25 ms·

How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?

• vasqw 4y ago
  I'd rather Microsoft spent developer time on useful stuff and not updating dialogs.
  • mihaaly 4y ago
    With which they did not do a very good job evidently. : )
  • nextlevelwizard 4y ago
    Since I haven't used Windows in a while; what are the new killer features of Windows 11 that the developers are delivering/working on?
  • herbst 4y ago
    Like a framework so future UI updates would also update existing ones.
• mihaaly 4y ago
  I am still looking forward for the option to ungroup task bar buttons, preferably with titles. Again! Something that was there before, worked, and was useful. But some designer decided we don't need that, to the bin with it!
  • alganet 4y ago
    If you're willing to tweak your installation, you can revert to the Windows 10 taskbar using the free third-party ExplorerPatcher utility. It has an option to not combine taskbar items and a lot of other goodies.
    • mihaaly 4y ago
      Wasn't this corrupted by one of the Windows updates? Or was that the other product? Got the whole UI frozen or such. I read about third party apps that hack back features this way or the other but I am still hoping a bit that MS will get back their senses and not some - potentially fragile to underlying OS structure change - third party app is required to make things functional again. But I am around the breaking point actually. I use several insteance of the same app all the time and switching simply between those using the taskbar is just not working, bogus, unpredictable, not fulfilling the purpose. I cannot relly get used to it and starting to give up hope. The usability of Windows diminished a lot to me.
      • alganet 4y ago
        It never broke for me. I've been using since October. There has been a large update since, but the app repatched explorer flawlessly. I also use a lot of other funky stuff (system icon changers, theme patchers, etc gotta get that rice). I also remove a lot of stuff using SophiaApp. There has been some usability turndowns for me in the past years, but two things keep me hooked: snap windows (built in) and powertoys (ms-made but requires an install). I can't imagine myself without these two anymore.
        • IIsi50MHz 4y ago
          I like some of the features of AquaSnap, including more window-snapping options, better than the built-in snapping. It does have rather more features than its name implies, like "shake a window to toggle Always On Top" (this enabled one is enabled by default, with an adjustable threshold).
      • jccalhoun 4y ago
        I was using explorer patcher when I did the update to 22H2 and it really screwed up my computer. After many tries I had to boot from a usb drive to get safemode to finally boot so I could uninstall explorer patcher. But after a week of Windows 11's "grouped" taskbar buttons I risked reinstalling explorer patcher and it worked fine.
  • cokeandpepsi 4y ago
    I'm not sure why they rushed out the release, Windows 10 was and is fine and I don't think any customers were really interested in this new version/ui update/whatever total blunder imo but I think most people are just happy it's not as screwed up as whatever the hell Windows8 was for me personally besides the common complaints just getting to the weather widget is now a huge microannoyance that drives me up the wall
    • oblak 4y ago
      I am still baffled by the whole Windows 8 drama. All they did was they replaced a menu with another one. Everything else was the same or better. Supposed power users freaking out about something completely inconsequential. What the hell is wrong with people
      • transfire 4y ago
        I liked Windows 8. And still use it on one computer. The PDF reader app that used Windows 8 design principles has one of the most intuitive interfaces, IMO. Now they’ve gone and half-baked that design in new software and it’s less intuitive, eg clicking file menu item and a whole new screen appears.
      • Dalewyn 4y ago
        Windows 8 with Metro and Start Screen was practically unusable, with the desktop in a /desktop computer/ relegated to third-rate citizen status. Any other Windows UI even as far back as Windows 1 is better than the piece of hot, useless garbage that was Windows 8.
        • oblak 4y ago
          This is exactly the mindless vitriol I had in mind. Flow A: hit a button, a menu with text input and pictures shows up Flow B: hit a button, a full screen with text input and pictures shows up A is perfect, and B is "practically unusable".
          • 4y ago
  • eCa 4y ago
    One of the first things I installed recently on my first Win11 computer was StartAllBack[1]. It’s not perfect but the standard taskbar is so bad that I had to fix it somehow. [1] https://www.startallback.com/ https://www.startallback.com/
    • vasqw 4y ago
      Costs money.
