10 ms·

The early 2000's were a period of especially low usability for Microsoft's products. At the time, I had a roommate who was a die-hard Windows user. Over sever

The early 2000's were a period of especially low usability for Microsoft's products. At the time, I had a roommate who was a die-hard Windows user. Over several years, I tried to convince him to switch to Mac OS X, with examples like: (a) Just drag/drop a PDF to a printer spool window, and it will print; (b) to install an app, usually you just have to drag it to the Applications folder; to uninstall it, simply drag it to the trash; (c) the simplicity of System Preferences and Software Update; (d) the composited window manager, enabling things like Expose. What finally converted him was the horrible experience around updating to Windows XP SP3. Recall at the time, Windows Update opened as a control in an Internet Explorer window. Well, he must have waited a very long time until Windows Update no longer supported IE6. So when he attempted to update to SP3, he got an error that the current version of Windows Update required IE7. But for some reason, he could not install IE7 without updating to SP3 -- again, likely because he waited a long time after the SP3 update became available. He told me "I'm never using Windows again" and promptly bought his first MacBook. To my knowledge, he still hasn't gone back.

jseliger 7y ago
This kind of thing also got me to OS X. Now I'm looking at fiascos like the MBA/MBP keyboards, the bug-fests that are x.0 OS updates, and the way Catalina kills 32-bit applications for little reason (that I can discern), and I find myself wondering if I should quit the Mac world.
- K0SM0S 7y ago
  A few years ago, after following the same path as you, I switched to Linux and never looked back. I'd recommend KDE (e.g. Kubuntu) if you like out-of-the-box productivity, with built-in settings for pretty much everything useful, and a strong ecosystem of default apps.
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago
  Ditto. I love my MBP, it's still tottering along after 10 years (!), but it's on its last legs. the keyboard fiasco had me thinking that maybe my next backpack computer might not be a Mac...and then here comes Catalina with no 32-bit support and App Store-onerous requirements to get software signed, and fuck that. MS' Surface Books look pretty cool. Or maybe I'll just get a bigger backpack and tote my 17" gaming laptop around.
- vbezhenar 7y ago
  Try Windows. I migrated from Macbook to Windows PC and I like it. It's far from perfect as everything seems today, but it works for my needs.
- scarface74 7y ago
  How long should Apple keep 32 bit support? Apple hasn’t shipped a 32 bit Mac for a little over a decade, warned developers back in the 10.6 - 10.7 era and they cancelled 64 bit Carbon. Should Apple also still maintain Classic MacOS support? PPC support? 68K support? As far as “no good reason” with as bad as Intel is falling behind ARM - especially Apple’s own ARM designs, it’s widely expected that Apple will move away from Intel to ARM in their consumer laptops. Apple dropped 32 bit support in their ARM chips two or three years ago. Besides, every bit of code you can get rid of is less of a service area to support, maintain and for security vulnerabilities. The more than half dozen ways of defining a string in Windows has led to security vulnerabilities by itself. Even MS dropped support for 16 bit apps in 64 bit Windows.
basch 7y ago
This letter is what inspired my similar O365 rant. Usability is just as bad as ever, if you find yourself in the wrong places of the suite. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14160809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14160809
wayneftw 7y ago
I'm not sure if you're serious, but > Just drag/drop a PDF to a printer spool window, and it will print; this is just the most obtuse way of doing things. > usually you just have to drag it to the Applications folder; to uninstall it, simply drag it to the trash; So does this, and unreliable as you noted - i.e. usually. But, ugggh... dragging things to other things to do things though? There's a reason why certain large classes of disabled users are on Windows. Stephen Hawking used Windows. Aside from the disabled, the mechanics of Windows have always been better, no matter how bad they actually were. That last bit is my opinion, but it is true that many, many more disabled users are on Windows. If they can figure it out, couldn't your roommate? I'm joking of course, some people just seem to have a completely different way of thinking about things and certainly it is a fact that at least some portion of the population prefers the way macOS does things just like there are some people who can only use their chin to move a mouse.
- TimTheTinker 7y ago
