111 ms·

Windows needs a change in priorities

• bastardoperator 5y ago
  I just want a barebones version of windows with none of the fluff. It would also be nice if they could hire someone that understood fonts and icons and worked on those too. At this point all I see is an old OS that keeps getting garbage bolted on to it.
• sph 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure Windows got their priorities straight: telemetry, advertisement are the priority and they're executing their strategy very well. Your priority as a user are different, but, sorry to say, your voice doesn't count. The year-end revenue and KPI is what counts, because you and 99% of other companies will still be buying and using PCs with Windows preinstalled and paying Microsoft for licences. You say so yourself, you're disappointed with the direction Windows is taking, but you still use it [for very legitimate reasons]. Why should Microsoft sell Windows for $199, when they can earn $199 + $x/month/user from ads and create more value for its shareholders?
  • dend 5y ago
    I would pay extra to buy a "Signature Edition" (kind of like they had with PCs) of Windows that has none of the ads and whatever other "value-add" pieces are integrated in it. One would say - I want LTSC accessible for customers like myself, without the kneecapped ability to run latest Windows software.
    • 1_player 5y ago
      They make more off you if you have a regular licence and they can sell your data. You wanting to pay extra not to be spied upon is irrelevant, you have no choice in the matter. Very simply, the money lost because some people have left Windows for greener pastures is being offset by the increased revenue.
      • dend 5y ago
        I don't disagree with this. It's the unfortunate reality that I hope changes, but that change needs to come from _a lot_ of dissatisfied customers.
      • lukas099 5y ago
        There must be some amount of money that someone could pay to make it worth it to Microsoft to not show ads or sell data. The problem is, I doubt many people would actually pay that amount.
        • juanani 5y ago
        • sylens 5y ago
          There was an interesting interview on the Windows Weekly podcast with Chris Capossela (CMO of consumer at Microsoft) a little ways back I believe where the hosts asked Chris why there is no ability to do just this - I believe the answer was that Microsoft views these features as valuable to the user, so why would they think that a user would want to turn them off?
          • marssaxman 5y ago
            I wonder, do marketing types actually believe that kind of nonsense? Could it actually be true for them, personally, that they feel they get some benefit from intrusive communication? That would be such a different experience of the world that it's difficult to wrap my head around. And yet... I was once griping about one or another of the many tricky ways excessively-clever web designers abuse javascript to impose their concept of a "user experience" on me when I would deeply prefer they simply left well enough alone, and my listener replied - "but what if I want the experience they're offering"? - Well, that thought had never occurred to me.
            • hackerfromthefu 5y ago
              No, they do not. The ones who are making choices about it anyway. They just realise they can manipulate the masses.
    • crazysim 5y ago
      I think there was a Pro for Workstations SKU that installed with a lot less candy crush in the start menu when I tried it.
      • dend 5y ago
        There's that, and there's also the limited access Enterprise SKU. Last I checked, the Pro versions will now also require[1] a Microsoft account. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/18/22940517/windows-11-pro-require-microsoft-account-internet-connection https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/18/22940517/windows-11-pro-r...
  • mistrial9 5y ago
    .. because the minute your monopoly power crumbles, you will be met with resentment and abandonment, including by the "investors" who were with you minutes ago.. the ecosystem has dealt with hostile insider moves, high profile technology theft, and constant attack vectors already.. more in store here
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• hughrr 5y ago
  Windows 11 is the first windows release I haven’t used. It’s also the first windows release I will never use going back to windows 3. I am completely done with it now. The last release which wasn’t a complete punch in the balls was nearly 20 years ago.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • AussieWog93 5y ago
    >The last release which wasn’t a complete punch in the balls was nearly 20 years ago. Windows 7 was actually pretty bloody good.
    • city41 5y ago
      Windows 8 came out just about a decade ago. Nearly a decade of Windows pain is still quite unfortunate.
    • InCityDreams 5y ago
      I still have a not-connected-to-the-net w7. Runs my software great.
• jeroenhd 5y ago
  You've got to admire Microsoft's support of open source software. They're doing their best to push users to Linux! By making their UI as ugly and difficult to use as possible so that users don't feel too much of a bump in usability when they try Linux. I'm sure MS can get the job done and kill off their OS with just a few more years of obnoxious bullshit forcefully shoved into their operating system!
  • andrewmcwatters 5y ago
    Not only that, but shipping Microsoft Office onto the Mac makes it so much easier to leave if you're not playing video games.
    • nyanpasu64 5y ago
      Sadly I found out that Macs are filled with telemetry as well: https://mspoweruser.com/macos-big-sur-has-its-own-telemetry-privacy-nightmare/ https://mspoweruser.com/macos-big-sur-has-its-own-telemetry-... (2020)
    • flatiron 5y ago
      Office on the Mac is awful. When I worked at apple I wasnt the only person who ran office in a windows vm. It was a supported config.
      • hattar 5y ago
        It is awful, but so is office on windows. I get so many weird lockups, crashes, and file desynchronizations. Office is one of the worst pieces of software I have to run in windows.
      • wildrhythms 5y ago
        This was years ago now, but I got thru college with a Macbook Air using the "Office Online" apps because the native apps were so unbelievably sluggish and resource hungry. Somehow the web apps were more performant.
  • deleted 5y ago
• sylens 5y ago
  This post resonates with me a lot, as I share many of the same complaints. The UI inconsistencies are one thing (that you would hope get ironed out over time), but the level of ads creeping ever higher is alarming. The “accidental” inclusion of an ad in Windows Explorer this week may have tipped their hand - if that’s the direction they are going, I’m moving off the platform entirely.
  • duskwuff 5y ago
    > The UI inconsistencies are one thing (that you would hop get ironed out over time) I wouldn't get my hopes up. Microsoft seems to be introducing new UI frameworks -- each with their own slightly different appearance -- at an ever-increasing rate. If current trends continue, by 2030 there will be more Windows UI frameworks than developers using them. :)
    • xattt 5y ago
      Are you saying that by 2030, there will be a custom UI framework for every developer out there? Beat that, Apple!
      • grishka 5y ago
        Isn't Apple's SwiftUI just a unified layer on top of AppKit/UIKit/WatchKit depending on the platform though?
        • sgjohnson 5y ago
          Yes, although there’s also Cocoa.
  • sbierwagen 5y ago
    >The UI inconsistencies are one thing (that you would hope get ironed out over time) Windows 8 was released ten years ago. All the old-style control panel dialogs are still with us. Regedit will never get ported to the new UI toolkit.
• worewood 5y ago
  If they shipped a version of Windows sporting the Windows-11 kernel, so running all the recent software, but with Windows 2000 UI for a thousand dollars I would buy it immediately.
  • anarazel 5y ago
    Server isn't too far off...
    • dend 5y ago
      That's true, but then you start running into weird compatibility issues, where a specific game won't work because an Xbox Live component is not installed or DirectX SDK is not at the right version (and you can't install the right version because it only works on the consumer OS).
    • ComputerGuru 5y ago
      Server 2012 (or was it 2008?) was absolutely terrible in that was absolutely Windows 8-ified with a forced full-screen metro start menu "experience," but that was fortunately rectified in the next release (Server 2016, I'm pretty sure).
  • MarkSweep 5y ago
    It’s not quite Windows 2000, but the LTSC edition has much of the bullshit stripped out. It does not support the store therefore Candy Crush is not installed by default. And I don’t think it’s quite $1000, if you can figure out how to buy it.
    • elorant 5y ago
      It's available in volume licensing, with a 5 license as minimal order.
      • kingcharles 5y ago
        Can also get it free with a Visual Studio subscription, that's where I got mine.
• agumonkey 5y ago
  Maybe the personal desktop idea has done its time and they can't find ways to motivate hard work for the reducing profits.
  • riskable 5y ago
    No. It's just reached the point where organic growth is all that's possible. This leaves Microsoft no choice other than the turn their users into the product in order to increase revenue. It's a GOOD thing! The more people that migrate off of Windows the better the world will be because then companies can (hopefully) focus their software development on non-closed, cross-platform ecosystems. Microsoft is long overdue for a market correction. Hopefully the OS market will diversify, bringing a cambrian explosion of life into the market.
• bitwize 5y ago
  Windows at this point is a ball and chain around even Microsoft's leg. They pivoted to a "cloud and services" company under Nadella because they can't make money off Windows anymore -- except by strip-mining its reputation and ubiquity by turning it into adware/spyware. Truly we live in the worst timeline.
  • jthrowsitaway 5y ago
    If it pushes people towards better OSes (any *nix IMO) that's a good thing. I was tired of Windows back in the XP days.
    • 8note 5y ago
      Imo, the best OS has the software that I want to run. I think wine is doing a more important job than MS at allowing windows to die
      • mindwok 5y ago
        Agree. Wine, Proton and associated libraries are allowing Windows to slowly go the way of the dinosaur. If those projects keep delivering I genuinely believe the year of the Linux desktop will slowly approach.
• Royi 5y ago
  The only direction Windows should go is being more modular and less features. Speed is probably the only feature all users want. So make all features modular with advanced user being able to remove and get a lean and mean OS. We want less, we want speed. P. S. It is about time to upgrade the File System. It is too slow...
  • dend 5y ago
    Wholeheartedly support this. I want my OS to be as boring as possible so that I can do all the interesting things I want.
  • flatiron 5y ago
    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/refs/refs-overview https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/refs...
    • duskwuff 5y ago
      ReFS has the stink of death all over it. It's been the "next generation" filesystem for Windows since 2012, with no signs of ever graduating to being the current filesystem -- in fact, a 2017 update to Windows 10 removed the ability for most desktop systems to create ReFS volumes.
      • chungy 5y ago
        ReFS is a poor man's version of btrfs much in the same way btrfs is a poor man's version of ZFS. It's also apparent that ReFS is basically abandoned.
        • yyyk 5y ago
          It's not abandoned, but the intended use case is not consumer use: https://gist.github.com/0xbadfca11/da0598e47dd643d933dc https://gist.github.com/0xbadfca11/da0598e47dd643d933dc
  • panick21_ 5y ago
• segphault 5y ago
  Like every Windows user, I have had a lot of frustrating experiences with the abusive behavior and dark patterns that have taken over the platform. Like when they started having Skype silently run in the background logged in with the user's Microsoft account without any notice or human intervention, and removed the setting to disable it from launching at startup so that it couldn't be prevented. I had to completely uninstall it, which didn't really help, because they still kept bringing it back after every update. I assume that they're going to do this with Teams now. For every egregious user-hostile behavior, you can search and find a ton of forum threads where people discuss at length how to reverse or mitigate them. The fact that Microsoft is aware of this and continues to prioritize this kind of abusive growth hacking over user trust, knowing fully how that impacts the company's reputation among enthusiasts, is perhaps more damning than the actual practices. Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares. Contempt for the users is so deep in the DNA that this will never get better. It's disappointing, because it ultimately undermines all of the great effort that people elsewhere in the company have put into features like WSL that might otherwise make the platform attractive to modern developers. It creates a really adversarial posture between the user and the platform. When they introduce new features, I'm reluctant to even try them because I don't trust their intentions. It's like being in an abusive relationship.
  • rektide 5y ago
    It's such an interesting contrast, for both ends of Microsoft to have reversed so heavily. The core consumer product once fought for betterment and improvement. "Where do you want to go today" was the slogan, suggesting users the helm, piloting their Personal Computer wherever they may. Oh, and it was a complete vision, totalizing. Microsoft did not care at all about open source, webdev, Linux, or broader ecosystem outside their castle. The extent to which Microsoft has become the inverse in a mere decade of time is mind-boggling. Core products seem to lack the internal political strength to resist becoming naggy, crappy ad-ware, pushing other people's not your own desires. Teams and Office are the new core focus, asking, Where does your company want to go today? Teams has boss-ware pro-harassment features like letting people re-raise notifications at you every 5 minutes. This is expressly hostile anti-personal computing, is deeply mechanized corporate processes applied to people. But in terms of open source, Linux, webdev, the broader world of development & making things happen, Microsoft has completely reversed course, embracing Linux in the data center, releasing vast amounts of their systems as open source, providing & sponsoring copious onramps & cross-platform integrations, doing everything they can to make themselves appealing as a broad partner to the rest of the world, rather than Castle Microsoft, Windowsland.
