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I recently switched back to Windows after using OS X exclusively for about five years. Windows has the ergonomics and aesthetics of a U-Haul. :) I don't know h

I recently switched back to Windows after using OS X exclusively for about five years. Windows has the ergonomics and aesthetics of a U-Haul. :) I don't know how regular people can use Windows productively without breaking everything. All the controls and settings are so persnickety and janky, built upon strata of earlier generations that are still in the way. There are so many little things Microsoft could do to streamline the user experience and make it feel solid without alienating existing users, but they just keep adding more to the stew or throwing curve balls like Metro.

toast0 10y ago
> I don't know how regular people can use Windows productively without breaking everything. With the keyboard. The UI changes, and the mouse handles move around, but the keyboard shortcuts still work (mostly). After using a Mac for work for almost 5 years, it still annoys me the amount of things you can't easily do without the mouse.
- cpeterso 10y ago
  That's a good point. I worked at Microsoft, back during Windows 2000, and engineering management would encourage "no mouse" days to identify UI that was not keyboard friendly.
72deluxe 10y ago
I don't understand why they haven't updated shell32.dll with new icons in Windows 10, instead of the 50 different icon sets available. Open MMC, put in a snap in, open Explorer, open Control Panel, open Settings and observe the plethora of conflicting icons. It's horrible.
- WorldMaker 10y ago
  Because new icons take artists' time and effort? Windows 10 is slowly converging icon sets, it just clearly takes time. Additionally, as you point out, many of the classic icons are embedded into system DLLs and EXEs. Servicing some of those files is a potential backwards compatibility nightmare and as a programmer I can understand not taking that lightly. (Not to mention, as much as people complain about "unnecessary" restarts from Windows updates, how many people would complain about a restart just to change icons in a system DLL?)
  - 72deluxe 10y ago
    But if they're writing a new system and hailing it as a fresh start, why drag along all the old icons? They could replace those old icons in the same indexes in those DLLs with new flatter icons so it doesn't feel like you're using a horrible mess. It would be a case of opening the RC files and going through the source images, surely? As for it being a nightmare, it is their operating system so they should be able to maintain it... (I think they have sufficient resources to draw icons - after all, they have drawn a new set of flat icons for half of the system). As for the restart for new icons - I would have thought they would have done this before releasing the OS so that it didn't feel like a hodgepodge of different eras. Other inconsistencies include the 3 new menus: the right-click menu on the Start menu, the right-click menu or normal menu within Edge and the right-click menu in Explorer or anywhere else. Apparently it is the same system (and these 3 things were released concurrently, remember) yet they are different. It hardly encourages developers to be consistent if the OS vendor can't be bothered.
    - WorldMaker 10y ago
      As a whole Windows is not a new system nor hailed as a fresh start. Yes, there are new systems in Windows and the Universal Windows Platform is sort of a fresh start (but even then the UWP is certainly more evolutionary than revolutionary in a practical sense, ultimately still having roots way back in COM, early .NET history, and Longhorn ideals that didn't get finished in time for Vista). At the end of the day, even Microsoft's resources aren't infinite: they can prioritize new features and tech or they can prioritize cleaning up old stuff that still works and isn't broken, and unsurprisingly many times they can't prioritize both. I get that the little inconsistencies bug a lot of people, but it's a complex ecology of systems and they all evolve at their own rates. A truly fresh start for Windows would probably have been shutting down the Win32 subsystem altogether and they experimented with that on ARM tablets and people lost their minds; Windows' backwards compatibility swamp means that it will always be a somewhat inconsistent ecology. (Windows is much more consistent on mobile and Xbox and presumably the HoloLens where Windows 10 is less constrained by backwards compatibility ghosts.) To bring it back on topic: complaining about where Windows 10 is now, consistency-wise, is much like the complaints when OS X released and the way Cocoa apps and Carbon apps lived side-by-side. Eventually it will be great when the Windows equivalent to Carbon apps are all gone, but with the long, long tail of Windows apps in the world and even inside Windows itself, that's going to take a while and Microsoft has much less of an ability than Apple to just fiat mandate that Win32 will end of life any time soon (at least not without angering a vast number of developers and users).

toast0 10y ago

> I don't know how regular people can use Windows productively without breaking everything. With the keyboard. The UI changes, and the mouse handles move around, but the keyboard shortcuts still work (mostly). After using a Mac for work for almost 5 years, it still annoys me the amount of things you can't easily do without the mouse.

cpeterso 10y ago
That's a good point. I worked at Microsoft, back during Windows 2000, and engineering management would encourage "no mouse" days to identify UI that was not keyboard friendly.

72deluxe 10y ago

I don't understand why they haven't updated shell32.dll with new icons in Windows 10, instead of the 50 different icon sets available. Open MMC, put in a snap in, open Explorer, open Control Panel, open Settings and observe the plethora of conflicting icons. It's horrible.

WorldMaker 10y ago
Because new icons take artists' time and effort? Windows 10 is slowly converging icon sets, it just clearly takes time. Additionally, as you point out, many of the classic icons are embedded into system DLLs and EXEs. Servicing some of those files is a potential backwards compatibility nightmare and as a programmer I can understand not taking that lightly. (Not to mention, as much as people complain about "unnecessary" restarts from Windows updates, how many people would complain about a restart just to change icons in a system DLL?)
- 72deluxe 10y ago
  But if they're writing a new system and hailing it as a fresh start, why drag along all the old icons? They could replace those old icons in the same indexes in those DLLs with new flatter icons so it doesn't feel like you're using a horrible mess. It would be a case of opening the RC files and going through the source images, surely? As for it being a nightmare, it is their operating system so they should be able to maintain it... (I think they have sufficient resources to draw icons - after all, they have drawn a new set of flat icons for half of the system). As for the restart for new icons - I would have thought they would have done this before releasing the OS so that it didn't feel like a hodgepodge of different eras. Other inconsistencies include the 3 new menus: the right-click menu on the Start menu, the right-click menu or normal menu within Edge and the right-click menu in Explorer or anywhere else. Apparently it is the same system (and these 3 things were released concurrently, remember) yet they are different. It hardly encourages developers to be consistent if the OS vendor can't be bothered.
  - WorldMaker 10y ago
    As a whole Windows is not a new system nor hailed as a fresh start. Yes, there are new systems in Windows and the Universal Windows Platform is sort of a fresh start (but even then the UWP is certainly more evolutionary than revolutionary in a practical sense, ultimately still having roots way back in COM, early .NET history, and Longhorn ideals that didn't get finished in time for Vista). At the end of the day, even Microsoft's resources aren't infinite: they can prioritize new features and tech or they can prioritize cleaning up old stuff that still works and isn't broken, and unsurprisingly many times they can't prioritize both. I get that the little inconsistencies bug a lot of people, but it's a complex ecology of systems and they all evolve at their own rates. A truly fresh start for Windows would probably have been shutting down the Win32 subsystem altogether and they experimented with that on ARM tablets and people lost their minds; Windows' backwards compatibility swamp means that it will always be a somewhat inconsistent ecology. (Windows is much more consistent on mobile and Xbox and presumably the HoloLens where Windows 10 is less constrained by backwards compatibility ghosts.) To bring it back on topic: complaining about where Windows 10 is now, consistency-wise, is much like the complaints when OS X released and the way Cocoa apps and Carbon apps lived side-by-side. Eventually it will be great when the Windows equivalent to Carbon apps are all gone, but with the long, long tail of Windows apps in the world and even inside Windows itself, that's going to take a while and Microsoft has much less of an ability than Apple to just fiat mandate that Win32 will end of life any time soon (at least not without angering a vast number of developers and users).