6 ms·

> They started running after the touch segment and deliberately removed the keyboard interface. They didn't get the app-buyers and the keyboard people (like me)

> They started running after the touch segment and deliberately removed the keyboard interface. They didn't get the app-buyers and the keyboard people (like me) probably left them. I get that for ordinary users it's a dealbreaker, but I never understood this complaint about the Windows 8 touch UI from power users or developers. It takes maybe 5 minutes to download and install Classic Shell and suddenly you have a classic UI that lets you forget the new Windows 8 UI ever existed. Otherwise the OS itself was quite better than Windows 7. How that UI change makes it such a dealbreaker just makes no sense to me. If you'd complained about your Linux kernel they'd have just said boo-hoo and told you to go compile your kernel to your liking... but now when it's Windows's turn suddenly the start screen is a showstopper for the whole OS you were such a fan of?

dmitriid 8y ago
> It takes maybe 5 minutes to download and install Classic Shell and suddenly you have a classic UI 1. Where would a user even learn about a "Classic Shell"? 2. Why would a power user install a third-party thing that radically changes the way the system looks? And one whose development stopped in 2017? 3. And, in general, why? It's the OS' job to provide interfaces for power users.
- mehrdadn 8y ago
  1. Google old start menu. It's literally the top result. 2/3. Sigh. I didn't realize setting up Classic Shell was so much harder than setting up a Linux box for a power user, I'm sorry. Power users definitely should be the ones to expect their OSes to be perfect for them out of the box, and it's definitely nuts to expect they'd be the ones to customize their systems.
  - rleigh 8y ago
    The problem with this is primarily that it's not the default. It's a remedial action to make a poorly functional system usable at a basic level. People in the know are aware of Classic Shell. Most people aren't. Most people won't take any remedial actions or even find out that there are options; they'll live with it, hating it, and despising Windows even more. The number of people who go to the effort of installing Classic Shell is a tiny minority of the total userbase.
  - rincebrain 8y ago
    Classic Shell is now unmaintained because MS kept iterating and breaking the APIs being used for it.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      The maintained version is Open Shell: https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
      - acqq 8y ago
        Looking their commit history, all the last "fixes" were rebranding. If I see it right, the latest substantial fix that is an actual improvement was: https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu/issues/53 https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu/issues/53 A patch by Ivo Beltchev himself! In the just world the man would be paid by Microsoft until the end of his life just for what he did up to now. The critical fix before that was important and made by the new maintainers: https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu/pull/33 https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu/pull/33 It also shows that it's a real work keeping everything functioning with each Windows release.
        rincebrain 8y ago
        The problem is, Microsoft Does Not Want to support people using older versions or things which permit emulating older versions. They saw what happened when they let people drag their feet on XP to avoid change, and are seeing it happen with 7, and have been scorched-earthing everywhere to avoid this recurring. That and being fed up with {customers coming to them having cherry-picked individual patches they thought were important from WSUS and then having unreplicable issues, users who just outright disabled updates of any severity} were why 10 is now a rolling release One Big Patch you cannot permanently disable updates for. It's a shame, because from a technical standpoint, Windows 10 has a lot of things I like, but from a usability standpoint, it's sometimes worse than Vista.
  - dmitriid 8y ago
    > it's definitely nuts to expect they'd be the ones to customize their systems. Power users are the ones who actually get tired of customising shit because nothing has sane configuration by default. I have better uses for my time and brain power.
opan 8y ago
Looks changed, but a lot of actions worked the same in Windows 8 from what I remember. The start screen obviously looks different from the old start menu, but in both 7 and 8, you could hit your super key and start typing something to search, which for me was often how I launched applications or found settings. You could still open the run box with super-r, they added that new menu with lots of options like shutting down (super-x IIRC). A lot of people didn't actually try to use Windows 8 like power users. I often defended it early on, and was of the opinion that the visual changes barely mattered. I stopped using Windows entirely before Windows 10 came out. More because I always thought GNU/Linux was better and I'd finally gotten brave enough to go all in than because of a Windows change. I also tend to advocate for a minimal tiling window manager over the major desktop environments in the GNU/Linux world, but something I noticed is that Windows has some really specific keyboard shortcuts that not even GNOME and KDE had. Using Windows without a mouse is surprisingly doable. You can even hit super-b to move the cursor to your tray icons, and from there use space/enter to "click", your menu key for right click equivalent, etc. I think having good keyboard shortcuts in a GUI is really underrated. I use a lot of command line stuff, but a GUI with good keyboard shortcuts is sort of the best of both worlds.
- mattkevan 8y ago
  Pretty sure that early versions of windows were specifically designed to be usable without a mouse as it couldn’t guarantee that the ropey-old DOS-era IBM compatible it was running on actually possessed one. This was in stark contrast to early MacOS which was specifically designed to be unusable without a mouse.
  - DanBC 8y ago
    Maybe, but they kept it up across different products over time. Excel has amazing keyboard shortcuts. Last time I used it (admittedly in 2003) you could do everything except drag the fill handle by using the keyboard.