• khaledh 5y ago
  This article nails a lot of the issues with Windows 11. I bit the bullet and upgraded to Windows 11 late last year thinking it must be an improvement over Windows 10. It turned out to be a big step backwards. - Changing the default browser is a lot of work instead of a single click. - I can't move the task bar to the side, even though almost every monitor nowadays has much more horizontal space than vertical. - All apps are not readily accessible from the start menu; I have to click another button to get to them. - I have a 2-in-1 laptop, and turning it into tablet mode is wonky. - I can't choose to not have grouped buttons on the taskbar. - The context menus UX is horrible. Some context menu items are now two clicks away instead of one. Also what's with the excessive rounded corners and slim selection padding? - The stacked notifications is confusing, and always shows the calendar when I open the notifications panel. - Lots of crap pushed on me, like chat (aka Teams), widgets (which require a Microsoft account), 3rd party apps that look like they're installed but actually get downloaded/installed on first use. I was able to fix a lot of those issues with ExplorerPatcher [0]. However, one day after a Windows update, Explorer didn't start at all after login (black screen, I thought Windows was hosed). This has since been fixed. But I decided enough is enough, and finally "upgraded" back to Windows 10. The only good thing about Windows 11 is wslg, which provides out of the box support for Linux GUI apps (not available on Windows 10). But I can get the same result with an X server and some work. [0] https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/wiki/All-features https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/wiki/All-features
  • userbinator 5y ago
    Also what's with the excessive rounded corners and slim selection padding? The people who worked on the design use Macs. Seriously. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307
    • Sakos 5y ago
      When I first heard about this, everything that's ever bothered me about the Windows 8-10-11 evolution makes so much more sense. They're turning it into MacOS.
• anon1900 5y ago
  As an engineer working at Microsoft in Windows, I 100% agree...it's just as frustrating seeing these from inside as well (edit: from throwaway as a protective measure)
  • WithinReason 5y ago
    Is it getting raised at meetings?
    • creakingstairs 5y ago
      Not working in MS but I would guess everyone knows about how bad it is. The problem is so colossal (technically and organisationally) thus no one person has the political capital to push for change. It’s a kind of thing where the usual growth metrics “looks fine”, so it’s hard to justify big initiatives to fix it, yet everyone knows it’s broken. One day, those metrics will start looking bad and then they will try to fix it, but by then it would be too late.
      • judge2020 5y ago
        I imagine the bigger problem is that you have to have hard user research to back colossal changes like this one up, especially if the change would do something like invalidate a possibly three-digit large engineering team's years of work. The only thing that saves this is Microsoft's continued commitment to win32 apps, which will probably continue for eternity at least until MS recreates the _entire_ os from the ground up.
    • anon1900 5y ago
      Personally, I've advocated for many user-friendly scenarios only to get shutdown by "business decisions" higher up by folks who have been in Windows for 20+ years. The engineering culture inside of Windows, from my experience, is poor and not improving
  • markus_zhang 5y ago
    I'm wondering who in the org has a bigger voice and from where he or she gets the political support?
• lucasyvas 5y ago
  These problems tend to work themselves out naturally - when you purposefully damage your user experience, you lose the early tech adopters that originally drove your product growth. They instead flock to a competitor that leaves you holding your bag of a shitty product. There are a few companies flirting with this dangerous line right now and it opens them up completely for disruption, which is the opposite of what they want.
  • lordnacho 5y ago
    I wish this was true, but there are a heck of a lot of office workers who have grown up with Windows and can never be trained to use anything else. You'll get a lot of resistance and rationalisation about why they don't think Linux or BSD or whatever isn't as good, and that the training time is better used to just work.
    • lucasyvas 5y ago
      You're not wrong, but office users should be locked to a browser in 2022 anyway. What do they need Windows for? They can all use a web browser. Microsoft has done an amazing job convincing the office world they need Windows, when they don't need a single feature that it provides in 99% of cases.
      • Pasorrijer 5y ago
        As an officer worker, there are many many things I do that cannot be done in a web browser. File comparison tools, macros and complex excel queries, hard applications for both new and legacy critical programs... Can this be done on Linux? Frequently. Can it be done in a web browser? Rarely effectively and often not at all.
        • lucasyvas 5y ago
          That's fair - I would still be curious to know what percentage of office workers run Windows that don't actually need to.
        • 5y ago
• pkrumins 5y ago
  Windows has to revert back to Windows 2000 when it was usable.
• grishka 5y ago
  Why do I get redirected to https://den.dev/ukraine https://den.dev/ukraine? This isn't a good idea. edit: https://archive.ph/q8ayE https://archive.ph/q8ayE
  • art3m 5y ago
    Agree. Those tricky Ukrainians become annoying
    • grishka 5y ago
      Yes, I'm Russian. No, I don't support what's happening right now and I stand with Ukraine. No, I can't do anything about it. Now get out of the way and let me read the article. These performative acts of shoving politics where it doesn't belong doesn't do anything to change the situation, they just make people like me angry.
  • gruez 5y ago
    Because virtue signaling. I'm not saying this to de-legitimize the "russia is bad" message, but the fact is, in instances like this (eg. a personal blog) such actions are far more about benefiting the person performing the action (ie. setting up the ukraine message) than it is actually about getting russia to stop.
• isanengineer 5y ago
  Does anyone have any insight into how much benefit MSFT actually gets from these decisions? I understand that the intent is to 'make line go up', but as a simpler user I can't really imagine how telemetry and shilling OneDrive actually leads to meaningful revenue growth. On the other hand, people have been loudly complaining about this since the Windows 7 days, and I imagine that there must be some reason they're doubling down on such an unpopular strategy.
  • after_care 5y ago
    > I can't really imagine how telemetry and shilling OneDrive actually leads to meaningful revenue growth. Microsoft’s ad revenue is $10B (1). Allowing advertisers to send ads based on user profiles is a major feature of digital advertising. Collecting telemetry data improves the user profiling. These types of changes have a direct positive impact on one of Microsoft’s fastest growing revenue stream. This will lead to meaningful revenue growth. (1) https://digiday.com/media/microsofts-ad-revenue-hit-10b-and-its-investing-is-a-sleeping-giant-about-to-wake/amp/ https://digiday.com/media/microsofts-ad-revenue-hit-10b-and-...
  • hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
    I'd argue that once a movement has been installed it's very difficult to rule it out unless someone on the board can PROVE that it hurts revenue. This kind of decision (UI designers overriding anyone else) probably comes from a middle manager who has top support, the exact reason why it is impossible to un-stuck such decisions. Think Apple, you have to get X out before you can unstuck his/her decisions. That's politics.
  • intern4tional 5y ago
    Former MSFT here. People tend to think of Microsoft as one unified company with a unified strategy. That is not the case, its best thought of as a batch of little companies that band together to create a product. These companies may compete for resources and attention internally and so each one will optimize for their own benefit. Ads in Edge? That's probably a decision made by some Principal Program Manager with director support on the browser team. The metrics that get tracked for that event are likely how many people click through the ad, rather than the over all impact to the OS. The OS Core team doesn't have the influence to say no, or stop the browser from showing those ads. I recall internally when I (a paying customer for O365) got a toast (that is what a popup ad is called internally) for O365 and I decided to raise an issue. Some PM II (mid-level PM was running the campaign, and they were showing metrics that more people signed up for O365 as a result of the campaign, so per them it was good. I was not in that organization and since that director had OKRs that required signups, he told me to go away. The core OS stripped down has none of these things, but at integrated build, lots of stuff gets put in, and when one team says no to something, often another one will say yes. A good example is that Office has its own update infrastructure and tooling outside of Windows Update. Why? Office wanted to deliver updates on weekly basis and Windows Update said no as that would be too impacting for users, so Office simply said ok and built their own. These issues rarely if ever get surfaced to an executive, as by the time the metrics get up to a CVP generally they are showing broader trends, like adoption, or game breaking bugs, or as you note, the line going up. Executives do not get these problems (such as inconsistent UI) to them. Those things rarely rise above a Group PM or Engineering Manager level, and those people often do not care about the complaint as for that metric helps them or is part of their strategy. Windows, the product team cannot do anything about it due to political problems internally at MS and that is not the engineering team behind Window's fault. We (as that was a team I was on) hated when a product team would do something obnoxious and if we could catch it prior to release would often bluntly complain. More often than not we would get told that we were the platform and to stay out of the other teams business. Anyways, there isn't some mass company dark pattern strategy or other conspiracy, just a bunch of little factions that are all optimizing for their own interests. Office is probably the worst offender of the batch (Skype, Teams, OneDrive) and Windows can do little about it.
• yuuta 5y ago
  Windows 7 is the last version made by Microsoft as a software company. Starting from Windows 8, Microsoft became a cloud company, pushing users all these craps.
• rbut 5y ago
  Talking about dark patterns, here are a couple I've noticed. In Windows, I'm very careful about NOT signing in to anything Microsoft, unless I have to. I make sure I use a local administrator account instead of a Microsoft account. Yesterday I had to open Microsoft Edge for something that would only work in Edge, and lo-and-behold, Microsoft had taken my Xbox Game Pass sign-in and applied to Edge, then informed me they are syncing all my browser history to their servers for my benefit.. It's even worse when you activate Office 365. There is a small checkbox at the end which if you don't uncheck, converts your local administrator into your Microsoft account.. Going back to a local administrator account is not an easy task.
  • jart 5y ago
    That whole thing with Edge has got to be the biggest information heist in the history of the software industry. Everyone on Windows basically woke up one morning and Microsoft was like, greetings, we've backed up your hard drive to our cloud. Always do your work in a terminal folks!
  • _Algernon_ 5y ago
    Looks like switching to linux when win 7 support ended was the right move. All my games may randomly freeze for no discernible reason, but at least I don't have to deal with that BS.
    • McAtNite 5y ago
      I’m desperately wishing for Valve to have success with the Deck so that Linux gets better attention from game devs. The last Windows machine in my environment is exclusively for PC games, and I honestly can’t wait to install Linux over it.
      • fartcannon 5y ago
        Just start now. Think of unsupported games as you think of games for Nintendo and Sony machines. Your financial support of gaming on Linux will encourage developers to support it. Waiting just keeps the status quo.
• vstollen 5y ago
  It's mind boggling how user-hostile one can make a piece of "premium" software. You pay 145€ for the Home or 259€ for the Pro Edition and they treat it like it's freeware. I want my computer to support me in achieving what I want to do, but Windows just keeps grabbing attention with intrusive ads and never-ending notifications.
  • userbinator 5y ago
    For many, it was a "free upgrade".
    • TowerTall 5y ago
      I bought 1 pro license for Windows 8. I have used that key ever since. Countless virtual machines and reinstall / hardware upgrade has accepted that key the past 10 years.
  • IshKebab 5y ago
    Yeah I think the issue is that for most people it is freeware. Very few consumers are actually paying €145 for Windows. They might have got Windows 7 with their PC (I believe the actual cost is around $10) a literal decade ago and paid nothing since. I can see why Microsoft are trying to explore other revenue sources. If they give Windows away they make a huge loss but if they charge for upgrades nobody will upgrade and it will become a support nightmare.
  • lostgame 5y ago
    We used to call seeing ads in Windows ‘adware’. Now we just call it ‘Windows’. I’m dead serious - unless you have a specific business reason like most do to use this POS, I can’t imagine anyone actually choosing to use Windows over the alternatives. What a seriously awful piece of software.
• ncmncm 5y ago
  Windows does what Microsoft wants. Period. Public discussion is just noise. Even more so, Apple. If you want a computing environment that is responsive to your needs, you need to step away from products of those autocratic organizations.
  • unsupp0rted 5y ago
    What Apple wants and what I want seems to intersect about 95% of the time, at least in terms of phones and laptops. Mainly what I want is to not think about my tools at all, and just pick them up or put them down whenever the need arises, without worrying about whether I'm making a secret catastrophic error or that my tools are pretending to be my tools, while actually their master is somebody else. I gladly sacrifice control to Apple the same way I sacrifice control to my doctor or to my sanitation engineer, or, if I had a car, to my car manufacturer. I'm not a teenager exploring the universe of options anymore. Now I just want to get from point A to point B.
    • ncmncm 5y ago
      In my experience, Apple customers mostly just convince themselves that they must want whatever it is Apple chooses to offer at the moment. This is most easily seen whenever the new version of an Apple product arrives, lacking a feature they had relied on. They immediately set to work persuading themselves they can make do without that.
      • kadenwolff 5y ago
        This seems dismissive, especially when you're talking to other devs who have a lot of experience with different OS's. I'm sure some people just accept whatever Apple pushes because they want to have an iPhone for the status signal, but there are a decent number of tech-informed people who prefer MacOS for reasonable reasons.
        • ncmncm 5y ago
          The easiest person to fool has always been yourself. Apple didn't bring that about, but they absolutely rely on it.
• userbinator 5y ago
  This menu is familiar to me because that’s what the Windows API allows you to create (as long as you are not creating it through Windows Forms.) There is no dark theme for this, but at least there are rounded corners. That is just a huge WTF. Since the very earliest versions of Windows there has always been the option of a dark (or white, or rainbow, or ...) theme, where you could adjust the colours and sizes and fonts, and everything using Win32 would follow it. Here's Win95 example: https://64.media.tumblr.com/6d3e8c64cd9a38e70d24c0b1b2c73cb5/tumblr_mwjaieyign1t2as4so6_1280.png https://64.media.tumblr.com/6d3e8c64cd9a38e70d24c0b1b2c73cb5... Yet if I'm understanding correctly, in Win11 that stopped working completely? It really sounds like the Windows team has no one left who knows what used to be possible but isn't anymore, being replaced with probably younger developers making constant excuses to "modernise" by rewriting and breaking stuff. To use an analogy, they're not just reinventing the wheel but making it square.
