5 ms·

> The real issue here is that W11 doesn't solve a problem or fix a need Having a scheduler that actually works with 12th generation and 13th generation P+E cor

> The real issue here is that W11 doesn't solve a problem or fix a need Having a scheduler that actually works with 12th generation and 13th generation P+E cores coming out of Intel is a pretty important problem methinks. Especially if you're a user who wants to take advantage of the E-core's efficiency to increase battery lives on your laptop. > Instead what it does do is makes unnecessary UI changes. I do wonder why the Microsoft / Windows folk keep reinventing their UI. Literally reinventing it. We're on WinUI 3 now, from like Silverlight -> Windows 8 Metro -> Windows 10 UWP -> WinUI3 (I'm not sure where WinUI1 or 2 stand, but its probably somewhere in that Win10 UWP era). I get that Microsoft's business strategy keeps changing. But it has to be annoying for Windows developers to try to keep up with all that.

skelpmargyar 4y ago
How come they don't update the scheduler in Windows 10 to support Intel's processors? Also, from what I have read the biggest changes are UI based and some new features like DirectStorage which don't seem like they would require an entirely new operating system. Is there some backwards compatibility issue with the new features? And is there a complete changelist from Microsoft?
- mike_hearn 4y ago
  A lot of people aren't aware of this but Win10 is in maintenance mode and has been for quite some time. Not only do they not backport new features but they also don't always backport important bug fixes either (except for security obviously). Win11 is probably an opt-in upgrade due to the UI changes. The idea of Win10 being the last version ever was nice, but if all upgrades happen automatically you can't make any serious UI changes because people hate stuff just suddenly changing on them when they don't expect it. Note that Apple never made any move as bold as removing versions, and they were able to continue making UI changes as a consequence in each version. People moan, the people who don't like it don't upgrade, and eventually have to pick between support or upgrading but they're never forced so the blowback is minimal. The idea of Win10 being the last version seems to have come from web apps which aren't visibly versioned. But the same problem crops up there, hence why big UI changes on sites like Gmail, Reddit etc have to fork the frontend codebase - sometimes for years.
- soco 4y ago
  Oh my and if they would finally fix that darn printing spooler which hangs exactly in the same way since Windows 3.1 with undeletable jobs and can't find a printer to save its life when you hop wireless networks...
hbn 4y ago
> I do wonder why the Microsoft / Windows folk keep reinventing their UI. There's a trend in the general tech zeitgeist where people think anything older than a couple years is decaying old cruft and needs to be redone. Whether that's UI/UX, programming languages, architectures, etc. Any software shop that fancies itself as a cool, move-fast-and-break-things environment for hip young Silicon Valley-types needs to always be following the latest trends lest the stubborn organization and its red tape turn us into the next BlackBerry. I blame Google. After having enough products of theirs that I used and liked ripped away from me and replaced with something worse, and having to adapt to a new Android UI with every annual OS update (their favorite place to rearrange is the quick settings/notification shade - I don't know if a year went by where they didn't redesign it), I finally swore off using any new services they come out with, de-Googling where I can, and bought myself an iPhone. I won't say Apple is perfect for not doing stupid UI redesigns, but at least the texting app looks pretty much identical to what Steve Jobs demoed in 2007.
pjmlp 4y ago
Except the people running the show seem to not have any clue about what Forms, WPF and MFC are capable of doing, while trying to sell WinUI 3.0, and not having an answer for those stuck in UWP for XBox and HoloLens. They have burned lots of good will from WinRT advocates with all those rewrites, I doubt most of us care, other than those with a sunken cost in WinRT.
- StillBored 4y ago
  Its largely what happened to windows CE/etc too. They could have had a much larger part of the phone pie, but they literally would throw everything away every year or so and start over. Which is such an odd behavior from a company who's main product didn't win because it was the best, or most ubiquitous, but because they maintained a religious amount of backwards compatibility for 15+ years while steadily improving the product.
  - mike_hearn 4y ago
    That problem was noticed way back in 2004: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost... "There are two opposing forces inside Microsoft, which I will refer to, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as The Raymond Chen Camp and The MSDN Magazine Camp .... The Raymond Chen Camp believes in making things easy for developers by making it easy to write once and run anywhere (well, on any Windows box). The MSDN Magazine Camp believes in making things easy for developers by giving them really powerful chunks of code which they can leverage, if they are willing to pay the price of incredibly complicated deployment and installation headaches, not to mention the huge learning curve. The Raymond Chen camp is all about consolidation. Please, don’t make things any worse, let’s just keep making what we already have still work. The MSDN Magazine Camp needs to keep churning out new gigantic pieces of technology that nobody can keep up with ... Inside Microsoft, the MSDN Magazine Camp has won the battle." This telling of the situation is rather unfair on both sides, of course. The actual reason behind what happened is straightforward - Microsoft had to abandon Win32 because it was a terrible API even by the standards of its time that had no hope of keeping up with competitors, but their intended replacement (.NET) was too big of a leap and didn't manage to fully take over. They were trying to compete with Java and mostly managed that, but it was too far above the metal to replace Win32 in every context. In particular the Windows team rejected it as a way to build and ship Windows itself, leading to severely dysfunctional internal politics and dramas. Plus their whole strategy for the web was "try to kill it by making IE dominant and then defunding it, whilst pushing people back to the Windows API". They didn't try very hard to understand why devs were flocking to HTML despite its massive disadvantages compared to Win32. In fairness nor did Apple or Sun or anyone else, really. So: Win32 was dying, and was designed in such a way that incremental progress wasn't going to fix anything. The API itself was just too badly flawed. But they ceded the battle of ideas to Java and then couldn't find a way to incrementally port existing Win32 apps, because C# was too different to C++, and the various .NET C++ dialects just weren't a compelling story for games, the MS Office team, the Adobe suite etc. Roll forward a decade or so and we have a needle scratch moment - the Windows team finally decide that they need a proper replacement for Win32 that can actually be incrementally adopted. WinRT is their answer. It's sort of COM but evolved and with databases of metadata that allow the auto generation of high quality language bindings (including a standard C++ binding), along with a pile of new APIs, which can also be incrementally adopted inside Win32 apps. It's actually, dare I say it, not that bad. At least in terms of overall design. Unfortunately by the time they finally get this strategy right the world has long since forgotten about Windows programming, with experts in it confined mostly to the video games industry, the Chrome team, and random old farts like me who occasionally still need to write a Windows app for whatever reason. Currently for me that's about making distributing apps easy - Conveyor [1] uses a small custom app that mixes Win32 and WinRT in the same program, a small EXE that drives the download/install. And it uses the WinRT packaging scheme (MSIX) which is Linux-like and has a whole bunch of advantages over other installation mechanisms. Unfortunately for Microsoft whilst WinRT does get the foundations right, the implementations of the new APIs at the UI level (WinUI) aren't really being used by anyone outside the Windows team themselves, and it's a whole new UI toolkit written from scratch, not based on an evolved Win32 codebase. So a lot of little details are wrong. Try triple-clicking to select text in the Settings app for an example. I guess the core question is how things could have been different. The WinRT strategy could have worked or at least resulted in slower decline, if it had been started around the Win 2000 era and if .NET had been a properly integrated feature of Windows. In other words if they'd retained strong technical leadership over the platform as a whole. They'd still have lost out to the web and Linux though, because even now their platform doesn't really grok why web apps or Linux are popular. [1] https://conveyor.hydraulic.dev/ https://conveyor.hydraulic.dev/
oblak 4y ago
> Especially if you're a user who wants to take advantage of the E-core's efficiency to increase battery lives on your laptop. It is my understanding that "e cores" in AL/PL are all about space, not power. Did I read the graphs wrong?