  > > Just drag/drop a PDF to a printer spool window, and it will print; > this is just the most obtuse way of doing things. Perhaps that was a bad example of the incredible leg-up Mac OS X had over Windows around printing... all-around, printing was so much more straightforward on the Mac. To extend the example: (a) printing to PDF has always worked - no need to install a 3rd party "PDF printer"; (b) PDFs and print spool jobs are indistinguishable, hence "drag a PDF to a print spool" works fine. (c) Accidentally printed to the wrong printer? Easy to fix - just open the intended printer and drag the job from the wrong one over.
  - dingo_bat 7y ago
    > b) PDFs and print spool jobs are indistinguishable, Then what does "drag a PDF to a print spool" mean?
- machello13 7y ago
  Dragging things around is not required on macOS. There are always ways to do things without it. It's just that it's a generally pretty intuitive way to accomplish a task, and it's something that macOS embraced in a way that Windows never did. Want to trash an app? Drag it to the trash. Want to print a PDF? Drag it onto a printer. You can do it other ways, of course — right click and "move to trash", or right-click and "print".
partiallypro 7y ago
Still to this day people view Windows through the lense of XP experiences. I always wonder how much damage that era did. People claimed to "love" XP, but they are all rose tinted in memory. Everyone hated XP until SP2 and SP3. The Security Center was something everyone hated too. But yeah, some things it did really well, but others not so much. 10 is so much better than people give it credit for, and yes there are still bugs. But, all things considered it without a doubt the strongest OS Microsoft has ever built, and it is moving forward...where I feel like OSX is finally moving backward.
- riffraff 7y ago
  People loved XP coming from '98 which was way more prone to crash, BSOD, data losses etc, from what I recall.
  - rnd0 7y ago
    I think it's a mix of both? I "loved" XP once two things happened: I got a computer with more than 256mb of ram, and I installed SP2. After that it ran really well and yes, so much better than Windows 98 did.
  - tinus_hn 7y ago
    Don’t forget Windows ME which was truly a turd in a class of its own.
    - asveikau 7y ago
      I still don't completely understand why they didn't make Win2k into a "consumer" product. A lot of techies here who installed Windows themselves in that era probably skipped ME and went to that. But all the consumer PCs shipped with 98 or ME. I remembering hearing at the time that this was about hardware support and/or app compatibility. But my cynical side just thinks they wanted to justify charging more for a workstation SKU for another release cycle.
      - TheKarateKid 7y ago
8sleef 7y ago
Windows 7 with its constant mandatory automatic updates did it for me... Windows, never again, and I switched happily to Ubuntu.
- pas 7y ago
  Chrome and Firefox auto updates too. But those are fast, done in the background and they don't require reboots. Windows is still terrible at this.
  - potentialverand 7y ago
    I don't think updating an application is really comparable to updating an operating system. The OS is vastly more complex. Nevertheless, Firefox on Linux via package manager definitely requires a restart. Typically I know when Firefox has been updated because I get a window saying "your browser needs to restart". https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/9s78fh/sick_of_getting_restart_required/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/9s78fh/sick_of_get...
    - pas 7y ago
      The restart is not the problem, the time it takes is. (And that it prompts rather aggressively to reboot.)
  - MikusR 7y ago
    They do require you to restart the application. Same with Windows, it updates in background and requires a relaunch.
    - pas 7y ago
      I have no problem with the relaunch, but it takes a lot of time to do the actual update at relaunch time. So the launch time with update is at least a magnitude larger than it should be. This coupled with the fact that Windows update is rather monolithical yet it should be simple to update most of the non-kernel parts without reboot leads to too many slow reboots :/
pishpash 7y ago
After OS X, has anybody ever switched back to Windows from a Mac OS for daily use (i.e. not for a specific application that is only available on Windows)? I don't even want to look at Windows now. It's so unsightly in a way that you don't notice until you switch away.
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago
  After 15 years on OS X, I won't be buying another Mac. The MB keyboards with no Escape key and constant breakage, and dropping support for 32-bit apps, would have been enough for me. The newly onerous restrictions on software signing, and Apple's general obsession with sacrificing anything and everything to get thinner and lighter, only make it worse.
  - llarsson 7y ago