  • 8note 5y ago
    Mind you, at the same time, there's fewer and fewer users for those old features, so why should they be priority vs the people who are just starting to pick up a computer?
    • wildrhythms 5y ago
      The author is pointing out that the context menu style applied through Microsoft's own software GUI framework is inconsistent with the style applied by the rest of the OS. What 'old feature' are you referring to?
  • dend 5y ago
    Ah, but you see - there is a difference in how theming works in Windows 11, in that it's different from the high-contrast mode. So, you can get a control that swaps the theme to high-contrast (you need to use the native Windows API for that), but you can't get one that works with the Windows 11 style of dark theme out-of-the-box without re-writing it from zero.
    • userbinator 5y ago
• eek2121 5y ago
  Going to disagree. I will agree once Apple allows you to ungroup windows of the same application in the dock. Until then, I will use Windows + WSL2 as my core development system. Sure, Apple has a different workflow. Pro-Apple peeps insist I should 'learn it'. Why? I know the Apple workflow. In my eyes, it is inferior to the one offered by Windows, and KDE on Linux. Everyone has their opinions of course. I respect people who can get stuff done on a Mac, but I'm not one of those people. I grew up on MS-DOS, Linux, Windows 3.1, 95, 98, NT, 2000, etc. I'm left-handed and use alternative inputs. I also don't care about the UX design. It's a step above Windows 10, that is all that matters. Both Apple AND Microsoft could learn a ton of stuff from each other. For Apple: Don't dictate user workflows. For Microsoft, consistency is key. That is all.
  • pthread_t 5y ago
    > KDE on Linux Have you tried other desktop environments on linux?
  • hpcjoe 5y ago
    > I will use Windows + WSL2 as my core development system. Glutton for punishment I see. Seriously, I used WSL2 under Win10 for a year as a (very) poor man's linux for $dayjob. Recently switched to a Mac. I do keep pressing on getting Linux laptops, having run them for work for the last 22+ years ... WSL2 is garbage. Pure and simple. Even on an 8 core 16 thread 64 GB monster with Nvidia graphics. My view on it is that it is an attempt by MSFT to staunch the flow of developers off their platform. To say "hey, see, we do linux within windows". But then you use it. And get bitten in the behind, repeatably, by the memory compaction bit, even after tuning the overall memory usage of WSL2. I was able to get a rough linux desktop by using MobaXterm, single root display, and then running Xfce4 (which I had to build myself, as our corporate approved WSL2 distro was/is broken in so ... so many ways). This setup regularly crashed WSL2, and often windows. When I mentioned this in various fora, windows fans claim that the OS isn't buggy, it must be the hardware. Many BSOD, many hangs, crashes, etc. Couldn't be the OS. Had to be hardware. Or drivers. Yeah. About that.
  • thekyle 5y ago
    > allows you to ungroup windows of the same application in the dock I believe that feature was also recently removed in Windows 11
• lxe 5y ago
  Windows 11 adds another layer of chrome on top of 10, 8, 7, XP, and 98/95. All the code is there. I also see Firefox having the same issue albeit at a much smaller extent -- lots of legacy screens and maybe even some XUL.
• Borgz 5y ago
  It was a bit odd to have a section criticizing UI inconsistencies followed by a section criticizing Microsoft for fixing those UI inconsistencies in Notepad and Task Manager.
  • dend 5y ago
    As I mentioned in the blog post - both Notepad and Task Manager aren't that inconsistent with the rest of the OS. Notepad is just a giant text box. Task Manager is a compact, tabbed view (tabs didn't go anywhere in the latest version of Windows) that now became Fluent-ified and in the process now looks very wasteful of vertical space. Above all, I think the problem is in priorities - Notepad and Task Manager _should_ be consistent with the OS. But when so much focus is assigned to those instead of the core pieces of the OS, it's fair to start raising some questions.
    • ripley12 5y ago
      > when so much focus is assigned to those instead of the core pieces of the OS Do you have any evidence that Notepad and Task Manager required "so much focus"? The new Notepad's about as bare-bones as the old Notepad, it just happens to use XAML Islands for the UI. It would be surprising if it significantly detracted from other efforts.
      • dend 5y ago
        It's all about contrast to everything else. If my house roof is leaking and instead of fixing that I put a limited amount of resources I have into repainting my office and installing a fancy new European faucet, and then go and tell everyone about it - that says a lot about my priorities. Yes, I am fully aware of the fact that different teams do different things at a big company, but funnily enough when asked about high-priority issues the answer is almost universally "We don't have enough time and/or developers to tackle this right now." But there is magically time for MSN toolbars and Notepad tweaks.
        • ripley12 5y ago
• anonymousiam 5y ago
  Complaining about Windows UX inconsistency sort of misses the point that the OS and the windowing system should be separate. The function of an OS is not to manage windows, it is to provide an abstraction layer between the applications and the hardware.
  • Stevvo 5y ago
    It is called Windows, the name does suggest that the product is more than a kernel.
  • tcmart14 5y ago
    I think your argument is valid for something Linux where you can actually decouple those things. Technically, it is still true for windows, but practically it isn't. What you get from Microsoft is a complete OS without any officially sanctioned way to decouple the OS part (kernel and perhaps a few critical user land utils) and windowing system.
  • frosted-flakes 5y ago
    That's, just your opinion, man.
• wenmoon 5y ago
  windows is great (/s) for having multiple areas with the same settings like regular "Control Panel Mouse" and "Mouse and Keyboard" and "Gaming" as a user it makes getting help when something is not working (which is often) very difficult and borderline impossible not to mention completely infuriating if i could boot directly into a launcher for my games i would do it in a heartbeat. get the OS out of my way please
• eyelidlessness 5y ago
  I’m not a Windows user and I know this is not a popular opinion, but… I really wish Windows 8 had been better received. Sure it was a huge break from Win<8. But it was a bold, thoughtful and thorough one, with a lot of potential. Refining Metro but ultimately sticking to its core ideas would almost certainly have produced a better Windows experience overall than the basically incoherent changes which followed.
  • nyanpasu64 5y ago
    I'm convinced Windows 8 is a better tablet OS than 10. I don't know if it's a better desktop OS.
    • eyelidlessness 5y ago
      It wasn’t a better desktop OS, but it was a just as good desktop OS with potential to become a better one.
    • tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      What I don't understand is why they decided to shoehorn Windows onto their tablets instead of the Windows Phone OS. Windows phone was well received, it would have made far more sense. Apple could see that wasn't going to work, why couldn't Microsoft.
  • jenscow 5y ago
    Well, you're right about one thing, > I know this is not a popular opinion
    • eyelidlessness 5y ago
      I also wish the Zune and Windows Phone had succeeded. I’m not very good at gambling either. It’s good to recognize one’s strengths or lack thereof :)
• lamontcg 5y ago
  > I can literally run a game written for Windows 95 on Windows 11 without major issues That probably isn't a good thing. Not without firing up some kind of explicit emulator.
  • hpcjoe 5y ago
    Yeah, I read that, and wondered if that is a real justification for, well, anything. I have and can run Linux binaries I had compiled (statically) from the late 90s. Doesn't mean that I should. If you are running ancient games, run them on the ancient OS. Using this as a reason to dismiss Mac and Linux? Not the best thought out argument. Kinda makes the opposite point than the author intended.
    • Sugimot0 5y ago
      Also with package managers like Nix you can install older versions of a program along with that program's corresponding dependencies at the corresponding version and so on. It's not baked-in to unix but things like this are made easier on unix and I think that's where the sauce is.
• wolpoli 5y ago
  Windows 11 looks great in screenshots, but when I actually try to use it, it was terrible. I tried to move a file in Explorer using the context menu and I couldn't confidently tell Cut/Copy/Rename icons apart because they are just abstract lines that represents the file operation. I started looking at ways to get the original Context Menu back, and then I just decided to rollback to Windows 10.
• Sophistifunk 5y ago
  All of these gripes are valid. And none of them aside from the new actively-evil stuff in 10 and 11 like telemetry can ever be fixed, because all of this poorly-matched stuff is exactly why almost all old Windows software (apart from games, that's just a lie thanks to DRM and GPU vendors) still run.
• hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
  Windows 11 is probably the last straw that pushes me to Linux. I'm still using Windows 10 on my Lenovo 470S laptop, but my next one is going to be a Linux one. I still have to keep a Windows gig somewhere to play old school games but that's pretty much all I need. I'll also try to avoid any job that requires MS Office. Nowadays I have to "Save as" to easily navigate to a local folder, otherwise it takes quite a few steps to move away from the OneDrive default folder. Windows 10 is bad enough, but whatever I heard about 11 seems to be much worse. MSFT has made the decision to suck money on Cloud, which is fine. I'd like to remind you not to fall into the WSL trap. Use a standalone Linux instead. Once you are getting used to WSL you are probably getting sucked into Windows anyway.
  • barbs 5y ago
    Out of curiosity, what games do you play? Would wine and/or a virtual machine suffice?
    • hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
      I actually play a lot of old school games so 1) Dosbox solves a lot of them and 2) Never tried that but maybe Wine solves the rest. A list of freq games: 1) Baldur's Gate EE Trilogy (And their EE cousins) 2) Quake I (this I'm sure can be played in Linux directly) 3) Diablo 2 (Also think there is a Linux version, they even have a MacOS one) That's pretty much it, and TBH I don't really play them frequently, maybe a few times a week? So yeah I can probably move into Linux right now, and the only "obstacle" is that I removed most bullshits from Windows 10 Pro and it is now usable, so I'm kinda lazy to change. On the other side, since I want to learn sys programming, that's some incentive to move to Linux...
      • goosedragons 5y ago
        There's a Linux version of Baldur's Gate EE and all the other Beamdog EE titles including NWN. If you bought them on Steam or GOG you already have the Linux version. Only Icewind Dale 2 is left on Windows but they lost the source code which is why there's no EE version of that. Diablo 2 doesn't have an official Linux version but there is a source port called OpenDiablo 2. Diablo 2 also runs well under Wine.
• keithnz 5y ago
  I don't mind the UX so much, its pretty good for the most, I'd probably put any gripes I had at the bottom of the list. But 100% agree that they have got to kill treating windows as a marketing channel to advertise and arbitrarily making edge hard to customize to avoid being pushed the Microsoft narrative. Telemetry I'm not as concerned about, but it should be easy to turn off, and it should ask you before using windows if you want to turn it off. I'd leave it on. But obscuring this stuff just loses peoples trust. Trust is the battleground at the moment, google, facebook, apple, microsoft are really burning their bridges in this area. You don't get that back easily, people are still angry at Microsoft for stuff they did 3 decades ago.
• robertwt7 5y ago
  having both mac and PC (windows), it is honestly very frustrating to see how significant small bugs are there when it is launched. I found myself constantly trying to raise my voice in microsoft but don't know where to go. Simple things such as task manager and file explorer are super laggy. I'm not sure how does the PM / QA approve that when they launch? At least in apple, it just works, I don't think I've ever felt super frustrated that I feel like I want to find a way to report a bug. Sure they've got a feedback form / assistant that may or may not be answered as well, but I don't remember the last time I want to report something in apple. Community forum is good, apple support is 1 click away for hardware related. You just feel the definition of "it just works". Sure its hard to manage 2 of the biggest tech companies in the world. but when will MS ever learn?
• perryizgr8 5y ago
  I fully understand the need to express support or condemnation for any popular worldwide topic, but why did they have to make it persistent? The bottom bar is so annoying on this site.
  • dend 5y ago
    Thank you for the note. Because the worldwide topic touches directly on me and my family, I've decided that this was the right approach for my own blog.
• hsnewman 5y ago
  RIP windows.
• Havoc 5y ago
  That’s ok - my computer still thinks it isn’t TPM capable. So it seems that craziness will save me from the other MS craziness
• LegitShady 5y ago
  I have been a relatively happy windows 10 user since its release. Lots of small issues but overall very solid and no serious concerns. Windows 11 doesn't seem to justify its existence in any way, and since the decision to require a microsoft account, I've decided I won't be upgrading to Windows 11 for any reason. When windows 10 reaches EOL I will find an alternative. If its osx, ok. If its linux, ok. But Microsoft seems to continue to make their product worse and worse and pretend they're upgrades.
• mberning 5y ago
  I ponied up for a win11 pro license so I could run the ARM version in Parallels on my M1 mini. All this just to run an old piece of CAD software. If it weren’t the M1 I’d still be running that CAD software in a Win7 VM. Microsoft is living well of of similar scenarios all across the world. It’s terrible within the enterprise. It starts off with the premise that people need windows desktops and laptops. Then it turns into you need AD. Now you need an AD team with half a dozen engineers and even more severs in your “forest” Now you need exchange. Hire a team for that. Might as well get teams too. And so on and so forth. Then accommodating all of these shitty Microsoft products has you paying millions of dollars in engineer salaries and even more in licensing costs. And every year MS just keeps bending you over with worse software and higher costs. Some day enterprise customers will get tired of supporting all this crap and start making long term decisions to reduce their reliance on windows on the desktop and therefore this leviathan of bullshit that infests their organization.
