8 ms·

It's such a shame too. Windows 10 is a great modern OS that everyone expected to last and be built upon, but they just had to go and push out a new "modernized"

• PostThisTooFast 5y ago
  How is it a "great modern OS?" Internally? Because its UI and user experience are a shitshow. Settings are scattered everywhere. Windows have no toolbars, title bars, or borders to distinguish them from the one they're overlapping. Menu bars are missing. There are access-prohibited shadows of user directories all over the place in Explorer. The color-scheme editor is simply gone. It's still full of peek-a-boo and Easter-egg UI, with controls disguised as text or simply invisible unless you accidentally roll over them. And my favorite: Microsoft has disabled remote desktop access except in its "pro" version. Gee, Microsoft: Your contention is that a PROFESSIONAL is the most likely customer to need someone else to log in and help him remotely? Retarded. When my parents have an issue that I could log in and solve, guess what? I can't. And no, Microsoft, I'm not "upgrading" them to a "pro" version of your broken shit. I'm going to buy them a Mac, and that's the end of Windows in any of my family's homes. And this is coming from a former Windows enthusiast / professional developer / Mac scorner. You don't realize how unusable Windows has become until you try to set someone up on it. Its E-mail program is absymal, defective in design and function. Outlook isn't included anymore. If you do make the mistake of installing another glorified spam conduit, Office 365, you'll be treated to defects that literally render it unusable to some people: I increased the system-wide font size for my parents, but Outlook didn't honor it. E-mail subjects in the In box remained microscopic and illegible. And of course there's the endless goddamned harangue to log in with your Microsoft account. A huge portion of the population is laden with an ever-growing pile of accounts and passwords. An account to log into your computer. Another for E-mail. Another for Apple products. Another for your cable provider. ENOUGH. They have no idea which one I'm asking for when I need to get their password to help them with something. It's easy for the Hacker News demographic to forget that PEOPLE DO NOT UNDERSTAND THIS MESS. And so they are writing down their IDs and passwords on Post-Its and putting them on their computers. They are using the same password on every site that demands that they use an E-mail address as a user ID, because they think that this is required. Then the users feel dumb and blame themselves for problems, which pisses me off even more. They're being TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF BY MICROSOFT and others, rendering their computers essentially unusable and their security at risk. It's disgraceful.
  • userbinator 5y ago
    Windows have no toolbars, title bars, or borders to distinguish them from the one they're overlapping. ...and let's not forget removing color from the active window's titlebar, so it was eye-searingly white like all the others, then reluctantly adding it back as an optional setting in an "update" later. https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/how-to-restore-color-to-the-title-bars-in-windows-10/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/how-to-resto... When stuff like that seems to happen almost regularly, I really wonder who's running the show at MS. Destroying two decades of UI refinement takes active (and IMHO almost malicious) effort, not mere ignorance.
    • marcodiego 5y ago
      They won't change until they have competition.
    • BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
      Bleach white minimalism is the thing I lament the most about 21st century design. And, when designers reluctantly put color and contrast back in, they tend to just give you light grays.
      • mycall 5y ago
        I'm looking forward to the return of baroque UX. It's been a few hundred years, but what the hay.
    • exporectomy 5y ago
      I use a custom active window title bar color but frustratingly Google Chrome is about the only application I notice that doesn't respect it.
    • vladvasiliu 5y ago
      Well, regarding the color thing, I figured it was a taste thing, and mine might be outdated or something. But I particularly like it when I open a new window, it appears on top of the old ones, it looks like it's accepting input (the cursor blinks) but when I type, nothing happens. I have to actually click inside it for it to actually gain actual focus. I'm thinking in particular of new Edge windows.
• thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > Windows 10 is a great modern OS that everyone expected to last and be built upon Possibly related to Microsoft explicitly saying "there will be no further versions of Windows after Windows 10".
  • Nition 5y ago
    I semi-seriously wonder if they did it because Apple finally decided to increment their number to Mac OS 11. I also wonder if Apple went to 11 because Microsoft got to 10.
• lostlogin 5y ago
  > Windows 10 is a great modern OS I’m an infrequent user of it but have a starkly different opinion. It feels like a layer on top archeology and the number of places you have to go to find settings and controls is unhelpful.
  • bombcar 5y ago
    I’m convinced that 80% of the hatred of modern Windows could easily have been avoided if they just made both settings areas have, you know, all settings.
    • 8note 5y ago
      I'm not convinced that's a thing they can do. Too many settings are in 3p apps
      • bombcar 5y ago
        Yeah but Windows itself has two control panels for its own settings, no 3P installed at all. Left over from the half-hearted touch Renaissance.
        • dboreham 5y ago
          I think this has changed in 11.
        • wvenable 5y ago
          In older Windows, the control panel was extendable by 3rd party applications and drivers. So it sticks around mostly for that and mostly because re-writing a UI for changing really esoteric IT-admin level settings is a waste of time.