    Work gave me an MBP. I am a vim user, so I need my Escape key. Mapping Caps Lock to Escape is easy to do now, even through the Settings GUI. I am not trying to convince you to stay with Mac, I am just saying that this particular thing helped me immensely.
    - jcranberry 7y ago
      It always surprises me when people remap the caps lock key. I find that I use it quite often. For vim you case use 'C-[' I believe which does the same thing as escape.
- LoSboccacc 7y ago
  me. the Java ecosystem used to update too slow and unreliably. After spending many hours wrestling the default jdk and ways to make different programs use a different install I just gave up. I still use my Mac for media production because it's still a power house after this many years but for everything else I'm back in Windows. it's ugly and not ergonomic when you go to the insides, but it sits in the background and let me do my things instead of pretending to know better at every step.
- 7y ago
NicoJuicy 7y ago
2) Right click - print 2) Double click setup 3) open setup again - remove option or the more opaque way, uninstall through configuration - software Your points wouldn't convince me actually.
- simonh 7y ago
  I thought it was pretty clear this argument was being made in the early 2000s, not today. But anyway, a few months ago I tried to install Office on a new laptop for my daughter, using a legit code I bought through work. However the laptop had a previously installed demo copy of a different office version. Oh. My. God. I spent 2 hours going through a handful of different Office download, install and upgrade sites, which were completely different in different domains and didn’t refer to each other or even look similar. I entered the product key into a dialog in the pre-installed office and into at least two different office web sites. I tried uninstalling it but it seemed to just end up broken. Finally I found an MS online support site and got into a chat with a support rep. He remotely uninstalled the pre-install, which had to be done using some power shell command line utility to clean that up properly, then installed the proper version. Unbelievable.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  2) You could (maybe still can I haven't tried it for a while) drag documents onto printers in Windows. There was a printto verb for the shell that enabled this. The problem was not many developers supported it.
- gattilorenz 7y ago
  > 2) Double click setup Press next. Click "I agree" radio button. Press next. Press next. Press install. Press finish. Ops, you forgot to uncheck the "create link on desktop", and now you have one (if you're lucky, could be more - Register now!) more desktop icon. You can delete it, but if you are running XP I think it would complain that you are not actually deleting the program, just the link. Click yes. The exercise of installing a pre-xp program with a limited user account is left to the reader.
userbinator 7y ago
The early 2000's were a period of especially low usability for Microsoft's products. If you thought that was bad... look at the "app-ombinations" which pass for productivity software today. Wide expanses of useless whitespace, low-contrast ultra-thin fonts, monochrome hieroglyphic icons everywhere, patronising "cute" and unhelpful messages, the ridiculous levels of bloat, and of course the pervasive spyware --- or "telemetry".
- dangus 7y ago
  .
  - thrower123 7y ago
    This, but unironically. We haven't made a great deal of progress moving forward, actually. Twenty years of churn and bloating system requirements. Give me Word 2003, Visual Studio 6, and AIM Messenger again and I don't think I'd be much disappointed compared to what I'm running today.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - dangus 7y ago
      You’d have a great point if you only mentioned VB6 and left out AIM and that word processor that spat out binary files.
      - thrower123 7y ago
        I still have a portable version of Word 2003 on a flash stick, because it still works better. The most incomprehensible thing to me is how much worse all the IM software I have to use today is.
        Terretta 7y ago
        Remember Trillian, Adium, or BeejiveIM? Seamless presence on IRC, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, MSN, GTalk...
mixmastamyk 7y ago
The windows classic shell is still the best, the kernel is great as well. The layers between, well plenty of garbage mixed in.
joyjoyjoy 7y ago
"The early 2000's were a period of especially low usability for Microsoft's products." Windows 2000 was actually a pretty stable system, considering MS previous standards. "user. Over several years, I tried to convince him to switch to Mac OS X, with examples like:" For me Mac OS was always a terrible system. I was forced to work with some Mac OS during my PhD studies in the lab. Terrible. Today Mac OS is a tax for people who are either to stupid or to lazy to put a decent linux on their machine.

