8 ms·

> However, that doesn’t answer why the Windows shell was so poorly architect in the first place. It's simple really: Microsoft doesn't have any competent devel

> However, that doesn’t answer why the Windows shell was so poorly architect in the first place. It's simple really: Microsoft doesn't have any competent developers working on the Windows user interfaces. My guess is that if you display any competence you wind up being moved to somewhere they care about like Azure, PowerShell, or the licensing team. At this point I'm wondering if it is worth trying to build my own desktop on top of Windows Server Core.

markus_zhang 5y ago
I'm wondering what's the average programming skill MSFT takes in. I mean they definitely have a lot of competitive people who work in kernels and system programming fields, but I'm not sure about the other departments. Maybe the less important fields are for new hires to get into the game and that's why they suck.
mathattack 5y ago
This is also why they never bother getting cut and paste to work between apps from companies they buy. It’s compounded by clueless salespeople who don’t know their products well enough to push the improvements that their customers want.
- thrower123 5y ago
  The inconsistency in the way copy/paste works just inside of Outlook is maddening. Copy text and an image from an email? Images paste in all broken. Copy just the image from the email? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Copy the image from the email, paste it into Paint, crop the canvas, then copy from Paint into whatever? Works every time.
  - RubberbandSoul 5y ago
    I have the habit of "washing" everything with Notepad to get rid of inconsistencies: Copy text, data, etc from wherever Paste it into Notepad Copy it again Paste it where you want it and then apply any formatting according to the destination app's formatting rules Not a great workaround but at least it works.
    - toto444 5y ago
      I used to do that and then I learnt about Crt + Shift + v. That pastes the text without any formatting.
      - orangepurple 5y ago
        In Windows programs another shortcut for unformatted text is Control Alt V where Control Shift V does not work https://superuser.com/questions/407113/shortcut-in-word-or-excel-for-special-paste https://superuser.com/questions/407113/shortcut-in-word-or-e...
      - jon_richards 5y ago
        That used to work in Google sheets, but now it only pastes the last thing copied from Google sheets. Really frustrating.
      - InitialLastName 5y ago
        That's broken in Outlook 2108. Now they want you to paste (CTRL+V) and then hold CTRL and click on/navigate to the obscure icon for the paste variant you want.
      - TorKlingberg 5y ago
        Ctrl+Shift+V is great, when it works. Which it doesn't annoyingly often, such as Atlassian's Confluence wiki. So I paste and re-copy things in the URL bar all the time. Ctrl + L V A X
    - tragomaskhalos 5y ago
      Ah yes - the "sheepdip" as we call it
    - klyrs 5y ago
      FWIW, this is necessary in linux and android too.
    - inetknght 5y ago
      > I have the habit of "washing" everything with Notepad to get rid of inconsistencies I also do that. I 100% attribute that to browsers and people who want to copy/paste HTML and have it all colorized and formatted in the destination app.
  - sixothree 5y ago
    Excel is even worse. Perform any action between the time you copy and the time you paste and everything on your clipboard is lost.
    - markus_zhang 5y ago
      Yeah this really sucks. Fortunately I'm largely away from the spreadsheet world. My motto is stay as far away from business as you can and have a happy life.
    - joenathanone 5y ago
      Excel is insane, the undo button is universal, meaning if you are editing multiple spreadsheets, you can’t just undo changes to one of them if you made a mistake between editing, you have to undo all changes to all open spreadsheets to get back to your desired undo point.
      - hughrr 5y ago
        Oh god this is one feature that literally makes me want to jump on a plane to Redmond and throw my own excrement at them like a deranged chimpanzee.
      - quakeguy 5y ago
        Yeah, this is so unproductive, it boggles the mind.
      - tragomaskhalos 5y ago