      • layer8 4y ago
        I‘d pay a 100 times that amount to get a new Windows with consistent classic UI (e.g. Windows 2000 style).
      • daemin 4y ago
        So does Windows itself. If you're afraid to or don't want to pay for software then you should probably use some variant of GNU/Linux instead.
        • switch007 4y ago
          Windows is free (as in beer), if you can live with the minor nags, minor lack of customisation and watermarking.
        • vasqw 4y ago
          Windows doesn't cost money because I pirate it. I could pirate this program as well but it's probably going to be harder to find a clean, recent version of it.
          • Beltalowda 4y ago
            How dare people charge money as compensation for their time! Can't they just live off sunlight like everyone else?!?!
            • 4y ago
  • jeroenhd 4y ago
    Microsoft seemed intent on removing settings and features that only a small segment of their telemetry showed enabled, probably because of some code cleanup efforts. This is despite their earlier attempt to convince everyone to use the weird 3D image editor instead of MS Paint. A real shame, because they showed with Windows 7 that they can redesign the OS UI without giving up features from earlier versions if they want to. Bugs like "the task bar is 20 pixels taller on my second screen" wouldn't have come up if they'd stuck to restyling their old code base. I find Microsoft's modern designs very comparable to the GNOME designs, in that they're eager to remove common features to build an overarching operating system theme. I like GNOME's design, much more than Windows 11's, but I don't think taking directions from a heavily criticised DE is the right move.
    • phpisthebest 4y ago
      I dont like either, both take their lead from mac os, which I also do not like I am a gnome2 person, KDE, win7, etc type UI, if I wanted a mac I would buy a mac. There was a post on here a few months ago from a former MS engineer talking about how a large part of MS design team were all MAC users.
      • numpad0 4y ago
        A lot of junior webdevs, iOS app devs and designers were buying Macs to run testing/staging envs, and they have a lot of leverages, so MS had to do what they did.
        • phpisthebest 4y ago
          Outsized influence IMO. Enterprise is still king, and we here in Enterprise Ops are not happy. Microsoft needs to remember where its money comes from, and it is not jr webdevs
  • fulltimeloser 4y ago
    I miss the vertical task bar option. Vertical space is more valuable than horizontal with 16x9 higher aspect ratio.
    • SrZorro 4y ago
      Im not updating to windows 10+ until they bring it back. I have 3 16x9 monitors. Why do I have to use 16*3 width of my screen for the taskbar when 1 vertical taskbar in 1 screen is enough?
  • matsemann 4y ago
    Yup, the sole reason I downgraded back to 10. So stupid to force me to loose seconds each time I use the taskbar. Aka all the time.
  • jabbany 4y ago
    This! So much this! What's the point of having a taskbar that only groups by app...This has been one of the major pain points of me using Mac OS and it is immensely sad that Windows 11 has also taken this approach. At least some Linux DEs still let me keep my app windows ungrouped...
    • kk_cz 4y ago
      this works: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
      • jabbany 4y ago
        I mean if I'm at the point of having to monkeypatch the explorer executable, I might as well not use Windows...
    • mihaaly 4y ago
      Luckily with macOS there is the way of expose (renamed) and hot corners that allows switching based on various logic by a swing of the mouse both lightning fast and visual (easy and quick to locate things and trace what is happening), very natural to me from the very first time I tried. (this allowed Mac + VM products like Parallels with coherence mode to work superior to any Windows practice in this reagard - better in handling multiple windows than Windows, hehe - having Win in a VM was my preferred way of working with Windows for a decade or so - only changed because of new job with different IT practices, and lately with the looong transition of Intel to ARM processors and the consequent difficulties with x64 Win systems and apps. All Windows window became a Mac window, switching between those very visually and quickly, superior to Windows way, even with the then working taskbar practices) Unluckily in Windows the taskbar became more essential than the dock in macOS for switching windows - on Mac I use the dock to start new instances or quitting the app (differing philosophy of window and app lifetime between mac and win), not much of a switching - and then they ruined this essential taskbar thing without good alternative on Windows (Ctrl + Tab is more like a complementary thing than alternative).