jseliger 7y ago

This kind of thing also got me to OS X. Now I'm looking at fiascos like the MBA/MBP keyboards, the bug-fests that are x.0 OS updates, and the way Catalina kills 32-bit applications for little reason (that I can discern), and I find myself wondering if I should quit the Mac world.

K0SM0S 7y ago
A few years ago, after following the same path as you, I switched to Linux and never looked back. I'd recommend KDE (e.g. Kubuntu) if you like out-of-the-box productivity, with built-in settings for pretty much everything useful, and a strong ecosystem of default apps.
PhasmaFelis 7y ago
Ditto. I love my MBP, it's still tottering along after 10 years (!), but it's on its last legs. the keyboard fiasco had me thinking that maybe my next backpack computer might not be a Mac...and then here comes Catalina with no 32-bit support and App Store-onerous requirements to get software signed, and fuck that. MS' Surface Books look pretty cool. Or maybe I'll just get a bigger backpack and tote my 17" gaming laptop around.
vbezhenar 7y ago
Try Windows. I migrated from Macbook to Windows PC and I like it. It's far from perfect as everything seems today, but it works for my needs.
scarface74 7y ago
How long should Apple keep 32 bit support? Apple hasn’t shipped a 32 bit Mac for a little over a decade, warned developers back in the 10.6 - 10.7 era and they cancelled 64 bit Carbon. Should Apple also still maintain Classic MacOS support? PPC support? 68K support? As far as “no good reason” with as bad as Intel is falling behind ARM - especially Apple’s own ARM designs, it’s widely expected that Apple will move away from Intel to ARM in their consumer laptops. Apple dropped 32 bit support in their ARM chips two or three years ago. Besides, every bit of code you can get rid of is less of a service area to support, maintain and for security vulnerabilities. The more than half dozen ways of defining a string in Windows has led to security vulnerabilities by itself. Even MS dropped support for 16 bit apps in 64 bit Windows.

basch 7y ago

This letter is what inspired my similar O365 rant. Usability is just as bad as ever, if you find yourself in the wrong places of the suite. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14160809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14160809

wayneftw 7y ago

I'm not sure if you're serious, but > Just drag/drop a PDF to a printer spool window, and it will print; this is just the most obtuse way of doing things. > usually you just have to drag it to the Applications folder; to uninstall it, simply drag it to the trash; So does this, and unreliable as you noted - i.e. usually. But, ugggh... dragging things to other things to do things though? There's a reason why certain large classes of disabled users are on Windows. Stephen Hawking used Windows. Aside from the disabled, the mechanics of Windows have always been better, no matter how bad they actually were. That last bit is my opinion, but it is true that many, many more disabled users are on Windows. If they can figure it out, couldn't your roommate? I'm joking of course, some people just seem to have a completely different way of thinking about things and certainly it is a fact that at least some portion of the population prefers the way macOS does things just like there are some people who can only use their chin to move a mouse.