r3bl 8y ago
To shutdown Windows 8 (not 8.1), you had to swipe from the right to bring up the "charms" thing and that's where the shutdown option was. I remember myself having to search for "how to shutdown Windows 8" and feeling like a moron because I really couldn't figure it out on my own.
- sbr464 8y ago
  I agree. It’s been a while, but using OG Windows, you’d open start, then ctrl + u or similar (it’s been a while), and you could restart without touching the mouse. I couldn’t figure how to do it (if possible) in win 10.
  - emptyfile 8y ago
    Alt + F4 ... been the same for a long time
    - sbr464 8y ago
      thanks. mac convert, forgot.
    - sbr464 8y ago
      Oh, I remember what it was: On newer laptops, you typically have to press a function key to activate f4 (by default). On a thinkpad carbon/dell xps 13 those keys are a bit finicky, especially if used to a mac key layout. In previous windows versions you could press the dedicated windows button then press "u" and the shutdown dialog would open.
- skocznymroczny 8y ago
  or just press alt-f4 on the desktop
- GordonS 8y ago
  You had to do this in Server 2012 too, prior to the R2 release. As much as I like Windows, I never understood the point of crow-barring touch features into Server editions...
vezycash 8y ago
Let's start with Windows 8. The unintuitive horizontal scrolling was because of touch users. Jump to Windows 10 in its present state ruled by Nadella. The anti keyboard campaign is accelerating. The new control panel aka settings menu is designed for touch and mouse only. With classic Windows, shortcuts were discoverable through ordinary usage. Now, you've got to Google em. Not only that, context menus used to have unique shortcut keys. For instance, keyboard right-click, plus R used to activate the property menu. Now it simply goes btw two options and requiring the enter key. Windows was ugly but some features worked or failed reliably. Now the replacements are beautiful but slow and break inexplicably e.g. The network interface is fine, but slow and will stop working if you turn it on/off often. Bluetooth connection has become a try your luck activity. Finally, the new control panel is just frustrating and confusing for simple tasks. It's a step back in usability. Tasks that used to take two clicks now require five or more. Some things are no longer possible
- wayneftw 8y ago
  If you're going to complain about the speed and convenience of developing certain types of software on Windows compared to a Unix system, then I'm with you 100%. I'd rather use Arch to work on anything that's not specific to Windows because most of the open source kits I use were originally developed on and for a Unix-like OS. You know how long it took me to setup my Linux laptop to make it usable though? About a week, to fix all the little annoyances and things that were just missing. I actually had to build some of my own little utilities with things like `xdotools` or whatever, to get it to be feature complete in my eyes. And I'm positive that many here will disagree but Macs are not even able to made usable IMO (especially for heavy keyboard users), so I typically only touch my Macs for testing websites and compiling iOS apps. Meanwhile, in about 5 hours last night I setup a brand new Windows gaming box for my nieces with offline, non-Microsoft account logins, "ads" (aka suggested apps) removed from the start menu, tons of games from Steam and of course Fortnite from Epic games... It took me about 20 minutes of just going through each and every setting in Settings to turn off all the features I didn't want. A couple other things I wanted to turn off were in the Group Policy Editor. This is the same way I setup all of my Windows dev and entertainment boxes and things always run fine after initial setup. (In my house we have like 6 Windows boxes, 2 Linux stations, a Mac Pro, a Macbook Pro and quite a few iDevices. The OS that gives me the least amount of annoyance is Windows, by far. Linux gives the most freedom, but with some annoyance. I find Macs and iDevices the most limiting and annoying of all unless you compare them to Android. We do have some old dead Android devices lying around, but nobody uses them anymore because they stopped receiving updates. We did get one Chromebook for my wife instead of a new laptop and it's pretty nice for remoting into her Windows desktop or for visiting the world of Android apps from time to time. The battery life is amazing too...an Acer Chromebook 14.) However, I don't think you could be more wrong about the usability of Windows, particularly with the keyboard. Windows is more easily navigable with just a keyboard than any other desktop OS that I've seen. The macOS has the worst keyboard navigation. Most Linux desktops including my favorite (XFCE) follow after the Windows style of keyboard navigation, albeit with more bugs than actual Windows. > The anti keyboard campaign is accelerating. ... For instance, keyboard right-click, plus R used to activate the property menu. That's just because you have 2 menu items that both use the _R_ keyboard accelerator. You can easily remove one of them with the registry editor or change its shortcut. (The second menu item you're complaining about is the "Compress to <filename>.zip" command, which you should remove and replace with 7-zip anyway IMO.) > The network interface is fine, but slow and will stop working if you turn it on/off often. ... Bluetooth connection has become a try your luck activity. Haven't seen this. I use a laptop at work and I often switch off between wifi and lan. I use bluetooth headphones all day, no problems... > Finally, the new control panel is just frustrating and confusing for simple tasks. I find it vastly superior to other systems. The search works better than it does on my Macs where Apple just highlights all the matches in the System Preferences instead of giving a normal search result. I can generally find everything I need from the main Settings app whereas with my Manjaro system, I have about 20 different control panels for different things.
acqq 8y ago