        Joel Spolsky used to work on Excel and he has written some brilliant stuff about it (at least, in its early days). My personal favourite is the revelation that the Excel team had their own C compiler, which kind of takes Not Invented Here into the stratosphere.
      - officeplant 5y ago
        This is why I always open up multiple instances of Excel.
      - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
lghh 5y ago
> Microsoft doesn't have any competent developers working on the Windows user interfaces Oh please. Do you really think that MS has nobody with any level of competency on any single team in their entire org? Do you really think that low of others? Could it possibly be that sometimes... things have bugs? Shit breaks in ways you don't expect. Things happen. Painting an entire group of people you've never met with such a large brush is gross. It's just software and these are just people.
- bodge5000 5y ago
  Its a controversial opinion (I think) but I'm inclined to agree. I do tend to find that devs are often much harsher to other devs, sometimes unfairly so, than any other profession that I know of. If you complain your mechanic is slow and expensive, a load of other mechanics will come and tell you (and probably rightly so) that the job is more difficult and complex than you know of. But you don't see that often with devs, which is a bit disappointing.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    Probably because your mechanic isn't actively making your car perform worse, gluing ads onto the body, or redesigning your steering wheel based on the latest fads.
    - bodge5000 5y ago
      I highly doubt the devs themselves run microsoft. I could be wrong but theres probably a manager or two in there as well. Maybe I'm stuck in the past, but I was under the impression that devs build the thing, others decide what it is thats built. If that is the case, then I personally wouldn't call a dev 'incompetant' because of a decision not made by them. Of course you could say they should stand up against this, but again, whilst theres this hostility towards other devs, why are you going to risk not being able to put food on the table for someone on the internet who thinks your an idiot? (As an aside, the analogy doesn't really stretch that far since developers are hired by companies whereas mechanics are paid directly by customers. Perhaps car designers would be a better fit here, but again, other car designers would be quick to point out the problems with your complaints, but thats by the by)
hughrr 5y ago
How bold of you to suggest they have anyone competent working on PowerShell or Azure. Everything I go near from them is a monumental crapfest these days. They could be a good platform if they stopped this schizophrenic direction changing and actually fixed shit rather than hiding it behind layers of new shit.
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  That's the reality of modern software development: creating new shits on top of old shits. They don't have the time to clean up the old shits. I guess we have to accept that.
  - hughrr 5y ago
    The problem is if it was a zoo this deep in shit it’d be shut down from an animal welfare point of view. Perhaps we should consider software welfare as well. “Clean up your shit or we’ll fine you”
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    If copyright terms didn't last so long, then other people could take the old layers and "compost" them into fertilizer for new code.
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      I think you have an excellent point.
    - marcodiego 5y ago
      only if the code was available.
  - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
    Aka “technical debt”
mattowen_uk 5y ago
> At this point I'm wondering if it is worth trying to build my own desktop on top of Windows Server Core. Oh, I'm not the only one thinking this then! That's good to know. For years I've been tinkering at the edges of this by having my own app launcher, and my own desktop widgets, and an explorer style start menu navigation app. All I need is to hook into the systray (although, do I need that? it's just a distraction), and put together a good/fast app switcher app, and I could ditch explorer.exe and the startmenu app completely.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Honestly I'm surprised I haven't yet stumbled across a community of people doing this. If I had to guess, there's probably a stumbling block that makes it unsuitable for a lot of desktop use cases that I'm not aware of.