TimTheTinker 7y ago
> > Just drag/drop a PDF to a printer spool window, and it will print; > this is just the most obtuse way of doing things. Perhaps that was a bad example of the incredible leg-up Mac OS X had over Windows around printing... all-around, printing was so much more straightforward on the Mac. To extend the example: (a) printing to PDF has always worked - no need to install a 3rd party "PDF printer"; (b) PDFs and print spool jobs are indistinguishable, hence "drag a PDF to a print spool" works fine. (c) Accidentally printed to the wrong printer? Easy to fix - just open the intended printer and drag the job from the wrong one over.
- dingo_bat 7y ago
  > b) PDFs and print spool jobs are indistinguishable, Then what does "drag a PDF to a print spool" mean?
machello13 7y ago
Dragging things around is not required on macOS. There are always ways to do things without it. It's just that it's a generally pretty intuitive way to accomplish a task, and it's something that macOS embraced in a way that Windows never did. Want to trash an app? Drag it to the trash. Want to print a PDF? Drag it onto a printer. You can do it other ways, of course — right click and "move to trash", or right-click and "print".

partiallypro 7y ago

Still to this day people view Windows through the lense of XP experiences. I always wonder how much damage that era did. People claimed to "love" XP, but they are all rose tinted in memory. Everyone hated XP until SP2 and SP3. The Security Center was something everyone hated too. But yeah, some things it did really well, but others not so much. 10 is so much better than people give it credit for, and yes there are still bugs. But, all things considered it without a doubt the strongest OS Microsoft has ever built, and it is moving forward...where I feel like OSX is finally moving backward.

riffraff 7y ago
People loved XP coming from '98 which was way more prone to crash, BSOD, data losses etc, from what I recall.
- rnd0 7y ago
  I think it's a mix of both? I "loved" XP once two things happened: I got a computer with more than 256mb of ram, and I installed SP2. After that it ran really well and yes, so much better than Windows 98 did.
- tinus_hn 7y ago
  Don’t forget Windows ME which was truly a turd in a class of its own.
  - asveikau 7y ago
    I still don't completely understand why they didn't make Win2k into a "consumer" product. A lot of techies here who installed Windows themselves in that era probably skipped ME and went to that. But all the consumer PCs shipped with 98 or ME. I remembering hearing at the time that this was about hardware support and/or app compatibility. But my cynical side just thinks they wanted to justify charging more for a workstation SKU for another release cycle.
    - TheKarateKid 7y ago

8sleef 7y ago

Windows 7 with its constant mandatory automatic updates did it for me... Windows, never again, and I switched happily to Ubuntu.

pas 7y ago
Chrome and Firefox auto updates too. But those are fast, done in the background and they don't require reboots. Windows is still terrible at this.
- potentialverand 7y ago
  I don't think updating an application is really comparable to updating an operating system. The OS is vastly more complex. Nevertheless, Firefox on Linux via package manager definitely requires a restart. Typically I know when Firefox has been updated because I get a window saying "your browser needs to restart". https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/9s78fh/sick_of_getting_restart_required/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/9s78fh/sick_of_get...
  - pas 7y ago
    The restart is not the problem, the time it takes is. (And that it prompts rather aggressively to reboot.)
- MikusR 7y ago
  They do require you to restart the application. Same with Windows, it updates in background and requires a relaunch.
  - pas 7y ago
    I have no problem with the relaunch, but it takes a lot of time to do the actual update at relaunch time. So the launch time with update is at least a magnitude larger than it should be. This coupled with the fact that Windows update is rather monolithical yet it should be simple to update most of the non-kernel parts without reboot leads to too many slow reboots :/

pishpash 7y ago

After OS X, has anybody ever switched back to Windows from a Mac OS for daily use (i.e. not for a specific application that is only available on Windows)? I don't even want to look at Windows now. It's so unsightly in a way that you don't notice until you switch away.