> I never understood this complaint about the Windows 8 touch UI from power users or developers. It takes maybe 5 minutes to download and install Classic Shell and suddenly you have a classic UI that lets you forget the new Windows 8 UI ever existed. That statement shows the complete misrepresentation of what happened and the size of the players: - Microsoft is a company worth 750 billion USD. There are around 1.5 billion users of their OSes in the world. They decide to change the way the users use their OS. - Microsoft releases "a new OS", people can't use the knowledge they already acquired, and the new implementation is intuitive, buggy and ridden with real UI problems. - It remains so for a while. - Eventually one programmer invests a lot of his time to be able to fix the problems intentionally introduced by the 750 billion USD company. He releases his program for free. - Every new Microsoft's update of OS again breaks the free program of the single programmer again. He has to invest his time to re-implement the functionality that already existed. Before he fixes it, the OS would again effectively be broken on each user's machine (sometimes actually not functioning due to the interaction of the OS and the non-compatible version of the Classic Shell, at best if the Classic Shell is disabled the OS is in its "original" brokenness). The programmer has to maintain the updates and care how his users get them, but he still fights the 750 billion Goliath. - So the programmer has to be fast enough to adjust his releases with every new Microsoft release, to work a lot for each of those as Microsoft absurdly doesn't care for a single programmer who actually makes their own product significantly more usable for many of its users. - Eventually the programmer just decides he can't do it anymore: http://www.classicshell.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8147 http://www.classicshell.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8147 In short it's a tale of a single programmer making Windows more usable to many millions of users against the active work of the whole managerial structure of 750 billion USD Microsoft(!), the structure directly being paid to effectively make many of their users less satisfied and less productive, to the point of the users being unable or even unwilling to use the OS. It is that absurd. All that is completely misrepresented with: "I never understood this complaint ...It takes maybe 5 minutes to download and install Classic Shell."
- LifeLiverTransp 8y ago
  The power users are the goto point for alot of not power users. So you spend hours and hours of 5 Minutes restoring windows to its original state, and reinstalling that over and over again, when the updates come.
alxlaz 8y ago
Classic Shell is no longer maintained. It works okay-ish today, but while it was still maintained, its developers had to regularly fix it, because it does rely on undocumented APIs. It's a pretty safe bet that it won't work in the 2020 release, and I'm not aware of any good alternative. A lot of Linux (and Windows) users don't realize it, but the amount of work that independent developers put into making Windows 10 (and Windows 8) useful for non-consumer applications, like software development or CAD, is breathtaking. There's probably an order of magnitude more people involved in that than in FOSS desktop development right now. This obviously says a lot about Windows' popularity (which, post-Windows 2000, is actually not all that undeserved), but it also says a lot about just how astonishingly terrible some of its design decisions were. Twenty years ago, the kind of hackery that gave us Windows Blinds was considered amazing, but borderline useless, because who the hell needs that after the age of 16. Today, that kind of hackery is essential because who the hell can use that after the age of 16? There has been no shortage of poorly-though UI changes on Linux, either, but you can at least avoid them there, because you have several choices of desktop environments. (Edit: yes, I know about OpenShell. Its last bugfix was in August last year.)
- mehrdadn 8y ago
  > Classic Shell is no longer maintained. It works okay-ish today, but while it was still maintained, its developers had to regularly fix it, because it does rely on undocumented APIs. It's a pretty safe bet that it won't work in the 2020 release, and I'm not aware of any good alternative. First of all they did continue it on a fork, but in any case, what's this obsession with recent commits? Lack of recent commits means broken software? Have you actually used Classic Shell? I've been using it for years on Windows 8 and 10 and it's been working fine on both despite the lack of maintenance. In my mind it didn't need any.
  - alxlaz 8y ago
    I have to use Windows on a few machines, so yes, I have "actually used Classic Shell", and have occasionally hit some of the bugs. I dug into one of them but it's been so long since I've written any Windows-related code that I can't really do anything useful anymore :(.
cm2187 8y ago
A lots of the Windows 8/10 design decisions are outright mistakes, not even controversial. Like in Windows 8, you had to place your mouse on the far right of the screen to access certain features. Fine with a small laptop touch screen, but clearly they haven’t tried it on a 4k, 42” non touch screen at native resolution where the side of the screen is far far away in term of mouse travel. I believe to this day, the Windows 10 start menu search feature is non deterministic (I removed Cortana and web search). I can search twice the same words and I won’t see the same results, seems random. You can search “SQL management Studio” and “SQL server management studio” won’t show up at any point of the typing (it did in Win7). It feels just broken. Having two control panels with some settings in one, some others in the other, and because they progressively move them you are never sure where to find them is just bad. I have many other examples like that. They are not a matter of taste, it is just bad QA and bad design.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  Is there an explicit strategy or vision for Windows? Does anyone know what it is?
- mpnordland 8y ago
  I have a similar search setup to yours at work. I type 'm' and get management studio every time. My previous computer developed it, and then it took some time for my current one to get it, but now it always works. I agree that there's some sort of learning going on with the search.