skelpmargyar 4y ago

How come they don't update the scheduler in Windows 10 to support Intel's processors? Also, from what I have read the biggest changes are UI based and some new features like DirectStorage which don't seem like they would require an entirely new operating system. Is there some backwards compatibility issue with the new features? And is there a complete changelist from Microsoft?

mike_hearn 4y ago
A lot of people aren't aware of this but Win10 is in maintenance mode and has been for quite some time. Not only do they not backport new features but they also don't always backport important bug fixes either (except for security obviously). Win11 is probably an opt-in upgrade due to the UI changes. The idea of Win10 being the last version ever was nice, but if all upgrades happen automatically you can't make any serious UI changes because people hate stuff just suddenly changing on them when they don't expect it. Note that Apple never made any move as bold as removing versions, and they were able to continue making UI changes as a consequence in each version. People moan, the people who don't like it don't upgrade, and eventually have to pick between support or upgrading but they're never forced so the blowback is minimal. The idea of Win10 being the last version seems to have come from web apps which aren't visibly versioned. But the same problem crops up there, hence why big UI changes on sites like Gmail, Reddit etc have to fork the frontend codebase - sometimes for years.
soco 4y ago
Oh my and if they would finally fix that darn printing spooler which hangs exactly in the same way since Windows 3.1 with undeletable jobs and can't find a printer to save its life when you hop wireless networks...

hbn 4y ago

> I do wonder why the Microsoft / Windows folk keep reinventing their UI. There's a trend in the general tech zeitgeist where people think anything older than a couple years is decaying old cruft and needs to be redone. Whether that's UI/UX, programming languages, architectures, etc. Any software shop that fancies itself as a cool, move-fast-and-break-things environment for hip young Silicon Valley-types needs to always be following the latest trends lest the stubborn organization and its red tape turn us into the next BlackBerry. I blame Google. After having enough products of theirs that I used and liked ripped away from me and replaced with something worse, and having to adapt to a new Android UI with every annual OS update (their favorite place to rearrange is the quick settings/notification shade - I don't know if a year went by where they didn't redesign it), I finally swore off using any new services they come out with, de-Googling where I can, and bought myself an iPhone. I won't say Apple is perfect for not doing stupid UI redesigns, but at least the texting app looks pretty much identical to what Steve Jobs demoed in 2007.

pjmlp 4y ago

Except the people running the show seem to not have any clue about what Forms, WPF and MFC are capable of doing, while trying to sell WinUI 3.0, and not having an answer for those stuck in UWP for XBox and HoloLens. They have burned lots of good will from WinRT advocates with all those rewrites, I doubt most of us care, other than those with a sunken cost in WinRT.

