linux Mint did this, but apparently they’re kinda fuzzy about it? Which was not great to learn when I went to update an old laptop, and briefly thought the project had just died.
I had to type this three times because Lemmy closes the comment box and dumps whatever you had typed, if you upvote another comment while it’s open. That’s objectively terrible.
I had to type this three times because Lemmy closes the comment box and dumps whatever you had typed, if you upvote another comment while it’s open. That’s objectively terrible.
Yikes, that is terrible. What client are you using?
I was looking a Linus/Linux comment, I was trying to remember at what point Linus said “I’m incrementing the major version because these numbers are getting too big, there is no major advancement”.
People in general crave the big numbers. It’s why Microsoft is so weird with Xbox naming. Having the Xbox 360 compete with the PlayStation 3 Vs “Xbox 2”.
Firefox also started inflating version numbers because the high version numbers Chrome was using made it look more updated.
Simple, OP and some people just don’t know what they are talking about. There was no “aesthetic reason”.
One of the big changes in GNOME 40 (that would be 3.40) was the introduction of GTK4. People used to assume that the gnome major versioning scheme was tied to GTK, so loads of people were asking the devs when GNOME 4 was coming out.
To demistify this idea of one being tied to the other they just dropped the “3.”, specially since that part wasn’t that relevant and started with the 40.
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