Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

I don't want to put the preinstalled Windows 7 back on this netbook because it's too underpowered. It came with Windows 7 Starter, I bought and activated a Windows 7 Home Basic license using its Windows Anytime Upgrade, and that turned out to bloat the already sluggish experience.

Since the way back is a poor vintage computing experience, the way forward might be Haiku. I just wonder if it supports the weird graphics resolution 1024x600.

I just found out the hard way that FreeBSD effectively abandoned my Atom netbook starting with 14.3.

The upgrade from the now-EOL 14.2 succeeded, except the drm, i915kms, and other kernel module friends were removed from the i386 pkg repos, & graphics/drm-61-kmod, the only drm-kmod port, refuses to try building on i386.

Looks like this is the end of the Unix-likes road for still fully working x86 PCs.

I stand corrected. The 32-bit Windows versions had Edit.com, but the 64-bit versions didn't. However, starting with 25H2, Windows 11 *does* have a remade and open source text editor named Edit.com, and it works in both Cmd.exe and Powershell.

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS_Editor

GitHub: https://github.com/microsoft/edit

@earthshine @kusuriya TIL, but technically "still in" isn't true. AFAIK, it wasn't in 64-bit Windows versions until Microsoft remade it last year & shipped it in Windows 11 25H2.

@mavica_again I really hope we can eventually find a way to make that not the case.

Windows Script Host is still in Windows 11, & it chooses the VBScript interpreter if a text file is saved with a ".vbs" extension instead of a ".txt" one.

But Windows 11 doesn't even have Notepad anymore, let alone Edit, Edlin, or any other text editor.

Oddly enough, KDE's Kate text editor is in the Microsoft Store. I used it to make sure what I just said was true, & writing a simple "helloworld.vbs" file sparked a moment of joy I haven't felt in any current Windows version in 15 years.

It was a mistake to quit shipping computers and operating systems without even one hobbyist-oriented programming environment preinstalled & featured.

Even a dialect of BASIC, picking up where 8-bit ROM BASICs, GW-BASIC, and QBASIC left off, & much more discoverable & tinker-able than the WSH/VBScript buried deep in every version of Windows since 98, would've been an improvement.

At least then, explorers & would-be hobbyists would have options instantly more viable than the slop machine plague.