StillBored 4y ago
Its largely what happened to windows CE/etc too. They could have had a much larger part of the phone pie, but they literally would throw everything away every year or so and start over. Which is such an odd behavior from a company who's main product didn't win because it was the best, or most ubiquitous, but because they maintained a religious amount of backwards compatibility for 15+ years while steadily improving the product.
- mike_hearn 4y ago
  That problem was noticed way back in 2004: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost... "There are two opposing forces inside Microsoft, which I will refer to, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as The Raymond Chen Camp and The MSDN Magazine Camp .... The Raymond Chen Camp believes in making things easy for developers by making it easy to write once and run anywhere (well, on any Windows box). The MSDN Magazine Camp believes in making things easy for developers by giving them really powerful chunks of code which they can leverage, if they are willing to pay the price of incredibly complicated deployment and installation headaches, not to mention the huge learning curve. The Raymond Chen camp is all about consolidation. Please, don’t make things any worse, let’s just keep making what we already have still work. The MSDN Magazine Camp needs to keep churning out new gigantic pieces of technology that nobody can keep up with ... Inside Microsoft, the MSDN Magazine Camp has won the battle." This telling of the situation is rather unfair on both sides, of course. The actual reason behind what happened is straightforward - Microsoft had to abandon Win32 because it was a terrible API even by the standards of its time that had no hope of keeping up with competitors, but their intended replacement (.NET) was too big of a leap and didn't manage to fully take over. They were trying to compete with Java and mostly managed that, but it was too far above the metal to replace Win32 in every context. In particular the Windows team rejected it as a way to build and ship Windows itself, leading to severely dysfunctional internal politics and dramas. Plus their whole strategy for the web was "try to kill it by making IE dominant and then defunding it, whilst pushing people back to the Windows API". They didn't try very hard to understand why devs were flocking to HTML despite its massive disadvantages compared to Win32. In fairness nor did Apple or Sun or anyone else, really. So: Win32 was dying, and was designed in such a way that incremental progress wasn't going to fix anything. The API itself was just too badly flawed. But they ceded the battle of ideas to Java and then couldn't find a way to incrementally port existing Win32 apps, because C# was too different to C++, and the various .NET C++ dialects just weren't a compelling story for games, the MS Office team, the Adobe suite etc. Roll forward a decade or so and we have a needle scratch moment - the Windows team finally decide that they need a proper replacement for Win32 that can actually be incrementally adopted. WinRT is their answer. It's sort of COM but evolved and with databases of metadata that allow the auto generation of high quality language bindings (including a standard C++ binding), along with a pile of new APIs, which can also be incrementally adopted inside Win32 apps. It's actually, dare I say it, not that bad. At least in terms of overall design. Unfortunately by the time they finally get this strategy right the world has long since forgotten about Windows programming, with experts in it confined mostly to the video games industry, the Chrome team, and random old farts like me who occasionally still need to write a Windows app for whatever reason. Currently for me that's about making distributing apps easy - Conveyor [1] uses a small custom app that mixes Win32 and WinRT in the same program, a small EXE that drives the download/install. And it uses the WinRT packaging scheme (MSIX) which is Linux-like and has a whole bunch of advantages over other installation mechanisms. Unfortunately for Microsoft whilst WinRT does get the foundations right, the implementations of the new APIs at the UI level (WinUI) aren't really being used by anyone outside the Windows team themselves, and it's a whole new UI toolkit written from scratch, not based on an evolved Win32 codebase. So a lot of little details are wrong. Try triple-clicking to select text in the Settings app for an example. I guess the core question is how things could have been different. The WinRT strategy could have worked or at least resulted in slower decline, if it had been started around the Win 2000 era and if .NET had been a properly integrated feature of Windows. In other words if they'd retained strong technical leadership over the platform as a whole. They'd still have lost out to the web and Linux though, because even now their platform doesn't really grok why web apps or Linux are popular. [1] https://conveyor.hydraulic.dev/ https://conveyor.hydraulic.dev/

oblak 4y ago

> Especially if you're a user who wants to take advantage of the E-core's efficiency to increase battery lives on your laptop. It is my understanding that "e cores" in AL/PL are all about space, not power. Did I read the graphs wrong?