      • 4y ago
  • olivermuty 4y ago
    Lmao, I am not able to group it! I have two browser profiles and no matter what I do they come up as separate tasks on the task bar.. I am not able to group them up. I would also like to alt tab to them as a whole, then tab between the group windows instead. Luckily win11 is just a game launcher for me these days, so I only manage to get so and so aggravated :D
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • rightbyte 4y ago
    Win XP had this right-click on group in the bar and you could spread the windows evenly on the screen. It was really useful for Matlab plots but for some reason they removed it for Win 7.
  • noisem4ker 4y ago
    There's a hope: its comeback appears to be under development. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33781752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33781752
    • mihaaly 4y ago
      Hooray!
  • ss48 4y ago
    I've been using StartAllBack for this after upgrading to Windows 11, and it's worked out pretty well.
  • CrimsonRain 4y ago
    Absolutely. I had to find something for this. And thankfully, some guy was annoyed enough to build this: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
• dochtman 4y ago
  I would be curious for a similar dissection of modern macOS. My intuitive sense is that it is a little better though there are probably still at least 5 layers of stuff. So to some extent, does doing this better at the scale of a modern user-facing OS provide enough return on investment?
  • meindnoch 4y ago
    Ummm... macOS (aka OS X) have been using a single UI toolkit (AppKit) since the beginning. (Carbon apps no longer work since Catalina, because Carbon was never updated to 64-bit)
    • Macha 4y ago
      Carbon is gone but now we have Catalyst and SwiftUI
  • piyush_soni 4y ago
    Unpopular opinion: Windows UI has a lot of problems, but it's still much more intuitive and stupid-proof than macOS. Having worked with both, macOS is just inconsistent to the core (and Finder is an application one would have to pay a team of developers with the core instruction of 'make it a non-intuitive and unusable mess'). Also, I still use apps last maintained in 2010 on the latest Windows version, while apps written just a few years back don't work on macOS 12.6 anymore. (P.S. - Latest Windows when installed with MS 'PowerToys' brings a few missing things in Windows from macOS where it might otherwise shine)
    • mihaaly 4y ago
      macOS got worse during the past decades but still better for everyday use than Windows (which brought in macOS ideas for its advantage meanwhile closing the gap), still much more consistent than Windows despite the changes (to the worst mostly). Much less in the way while doing your job than Windows. Of course it has different philosophy on how to carry out things and it does not fit everyone, for them Windows may be better choice of course.
    • 4y ago
• sylens 4y ago
  This is a really great documentation of how far back various pieces of the UI go. If you’ve been using Windows for a long time, you remember when different pieces of the UI got introduced or changed and then frozen in amber until today. Crazy to think they are still recovering from Windows 8 and the pivot to Metro UI.
  • agilob 4y ago
    Pretty sure some of these screenshots show Windows Vista design.
    • sylens 4y ago
      Oh they definitely do. And even some XP ones. But all the time that could’ve been spent updating those to a more modern UI style, they instead reinvented the wheel with Windows 8 and then had to roll it back, wasting about 5 years
      • hajile 4y ago
        They were on Vista/7 for years, but couldn't be bothered to upgrade the ancient Windows 3.x stuff. The problem seems much bigger than metro.
        • TeMPOraL 4y ago
          I imagine the things that they thought were the most important to update in Vista were also the most important to update in Win7, Win8, Win10 and Win11, always for the same reason.
• Closi 4y ago
  There is a real cost to consistency/change, and I don't personally believe that this is just laziness or poor design on Microsoft's behalf. Sure, Windows could have changed the look and layout of every component with every release, but with an application as widely used as Windows you really want the ability for users to move from Windows XP to Windows 11 and still have a sense of familiarity and confidence. It is also difficult for them to remove settings or change their behaviour of settings without breaking compatibility, so really whenever they are making the UI 'consistent' we really mean moving around the existing settings rather than rethinking them entirely - true change has to be done in baby-steps across many Windows versions.