• throwaway22032 5y ago
  For about ten years now I've only used Windows for rare tasks I can't do on Linux. Slowly I've just stopped doing those things until eventually, now, we're talking like, a dual boot I use a couple of times a year for things like running exam software or whatever. Why would they change a winning recipe? Millions (billions) are perfectly happy with their shit sandwiches.
• rr808 5y ago
  I have always used Windows, but the reasons to are really going away. I mostly just use browsers and IntellJ, even Linux can do that.
• artificialLimbs 5y ago
  I stopped playing Minecraft recently again. I first quit a few years ago, but wanted to show it to my young son. Trying to go back and EVEN JUST INSTALL it now is filled with Microsoft-ian circles of login catastrophe and "upgrade your account" nightmares. The installation process was so difficult, I will never play again.
  • Mikeb85 5y ago
    Minetest scratches that itch pretty well, open source and no MS nonsense.
    • taneq 5y ago
      Was going to mention Minetest, we’ve been running a family mineclone2 server for a couple of months now and it’s been great.
    • jasonjayr 5y ago
      I've been playing the same Minetest SMP server for 5+ years now. Minetest is pretty good, the engine is C++ but the game world is defined via lua. There are some quirks that will drive hard-code Minecraft players nuts, but it's not that bad overall, especially if you like the building aspect of MC.
  • MereInterest 5y ago
    As somebody who started playing back in alpha, it's amazing how many user-hostile changes have been made. Needing to transfer accounts multiple times, finding the cross-platform Java version among all the various Windows-only or mobile only versions, finding out that the account had been archived years ago. And that's not even getting into the mess that is the licensing that was Minecraft Alpha. That was changed even before Microsoft took over, when lawyers took one look at the license and realized that players getting "all future versions" [0] would include any sequels, spin-offs, platform ports, etc. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20101214061702/http://notch.tumblr.com/post/2175441966/minecraft-beta-december-20-2010 https://web.archive.org/web/20101214061702/http://notch.tumb...
• neltnerb 5y ago
  I've been using Linux for 21 years. I currently have to deal with maintaining specialty software for 50+ computers. From everything I've seen I dread upgrading to Windows 11 only slightly less than just figuring out how to convert it all to work on Linux somehow. I imagine like everyone I will put it off until the last possible second. No need to reply about how you can do everything on Linux now, until wine works perfectly with $100k equipment that only works with Windows software from 2004 100% of the time it's too risky ;-) The point is that I understand how much of a pain it would be to convert to using Linux and still think it could potentially be worth it compared to upgrading to Windows 11. I would never consider it at all if it was just an OS instead of an experience... what are the odds that the software works on Windows 11 perfectly anyway, my experience going from Windows 7 to Windows 10 was pretty miserable and that was 3 years after Windows 10 was standard.
• IceHegel 5y ago
  I can't stand the ads. I feel like a sucker whenever I use windows for games, like I'm just there so the computer can extract something from me.
• fmakunbound 5y ago
  What you’re seeing there in Windows is a two-dimensional, stylized representation of the bloody turf battles between business units within Microsoft. Most recently adtech has entered the battle and seem to be really killing it.
  • astrea 5y ago
    This is the only comment that needs to be on this post. Microsoft has been designing-by-committee Windows much to the chagrin of their users for years. I don't know the last time I was truly excited for a release.
    • Loughla 5y ago
      >I don't know the last time I was truly excited for a release. Honestly, and I know it's a joke because of the very nerd-tastic dancing, but it was for this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAkuJXGldrM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAkuJXGldrM
• patientplatypus 5y ago
• grogenaut 5y ago
  The only thing keeping me on windows at this point is getting all 5 of my monitors to work under Linux with my 3090 and 2080ti. The only other issue was fusion 360 but someone fixed that.
• user_7832 5y ago
  You know, for an operating system that's meant for an average user and not a tech-savy person (that most of us likely are), Windows 11 is fine if you strictly use the basic features. But if the average person of my dad's generation had a start tile, and clicked on windows on the left... they'd have no idea what's going on. A lot of this appears to be changed just for the sake of it. What I don't understand is - it takes effort to change something. Why not keep the basics the way they are? Start tiles got a reskin I think 2 years ago, and while it changed the visual look (positively) it kept it functionally identical. The current changes... are not. Despite windows being the OS I'm most familiar with, I'm quite certain I'm going to go Linux with wine/proton after Win10 EOL (2025 iirc) - almost every Win11 article gives more reason to hate it, despite me wanting to love it. I'm setting up a server and I think I'll start dabbling with Linux from now itself so the transition is smooth.
• slaymaker1907 5y ago
  Maybe I'm in the minority, but I really don't care that much about UI visual consistency so long as it doesn't make the application confusing (i.e. not underlining hyperlinks or something). However, stuff like tasks on startup should be managed in one location that is easy to find.
  • ripley12 5y ago
    > stuff like tasks on startup should be managed in one location that is easy to find Task Manager's Startup tab?
    • slaymaker1907 5y ago
      It doesn't show everything there. For example, it doesn't show Steam or Discord on my machine at all. There are many ways of implementing startup tasks on Windows.
• Traster 5y ago
  The problem I have with windows is two-fold. Firstly, I came to windows before Vista. So I know how powerful the old windows settings/features were. I knew exactly where to access everything I wanted. I have a feeling this is probably the same for many people from all sorts of backgrounds (Personally, I experimented with Apple - Hello touchbar!). But the second issue is the new damn UIs aren't exhasutive! THey're a thin layer on top of the acutal data, which don't tell you what you actually need, and often revert you back to the old UI. If you're going to ship a product that refers me back to the old UI for half the stuff I'm interested in... just don't ship the new UI. It's not worth the time. It's been 15 years since Vista and this hasn't been fixed. It's difficult to find people to actually just deliver on basic stuff apparently. This is why the commandline works. Becuase if all else fails there is 1 interface. I don't think this is unfixable but it requires a lot of gruntwork.
  • charles_f 5y ago
    > If you're going to ship a product that refers me back to the old UI for half the stuff I'm interested in... just don't ship the new UI. That's exactly the problem of each iteration on Windows. New overlay on top of the old one that always misses the one thing you need, and you either get lucky and find the right menu right away to get to the old screen that gives you what you want, or you get into hell. The new network screens are notoriously bad, and it always takes me 5 minutes to find how the hell to get to the adapters screen again.
    • alternatetwo 5y ago
      I put a shortcut for specifically that screen on my desktop ... and ClassicShell makes it easy to open the original control panel.
• mmis1000 5y ago
  Although most points are true, I don't think ms is the one to blame about limit of changing new tab page. The reason of limit of change default edge new tab is simple. It is just due to adwares. The adwares changed the dawn new tabs instead of the users changed it everytime. The popularity is so high that there is no benefit to allow users change it by default. Because users won't do it, adware will.
• shp0ngle 5y ago
  Well, what are you going to do. Not use Windows? Linux still barely works in 2022 (and if one distro will become really popular, with a big investment of money like Ubuntu did once, they will ad ads, like Ubuntu added Amazon), and MacOS works just on Apple HW (and has ads for Apple services baked-in too, just less obnoxious). You can use ChromeOS! Which is literally ad tech. Pick your poison.
  • ficiek 5y ago
    >Linux still barely works in 2022 I have had zero problem running linux as my daily driver for the last 10 years, care to explain your comment? The only problem that I have is that video games don't always work because the developers don't care.
    • hypertele-Xii 5y ago
      Last time I tried Ubuntu it exclaimed I'm not "the owner" of my external hard drive and wouldn't let me access my files. Very fundamental basics completely broken somehow.
    • dimgl 5y ago
      I see this argument in every thread about Linux. There's always this one magical user where everything "just works", has had 0 issues and everything's just dandy.
      • fgonzag 5y ago
        I guess I'm the second magical user.
      • O5vYtytb 5y ago
        Hi I'm another magical user
      • yoyohello13 5y ago
        I’m not going to lie and say Linux is problem free, but “barely works” is a massive exaggeration. Linux works just fine. Windows isn’t problem free. I use windows for work and it’s often a roll of the dice whether my monitors will got to sleep properly, or if windows will deign to recognize my keyboard on boot.
• ficiek 5y ago
  >I mean, I can literally run a game written for Windows 95 on Windows 11 without major issues Ok, I think this person hasn't tried to run many old games.
  • dend 5y ago
    It's not ideal, but to be fair, a lot of them (not all) that don't require funky DRM APIs (a-la Grand Theft Auto IV with Games for Windows Live) do work decently. Some might need to have a right-click, run in compatibility mode check done.
• seanp2k2 5y ago
  I don't see any mention of Cortana or how hard that is to rip out of the OS, but I think it's worth mentioning. The tool called "Everything" by https://www.voidtools.com/ https://www.voidtools.com/ is so insanely better than Cortana and blazingly fast that I'm not sure why they're still trying to push Cortana. https://www.getblackbird.net/ https://www.getblackbird.net/ helps a lot and it's one of the first things I do to Windows installs when I need to use them, but it can break stuff if you're too aggressive with it (e.g. Windows store / Xbox stuff, which for some reason is how to record screenshot videos in Windows... https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/record-a-game-clip-on-your-pc-with-xbox-game-bar-2f477001-54d4-1276-9144-b0416a307f3c https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/record-a-game-cl... ). The article also didn't mention the Microsoft Store and how awful everything around that experience is, especially compared to macOS, where the worst part is how signing apps works ( https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Security/Conceptual/CodeSigningGuide/Introduction/Introduction.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40005929-CH1-SW1 https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Se... vs https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/package/signing-package-overview https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/package/signin... ).
  • mizaru 5y ago
    Blackbird gets blocked by Defender immediately. Not sure why I'm surprised. edit: Then again, that tool does seem to make it quite easy to damage your Windows installation.
    • skissane 5y ago
      I don't trust it because it is a closed source binary and there is a lack of detailed documentation of exactly what settings it changes.
      • krageon 5y ago
        You could run it in a VM and see what changes are made. Given that Jotti by and large says it is benign (very few positive results), it's probably okay. Such trojan flagging as you see here is frequently a result of binary compression or packing.
• causality0 5y ago
  I switched over to castrated versions of Windows a while ago, like AME and Ninjutsu OS. The polite word is "custom" versions, but I call them castrated versions because they can't fuck me anymore.
• Galanwe 5y ago
  I did not develop a graphical Windows application since around 15 years now. At the time it was mainly Win32, and WPF just starting. I remember that Qt was a big thing though. They had this CSS like capability that would allow you to style your application after the fact. You could also just change the rendering backend at build time. Is Qt not an option anymore to have all the various GUI details right?
  • withinrafael 5y ago
    The problem is, to really nail the look and feel, you're going to have to create your own controls with the same exact behaviors, looks, etc. and none of that is documented.
• princevegeta89 5y ago
  Bought a high-end laptop recently and really wanted to give Windows 11 a try [after being a Linux user for about 7 years]. While the WSL and WSLg aspects of it along with development-related features have improved considerably, the base of the system as a whole was still the same mess. So much telemetry stuff running in the background, so many unnecessary updates kicking in, heavy CPU and memory usage and the general perceived slowness of the OS have all immediately pushed me back to Linux. There's no bloat, the difference in performance is night and day, and I have to never worry about any privacy-related stuff. Long live Linux Desktop.
  • azangru 5y ago
    > a high-end laptop recently Oh, cool, a recent high-end laptop that works well with linux. Could you share the model?
    • princevegeta89 5y ago
      Dell G15 Ryzen Edition. From my experience all Dells and Lenovos are great with Linux compatibility.
• Decabytes 5y ago
  I’m curious to see if Microsoft will lose market share to Linux and MacOS over it’s user hostile practices
  • NL807 5y ago
    So long it's deployed on laptops by default, probably not.
  • gfaster 5y ago
    That can only happen when those other OSs match the level of functionality, reliability, and support that windows enjoys. I would love to switch my main OS to a Linux distro but it is still unstable enough and not supported enough that I can't reasonably switch. As far as I can tell, our best hope is for Linux to improve at the same rate or faster as it has over the last 5 years for at least the next 5. Only then will Microsoft start to face any meaningful competition in operating systems.
• everyone 5y ago
  There already is an ideal version of Windows 10, without windows store, metro, cortana, xbox live, ads etc. etc. It also will get support and security updates but zero feature updates or changes for 10 years. It's called Windows 10 LTSB. They dont sell this useful version of windows to normal people though, only to corps via a volume license. This is one of those situations that behooves one to pirate it, and there are plenty of copies of this + crack on torrent sites.
• neilv 5y ago
  Vote with your feet. Debian, Arch Linux, etc.