PhasmaFelis 7y ago
After 15 years on OS X, I won't be buying another Mac. The MB keyboards with no Escape key and constant breakage, and dropping support for 32-bit apps, would have been enough for me. The newly onerous restrictions on software signing, and Apple's general obsession with sacrificing anything and everything to get thinner and lighter, only make it worse.
- llarsson 7y ago
  Work gave me an MBP. I am a vim user, so I need my Escape key. Mapping Caps Lock to Escape is easy to do now, even through the Settings GUI. I am not trying to convince you to stay with Mac, I am just saying that this particular thing helped me immensely.
  - jcranberry 7y ago
    It always surprises me when people remap the caps lock key. I find that I use it quite often. For vim you case use 'C-[' I believe which does the same thing as escape.
LoSboccacc 7y ago
me. the Java ecosystem used to update too slow and unreliably. After spending many hours wrestling the default jdk and ways to make different programs use a different install I just gave up. I still use my Mac for media production because it's still a power house after this many years but for everything else I'm back in Windows. it's ugly and not ergonomic when you go to the insides, but it sits in the background and let me do my things instead of pretending to know better at every step.
7y ago

NicoJuicy 7y ago

2) Right click - print 2) Double click setup 3) open setup again - remove option or the more opaque way, uninstall through configuration - software Your points wouldn't convince me actually.

simonh 7y ago
I thought it was pretty clear this argument was being made in the early 2000s, not today. But anyway, a few months ago I tried to install Office on a new laptop for my daughter, using a legit code I bought through work. However the laptop had a previously installed demo copy of a different office version. Oh. My. God. I spent 2 hours going through a handful of different Office download, install and upgrade sites, which were completely different in different domains and didn’t refer to each other or even look similar. I entered the product key into a dialog in the pre-installed office and into at least two different office web sites. I tried uninstalling it but it seemed to just end up broken. Finally I found an MS online support site and got into a chat with a support rep. He remotely uninstalled the pre-install, which had to be done using some power shell command line utility to clean that up properly, then installed the proper version. Unbelievable.
tonyedgecombe 7y ago
2) You could (maybe still can I haven't tried it for a while) drag documents onto printers in Windows. There was a printto verb for the shell that enabled this. The problem was not many developers supported it.
gattilorenz 7y ago
> 2) Double click setup Press next. Click "I agree" radio button. Press next. Press next. Press install. Press finish. Ops, you forgot to uncheck the "create link on desktop", and now you have one (if you're lucky, could be more - Register now!) more desktop icon. You can delete it, but if you are running XP I think it would complain that you are not actually deleting the program, just the link. Click yes. The exercise of installing a pre-xp program with a limited user account is left to the reader.

userbinator 7y ago

The early 2000's were a period of especially low usability for Microsoft's products. If you thought that was bad... look at the "app-ombinations" which pass for productivity software today. Wide expanses of useless whitespace, low-contrast ultra-thin fonts, monochrome hieroglyphic icons everywhere, patronising "cute" and unhelpful messages, the ridiculous levels of bloat, and of course the pervasive spyware --- or "telemetry".

dangus 7y ago
.
- thrower123 7y ago
  This, but unironically. We haven't made a great deal of progress moving forward, actually. Twenty years of churn and bloating system requirements. Give me Word 2003, Visual Studio 6, and AIM Messenger again and I don't think I'd be much disappointed compared to what I'm running today.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - dangus 7y ago
    You’d have a great point if you only mentioned VB6 and left out AIM and that word processor that spat out binary files.
    - thrower123 7y ago
      I still have a portable version of Word 2003 on a flash stick, because it still works better. The most incomprehensible thing to me is how much worse all the IM software I have to use today is.
      - Terretta 7y ago
        Remember Trillian, Adium, or BeejiveIM? Seamless presence on IRC, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, MSN, GTalk...

mixmastamyk 7y ago

The windows classic shell is still the best, the kernel is great as well. The layers between, well plenty of garbage mixed in.

joyjoyjoy 7y ago

"The early 2000's were a period of especially low usability for Microsoft's products." Windows 2000 was actually a pretty stable system, considering MS previous standards. "user. Over several years, I tried to convince him to switch to Mac OS X, with examples like:" For me Mac OS was always a terrible system. I was forced to work with some Mac OS during my PhD studies in the lab. Terrible. Today Mac OS is a tax for people who are either to stupid or to lazy to put a decent linux on their machine.