  - pacifika 5y ago
    It used to be the case that directx 9 wouldn’t install, and several software would detect the server is and refuse.
  - userbinator 5y ago
    There are various (mostly non-English) communities making weird chimeric combinations of XP/Vista/7-era OS mods, more recently guided by the leaked source; I don't think they're interested in doing anything legal, but also seem to not be interested in post-Win8 either.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure Retrobar will work with the systray, that is if you're into the classic Windows taskbar experience.
Arainach 5y ago
This is insulting and trivially untrue. The Windows shell org has a number of excellent engineers. When I was at Microsoft it was one of the most senior and highest-tenured orgs. There are fantastic engineers such as Raymond Chen (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/) and many more. Do not mistake domains you don't understand as being bad at things. Programs and extensions that are 26 years old are still running strong on Windows 10 today. The economy runs on ancient tools that rely on that compatibility. Throwing together a pretty context menu isn't as important as making sure that all of the UI elements are accessible to screen readers and other tools. It's also trivial compared to ensuring that old programs that assumed they could just click on the third menu item to make something happen keep working even if you redesign the menu.
- only_as_i_fall 5y ago
  Is your argument that the windows desktop is a good piece of software or that software developers who consistently create bad software are actually good developers? I realize most of the terrible bloat, adware, security holes etc are probably caused by external factors, but at some point I think it's important to take responsibility for your own work and either push back on or move on.
  - Arainach 5y ago
    I certainly consider it a good piece of software. It does more things across more environments than its competitors. I have and regularly use machines with all the major desktop platforms in my house - Windows, OS X, Linux, Chrome OS. While I cycle between them, I strongly prefer the Windows machines. The alternatives are all are missing all sorts of window management things such as snapping to screen quadrants and multimon borders, keyboard shortcuts for moving and snapping windows. Monitors with different DPIs is a challenge on Mac and hopeless on Linux. There are all sorts of UI affordances in Windows to do things like open new copies of an app (middle click on the taskbar icon), close an app (middle click on the taskbar preview), and so on. There are a number of changes I strongly disagree with in Windows 11 such as removing the ability to put the taskbar on the side, but as a whole I still think the Windows desktop is an excellent piece of software that's significantly more usable than the alternatives.
the_only_law 5y ago
> At this point I'm wondering if it is worth trying to build my own desktop on top of Windows Server Core. Supposedly there used to be all sorts of third party shells. Only thing I’ve found to still exist are a few black box ports though.
MikusR 5y ago
I was following the development of WSL and got the impression that The people that work on kernel kinda know what they are doing and even listen to requests. The network team takes long to respond but still kinda implements requests. And NTFS is developed by a single person that lives in a wine cellar with a machine gun (as seen by every new file system feature being built in layers above ntfs.) And explorer and other user facing features are done by monkeys on typewriters.
userbinator 5y ago
Highly controversial opinion: around the time quality seemed to very noticeably take a nosedive (Win8?) was also roughly the time all the "diversity and inclusion", "anti-meritocracy" etc. stuff took off. Maybe we are just seeing the proof of what happens when you hire people for who they are rather than what they can do. Someone in another comment here mentions Raymond Chen. He is from the "old Microsoft", and probably has significantly less power than he used to.