• ta220320119 5y ago
  It's been my issue with some of the non-azure MSFT products generally speaking. You can play games and have fun backgrounds in Teams, but the app eats up all your memory and chatting sucks. Windows is the same as the article is pointing out. It somehow became harder to save documents in office. Feels like all the feature sets in the products are pushed with the wrong agenda. "better is the enemy of good"
• slategruen 5y ago
  It's funny how much it's been becoming more difficult it is to tweak Windows with janky workarounds compared to just installing a Linux distro altogether
• ryandrake 5y ago
  There's been a big shift in the whole software industry from "enable what the user wants to do" over to "we want the user to do this". Back in the '90s, we would go out, talk to customers, find out their needs, gather requirements, and write software that enables them to do what they want to do. Now, in a lot of software companies, it's the opposite. Product leadership starts with "What do we want users to do?" and then every software decision is in service of encouraging / forcing / channeling users' behavior into these paths. I've sat in product meetings where people would just say "No, the user should not be allowed to do ABC, we (Company) need them to do XYZ!" It's arrogance, it's hubris and it's everywhere. The slogan "Where do you want to go today?" is dead. It's now all "This is where we will let you go today!"
  • srvmshr 5y ago
    That misguided notion of product features and integration, where the user has minimum role, started out at Apple. The standard pattern used to be talking to OEMs and discussing what users wanted from them. That review phase generated update ideas for next release and so on. Apple turned that question on its head and made it "the one last thing" show business. We have employed a generation of PMs now who idolize Steve Jobs' mantra: "Users dont know what they want until you show it to them". EDIT: We does not mean I am employed by Apple. It signifies the general trend for companies to enable product development by PMs
    • devmunchies 5y ago
      > We have employed a generation of PMs now who idolize Steve Jobs' mantra: "Users dont know what they want until you show it to them". just because a bunch of dumb PMs are pushing hot garbage to the user doesn't mean that statement is false. There almost always IS a way to improve and innovate a user experience—a new experience that the user hasn't thought of before. Its just that the PM incentives aren't aligned with the users these days.
      • srvmshr 5y ago
        That is a good observation. The whole GTalk-Hangout-Chat saga at Google is testament to that misguided ideology.
• isoblvck 5y ago
  there's also built in keyloggers, eye tracking, and an absolutely insane amount of telemetry. revoke permissions for the camera and mic and see how many times "your settings blocked access" notifications show up.
• nla 5y ago
  The problem is that it is garbage and has always been garbage. I just bought my wife a new laptop that had 11 pre-installed. It REQUIRES a MS account to use the laptop. So I returned it today and got her a Mac. Problem solved.
• ghostly_s 5y ago
  > What’s the point of these changes? My first impression is that someone used a macOS machine a bit too much and decided to rip off the macOS-style Dock without really porting over anything else from the Dock behavior and trying to shoehorn it into Windows without considering any of the past conventions that make Windows what it is. Why does this story sound so familiar as a Linux desktop user...
• lifeplusplus 5y ago
  If not have left xp if it wasn't for automatic driver installations
• Quiark 5y ago
  When I was buying a new computer last month, I spent a some time considering if it should be Mac or Linux. The Windows option was rejected rather quickly. And I was a Windows developer around the time .NET was starting.
• mc4ndr3 5y ago
  From the author's own words, sounds like he should stop supporting Windows. I only support Windows and macOS as a masochistic exercise in extreme cross-platform support, and even then it's only CLI applications and programmatic API's, never GUI bother.
• killjoywashere 5y ago
  Windows can only deprecate things at the rate people retire, so it ends up looking like a house that four generations of a family live in. Junior’s flashing the lights in the hall in time with Bassnectar using a programmable lightbulb he wired to an arduino while grandma is playing pinochle on the back porch with a couple of birds from church. Mom’s in the kitchen counting her blessings, enjoying her circa 1997 gas stove while Dad’s trying to figure out if he has to pony up for a new laptop for daughter to finish her homework, or is her problem that the latest Word won’t run Java applets? Did Word ever run applets? Meanwhile, Junior barely knows pinochle is a thing, but Grandma is convinced he has summoned demons. Kids these days.
• phendrenad2 5y ago
  Am I the only one on HN who doesn't care about these? I mean they're just the standard Windows 11 complaints (UI style inconsistency, requiring a Microsoft account, not being able to easily change the default from Edge). But they come up again and again, and everyone acts that they're doing the world a favor by listing them. Just look at the top comment, which starts (rather boldly) with: "Like every Windows user, I have had a lot of frustrating experiences with the abusive behavior and dark patterns that have taken over the platform". But, I don't care, and probably many others don't care. Maybe Windows will get worse for people with my set of priorities if you get your way?
• TheBlight 5y ago
  Windows has always been (mostly) pretty rad to code for. Best library documentation you'll ever find and, as the author points out, exceptional backwards compatibility. That said, I don't like to use it. Much prefer macOS. But I "get" and appreciate Windows. It's pretty good.
• TedShiller 5y ago
  Or, just don’t use it.
• graycat 5y ago
  Except for some details, I really REALLY like Windows. Really what I'm liking is computing, and Windows is a big part of that because I selected Windows instead of Linux. Over the years there have been some changes: So, we have new hardware, some HUGELY important new communications standards, a huge effort on computer security, etc., and it is crucial that Windows has kept up with the changes. I like that. And I like that I can still run my favorite old programs: Since I do all I can with plain text, my most heavily used program is my favorite text editor KEDIT. And I really like hierarchical file systems so really REALLY like Microsoft's NTFS (new technology file system) and do a lot of tree walking, searching, copying, deleting, etc. But Microsoft went for an unstated philosophy of a graphical user interface (GUI) where (a) there is a metaphor of direct manipulation of desktop objects and (b) commands and operations are to be learned by experimentation without documentation. I can see some utility there, otherwise I still like command lines because the documentation tends to be better, it is more clear just what is going on, and I can script, automate some of the operations. And I get to write software, e.g., in .NET, ASP.NET, ADO.NET for my Web site startup and whatever else seems worthwhile. So far, I like .NET. I do wish Microsoft had explained, just explained in simple text, just what the heck .NET CORE was. By now I've come to a guess that .NET CORE is irrelevant to me and I should f'get about it -- would have been nice to have had some EXPLANATION. For the future of GUIs, that seems to be just Web pages, i.e., HTML. For me, the above is the view of Windows I find most important. For the future, I hope that Microsoft does not mess up that view. To have me a happier customer, Microsoft should concentrate on one word, DOCUMENTATION. I can understand that Microsoft has some middle managers who want to add things to Windows or change Windows to improve it. Now, for changes such as I mentioned above, SURE. Otherwise, please sit down: Each new version of Windows I find to be, in one word, a pain. The changes are not improvements but PAINS. E.g., with the old version of Windows, after hundreds of hours of work I finally learned and documented for myself how to get routine things done. Then with the changes, I have to invest many more hours just to be able to continue to get routine things done and for no gains at all. Sorry Microsoft middle manager: To me you are like TV producers, what they try for, I don't like; what I like, they don't try for. E.g., as far as I can tell from a command line window Examples: > runas /noprofile /user:mymachine\administrator cmd is wrong. Just wrong. It doesn't work. First, set aside that from this "example" can't tell what is a constant and what is a variable. So, try all possible combinations. Second, still, nothing works. Nothing. Go for 1, 2, 3 hours trying everything. Did I mention, nothing works? This is grotesquely bad computing. Just awful. Want to make things better, fix things like that. But it's worse: Go out on the Internet and can find lots of documentation of that command. Some of the documentation has lots of double quote marks. Nothing worked. Hours; nothing worked. We're talking mud wrestling here. Eventually I got the software to request my administrator password, but that was as far as it went. This isn't my work. Yet my time, effort, energy are soaked up, repeatedly, over and over, by such system management mud wrestling documentation problems. Eventually I guessed some of what was going on and found another path that did work. It's not fully clear just why that worked, but it did. Documentation? I took some good notes, and apparently they are better than anything from Microsoft or readily available on the Internet. The main bottleneck in my startup is the bad documentation that leads to wasted effort in this mud wrestling. What fraction of my effort goes to such stuff? Essentially 100% -- I can't get back to my real work due to a continuing list of such disasters. They are taking up ALL my time, just mud wrestling from bad documentation. For Windows, Firefox, Acrobat, etc., sure, important security updates and otherwise I'll consider updates in functionality maybe twice a year, maybe once a year, or once each 2nd year. Except for security, bluntly and quite broadly I don't want your updates but will consider some, say, occasionally. As you force updates on me, I get TORQUED, become a VERY unhappy customer. E.g., Adobe went too far, essentially taking over my PC, at startup, with updates I don't want, with popups, with "Do you want to ...", and yesterday I deleted everything from Adobe now "Dead to me.". Firefox will read a PDF (portable document format) file, at least the ones I want read, a little better than Acrobat. Adobe, with me, you went too far and BLEW IT. I have big hopes for the future of computing for myself, Microsoft, the computer industry, the economy, and civilization, but I want do to my part, get on with it, and there is no room in that work for me to click "NO" tens of thousands of times to popup windows stopping my work until I answer some "Do you want to ...", and there is no excuse for the system management mud wrestling from bad documentation. At one time Microsoft was very interested in "developers, developers, developers!!!". Well, I'm trying to be one. Then I hope to be a good customer for Windows Server and SQL Server. And on Windows XP and Windows 7 I got 100,000 lines of .NET code running apparently as intended. But now I've lost YEARS of time in system management mud wrestling from bad documentation. I can't be a good customer of Windows Server if you have me stuck in a mud hole wasting time.
• bstar77 5y ago
  Windows doesn't need to change a single thing, it's just doing it's thing and it's been doing it for ages. There are actually viable alternatives these days if you don't like it. Windows has always been an inferior OS, but I don't worry or complain about it. It hasn't been on my radar for over 15 years. I've spent that time learning *nix patterns instead of dealing with Windows quirks. That choice has paid massive dividends.
• kjellsbells 5y ago
  Often in these conversations the response is around gaming as the last bastion that needs Windows. Im here to claim that its Office, specifically reliable desktop implementations of 365 and SharePoint/onedrive, not the (admittedly rather cool, but not nearly powerful enough) web versions. I am simultaneously encouraged and disturbed by the idea that, say, 365 desktop native Outlook might be rewritten as a cross platform Electron app. Encouraged because if I could have 365 on Linux I would transition overnight, and disturbed because of the thought of grindingly slow Office on Windows (Teams already showed this tendency).
• gorgoiler 5y ago
  Very tangential, but the free and open source code (“Linux”) counterpoint to software longevity is version control. You don’t need to care about old binary compatibility because you don’t have old binaries, only old source code. If your modern compiler doesn’t like it, just build the old compiler instead. Good luck finding a matching libxyz though, for your git checkout —before 10.years.ago. Friendly reminder to vendor in your third party dependencies alongside your source code.
• ki7 5y ago
  People should really look into using the LTSC version instead the pre-installed windows 10. lTSC has no crap apps and bare minimal footprint in terms of shit preloaded. Also there are tools like privatezilla on GitHub to tweak some privacy settings and wpd.app which can block telemetry on firewall level.
• homerhomer 5y ago
  Windows IS shareware. You just haven't realized it yet.
• emptysongglass 5y ago
  I read through the nearly 400 comments and no one brought up using the LTSC edition of Windows, which actually gets out of your way or that you don't own the OS when you use a proprietary operating system. I'm not really sure what to make of this as it seems people prefer to complain as if they were hostages to the whims of others. I buy my computers with Linux pre-installed on supported machines. All those complaints of Linux "still not working" in 2022 effortlessly glide over the obvious: you're already making it an unfair fight when you adopt an OS to a non-native machine. If you don't own the OS what's the point of complaining? MacOS and Windows will never have the best interests of the user at heart because that's not where the capital incentives are. It's really as simple as that. Are you going to develop a patch for Windows that makes Windows do as you want? If you do, who at Microsoft is going to take your PR? No one? This behavior should be blindingly obvious to anyone who thinks for a second where the incentives are. If the incentives are not aligned with yours, it's time to a. consider paying for a volume license for LTSC so you can get the experience you want that you pay for and vote with your dollars or b. use an OS that isn't abusive. C. moan and complain isn't actually a productive strategy because the money bundled into your OS cost is neglible to the value of your metrics and pushing a subscription to Office that actually makes Microsoft money. People keep smashing this button in the vain hope something will change. Stop and think. Follow the money. Do something about your situation that doesn't enrage you so often.
  • tomerv 5y ago
    > consider paying for a volume license for LTSC And if I just want a single Windows machine and not 5?
    • emptysongglass 5y ago
      Unfortunately, this is the price you pay to let Microsoft know the OS you want respects you as a user.
  • pjmlp 5y ago
    > I buy my computers with Linux pre-installed on supported machines. All those complaints of Linux "still not working" in 2022 effortlessly glide over the obvious: you're already making it an unfair fight when you adopt an OS to a non-native machine I did as well, an Asus 1215B netbook, remember those? The wlan still has issues to work properly to this day, the graphics card should be able to do OpenGL 4.1/DirectX 11, yet the AMD driver only does OpenGL 3.3. Good that it was shipped with official Linux support.
• bcatanzaro 5y ago
  For a website that is all about user interface design, I was surprised I couldn’t get the Ukrainian profanity to go away at the bottom of the page. (I do support Ukraine but this user interface is bad.)