  • mihaaly 4y ago
    With those 8 or so (partial!) redesigns I do not feel the overwhelming urge for consistency here. (in fact they broke this and that along the road, the latest and most crucial for me is the taskbar, and I am not talking about the alignemnt, not at all, but all the other possibilities gone, starting with the option of grouping/ungrouping, but not ending there)
    • Closi 4y ago
      > (in fact they broke this and that along the road, the latest and most cruitial for me is the taskbar, and I am not talking about the alignemnt, not at all, but all the other possibilities gone, starting with the option of grouping/ungrouping, but not ending there) The way I look at it (which may be wrong!) is that companies get a 'change budget' of how much users will tolerate in terms of change (i.e. an 'emotional' budget with users rather than a cash/resource budget). Look at the large facebook designs which recieved huge amounts of backlash from the community - while each of them pushed Facebook in the right direction, each of the changes was also very disruptive to an extent that Microsoft probably couldn't tolerate in Windows. This time around they decided to use a lot of their 'change budget' on the taskbar, which probably means you don't want to touch other parts. IMO they should have added the option of grouping/ungrouping too before making the change, although the fact that people are complaining about taskbar grouping probably further demonstrates how careful Microsoft needs to be with design changes (Especially as you can probably see WHY Microsoft might want to remove the option of grouping/ungrouping and follow their thought process with this, which shows how easily these UI pitfalls can occur when making changes).
• tacker2000 4y ago
  I guess theyre going for the typical 80/20 rule here! I assume for example that not many people would be setting up ODBC stuff.
• cokeandpepsi 4y ago
  the more consistant it becomes the less I like it, bland
• wadd1e 4y ago
  I have a bit of a perfectionistic tendency to 'start over' things over and over and do them again as perfectly as possible; the Windows side of MS feels like a corporate embodiment of this habit. They've done this sort of thing with app installers(setup.exe, click once, appv, msi, msix) and UI frameworks(win32, mfc, wpf, winui 2, winui 3). It's like the teams responsible for their respective product keep starting over with a shiny new way of doing things every couple of years to achieve the 'perfect' installer/ui framework or anything else for that matter. Infact W11 felt like a way of 'restarting' W10 without building a whole new OS. Atleast with W11 they're actively updating old things rather than introducing new ones, I did not have a lot of hope when it first came out, but they have gotten my hopes up since the release for sure. I just hope they stick with winui 3 and see it through.
  • TylerE 4y ago
    Setup.exe was installshield, not MS. Back then MS was still pushing .cab files
  • adql 4y ago
    Well, if you're UI designer and designed the UIs launched it and all works... what else you're going to do ? Same disease that plagues GNOME, change shit for sake of changing shit, fuck users that got used to the old way, they don't matter, is new way faster ? Who knows, we don't.
    • petepete 4y ago
      It's funny how the huge silent majority get on just fine with GNOME but the vocal few act like the devs have poked them in the eye and called their mother fat.
      • kevingadd 4y ago
        Well, I'm used to Ubuntu updates breaking my workflow and potentially breaking some of my boot services, which is genuinely inconvenient. So I don't think those vocal few are wrong.
• black_puppydog 4y ago
  See the problem with operating systems which don't have strict design guidelines and review like iOS is that they don't have a consistent design language which clearly prevents adoption. That's one of the prime reason why Linux on the desktop will never take off. /s
• tgv 4y ago
  I wrote a similar comment here recently, but this is much more detailed, and it's worse than I thought. Nice to see practically all versions addressed in some detail. Looks like Microsoft does have some kind of UWP (he wrote, not at all resenting the loss of his Windows phone).
