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> This has been the case for a while. I worked on the Windows Desktop Experience Team from Win7-Win10. Starting around Win8, the designers had full control, and

• Arainach 5y ago
  To each their own. Linux DMs (including KDE, Gnome, and many others) are still way behind in basic UX flows like multimon and snapping windows, and Mac has barely even tried. Keyboard shortcuts for moving windows between monitors, snapping, launching pinned apps, etc. are also sorely lacking on alternatives. I use Linux (Gnome 3 these days), OS X, Windows, and Chrome OS on a daily basis and still prefer Windows for my personal devices.
  • pkulak 5y ago
    > Keyboard shortcuts for moving windows between monitors, snapping, launching pinned apps, etc. are also sorely lacking. Allow me to show you this tiling window manager…
  • bayindirh 5y ago
    KDE has 95% of the things you've mentioned for at least 5 years, if not longer (I'm using KDE for more than a decade, so I don't remember exact dates). I clearly remember that when Windows introduced auto-snapping/auto-scaling windows, I looked and giggled as yet another KDE feature made its way to one of the "bigger" environments.
  • Zardoz84 5y ago
    What ? I can't speak about Gnome and other DMs, but KDE experience with multimonitor, it's better. It simply works out of the box. I don't get monitors swapped aleatory. I can designated my primary screen without issues. Also, snapping windows was a feature on Linux DMs like decades ago!
    • bayindirh 5y ago
      Multi monitor comfort in Linux is a relatively new thing. In the olden days, that thing was flat out painful. It's really well working in these days, but it was not like that until recently. I remember setting up Xorg.conf to get my single monitor working as it should.
      • jcelerier 5y ago
        What's "recently" for you ? The last time I had to write Xorg modelines must have been before Ubuntu 6.04
        • bayindirh 5y ago
          5-6 years. Yes, Auto configuring X.org is older than that, but drivers, Multi monitor setup and other related things came later than that. Even if X had proper support for multiple monitors, drivers were very finicky at the beginning.
          • jcelerier 5y ago
            weird, I wonder what distro you were using. Even 5-6 years ago, multi monitors just worked for me - hell, I had a retina screen at that time and it pretty much just worked too.
      • jeffreygoesto 5y ago
        Jesus, those days of manual modeline hacking, because I could get an enormous, 42kg (had to carry it 6 stories up and later down), 21" fixed frequency Monitor from an old Workstation for small money...
  • wastholm 5y ago
    To each their own indeed. For me, as someone who uses KDE/Plasma by choice and Windows because sometimes I have to, it has been a source of humor for years and years how an environment literally called Windows can have such hilariously bad window management. No point to focus, no configurable window shortcuts, no send to front/back, no minimizing a window when its application is "busy", bad and inconsistent visual indication of which window has focus...
  • indymike 5y ago
    You've clearly not used KDE in about 10 years if you think it doesn't have excellent snapping and multi monitor and multi desktop. VS KDE. Without powertoys is at parity with maybe kde4 in this area.
• systemvoltage 5y ago
  Ermm...no. I would say Microsoft's UI team was absolutely stellar and basically the gold-standard in the world during Windows 95 days. I think you need to open your mind a little bit and read: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/ https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9... This is debatable but personally, 2009 Windows 7 UX/UI is still better than 2022 versions of GNOME, KDE, XFCE what-have-you in the Linux world. If anything, complete opposite of what you're saying is true. Linux UX/UI is let's just politely put it - OK.
  • zakius 5y ago
    win7 was aesthetically awful, but usability was almost on point but KDE is slightly better, at least in these aspects I care about, of course it looks disgusting, but you don't need third party tools to disable taskbar grouping and that's a big thing
    • CRConrad 5y ago
      > win7 was aesthetically awful, but usability was almost on point A bunch of clicks to get to the Control Panel, but once there just a few to get to the GUI configuration dialogue box, and somewhere in that one or two more to enable "Windows Classic" style, and you had the good old W95/NT4/98/2K aesthetics back -- and all the functionality of W7. (And then you could spend a day or two getting colours and fonts and GUI-element sizes juuuust... so, if you wanted to.)
      • systemvoltage 5y ago
        I agree, Windows 7 wasn't as good as Win95/98. Win95 I think is just second to none in UI design. Perhaps, Cinema4D UI is a contender but that's an application. If you haven't checked, totally checkout C4D :-).