• Shadonototra 5y ago
  It needs a complete rewrite, just like google is doing with Fuschia, betting on the future involve making new choices that are not backward compatible due to security and performance concerns Backward compatible is not what people want, they want ways to move forward just like how Apple did with Roseta2 We are moving in a world where energy consumption needs to be optimized due to climate change
• tlhighbaugh 5y ago
  Why is anyone surprised, Microsoft can do whatever it wants and people still spend hundreds on its OS offering that has been awful for over a decade, so of course they are going to get more abusive to lower costs and raise revenues since people still buy the thing. This is at the heart of Meta (I hate that name) and Alphabet too, the most simplistic understanding of market dynamics should illuminate how this is working. What's weird is the government not trustbusting them and letting Germany cut them down here and there (not because they care about privacy but to make room for their domestic firms) while the once called conspiracy theory NSA are still amassing a monster to make Big Brother look like Little Whimpy Cousin, does no one else see the writing on the wall here? You really can't even blame any of them for being that way, the public could have a multitude of free alternatives with a bit of effort and yet they rather spend 200 on an upfront abusive and honestly highly flawed OS, pay google to store their photos (and scan them with emerging AI technology) and use Facebook for whatever reason people even use that for. Why shouldn't they find the edge of what the public will now accept, since its changed so much. Such is the nature of organizations interacting with a market or the public (in the case of government agencies which operate the same way just less efficiently). As my dearly departed great grandmother said about this sort of thing between drags from her Lucky Strike unfiltered cigarette while tending her rose garden, "Ya gotta get it while the gettin is good!"
• 0dayz 5y ago
  This article resonates really well with my frustration with Windows and oh how I wish I could just switch to Linux, sadly the lack of hardware customization on Linux is still a deal breaker for me. It's strange to me tat the company during the xp-7 years had very solid and firm understanding of conservative UX design and seemed to take pride in it (essentially enterprise quality even for the end user), that ship seems to have sailed and instead acts like a hybrid of Facebook, Google and Apple worst practices.
• bigbluedots 5y ago
  There is no reason for ms to care about any of these issues while users keep paying for Windows, either through new PC builds or directly. It doesn't help that in many cases there is no viable alternative for users.
  • spiderfarmer 5y ago
    It put me off Windows years ago. Though it was the constant battle with alert boxes, popups and other windows that stole focus that put me over the edge. If my computer doesn't let me type text undisturbed, why do even use that tool?
• sebow 5y ago
  > “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” To this end, I find it somewhat funny how people still believe Microsoft has a redemption arc.
• mszcz 5y ago
  For me Windows is starting to resemble consumer routers. I mean, some serious resources and engineering talent had to have been spent on the internals, the kernel, networking, drivers. But the thing that the users, the people paying and using the OS end up interacting with ends up getting the least resources and even less focus. My theory as to why that is is kinda like The Color of the Bikeshed Theory. New management hires want to make a name for themselves and want to work on something that's visible, that they have an illusion they know something about and something that they can use to climb up the corp ladder. So with each iteration some new idiot comes along and wants to start over. Two years later, when the thing's half finished, they move on and a new person comes along...
• apatheticonion 5y ago
  Kinda at a loss for OS/DE at the moment. Lived on Windows for over 2 decades (completed work via a Linux VM). Windows 8 was horrid and Windows 10/11 is hostile towards user experience (etc, etc privacy, but mostly user experience). Used MacOS for half a decade after that and loved the Unix terminal and tight desktop experience but underpowered and overpriced hardware had me running a hackintosh for over half of that time. The move to M1 (and general difficulty maintaining a Hackintosh) means that MacOS is off the table for me. I am currently daily driving Gnome 4 on Fedora and loving it. It has some user application UX issues (like Google Chrome mouse scrolls slowly) and some questionable desktop environment design decisions - but overall a nice place to land. Not quite as nice as MacOS but it gets the job done. It's sad that after 30 years on computers, my user experience has gotten worse - Gnome 4 came along at the perfect time to catch a bunch of MacOS and Windows refugees and I pray the developers push it in a direction where it becomes the most ergonomic desktop environment available on the Desktop - at least for engineers.
  • nikodunk 5y ago
    Same story for me. Landed on Gnome 4x series Fedora after ditching macOS for engineering after a decade. iCloud, iMessage, appleTV etc etc hooks just got too intrusive and made things too unresponsive in my case.
    • mulmen 5y ago
      Messages is basically unusable after Big Sur. The new windows are a huge step backwards. Notifications are mind bogglingly broken. Reminder sync with iCloud… doesn’t. Spotlight indexes Time Machine directories, which create more deltas for Time Machine to index, sending the Spotlight service into a feedback loop. Etc, etc, etc. I’m hopeful the next MacOS shakeup is similar to the recent return to sanity in hardware. Apple hardware is finally recovering from Ives’ fever dream. The OS needs saving next.
  • mulmen 5y ago
    The current MacOS desktop environment is, generously, a dumpster fire. But it’s also miles ahead of anything else on the market. The last decade of desktop environments feels like a march backwards, or perhaps even vertical, into some kind of alternate reality where the UI is designed to get in the way instead of enable. Modern desktop environments are a painful death by a thousand cuts. This is a rant but a desktop environment is my hammer. It is the tool I use more than anything else. The experience is sacred. And yet it is defiled annually. I never feel more helpless than the first moments after a MacOS upgrade. Like all my power has been stripped. It hurts.
• mavhc 5y ago
  Windows is free as in adverts for beer
• DeathArrow 5y ago
  There isn't much competition in the desktop space. It's either macOS with its downsides or Windows with its downsides. Basically neither Microsoft nor Apple have any pressure to make life better for users.
  • tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    The incentives do seem slightly different although I do worry about Apple's forays into services.
• DeathArrow 5y ago
  Some of the anti-user patterns aren't even pioneered by Microsoft, they simply fall in the anti-user direction many big companies are pushing. Ads in apps? Pioneered in Android. Tricking the user to log in using Microsoft account? You can't make much use of an Android phone unless you sign in with your google account. Also, Apple requests having an Apple Id. I wonder what if someone at Apple, Google, Microsoft decides at some point that you shouldn't be able to use your own device, bought with your own money? They can disable your account at one push of a button. Or maybe a state agency decides you are one of the bad guys.
  • Const-me 5y ago
    > You can't make much use of an Android phone unless you sign in with your google account. This depends on the phone. Samsung phones aren’t terribly bad, I’ve been using one without google account for a few months now. For instance, the built-in web browser has a command like “setup an ad blocker”.
  • theclansman 5y ago
    These companies all copy each other's bad practices, it's no surprise there, if one can get away with it the rest will follow.
• DeathArrow 5y ago
  It seems Windows releases come in series of two, one good, one bad. Windows XP, Windows Vista. Windows 7, Windows 8. Windows 10, Windows 11. After each successful release Microsoft pull a bunch of crap. Users aren't happy and they rather use the older version than upgrade to the new one. Microsoft comes to its senses, release a better version and the cycle repeats. So we should kind of wait for Windows 12.
  • m_mueller 5y ago
    to me it seems more like the pile stuff on top of each other, trying to make bad stuff below the surface go away after it's sufficiently plastered over. but it never is 100% complete and you can still find components even from the Win3.x era. it's just that some releases they have plastered it a bit more completely (7) and others where it's most superficial (8, 11); Vista is a special one as it brought a major new kernel version, which afaik they are still using to this day.
• robertlagrant 5y ago
  > After all, what else are you going to do if you need to run Photoshop or Premiere for your work - switch to Linux? Good luck with that. I now believe that you can't like Windows because of exactly this. Linux gives you choice, and if someone wants to create a competitor OS from the Linux kernel (or even from another OS) they can. That is incredibly healthy and sustainable.
• Const-me 5y ago
  Good article, one remark, still. > breaking from the legacy is hard for the sake of backwards compatibility Generally yes, but in case of Windows the hard part of the problem is already solved. I think it was just the wrong priorities. Specifically, Windows SDK could do following things to enable new styles/controls/behavior: 1. Require new apps to call an API to switch to new stuff, like InitCommonControlsEx 2. Require new apps to include an XML manifest with some flag or version number, like they did with high DPI support 3. A nuclear option — implement new userland, write new apps against that one; NT kernel supports multiple subsystems at the same time, Win32 is one of them.
  • jcelerier 5y ago
    isn't all of this what they tried with UWP and WinRT ? It utterly failed. People want their useful win32 apps. Those are the only reason I boot on that OS once in a while.
    • Const-me 5y ago
      UWP/WinRT was close to the nuclear option. I think the main reason it failed is their app store. They should have allowed to publish these new apps with SetupSomething.exe and I think developers would eventually switch. A good example of that option is the way they did Linux support in WSL1. Not exactly a new subsystem but technically pretty close. They could do something like that only with GUI, and not based on Linux. BTW, I still use WSL1 every day. Too bad it’s deprecated, WSL2 is VM based, borderline useless for me.
• ulzeraj 5y ago
  > I can literally run a game written for Windows 95 on Windows 11 without major issues I'm not really sure about this. Games like Vampire the Masquerade comes to mind.
• Beltiras 5y ago
  Maybe someone should make a file browser app for Windows so we can continue enjoying ad-less perusal of finding and opening a file in Windows.
• lwkl 5y ago
  Thank you. This is so true and annoying. Microsoft should treat their UI like their APIs and not break it with every major release. Changing a submenu is alright, changing how flat it is, is fine. But don't release a new settings app with every update. Microsoft settings is like Google chat apps as soon as you get used to it they throw it in the trash and release a new one to works completely differently. I bought a MacBook recently after switching from Mac OS X to Windows and Linux 13 years ago. After booting for the first time I opened the settings app do do some changes and was expecting to google a lot and I didn't have to. The settings still have the same layout and it generally worked the same as on macOS 10.4. The same was true for the preinstalled system apps. They were in the same place, had the same names and generally functioned the same expect some UI changes. There are additions to the UI that replaced some old features like multiple desktops, the control center and the widgets but they didn't any of my usage patterns and it was pretty easy to integrate them into my regular workflow. If you look at it from a normal users POV Apple has much better backwards compatibility than Microsoft, if my software is being maintained by a dev and I'm willing to update to the newer versions. If I want to keep using a program that was released 20 years ago not so much, but Microsoft has been breaking a lot of these programs in the last 5 years as well.
• lbriner 5y ago
  It definitely suffers from a number of problems in MS, probably mostly due from having a very large organisation with different priorities: 1) UX teams who have to change things to jutify their existence. None of the problems in Windows 10 imho were related to major UX problems, just things that should have been fixed like the stupid search function which can't find "Explorer" when you type in "Explore" 2) UX people who think that the world cares as much as they do about the fact the UI looks a bit "dated" and needs to be refreshed otherwise people will leave! Apple haven't massively changed MacOS and people still use that. 3) Strategic people who are trying to pre-empt or force a different way of interacting with the OS so that things like AI, blockchain, or whatever will work more naturally. 4) Development teams who have decided that the programming model is wrong again and therefore they will make a load more changes. If I was a Product Manager at MS I would be depressed and embarrassed by the number of inconsistencies in the platform. It would be understandable if "windows 10 apps will start to look different" but this is so random, it is annoying. 5) Finance people who can't accept that a paid-for product should have exactly zero adverts and the whole premise is obnoxious and stinks of greed when it's not like MS are struggling to make money. 6) Cloud everything even when those experiences e.g. Office365 are noticeably worse in the cloud. Also, they are charging you the same/more even though they can now manage everything centrally with no deployment costs. 7) The whole security accounts eco system is another disaster. "Log in with MS account", "Is it a work or personal account?". How should I know? It's your account. "Do you want to link all these devices?" "No", "Well we will anyway because we have assumed you want to and we were only asking to pretend it was your choice" Microsoft, Microsoft, we love you but we need to talk!
  • zippergz 5y ago
    As a Mac user, I can tell you that people on this side of the fence have been complaining about how Apple is changing the UI to make it “fresh” for the past few years too. Maybe the changes aren’t as drastic as they are in windows, but the same thing happens, unfortunately.
• Pooge 5y ago
  > I can literally run a game written for Windows 95 on Windows 11 without major issues This is not my experience with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Worked flawlessly with Proton but it didn't even launch correctly on Windows 10. It's a hit-or-miss and not a silver bullet.
• yeetard 5y ago
  This is why I don't think the world makes any sense anymore. How is this a product the worlds 2nd biggest tech conglomerate in the year 2022 thinks is acceptable to be released to the public? How...how are people just accepting this? It's comically bad. Remember when Vista came out and there was this massive hate storm going on because...reasons I guess (yeah, poorly optimized aero on shitty hardware might have sucked but come on...) and now 15 years later THIS is what Windows looks like and ... nobody bats an eye? Hello?! Is anybody still paying attention? People always talk about google dying. Yeah, how about Microsoft goes dying, how are they even still in business I just don't get it..
• DeathArrow 5y ago
  I would be nice if ReactOS team would be funded to finish development of the OS. You would run any Windows software without the annoying bits that Windows has.