• simion314 4y ago
  I would prefer for feature to exist and work and don't care if the buttons look the same. I am super salty because I tried to run some old 32 bits qt4 and gtk2 python apps on latest Kubuntu LTS (I am 100% only Linux for years )and I just wasted hours without any satisfaction, at least on Windows 10 year old programs will still work most of the time(probably some old games could fail but might be a driver issue and not a Microsoft stuff).
  • jeroenhd 4y ago
    What problems did you run into? If it's dependencies and packages no longer being shipped, you'll have the same issues running those Python programs on Windows and probably the same solutions as well (downloading all the old sources, compiling all the libraries manually). You can still run the x86 ABI on x64 (or any other architecture through qemu) though unlike Windows, most Linux distros don't ship support for it by default. The programs themselves work, but the dependencies have moved on. This is why many recent ecosystems are focusing on static compilation, only demanding a very basic minimal set of functionality (C runtimes and such) from the OS at the cost of needing to patch every single binary on your system one by one when the next log4j/heartbleed bug hits. This stuff is also why I dislike Python as a platform for running GUI applications. It's easy and it works assuming you put in the work to maintain compatibility yourself. Compiled binaries will work for much longer.
    • simion314 4y ago
      For Windows Qt developers will put the Qt dlls in the application , not statically link. So in general you will probably be able to run an old Qt app on Linux by using Wine. Yeah, the issue is missing dependencies, the 32 bit versions, Linux Gamers complained so there still are some 32 bit packages around but not all of them. Compiling this old apps I assume will hit same issue, this time missing even more packages since I will need all GTK2 dependencies. I wish there was a nice, slim way to put in a folder all the libraries from a say 16.04 release and tell this app to look there in that folder. App images would probably be the solution, but who will find all those old projects from source forge that have very few users and rebuild them?
• nih0 4y ago
  Amazing how well the old stuff in windows holds up.
  • crecker 4y ago
    Retro-compatibility is one of the reasons that Windows is still used in industry.
    • dimatura 4y ago
      Not just industry. Linux has been my daily driver OS for ~20 years now, but I just installed windows 10 on an old laptop so I could run some old music production-related software on it, such as editors for the Virus TI and Nord Modular synths that stopped working on MacOS years ago. (And of course, has never been available on Linux outside of Wine/VMs).
  • dutchCourage 4y ago
    I think so too. It makes me wonder why they don't update all their apps to look like W7 or Windows 10 instead of changing their design language with every release. I'm sure there are some technical reasons there, but I suspect it's also the result of poor judgement.
• muststopmyths 4y ago
  As a 25+ year user of windows none of this stuff bothers me. What ticks me off is just the abysmal quality of windows 11 compared to the past. It’s like no one working on it has any pride in their job Example: - hate the new notification area. The action center was so much better - dumb stuff like a window update notification that shows a c# class name instead of windows update - clicking said notification does not bring up the windows update settings as it used to. - searching for windows update in the start menu does not show the setting as a result. Even when you select setting. - every few edge updates, th browser is able to put itself in a state that it takes 5 minutes to start up. In that time most other apps will not launch either. I could go on and on, but these are just a few of the daily problems that irritate me.
  • mihaaly 4y ago
    I am getting very repetitive here but my first addition to your good list is the taskbar. (and not the center alignment as default - mimicking macOS -, not at all, that's marginal and still can be reverted).
    • KronisLV 4y ago
      As far as I know, you can't have a vertical taskbar in Windows 11 either, which is unfortunate for those with widescreen monitors that like vertical screen space to be used efficiently (e.g. seeing more lines of code, but being able to switch windows easily as well).
      • mihaaly 4y ago
        I know so, too.
  • tcfhgj 4y ago
    - calendar of task bar became useless - swipe from the left is unchangeably wasted for trash news - touch interaction (especially in Edge) is worse than Windows 8: I am dependant on a virtual touch pad to do certain stuff (e.g. selecting text and copying it via context menu) - start menu customization possibilities are ridiculously low
• hoseja 4y ago
  I was promised 10 would be the final version and I will make sure to keep it that way, one way or another.