markus_zhang 5y ago

I'm wondering what's the average programming skill MSFT takes in. I mean they definitely have a lot of competitive people who work in kernels and system programming fields, but I'm not sure about the other departments. Maybe the less important fields are for new hires to get into the game and that's why they suck.

mathattack 5y ago

This is also why they never bother getting cut and paste to work between apps from companies they buy. It’s compounded by clueless salespeople who don’t know their products well enough to push the improvements that their customers want.

thrower123 5y ago
The inconsistency in the way copy/paste works just inside of Outlook is maddening. Copy text and an image from an email? Images paste in all broken. Copy just the image from the email? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Copy the image from the email, paste it into Paint, crop the canvas, then copy from Paint into whatever? Works every time.
- RubberbandSoul 5y ago
  I have the habit of "washing" everything with Notepad to get rid of inconsistencies: Copy text, data, etc from wherever Paste it into Notepad Copy it again Paste it where you want it and then apply any formatting according to the destination app's formatting rules Not a great workaround but at least it works.
  - toto444 5y ago
    I used to do that and then I learnt about Crt + Shift + v. That pastes the text without any formatting.
    - orangepurple 5y ago
      In Windows programs another shortcut for unformatted text is Control Alt V where Control Shift V does not work https://superuser.com/questions/407113/shortcut-in-word-or-excel-for-special-paste https://superuser.com/questions/407113/shortcut-in-word-or-e...
    - jon_richards 5y ago
      That used to work in Google sheets, but now it only pastes the last thing copied from Google sheets. Really frustrating.
    - InitialLastName 5y ago
      That's broken in Outlook 2108. Now they want you to paste (CTRL+V) and then hold CTRL and click on/navigate to the obscure icon for the paste variant you want.
    - TorKlingberg 5y ago
      Ctrl+Shift+V is great, when it works. Which it doesn't annoyingly often, such as Atlassian's Confluence wiki. So I paste and re-copy things in the URL bar all the time. Ctrl + L V A X
  - tragomaskhalos 5y ago
    Ah yes - the "sheepdip" as we call it
  - klyrs 5y ago
    FWIW, this is necessary in linux and android too.
  - inetknght 5y ago
    > I have the habit of "washing" everything with Notepad to get rid of inconsistencies I also do that. I 100% attribute that to browsers and people who want to copy/paste HTML and have it all colorized and formatted in the destination app.
- sixothree 5y ago
  Excel is even worse. Perform any action between the time you copy and the time you paste and everything on your clipboard is lost.
  - markus_zhang 5y ago
    Yeah this really sucks. Fortunately I'm largely away from the spreadsheet world. My motto is stay as far away from business as you can and have a happy life.
  - joenathanone 5y ago
    Excel is insane, the undo button is universal, meaning if you are editing multiple spreadsheets, you can’t just undo changes to one of them if you made a mistake between editing, you have to undo all changes to all open spreadsheets to get back to your desired undo point.
    - hughrr 5y ago
      Oh god this is one feature that literally makes me want to jump on a plane to Redmond and throw my own excrement at them like a deranged chimpanzee.
    - quakeguy 5y ago
      Yeah, this is so unproductive, it boggles the mind.
    - tragomaskhalos 5y ago
      Joel Spolsky used to work on Excel and he has written some brilliant stuff about it (at least, in its early days). My personal favourite is the revelation that the Excel team had their own C compiler, which kind of takes Not Invented Here into the stratosphere.
    - officeplant 5y ago
      This is why I always open up multiple instances of Excel.
    - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

lghh 5y ago

> Microsoft doesn't have any competent developers working on the Windows user interfaces Oh please. Do you really think that MS has nobody with any level of competency on any single team in their entire org? Do you really think that low of others? Could it possibly be that sometimes... things have bugs? Shit breaks in ways you don't expect. Things happen. Painting an entire group of people you've never met with such a large brush is gross. It's just software and these are just people.

bodge5000 5y ago
Its a controversial opinion (I think) but I'm inclined to agree. I do tend to find that devs are often much harsher to other devs, sometimes unfairly so, than any other profession that I know of. If you complain your mechanic is slow and expensive, a load of other mechanics will come and tell you (and probably rightly so) that the job is more difficult and complex than you know of. But you don't see that often with devs, which is a bit disappointing.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Probably because your mechanic isn't actively making your car perform worse, gluing ads onto the body, or redesigning your steering wheel based on the latest fads.
  - bodge5000 5y ago
    I highly doubt the devs themselves run microsoft. I could be wrong but theres probably a manager or two in there as well. Maybe I'm stuck in the past, but I was under the impression that devs build the thing, others decide what it is thats built. If that is the case, then I personally wouldn't call a dev 'incompetant' because of a decision not made by them. Of course you could say they should stand up against this, but again, whilst theres this hostility towards other devs, why are you going to risk not being able to put food on the table for someone on the internet who thinks your an idiot? (As an aside, the analogy doesn't really stretch that far since developers are hired by companies whereas mechanics are paid directly by customers. Perhaps car designers would be a better fit here, but again, other car designers would be quick to point out the problems with your complaints, but thats by the by)

hughrr 5y ago

How bold of you to suggest they have anyone competent working on PowerShell or Azure. Everything I go near from them is a monumental crapfest these days. They could be a good platform if they stopped this schizophrenic direction changing and actually fixed shit rather than hiding it behind layers of new shit.