• avsteele 5y ago
  Article is 90% spot-on. Win11 is the first time I do not want to upgrade, because it turns the actual bad parts of Win 10 up to...11! MS is annihilating the good will they get from me via VSCode, Terminal, VStudio etc... 1) The ads, my god, the ads! Even normal, non-tech, people see this stuff and make a sour face. 2) "Lets finish setting up your PC" : Excuse me sir, its been set up for 4 years. Stop trying to get me to link my phone! I don't want O365 at home! I don't want to switch to Edge (it is not terrible but have made another choice.) I better be careful ant not mis-click or god knows what settings will be changed. The UI stuff i really don't care a wit about. Suggestion: Whatever, fine leave this garbage in 'Home' edition but let 'Pro' mean PRO and stop fighting me.
• httpsterio 5y ago
  One of the most annoying things I've had to experience is Onedrive moving your documents folder inside onedrive. I've done some tech support in a music production forum and you wouldn't believe how many problems it'll cause.
• ho_schi 5y ago
  > There is Windows Forms, WPF, MAUI, UWP, WTL, WinUI, MFC, and I am sure others that I am missing. The list is missing the old Win32 API? Microsoft never cared about continuation between UI libraries and HIG. Neither application programmers. They just add another UI when they feel the need. While Gtk is puting a lot effort in compatibility and consistency and they're blamed anyway. Usually for theming which Gtk actually doesn't appreciate. And for Qt compatibility is a business model.
• keithalewis 5y ago
  Y U h8 capitalism? A bit dated, but http://www.proudlyserving.com/ http://www.proudlyserving.com/ is still a worthwhile read to understand the Microsoft mindset.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• phkahler 5y ago
  Windows users need a change in priorities. FTFY. The OS has gone to shit, but people keep right on using it and complaining about how bad it's getting. What is your lame priority for sticking with it? Don't tell me gaming - get a console or VR headset, or steam on Linux. If you're that hung up on one game that doesn't run anywhere else then again you need to change your priorities. If it's using Excel or Word with a bunch of customizations that won't work in LibreOffice, again you need to change your priorities or approach to solving the problems you did that to solve.
  • canbus 5y ago
    Maybe I use it for work? Or because WINE isn't perfect for everything that I need to use, and I don't want to spend hours trying to configure it? What about basic users? They don't care whether they should be using KDE Plasma or a Gnome-based window manager etc - maybe they want something that 'just works'
    • phkahler 5y ago
      >> What about basic users? They don't care whether they should be using KDE Plasma or a Gnome-based window manager etc - maybe they want something that 'just works' There are Linux distributions and MacOS that "just work" a LOT better than Windows these days.
  • Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
    > What is your lame priority for sticking with it? Don't tell me gaming - get a console or VR headset, or steam on Linux. Tell me you're not a gamer without telling me you're not a gamer. The desire to play with mouse + keyboard is reason enough to stick with a PC. Wanting to play in 1440p @ 144 fps is another. First-class support for Discord. Steam sales. I could go on and on about reasons to play on PC. Steam on Linux is getting better, and the success of the Steam Deck might convince developers to offer greater Linux support, but it's still not at the level it needs to be. Not to mention this argument completely ignores non-Steam games like League of Legends. It kind of works on Linux...sometimes...and with a lot of configuration and work. Also, the suggestion to just get a VR headset is absurd.
• zcombynator 5y ago
  Happy that Microsoft lost the mobile wars. So just wait 10 years and Windows will be gone anyway.
• ultra_nick 5y ago
  Gaming was the only thing keeping me on windows. Windows 11 ads have given me a reason to finally move to Linux.
• bayindirh 5y ago
  Talking about wonderful backwards compatibility, and then talking inconsistent UI design is kinda ironic though. Because all these older themed windows are using the exact feature you told you love in the opening paragraphs of the piece: "Backwards compatibility". So, why Microsoft shouldn't use the exact feature they have built so painstakingly? Also, forcing these older UI toolkits to render the same as the latest iteration would break many many things. We're talking about an OS which includes almost complete copies of its older versions and some patched installations of InstallShield to begin with. I have no words for ads though. This is really very bad.
  • croes 5y ago
    It's one thing to keep old the old API for backwards compatibility it's another to lack a new API for the new UI. >The API to render a Windows 11 native context menu does not exist.
    • bayindirh 5y ago
      My comment was not about that. That lack of API situation is unacceptable from my point of view, but I'm not terribly surprised about that when we're talking about Microsoft. My comment was about the paragraph starting with: There’s a meme about how there are at least ten different design conventions in Windows 11 and it’s very much “in your face” once you start using Windows 11 on the daily.
      • AlexandrB 5y ago
        A lot of the examples of inconsistent UI in the article are things built into Windows. For example the "Windows security center" vs. "Eject disk" context menus. I think it's fine for third-party apps to have differences in UI based on their vintage, but why are Microsoft's own apps and utilities all over the map? Microsoft has also done a really bad job of evolving existing UI frameworks. Instead they seem to replace the whole thing every few years with something new and shiny which leads to even more inconsistency. The article lists all of these: > There is Windows Forms, WPF, MAUI, UWP, WTL, WinUI, MFC, and I am sure others that I am missing.
• nla 5y ago
  What would people rather have? A new OS that doesn't vacuum up your privacy or social media that doesn't partisan censor? Which is more important?
• amai 5y ago
  Windows needs a good stackexchange forum where one can find all kinds of workarounds for its shortcomings. Otherwise it will stay unusable.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• a-dub 5y ago
  confused software encourages confused habits of mind. ditched windows (and its apparent organizational brain damage) 18 years ago and have only ever looked back when forced to in employment situations. strongly believe that if you normalize broken computing by forcing developers to use broken platforms, then they'll produce broken software.
• aftergibson 5y ago
  If users were willing to put up with all the dark patterns, ads and tracking in Windows 10, they'll suffer through this too and the next iteration. People using computers as appliances won't care, and the rest technical enough to be annoyed are boiling frogs.
• trey-jones 5y ago
  Of course I agree with these confounding decisions, and I've written about it before. I must, however, point out that yes, you do in fact need an Apple account to log into your Mac device on recent versions of macOS. Not only that, but you won't be able to download any apps (free or not) without adding a credit card to your account. I found the mac setup experience to be even worse than Windows 10 (both of these done in the last 6 months). I haven't even tried Windows 11 and have no intention of doing so. In both cases I made choices during the setup process that were not the default, and I believe that it broke some things, at least in the case of Mac, where most of the users do have another Apple device to use for 2FA, or do want to use iCloud for backups (or OneDrive - I'm sure some people use these services but I have absolutely no desire!) Anyway, it's very frustrating to watch the user experience getting worse and worse from organizations that have an amount of resources to work with that we can't even fathom. Edit: to say I'm not hugely invested in either Windows or Mac's longterm success. There are no personal or professional computing needs that I have (or predict) that can't be satisfied in Linux, and my usage patterns reflect that.
  • amarshall 5y ago
    > I must, however, point out that yes, you do in fact need an Apple account to log into your Mac device on recent versions of macOS. This is false, at least as of macOS 12.3. However, the install process does encourage signing-in. Unlike Windows, though, it doesn’t require non-obvious shenanigans—like disconnecting from the Internet—to bypass it during the installer. Reportedly, the latest Windows 11 Insider builds do not provide any means to create a local account in the installer. > Not only that, but you won't be able to download any apps (free or not) without adding a credit card to your account. This is also false, I presently have an Apple account with no CC and have downloaded (free) Mac App Store applications using it.
    • trey-jones 5y ago
      I guess I should be more specific about what I could and could not do. I could not download XCode without adding a credit card. I've already mentioned that it seemed broken, which it did. I spent time with support trying to figure it out. Ultimately, once I added a credit card I was able to download. Perhaps I was already acknowledging that I would have an AppleID, since the machine was expressly for iOS development.
• pie_flavor 5y ago
  I am the most ardent Windows evangelist I know. I have spent so much time learning Windows's APIs and idiosyncrasies because they're just so cool. I love the APIs, I love the system, I love the software and I love the way everything Just Works. And I'm not installing this shit. It's a skin. It's Windows 10, but retvrned to rounded corners, and with a tenth of the customizability. It's an attempt to put Mac in Windows by people who don't understand either and, if previous HN threads are true, who don't dogfood the result. It has no serious improvements at any level, and every change they have made at first glance is a step backwards. WinUI 3 is already in Win10 and the Android emulator will be ported when it actually comes out. And most damning, I hear report after report after report of backcompat issues with games, which is supposed to be Windows's flagship feature. So what's the point of upgrading? Why would I ever? It's like Windows 8 all over again, but this time they're not even replacing old stuff with new stuff, they're just fucking up the old stuff.
  • tonguez 5y ago
    “I love [Windows]… I love the way everything Just Works.” Stopped reading here.
    • baal80spam 5y ago
      It IS true, though.
    • piyush_soni 5y ago
      It might be fashionable to say that about Apple products etc., but using a macbook pro for 8 months now (long term user of Windows), I can say, Windows machine DOES actually just work MUCH more than macs. I can't even connect to an external 4K monitor to this stupid silver box without it completely throttling everything meaningful that I can do on it. On top of that there are so many stupid UI/UX decisions that it has taken that make no sense. I would want my company to at least allow people to work on Windows machine too, but they are so much invested in macs that they don't want to.
  • s3micolon0 5y ago
    Hi pie_flavor, I am interested in learning more about windows myself, since I am using it on a daily basis. I have found it quite difficult to learn deeper about windows (unlike linux) and look into the "power user" features since I find most of the information/blogs on windows is usually surface level and things being described as a blackbox. Seeing that you quite like the windows API and are familiar with windows quite intimately, would you please be interested in chatting with me for windows resources which I can use to dive deeper into and learn more ? Would really appreciate if I can get in touch with you on some other chat based social platform. Thank you in advance!
• snambi 5y ago
  The best way to make windows better, is, "stop using windows". That is the only way.
• stuffbyspencer 5y ago
  Hot Take that no doubt will meet a lot of doubt: I would make a prediction that Window's next OS, is going to be semi-Linux based. Imagine Windows doing to their OS the way they did with their browser, forking opensource code and rebranding it as their own. I could see them deciding to take some flavor of Linux (or maybe even something esoteric like Google's Fuchsia), and just slapping on their bloat & spyware. I don't think this would damage Microsoft's marketshare as much as some people think. Sure, they no longer have "their own codebase", but I don't see the benefit in that. Hell, they could go lower & build off the actual Linux kernel and then build there own distro off of that. That way they can still enforce certain structures at a low level. I would deeply enjoy this, although I would not use it (sticking with Linux). But imagine Microsoft embracing & advocating for AppImages/Flatpaks/Snap packages, Vulken, WINE/Steam Proton, etc. Imagine building for only 2 platforms to get your app running on (nearly) all devices. Imagine having Linux on the desktop get the same treatment it got with Linux on mobile. Again, I understand this sounds like I'm predicting pigs will fly, or it'll rain cats & dogs, or the government will be efficient, but I'm serious, I can see this happening. Maybe not soon, but the next decade could be very interesting to see how this fabled "new" Microsoft moves & behaves.
  • phendrenad2 5y ago
    > Hot Take that no doubt will meet a lot of doubt That's neither a hot take nor a new one. People have been predicting it since the 1900s. If anything, more people believe it than doubt it. But sadly, after making these predictions, and being proven wrong, year after year, no one sits down and asks why it didn't happen. But I did. So let me try to explain. The short version is: "The Linux kernel licensing model is hostile to the Windows hardware ecosystem". What does that mean? Well, the Linux kernel licensing model is GPLv2. But it's more than that. It's actually "GPLv2 plus the interpretation of the kernel developers". And the kernel developers have tried to enforce their interpretation using technical means. Specifically, if you want to compile closed-source drivers into the MAINLINE Linux kernel, they make it difficult for you. Only one company fights this difficulty. That company is Nvidia. How hard does Nividia have it? Nvidia has to ship their kernel driver as two parts. A GPL-compatible stub (which is compiled into the kernel), and a closed-source blob (which connects to this stub). "That's not so bad" you say. Well there's more. The GPL stub only works for one kernel version. You know, 5.17, 5.18, etc. When the user updates their kernel (which they MUST do in order to get security fixes!), the GPL stub may stop working. Why is that? Because while Linus Torvalds mandates a stable _userland_ API, the internals of the kernel, including drivers and other kernel modules, changes ALL THE TIME. Seriously, stuff is changed and refactored all the time. So, Nvidia must release a new driver each time the kernel updates. That's more work. That means more employees for every hardware vendor. That means every hardware vendor would need to push those costs on to consumers or accept lower profits. That means every hardware vendor would scream bloody murder at Microsoft to not do this. Not so bad now? But there's more. How do you install the new driver version? When you update the kernel, hopefully your distro is smart enough to grab the new version of the nvidia driver and install it for you also. If that somehow gets out of step, you get a kernel panic. That's an ugly error for Sam Sixpack or Deb McBusinesshuman to deal with. They're certainly going to call their IT department, who is going to call Microsoft and complain. But that's not so bad... But there's more. Antivirus. Once Linux is underlying the most popular OS in the world, it'll need antivirus. But, antivirus companies will need to release a new kernel module each time there's a new Linux kernel update. Or, they can rely on eBPF. Maybe. eBPF is still untested for that purpose. "So why can't hardware vendors just release their drivers as GPLv2 and upstream them into the kernel?" Well, that's a possible solution. But companies are generally averse to giving their code away for free, and it's not the default, so the legal departments will have to check it over, and MBA types will have to grok the idea of open-source. Many will push back on Microsoft and ask them to not do this. "So why can't Microsoft just fork Linux and remove all of the restrictions, give it a stable closed-source driver API and/or make it capable of running Windows 11 drivers natively, and just give the bird to upstream/Torvalds?" Yeah that's very possible. But at that point, is it really using "Linux" or a kernel based on Linux? Why wouldn't they just use BSD instead and avoid 90% of this trouble?