dmitriid 8y ago

> It takes maybe 5 minutes to download and install Classic Shell and suddenly you have a classic UI 1. Where would a user even learn about a "Classic Shell"? 2. Why would a power user install a third-party thing that radically changes the way the system looks? And one whose development stopped in 2017? 3. And, in general, why? It's the OS' job to provide interfaces for power users.

mehrdadn 8y ago
1. Google old start menu. It's literally the top result. 2/3. Sigh. I didn't realize setting up Classic Shell was so much harder than setting up a Linux box for a power user, I'm sorry. Power users definitely should be the ones to expect their OSes to be perfect for them out of the box, and it's definitely nuts to expect they'd be the ones to customize their systems.
- rleigh 8y ago
  The problem with this is primarily that it's not the default. It's a remedial action to make a poorly functional system usable at a basic level. People in the know are aware of Classic Shell. Most people aren't. Most people won't take any remedial actions or even find out that there are options; they'll live with it, hating it, and despising Windows even more. The number of people who go to the effort of installing Classic Shell is a tiny minority of the total userbase.
- rincebrain 8y ago
  Classic Shell is now unmaintained because MS kept iterating and breaking the APIs being used for it.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    The maintained version is Open Shell: https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
    - acqq 8y ago
      Looking their commit history, all the last "fixes" were rebranding. If I see it right, the latest substantial fix that is an actual improvement was: https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu/issues/53 https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu/issues/53 A patch by Ivo Beltchev himself! In the just world the man would be paid by Microsoft until the end of his life just for what he did up to now. The critical fix before that was important and made by the new maintainers: https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu/pull/33 https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu/pull/33 It also shows that it's a real work keeping everything functioning with each Windows release.
      - rincebrain 8y ago
        The problem is, Microsoft Does Not Want to support people using older versions or things which permit emulating older versions. They saw what happened when they let people drag their feet on XP to avoid change, and are seeing it happen with 7, and have been scorched-earthing everywhere to avoid this recurring. That and being fed up with {customers coming to them having cherry-picked individual patches they thought were important from WSUS and then having unreplicable issues, users who just outright disabled updates of any severity} were why 10 is now a rolling release One Big Patch you cannot permanently disable updates for. It's a shame, because from a technical standpoint, Windows 10 has a lot of things I like, but from a usability standpoint, it's sometimes worse than Vista.
- dmitriid 8y ago
  > it's definitely nuts to expect they'd be the ones to customize their systems. Power users are the ones who actually get tired of customising shit because nothing has sane configuration by default. I have better uses for my time and brain power.