markus_zhang 5y ago
That's the reality of modern software development: creating new shits on top of old shits. They don't have the time to clean up the old shits. I guess we have to accept that.
- hughrr 5y ago
  The problem is if it was a zoo this deep in shit it’d be shut down from an animal welfare point of view. Perhaps we should consider software welfare as well. “Clean up your shit or we’ll fine you”
- nitrogen 5y ago
  If copyright terms didn't last so long, then other people could take the old layers and "compost" them into fertilizer for new code.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    I think you have an excellent point.
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    only if the code was available.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  Aka “technical debt”

mattowen_uk 5y ago

> At this point I'm wondering if it is worth trying to build my own desktop on top of Windows Server Core. Oh, I'm not the only one thinking this then! That's good to know. For years I've been tinkering at the edges of this by having my own app launcher, and my own desktop widgets, and an explorer style start menu navigation app. All I need is to hook into the systray (although, do I need that? it's just a distraction), and put together a good/fast app switcher app, and I could ditch explorer.exe and the startmenu app completely.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Honestly I'm surprised I haven't yet stumbled across a community of people doing this. If I had to guess, there's probably a stumbling block that makes it unsuitable for a lot of desktop use cases that I'm not aware of.
- pacifika 5y ago
  It used to be the case that directx 9 wouldn’t install, and several software would detect the server is and refuse.
- userbinator 5y ago
  There are various (mostly non-English) communities making weird chimeric combinations of XP/Vista/7-era OS mods, more recently guided by the leaked source; I don't think they're interested in doing anything legal, but also seem to not be interested in post-Win8 either.
selfhoster11 5y ago
I'm pretty sure Retrobar will work with the systray, that is if you're into the classic Windows taskbar experience.

Arainach 5y ago

This is insulting and trivially untrue. The Windows shell org has a number of excellent engineers. When I was at Microsoft it was one of the most senior and highest-tenured orgs. There are fantastic engineers such as Raymond Chen (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/) and many more. Do not mistake domains you don't understand as being bad at things. Programs and extensions that are 26 years old are still running strong on Windows 10 today. The economy runs on ancient tools that rely on that compatibility. Throwing together a pretty context menu isn't as important as making sure that all of the UI elements are accessible to screen readers and other tools. It's also trivial compared to ensuring that old programs that assumed they could just click on the third menu item to make something happen keep working even if you redesign the menu.

only_as_i_fall 5y ago
Is your argument that the windows desktop is a good piece of software or that software developers who consistently create bad software are actually good developers? I realize most of the terrible bloat, adware, security holes etc are probably caused by external factors, but at some point I think it's important to take responsibility for your own work and either push back on or move on.
- Arainach 5y ago
  I certainly consider it a good piece of software. It does more things across more environments than its competitors. I have and regularly use machines with all the major desktop platforms in my house - Windows, OS X, Linux, Chrome OS. While I cycle between them, I strongly prefer the Windows machines. The alternatives are all are missing all sorts of window management things such as snapping to screen quadrants and multimon borders, keyboard shortcuts for moving and snapping windows. Monitors with different DPIs is a challenge on Mac and hopeless on Linux. There are all sorts of UI affordances in Windows to do things like open new copies of an app (middle click on the taskbar icon), close an app (middle click on the taskbar preview), and so on. There are a number of changes I strongly disagree with in Windows 11 such as removing the ability to put the taskbar on the side, but as a whole I still think the Windows desktop is an excellent piece of software that's significantly more usable than the alternatives.

the_only_law 5y ago

> At this point I'm wondering if it is worth trying to build my own desktop on top of Windows Server Core. Supposedly there used to be all sorts of third party shells. Only thing I’ve found to still exist are a few black box ports though.

MikusR 5y ago

I was following the development of WSL and got the impression that The people that work on kernel kinda know what they are doing and even listen to requests. The network team takes long to respond but still kinda implements requests. And NTFS is developed by a single person that lives in a wine cellar with a machine gun (as seen by every new file system feature being built in layers above ntfs.) And explorer and other user facing features are done by monkeys on typewriters.

userbinator 5y ago

Highly controversial opinion: around the time quality seemed to very noticeably take a nosedive (Win8?) was also roughly the time all the "diversity and inclusion", "anti-meritocracy" etc. stuff took off. Maybe we are just seeing the proof of what happens when you hire people for who they are rather than what they can do. Someone in another comment here mentions Raymond Chen. He is from the "old Microsoft", and probably has significantly less power than he used to.