There was a few years where every laptop had a fucking touchscreen because everyone, retards in marketing mainly, thought tablets were the future and we'd all be using them as glorified terminals. I used the touchscreen on my laptop once, saw how dirty it made it, and never used it again. And who can forget the fucking, "wHaT's A cOmPuTeR?" commercial with that retarded goblina?
Maybe installing Slackware in 2005 was like that. Debian or Ubuntu mostly just worked on normal computers, it was when you had esoteric peripherals that it got "fun"
I have a laptop like that. I thought it was a great idea. I use the touch screen every couple months when I remember it has one, then remember I don't actually care.
For a time there might have been a point in using Windows 8.1: you can avoid Windows 10 but still use a version MS supports with (security) patches. Ever since official MS support for Windows 8.1 ended there's absolutely no good reason to use it.
I wonder how much of that was entirely artificial. I remember that, for example, some versions of Nvidia GPU drivers refuse to work with certain newer cards/chips on 8.1 that they do work with in 7, however if you hack the driver to bypass some OS version checks in it then everything seems to work fine. It might even have been that the professional Quadro variations of those same chips would have been officially supported in 8.1 by the driver.
windows 8 hate was always overblown, it really came down to the fullscreen start menu which was what people saw right at the start.
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It made my desktop computer have a tablet UI.