opan 8y ago

Looks changed, but a lot of actions worked the same in Windows 8 from what I remember. The start screen obviously looks different from the old start menu, but in both 7 and 8, you could hit your super key and start typing something to search, which for me was often how I launched applications or found settings. You could still open the run box with super-r, they added that new menu with lots of options like shutting down (super-x IIRC). A lot of people didn't actually try to use Windows 8 like power users. I often defended it early on, and was of the opinion that the visual changes barely mattered. I stopped using Windows entirely before Windows 10 came out. More because I always thought GNU/Linux was better and I'd finally gotten brave enough to go all in than because of a Windows change. I also tend to advocate for a minimal tiling window manager over the major desktop environments in the GNU/Linux world, but something I noticed is that Windows has some really specific keyboard shortcuts that not even GNOME and KDE had. Using Windows without a mouse is surprisingly doable. You can even hit super-b to move the cursor to your tray icons, and from there use space/enter to "click", your menu key for right click equivalent, etc. I think having good keyboard shortcuts in a GUI is really underrated. I use a lot of command line stuff, but a GUI with good keyboard shortcuts is sort of the best of both worlds.

mattkevan 8y ago
Pretty sure that early versions of windows were specifically designed to be usable without a mouse as it couldn’t guarantee that the ropey-old DOS-era IBM compatible it was running on actually possessed one. This was in stark contrast to early MacOS which was specifically designed to be unusable without a mouse.
- DanBC 8y ago
  Maybe, but they kept it up across different products over time. Excel has amazing keyboard shortcuts. Last time I used it (admittedly in 2003) you could do everything except drag the fill handle by using the keyboard.

r3bl 8y ago

To shutdown Windows 8 (not 8.1), you had to swipe from the right to bring up the "charms" thing and that's where the shutdown option was. I remember myself having to search for "how to shutdown Windows 8" and feeling like a moron because I really couldn't figure it out on my own.

sbr464 8y ago
I agree. It’s been a while, but using OG Windows, you’d open start, then ctrl + u or similar (it’s been a while), and you could restart without touching the mouse. I couldn’t figure how to do it (if possible) in win 10.
- emptyfile 8y ago
  Alt + F4 ... been the same for a long time
  - sbr464 8y ago
    thanks. mac convert, forgot.
  - sbr464 8y ago
    Oh, I remember what it was: On newer laptops, you typically have to press a function key to activate f4 (by default). On a thinkpad carbon/dell xps 13 those keys are a bit finicky, especially if used to a mac key layout. In previous windows versions you could press the dedicated windows button then press "u" and the shutdown dialog would open.
skocznymroczny 8y ago
or just press alt-f4 on the desktop
GordonS 8y ago
You had to do this in Server 2012 too, prior to the R2 release. As much as I like Windows, I never understood the point of crow-barring touch features into Server editions...