  • phkahler 5y ago
    I hate how the File menu in all the office apps turned into some weird thing with no text on it. And when I do remember that's where it went and click it, not a menu but a whole fricking nother version of control panel slides out covering what I was doing...
• jussij 5y ago
  Is Windows 10 really that good? It's been some time now, but I still remember the first time I upgraded away from Windows 7 and feeling disappointed. Since then my hardware is massively more powerful, but I'm still to be convinced my current Windows 10 setup is better than that older Windows 7 setup.
  • mkr-hn 5y ago
    They launched it at -90/10 and it's up to 7/10.
    • flutterwascrap 5y ago
      Like flutter? Edit: Seriously, they fixed 5000 flaming bugs in 2.2 release. God knows how many more are there.
  • nyanpasu64 5y ago
    Windows 10 is better at HiDPI support, and worse at performance on low-spec hardware (from what I hear on HN, and my experience with a 5 year old laptop which I don't know if it's my machine and drivers, or Windows 10 itself).
  • mixmastamyk 5y ago
    Windows Terminal is arguably the only feature worth upgrading for in the last decade. I'm tempted to say two, but there were a number of important security improvements to go along with the UI regressions in that era.
  • bitwize 5y ago
    Windows 10 is a really great OS marred by unfortunate business choices: ads, telemetry, settings scattered to the four winds, everything being so frickin' bloated you need 8 GiB and an SSD just to run Word acceptably. It's funny because Windows went from "too unstable to be relied upon for anything" in the 9x era to "death by a thousand papercuts" today. It's like it's ruled by a law of conservation of awesome: for every feature there must be an equal and opposite misfeature.
  • 5y ago
• nonbirithm 5y ago
  Perhaps there's a version of Moore's Law concerning the amount of innovation left at the OS level, and we're only starting to run out of it just now. What legitimately useful features can we expect out of the release of iOS five major versions down the line? Will there be any new features that change the status quo, and that we'd be practically unable to live without? The significant features like the app store and multitasking have already been done long ago. As for macOS, it seems that the new security controls and notifications are significantly impacting some people's user experience, but they're still "improvements" from Apple's standpoint. And yet Apple and Microsoft are still somehow compelled to keep releasing new versions of their operating systems on a fairly regular basis. It's hard to imagine there will be a "final" or even long-term-support version of iOS. But those companies aren't going to market their new OS versions as changing nothing, so something has to change. I'm honestly very curious to see what will happen ten years from now when the vendors will struggle to meet their own arbitrary standards for innovation with each new OS version when, by nature, there are not many more significant breakthroughs left to be had.
  • eloisius 5y ago
    I get so sick of Apple reshuffling their interface around just to make it "new" and "modern" every major release that I can almost seriously see myself using Serenity OS as a daily driver one day. I have no idea what's going on over there, but it's like they adopted all the worst design trends from web (things changing on hover, hamburger menus hiding everything to look "clean") to pulled it into macOS.
  • rocqua 5y ago
    There is plenty of innovation to be done on security and performance. But very little that is a great 'sales pitch'. Perhaps much better interface for multi desktop and other multitasking.
  • thomastjeffery 5y ago
    Just get feature parity with the average Linux distro, and I'll be happy. Windows is so behind, and every step they take in the right direction is an authoritative foot-gun. Most of its problems are, at their heart, symptoms of Microsoft's proprietary closed-source design style. Apple made huge strides in the right direction by basing OS X on BSD, then proceeded to make every step from then on in the wrong one. Walled gardens are pretty, not functional.
• userbinator 5y ago
  I really wish people would stop using the word "modern" in marketing rhetoric as if it was a good thing, because more often than not they're using it and other buzzwords because they don't have any better compelling reasons to convince you to use their product. No, I do not care that the newer version is more "modern", "stylish", "sleek", "clean", or any other number of useless buzzwordy adjectives. Tell me concretely what's actually better about it and how it will improve my (my, not your!) "experience". An OS should not be a fashion statement nor an advertising platform. It's a tool people use to get real work done.
  • BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
    monkey paw curls Introducing Windows 12, the worlds most powerful post-modern computing experience.
    • joquarky 5y ago
      If you think Microsoft Bob was whimsical, hold on to your seat.
  • throwtheacctawy 5y ago
    Do you ever get the feeling that advancement of technology is tied to two things? - Ad-Tech - Adult pornography consumption We’re not doing anything but creating a more seamless experience for the “thing” we interact with to send an API call for every keystroke, click, or tap. Maybe honesty or performance doesn’t sell anymore; “We dumped all this crappy poorly performing JavaScript components, spent 3 months addressing tech debt, and things are generally faster - using 38% less memory, and rendering HTML 13% faster”. Now the message is; “can you just buy a newer processor and make sure you don’t use our operating system with less than 16gb of ram and an SSD?”