• gxt 5y ago
  I don't understand the surprise expressed by many in this thread. There's 47k engineers all working very hard to justify their job at MS, there's no incentive on making a good product, it just has to sell, keep your boss happy and that's it. Why would you expect that many people working fulltime to output anything consistent? There's only so many real requirements to get a product that works, and as soon as someone gets his hands on them it inevitably threatens an other team. So new requirements are created and you end up with this.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• fleddr 5y ago
  As a lifelong Windows user (since 3.11), Microsoft has always sucked at Windows. It started as a single user, non-networked OS with an OK UI, followed by 25 years of duct tape. They've never had "taste". Even their attempts at modern flat design are a total disaster. Security for the longest of time was an afterthought, an entire industry was created to fill this fundamental gap. Even "internet" was an afterthought. Another issue is that Microsoft does not see things through. They start various seemingly random initiatives and then just give up halfway through. They suck at execution. It's been 10 years since Windows 8, and the UI is messier than ever. Same for their various attempts at a "light" or mobile version of Windows. I could go on, but the way I see it, Windows is the "people's OS". The use case for it is...all of them. It runs the combined use cases of billions of people, every niche you can think of. Most of these users do not see Windows as particularly enjoyable, nor do they enjoy Microsoft's mismanagement, they suffer in silence because it still somewhat works, and there's no realistic alternative. Windows is not cool and not high growth, which is why I think Microsoft is doing an "Adobe". It's a platform to sell cloud products and soon will be a cloud platform/subscription in itself. Windows as a service. The writing is on the wall.
  • alecmg 5y ago
    Its ironic and scary how 3.11 was the last Windows with consistent a) UI design. It was either a DOS box or a Win 3.11 style window b) file sharing, simple and intuitive c) integration with browsers. Browser was standalone. There was no integration.
• logbiscuitswave 5y ago
  I couldn't agree with many of the things stated in this article more. I really disliked Windows 8. Windows 10 was what made me move to a Mac for my next personal computer acquisition (I'm still stuck with Windows at work), but at least it grew on me after a while. I mean, I'm still not a huge fan of it but many of the rough edges got ironed out and I've gotten used to many of its quirks. Windows 11 on the other hand -- it's just so aggressively terrible that I actively dread using it. Just simple things like changing the volume, or changing the power settings on a laptop have become excruciatingly slow or require much more effort than before. In so many places text has been removed for the sake of "cleanliness" -- like in File Explorer, the Ribbon is now just a set of largely indistinguishable buttons with no labels that I'll never use. The Explorer context menu has been reduced to mostly things I don't care about and a more indistinguishable buttons I'll never use while burying the context menu things I really want behind another mouse click. (Thankfully there's a magic registry key that restores the old-style context menus.) It's easy to point out the consistency issues -- and yeah, they are really bad, and everywhere making Windows 11 feel like an early beta, not a full fledged release. More than anything even basic stuff that's worked well for years or decades has regressed to a point where so many things are barely functional or even recognizable anymore. It's like some designer had MacOS described to them verbally and decided to redesign Windows to look similar. Unfortunately, the latest versions of MacOS aren't all that awesome either when it comes to consistency or usability. In so many ways the design decisions in Windows 11 feel like solutions in search of problems -- they certainly don't make my experience using it any better -- all they do is make me appreciate Windows 10 more than ever (never thought I'd have that sentiment). I keep hoping Windows 11 will get better but even on the latest Insider builds I see very little in the way of improvements to things I really care about so it gives me little confidence. The article brings up a some great points about how there's no "one" UI framework and the difficulties for developers to make their applications look consistent -- and this is totally true. There's so many different UI frameworks from Microsoft with different levels of maturity, abandonment, usefulness, usability, and use. I'm a big fan of WPF and I think it's one of the best desktop UI frameworks out there -- and sadly it's largely been left to rot which is a real shame and it doesn't support many of the newer aspects of Windows without a lot of hacks. UWP is simply awful -- I swore it off after using it for one project. WinUI and MAUI have huge problems of their own and still feel beta. It makes you wonder what are you supposed to use for new projects when you're stuck with either a great framework that seems dead , or a bunch of new ones that don't feel production ready. This nearly 20 year old blog post from Joel Spolsky is just as relevant and prescient as ever: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
• flembat 5y ago
  Anyone else expect this to be about the Windows scheduler? It is a godawful shame, as Windows has the potential to be quite a good operating system for PCs, with just a bit more engineering effort and a bit less filthy gunk it could be great.
• aorth 5y ago
  I'm on mobile. How do I close that "Support Ukraine" banner taking up 1/3 of the screen?
• makecheck 5y ago
  I feel like the industry is really struggling with shipping “boring utilitarian things”. Rather than let software remain boring and just-plain-useful, it is forced to slowly transform into a nightmare of ads, pop-ups and other crap that is clearly NOT required for core functionality and ultimately the whole thing becomes awful to use. Even when the intrusion is small, it is ridiculous because it is not required for the software to work (e.g. in the iPhone SETTINGS app, nothing about tweaking settings ever requires the user to view a stupid ad, and yet there they are, crappifying the UI). And as I get older I am telling myself “this isn’t what I signed up for”: I want useful software that is free of garbage, especially when money is exchanged, and most certainly when a LOT of money is exchanged. So tell these bean-counters to get the hell out, and let us make computers “only” useful instead of ad-spewing machines.
  • xtracto 5y ago
    I blame "Product Managers" or "Product Owners". In my 20 years of being at different technology companies, I´ve realized that people in this position must come up with new "features", bells and whistles to keep justifying their job. Think about say, Microsoft Word (only word, not office). Word has been feature complete since maybe the 2000 version. But, where would all the "product development" arm of the Word application go if they declared it as such? The only required people would be "project managers" to manage bug fixes projects, and the development chain (programmers, QAs, etc)... But these people have to eat, so they keep adding crap to an otherwise good product, they keep shuffling things around and "experimenting" to maintain their job.
    • piyush_soni 5y ago
      > _Word has been feature complete since maybe the 2000 version_ I am not sure, say for example the browser / Office 365 release version of Microsoft Word was very useful, and I'm sure they had to make _many_ changes in the desktop Word too in order to sync everything with the online word. That's pretty important I would say and it works great. The requirement of 'Feature completeness' keeps changing with times.
• notyourNMI 5y ago
  It's almost cute that people still think Windows as a product team cares what individual users want/need/buy. Individual opinions/license purchases don't seem to move Microsoft a millimeter in any direction. As others pointed out, examples abound with the horrible UI intrusions/dumb things that users have to work around just to get work done. My personal pet peeve is this persistent Windows 10 screen dimming/darkening that happens whenever I pull up a terminal no matter the settings changed via UI or registry. Also, having volunteers doing the (not always helpful or even right) troubleshooting for frustrated users isolates the devs from the stupid decisions they or their managers make. (speaking as a software developer myself: devs should be required to work support briefly in the section they'll be developing on so they understand user frustrations). I believe the reason users still pay is so the price can justifiably be multiplied in bulk corporate purchases, otherwise they'd give it away for free to get more of that sweet, sweet data. So they can copy Google, poorly.
• arendtio 5y ago
  > I mean, I can literally run a game written for Windows 95 on Windows 11 without major issues (no, I am not going to open the SafeDisc can of worms this time). I can’t do that on macOS or Linux boxes reliably, and yet Windows is doing a-OK with this task. While I get the point, that is not as true as it sounds. E.g. AFAIK running Tomb Raider 2 is easier on Linux via Proton/Wine than it is on Windows.
• pjettter 5y ago
  This focuses on some aesthetic "features" and it doesn't even touch a large portion of all other problems. I won't even attempt but I'll mention one thing. The part about Windows that bothers me most is that I have no control regarding how windows behave. I am typing and suddenly I am typing in another window! And there is no way to know what just happened. I could be pressing the ESC key while a window for another application just came in focus. Gone! The window and my text. WTF? Or it could be a window with a default button and I just pressed ENTER. Gone! What just happened? Impossible to know. DO NOT INTERFERE WITH MY FOCUS! If I am typing in a window, DO NOT EVER DISTURB ME. I am operating in a context. MY CONTEXT. Not Cortana. Not some app that wants to do something on a schedule because of some enterprise policy. I am working!
• matiasmolinari 5y ago
  For anyone curious why these inconsistencies happen: https://youtu.be/5IUj1EZwpJY https://youtu.be/5IUj1EZwpJY https://www.melconway.com/Home/pdf/committees.pdf https://www.melconway.com/Home/pdf/committees.pdf
• roryokane 5y ago
  > The context menu in File Explorer now gates some of the most useful options behind another extra click […] What’s the point of these changes? For that specific change, the Windows Developer Blog post “Extending the Context Menu and Share Dialog in Windows 11” (https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/07/19/extending-the-context-menu-and-share-dialog-in-windows-11/ https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/07/19/extend...) hints at the designers’ reasons. I haven’t switched to Windows 11 due to the many other complaints I’ve heard, but based on various statements in that post I can imagine good reasons for changing the context menu: # Saving menu navigation time Having a long menu that contains every option is not free: it requires more time and effort from the user when they locate and click on the common items they use. Depending on how often the prioritized items are clicked and how big the penalty is for, the tradeoff could be worth it. I don’t have the data on how much menu navigation time a smaller menu saves in the long term, but since Microsoft forces telemetry on users, hopefully they did at least collect such data while they evaluated the new design. # Encouraging API upgrades This change also encourages app developers to upgrade their context menu extensions to the latest API by “punishing” them if they don’t, by making their context menu items slower to access. While it’s understandable that developers of such apps would feel annoyed at this increased pressure to upgrade, such a policy might be an effective way to helping end users by solving the last two Windows 10 context menu problems listed by the blog post. That is, this increased pressure to use a newer API might: • increase the numbers of apps the user uses whose commands are attributable to that app • increase the number of apps the user uses whose extensions of the context menu have a lower risk of performance and reliability issues However, I do see the potential for this backfiring if developers of Windows apps think that Windows is requiring too much upkeep for maintaining their software on Windows to be worth it.
• Donckele 5y ago
  Some weeks ago I resolved issues, for a friend, with searching for files or emails within outlook. The results for searches firstly did not make sense, some files/emails found but most not. I resolved the indexing of files by finally finding the right settings page after some time. The only feedback that I had done the right thing was seeing the “number of files indexed” incrementing. For outlook, I was expecting some settings page within the app that would explain why emails were not being found. After some more time I found that the settings page was outside of outlook! I cannot remember where or how I fixed the issue but it was complete bullshit. Every once in a while I have these experiences and and wonder how most people live with their computers and the amount of stress and time wasted on stuff that you would expect not to have to deal with in 2022. Even though I have a soft spot for Microsoft, I abandoned their flagship product, the operating system, many years ago and was probably one of my wisest choices. Just like I don’t use Google’s flagship product - I just hate it when companies ruin something near perfect by adding shit to please everyone or to milk it so much for profit that it becomes just a pile of trash.
• nmlt 5y ago
  This made me feel a lot of schadenfreude and also made me feel better about the “Upgrade to MacOS Monterey” notification on my incompatible Mac.
• erichalelund 5y ago
  Yeah, ads are annoying, sort of like someone taking a feather and tickling the back of your neck every few minutes. As for the inconsistencies, haven't really noticed and don't really care. If enough people make noise, someone may get a bug up their xxx and do something about it. The main game I play is on Windows, so windows it is. I get enough programming at work that I don't really want to do it at home anymore (and I'm on Linux / UNIX at work). A lot of what we are seeing is most likely due to Microsoft's eventual transition to Windows as a subscription. I suspect that's inevitable. As long as I can play my games and read my gmail ... meh.
• sadsteve 5y ago
  Yeah, I switch to Linux as my main OS about a month after Windows 8.0 was released. I definitely didn't like the direction Microsoft seemed to be taking. I now run MX Linux and have a Windows 10 VM (with GPU pass through)for the games that won't run under Linux and for the occasional photo editing session (I really dislike Gimp!). Linux has had way fewer issues for me than the recent chain of Windows releases.
• minroot 5y ago
  What is wrong with you?
• dam_broke_it 5y ago
  Find me a linux distro that can play ANY/ALL steam games.....
• aagha 5y ago
  I highly recommend using 'autoruns' [0]. 0 - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/autoruns https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/auto...
• meetakhilesh 5y ago
  [dead]