vezycash 8y ago

Let's start with Windows 8. The unintuitive horizontal scrolling was because of touch users. Jump to Windows 10 in its present state ruled by Nadella. The anti keyboard campaign is accelerating. The new control panel aka settings menu is designed for touch and mouse only. With classic Windows, shortcuts were discoverable through ordinary usage. Now, you've got to Google em. Not only that, context menus used to have unique shortcut keys. For instance, keyboard right-click, plus R used to activate the property menu. Now it simply goes btw two options and requiring the enter key. Windows was ugly but some features worked or failed reliably. Now the replacements are beautiful but slow and break inexplicably e.g. The network interface is fine, but slow and will stop working if you turn it on/off often. Bluetooth connection has become a try your luck activity. Finally, the new control panel is just frustrating and confusing for simple tasks. It's a step back in usability. Tasks that used to take two clicks now require five or more. Some things are no longer possible

wayneftw 8y ago
If you're going to complain about the speed and convenience of developing certain types of software on Windows compared to a Unix system, then I'm with you 100%. I'd rather use Arch to work on anything that's not specific to Windows because most of the open source kits I use were originally developed on and for a Unix-like OS. You know how long it took me to setup my Linux laptop to make it usable though? About a week, to fix all the little annoyances and things that were just missing. I actually had to build some of my own little utilities with things like `xdotools` or whatever, to get it to be feature complete in my eyes. And I'm positive that many here will disagree but Macs are not even able to made usable IMO (especially for heavy keyboard users), so I typically only touch my Macs for testing websites and compiling iOS apps. Meanwhile, in about 5 hours last night I setup a brand new Windows gaming box for my nieces with offline, non-Microsoft account logins, "ads" (aka suggested apps) removed from the start menu, tons of games from Steam and of course Fortnite from Epic games... It took me about 20 minutes of just going through each and every setting in Settings to turn off all the features I didn't want. A couple other things I wanted to turn off were in the Group Policy Editor. This is the same way I setup all of my Windows dev and entertainment boxes and things always run fine after initial setup. (In my house we have like 6 Windows boxes, 2 Linux stations, a Mac Pro, a Macbook Pro and quite a few iDevices. The OS that gives me the least amount of annoyance is Windows, by far. Linux gives the most freedom, but with some annoyance. I find Macs and iDevices the most limiting and annoying of all unless you compare them to Android. We do have some old dead Android devices lying around, but nobody uses them anymore because they stopped receiving updates. We did get one Chromebook for my wife instead of a new laptop and it's pretty nice for remoting into her Windows desktop or for visiting the world of Android apps from time to time. The battery life is amazing too...an Acer Chromebook 14.) However, I don't think you could be more wrong about the usability of Windows, particularly with the keyboard. Windows is more easily navigable with just a keyboard than any other desktop OS that I've seen. The macOS has the worst keyboard navigation. Most Linux desktops including my favorite (XFCE) follow after the Windows style of keyboard navigation, albeit with more bugs than actual Windows. > The anti keyboard campaign is accelerating. ... For instance, keyboard right-click, plus R used to activate the property menu. That's just because you have 2 menu items that both use the _R_ keyboard accelerator. You can easily remove one of them with the registry editor or change its shortcut. (The second menu item you're complaining about is the "Compress to <filename>.zip" command, which you should remove and replace with 7-zip anyway IMO.) > The network interface is fine, but slow and will stop working if you turn it on/off often. ... Bluetooth connection has become a try your luck activity. Haven't seen this. I use a laptop at work and I often switch off between wifi and lan. I use bluetooth headphones all day, no problems... > Finally, the new control panel is just frustrating and confusing for simple tasks. I find it vastly superior to other systems. The search works better than it does on my Macs where Apple just highlights all the matches in the System Preferences instead of giving a normal search result. I can generally find everything I need from the main Settings app whereas with my Manjaro system, I have about 20 different control panels for different things.