• moonchrome 5y ago
  >most Linux folks have known this since the early 90s, where KDE, GNOME, etc. were vastly superior to anything Microsoft was putting out. Saying this and also claiming revisionist history, this has got to be satire ? Early 90s Linux desktop ? From what I can tell KDE/gnome started development in 97.
  • microtonal 5y ago
    From what I can tell KDE/gnome started development in 97. KDE started in 1996, but I remember running one of the first alphas in 1997 (Alpha 2?) and being relieved that Linux had finally something that somewhat resembled the Windows 95 UI. Before that people were primarily running tvm or fvwm (CDE was still closed-source), which was fine for Unix-heads, but nowhere close to the gold standard that the Windows 95, NT 4, or macOS classic were. (Ps. fvwm95 was released pretty soon after Windows 95, but only had the look of Windows 95, not really the usability.)
• vijucat 5y ago
  I absolutely LOVE the Windows'98 UI : https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win98 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win98
  • CRConrad 5y ago
    I always found the gradients of the title bar colours a little cheesy.
• thomasz 5y ago
  Windows 7 with the dock, searchable launcher and hotkeys for placing windows was when Windows became quite usable. I’ve never heard people complaining that it was ruined, just moaning about having to relearn stuff. But that is inevitable. We would still be using stone tools, if we had listened to these people in the Neolithic.
• pjmlp 5y ago
  > In fact, most ideas you see in MacOS these days can find their roots in early (and often experimental) Linux interfaces (from multiple desktops, to launchers, to Exposé). I am pretty sure it was the other way around.
  • tapia 5y ago
    Not at all. Multiple workspaces was common in Linux way before it was a thing in windows or Mac. And Compiz really helped in bringing new fancy effects to the desktop.
    • microtonal 5y ago
      Multiple desktops were on Unix first. But Quartz Extreme preceded Compiz by three years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Compositor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Compositor Also, Exposé was introduced in 2003 before Linux counterparts (and requires a good compositor to do it well). In fact, there was a rush to write KDE/GNOME plugins after Panther was introduced. Sadly, most were pretty janky/bad until Compiz was introduced. Spotlight (launcher/search) was introduced with Tiger in 2005, also much before Linux desktops started introducing it. Only after that, desktop search (e.g. Beagle) and search-based launchers like GNOME Do started showing up.
• microtonal 5y ago
  The idea that designers circa Win7 "ruined" windows UX/UI is just revisionist history. Windows has had pretty terrible UI/UX basically forever, and most Linux folks have known this since the early 90s, where KDE, GNOME, etc. were vastly superior to anything Microsoft was putting out. Sorry, but talking about revisionist history. KDE had their first stable release in 1998, years after Windows 95. KDE was inspired by CDE, but almost equally by Windows 95 (see e.g. the launcher in early KDE versions). Before KDE, we were mostly using fvwm, twm, etc., which had extremely bad usability for non-expert users. The GNOME project was started after KDE, because some folks were unhappy that KDE used Qt, which didn't have a free software license at the time. In fact, most ideas you see in MacOS these days can find their roots in early (and often experimental) Linux interfaces (from multiple desktops, to launchers, to Exposé). Well, that's saying like "most ideas for the iPhone have their roots in...". Sure, there may have been environments that give some overview of applications. But Exposé set the gold standard for this feature and relied very heavily on GPU-accelerated compositing (Quartz compose). Something Linux desktop environments and Windows only got years later. Quickly after Exposé was added to Panther, you saw folks in the Linxu world trying to copy the feature to KDE and GNOME. See e.g.: https://store.kde.org/p/1220207 https://store.kde.org/p/1220207 (Also see how clunky and ugly it looked compared to OS X Exposé. Since the icons all have different resolutions, some are sharp, others are very pixely. The design is quite ugly, the Kopete window is cut in half. Etc.) The Linux development has largely been reactive, even to this day. E.g. once hamburger menus started popping up in Google's design language, GNOME started to copy this idea. Thanks to which GNOME doesn't have application menus anymore (which is absolutely disastrous for desktops.) most ideas you see in I think this also expresses an issue with the Linux-approach to the desktop (by and large). In the end it is not about features, ideas, or being there first. It is about forming a consistent and coherent interface. Linux desktops fail here in even basic things that have been solved in other desktops for decades, such as consistent keyboard shortcuts between applications.