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Windows has a particular knack for giving the user the impression it doesn't care about them at all. The things that irritate me now are the same things that ir

Windows has a particular knack for giving the user the impression it doesn't care about them at all. The things that irritate me now are the same things that irritated me last year, five years ago, and in a few cases twenty years ago. They make you go "Jesus is everybody asleep over there?" For example, if you want a notification icon to always be shown, you have to open a menu, open another menu, scroll to find the one you want, open an option list, and finally hit "show icon and notifications". Why can't you just right click an icon and hit "show icon and notifications"? Because Windows doesn't give a shit about you.

read_if_gay_ 5y ago
The insanely deep nesting of little configuration windows is probably the number one thing that makes Windows feel old to me. The new settings app is an improvement, but sadly one that lives in isolation.
- herbst 5y ago
  Or the point that many of these configurations can ONLY be accessed by GUI. That's one thing that makes windows (and even MacOS to some degree) so awkward to use sometimes.
  - aikinai 5y ago
    Almost every setting in MacOS can be accessed by the command line, and many things only there. Actually I don’t think I’ve found anything so far that can’t be set from the command line and I do a fair amount of that kind of tweaking.
    - herbst 5y ago
      Xcode license agreements? Took me literally more than a hour the first time I installed something on the terminal but refused to finish because I never heard of xcode or that you need to open it manually in order to confirm a license agreement. When I was just installing the ruby stack and it needed some compilers via xcode I guess? That was on a MBP like 2015 or so. The error message was not helpful at all, I had to ask someone with experience or I would still be installing ruby to this day. (Given I don't remember anything else)
      - aikinai 5y ago
        sudo xcodebuild -license accept Google actually autocompleted “in the terminal” when I started typing out the question and this was answered by the first link. I have tons of development environment software installed and I’ve never opened the Xcode GUI.
        herbst 5y ago
        This was not the case in 2015/14. These stack overflow answers easily confirm that you needed to open it at least once, and that there have been related bugs in that time: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/175069/how-to-accept-xcode-license https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/175069/how-to-acce... Good they fixed it. Still made a bad impression on me back then coming from using Linux for over a decade.
- leoc 5y ago
  And often that's because MS decided not to replicate some capabilities of the old WinNT-vintage configuration GUI in the pretty new touch-friendly interface. Probably the classic example is the trek you have to make, through two or three dialogs of nice-looking but most often useless new GUI, to a cryptic "Change adapter options" button and on to where Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections survives, still the vital dialog and still largely in its original late-'90s form. Oh, and then there's the decision that having separate default devices and default communication devices for audio is too nerdy, so hip young Windows 7 kids don't need to see anything about any default communication device in the shiny new sound GUI. Hilarity then ensues when the VR headset somehow automatically becomes the default-comms-device microphone and you mysteriously become barely audible on voice calls. Of course other big, important sections of the GUI (file permissions?!) seem to have been junked completely without any replacement.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    Those settings windows are part of the API and windows has to provide them for legacy software in many cases. What was absolutely insane was not replicating the functionality into the new control panel setup leading to power users feeling dumb because they can’t find network settings under network settings.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
johnwalkr 5y ago
Window 11 goes a long way towards fixing this. There's still multiple ways to change things, but all of the touch screen settings are gone and the new settings app is laid out logically.
MarkSweep 5y ago
All the ads, the file search that searches Bing and can’t be disabled, the telemetry that sends the websites you browse to Microsoft. There must be some product manager over there whose bonus is based on how much ad revenue they can get out of Windows, no matter the cost. Installing the Windows 11 preview is just depressing, like you say it really makes me feel like they don’t care and expect people just to take it. For your specific notification icon issue, I thought you can just drag the icon from the pop up tray to the main system tray to keep it always visible?
awiesenhofer 5y ago
> For example, if you want a notification icon to always be shown, you have to open a menu, open another menu, scroll to find the one you want, open an option list, and finally hit "show icon and notifications". Or, you know, just drag and drop it into the always shown area.

read_if_gay_ 5y ago

The insanely deep nesting of little configuration windows is probably the number one thing that makes Windows feel old to me. The new settings app is an improvement, but sadly one that lives in isolation.

herbst 5y ago
Or the point that many of these configurations can ONLY be accessed by GUI. That's one thing that makes windows (and even MacOS to some degree) so awkward to use sometimes.
- aikinai 5y ago
  Almost every setting in MacOS can be accessed by the command line, and many things only there. Actually I don’t think I’ve found anything so far that can’t be set from the command line and I do a fair amount of that kind of tweaking.
  - herbst 5y ago
    Xcode license agreements? Took me literally more than a hour the first time I installed something on the terminal but refused to finish because I never heard of xcode or that you need to open it manually in order to confirm a license agreement. When I was just installing the ruby stack and it needed some compilers via xcode I guess? That was on a MBP like 2015 or so. The error message was not helpful at all, I had to ask someone with experience or I would still be installing ruby to this day. (Given I don't remember anything else)
    - aikinai 5y ago
      sudo xcodebuild -license accept Google actually autocompleted “in the terminal” when I started typing out the question and this was answered by the first link. I have tons of development environment software installed and I’ve never opened the Xcode GUI.
      - herbst 5y ago
        This was not the case in 2015/14. These stack overflow answers easily confirm that you needed to open it at least once, and that there have been related bugs in that time: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/175069/how-to-accept-xcode-license https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/175069/how-to-acce... Good they fixed it. Still made a bad impression on me back then coming from using Linux for over a decade.
leoc 5y ago
And often that's because MS decided not to replicate some capabilities of the old WinNT-vintage configuration GUI in the pretty new touch-friendly interface. Probably the classic example is the trek you have to make, through two or three dialogs of nice-looking but most often useless new GUI, to a cryptic "Change adapter options" button and on to where Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections survives, still the vital dialog and still largely in its original late-'90s form. Oh, and then there's the decision that having separate default devices and default communication devices for audio is too nerdy, so hip young Windows 7 kids don't need to see anything about any default communication device in the shiny new sound GUI. Hilarity then ensues when the VR headset somehow automatically becomes the default-comms-device microphone and you mysteriously become barely audible on voice calls. Of course other big, important sections of the GUI (file permissions?!) seem to have been junked completely without any replacement.
- bombcar 5y ago
  Those settings windows are part of the API and windows has to provide them for legacy software in many cases. What was absolutely insane was not replicating the functionality into the new control panel setup leading to power users feeling dumb because they can’t find network settings under network settings.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

johnwalkr 5y ago

Window 11 goes a long way towards fixing this. There's still multiple ways to change things, but all of the touch screen settings are gone and the new settings app is laid out logically.

MarkSweep 5y ago

All the ads, the file search that searches Bing and can’t be disabled, the telemetry that sends the websites you browse to Microsoft. There must be some product manager over there whose bonus is based on how much ad revenue they can get out of Windows, no matter the cost. Installing the Windows 11 preview is just depressing, like you say it really makes me feel like they don’t care and expect people just to take it. For your specific notification icon issue, I thought you can just drag the icon from the pop up tray to the main system tray to keep it always visible?

awiesenhofer 5y ago

> For example, if you want a notification icon to always be shown, you have to open a menu, open another menu, scroll to find the one you want, open an option list, and finally hit "show icon and notifications". Or, you know, just drag and drop it into the always shown area.