acqq 8y ago

> I never understood this complaint about the Windows 8 touch UI from power users or developers. It takes maybe 5 minutes to download and install Classic Shell and suddenly you have a classic UI that lets you forget the new Windows 8 UI ever existed. That statement shows the complete misrepresentation of what happened and the size of the players: - Microsoft is a company worth 750 billion USD. There are around 1.5 billion users of their OSes in the world. They decide to change the way the users use their OS. - Microsoft releases "a new OS", people can't use the knowledge they already acquired, and the new implementation is intuitive, buggy and ridden with real UI problems. - It remains so for a while. - Eventually one programmer invests a lot of his time to be able to fix the problems intentionally introduced by the 750 billion USD company. He releases his program for free. - Every new Microsoft's update of OS again breaks the free program of the single programmer again. He has to invest his time to re-implement the functionality that already existed. Before he fixes it, the OS would again effectively be broken on each user's machine (sometimes actually not functioning due to the interaction of the OS and the non-compatible version of the Classic Shell, at best if the Classic Shell is disabled the OS is in its "original" brokenness). The programmer has to maintain the updates and care how his users get them, but he still fights the 750 billion Goliath. - So the programmer has to be fast enough to adjust his releases with every new Microsoft release, to work a lot for each of those as Microsoft absurdly doesn't care for a single programmer who actually makes their own product significantly more usable for many of its users. - Eventually the programmer just decides he can't do it anymore: http://www.classicshell.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8147 http://www.classicshell.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8147 In short it's a tale of a single programmer making Windows more usable to many millions of users against the active work of the whole managerial structure of 750 billion USD Microsoft(!), the structure directly being paid to effectively make many of their users less satisfied and less productive, to the point of the users being unable or even unwilling to use the OS. It is that absurd. All that is completely misrepresented with: "I never understood this complaint ...It takes maybe 5 minutes to download and install Classic Shell."

LifeLiverTransp 8y ago
The power users are the goto point for alot of not power users. So you spend hours and hours of 5 Minutes restoring windows to its original state, and reinstalling that over and over again, when the updates come.

alxlaz 8y ago

Classic Shell is no longer maintained. It works okay-ish today, but while it was still maintained, its developers had to regularly fix it, because it does rely on undocumented APIs. It's a pretty safe bet that it won't work in the 2020 release, and I'm not aware of any good alternative. A lot of Linux (and Windows) users don't realize it, but the amount of work that independent developers put into making Windows 10 (and Windows 8) useful for non-consumer applications, like software development or CAD, is breathtaking. There's probably an order of magnitude more people involved in that than in FOSS desktop development right now. This obviously says a lot about Windows' popularity (which, post-Windows 2000, is actually not all that undeserved), but it also says a lot about just how astonishingly terrible some of its design decisions were. Twenty years ago, the kind of hackery that gave us Windows Blinds was considered amazing, but borderline useless, because who the hell needs that after the age of 16. Today, that kind of hackery is essential because who the hell can use that after the age of 16? There has been no shortage of poorly-though UI changes on Linux, either, but you can at least avoid them there, because you have several choices of desktop environments. (Edit: yes, I know about OpenShell. Its last bugfix was in August last year.)

mehrdadn 8y ago
> Classic Shell is no longer maintained. It works okay-ish today, but while it was still maintained, its developers had to regularly fix it, because it does rely on undocumented APIs. It's a pretty safe bet that it won't work in the 2020 release, and I'm not aware of any good alternative. First of all they did continue it on a fork, but in any case, what's this obsession with recent commits? Lack of recent commits means broken software? Have you actually used Classic Shell? I've been using it for years on Windows 8 and 10 and it's been working fine on both despite the lack of maintenance. In my mind it didn't need any.
- alxlaz 8y ago
  I have to use Windows on a few machines, so yes, I have "actually used Classic Shell", and have occasionally hit some of the bugs. I dug into one of them but it's been so long since I've written any Windows-related code that I can't really do anything useful anymore :(.

cm2187 8y ago

A lots of the Windows 8/10 design decisions are outright mistakes, not even controversial. Like in Windows 8, you had to place your mouse on the far right of the screen to access certain features. Fine with a small laptop touch screen, but clearly they haven’t tried it on a 4k, 42” non touch screen at native resolution where the side of the screen is far far away in term of mouse travel. I believe to this day, the Windows 10 start menu search feature is non deterministic (I removed Cortana and web search). I can search twice the same words and I won’t see the same results, seems random. You can search “SQL management Studio” and “SQL server management studio” won’t show up at any point of the typing (it did in Win7). It feels just broken. Having two control panels with some settings in one, some others in the other, and because they progressively move them you are never sure where to find them is just bad. I have many other examples like that. They are not a matter of taste, it is just bad QA and bad design.

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
Is there an explicit strategy or vision for Windows? Does anyone know what it is?
mpnordland 8y ago
I have a similar search setup to yours at work. I type 'm' and get management studio every time. My previous computer developed it, and then it took some time for my current one to get it, but now it always works. I agree that there's some sort of learning going on with the search.