  • input_sh 4y ago
    > I was promised 10 would be the final version Funny thing is this was absolutely never said by Microsoft. If you dig deep enough you reach a single throwaway quote by some employee that said something along the lines of "Windows 10 is the last version released and we're focusing all attention to it, not 8.1".
    • zokier 4y ago
      Except MS did confirm that statement separately when asked > When I reached out to Microsoft about Nixon's comments, the company didn't dismiss them at all. "Recent comments at Ignite about Windows 10 are reflective of the way Windows will be delivered as a service bringing new innovations and updates in an ongoing manner, with continuous value for our consumer and business customers," says a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. "We aren’t speaking to future branding at this time, but customers can be confident Windows 10 will remain up-to-date and power a variety of devices from PCs to phones to Surface Hub to HoloLens and Xbox. We look forward to a long future of Windows innovations." https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/7/8568473/windows-10-last-version-of-windows https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/7/8568473/windows-10-last-ve...
      • input_sh 4y ago
        There's a couple of ways I'd interpret that non-answer, but I absolutely don't see that as a confirmation. "I don't know the answer, but I have to say something." Or "The answer's no, but this rumour goes in our favour of convincing people to switch to 10 so we're not going to deny it." If it said "Windows 10 will remain up-to-date indefinitely", then I'd agree.
    • xaldir 4y ago
      Oh come on. I've been talking for years with Microsoft representatives and they were balls-deep on the windows-as-a-service scheme for years, until they weren't. You could argue that Microsoft was betting on Windows 10 as a platform and that Windows 11 is in fact built on this platform (and the 11 is just marketing lingo for 10.x). But despite Microsoft revisionism, the fact is that they changed there mind along the way.
• Havoc 4y ago
  Pretty sure MS has just given up on consistency at this point. The control panel on particular is a writeoff - simple things like setting an IP on a net adapter is an adventure in itself
  • jve 4y ago
    ncpa.cpl cuts a long way to get there.
    • fest 4y ago
      It looks like Windows is heading towards Linux in this matter- having to know weird commands to get things done effectively. I only use Windows occasionally, but when I have to set up a printer (shared from another computer) or file sharing, I often have to resort to either creating obscure registry entries based on random internet tutorials or use command line to figure out what exactly the GUI wizard means by "the thing you want can't be found"
      • zokier 4y ago
        > It looks like Windows is heading towards Linux in this matter- having to know weird commands to get things done effectively. I'm pretty sure Windows has always been like that. Magic registry keys and underdocumented mmc panels, mystical cmd commands and some COM/WMI poking vbscript. This is also why powershell is such improvement in windows world, it attempts to reset at least some of the management madness.
      • phpisthebest 4y ago
        Windows is heading towards linux in that most of the "new" settings app is calling powershell under the hood. Just like in the linux where all GUI's are more or less just wrappers around command line utilities or have 1:1 cmd line alternatives, Windows is becoming powershell first then GUI. Where before ALOT of functionality was only accessible from the GUI
        • jve 4y ago
• alentred 4y ago
  To be fair, I think some examples, and specifically those from 95/NT and then 3.1 times, are too far-fetched. I agree that consistency is important, but it doesn't mean that every screen needs to be redesigned altogether. For instance, I don't think that examples of Screen Saver Settings or File Properties are relevant, as long as their styling is in line with the rest of the OS. One thing that surprises me a lot, though, is that a lot of applications seem to need to be upgraded one-by-one, even if the UI is largely the same and only the styling needs to be upgraded. I never developed for Windows UI, but does it mean that there is no single reusable UI Kit, where just the styling could be changed from OS version to another? Do all these examples demonstrate that different applications are compiled with different UI Frameworks that are all in use and supported?
  • biorach 4y ago
    Basically, yes. I believe some are no longer supported, but are still in use internally.
  • Someone1234 4y ago
    I agree, but I do want to point out that some of these "not updated" things are still heavily used and offer a bad user experience. For example the Services (or any mmc based) UI with no filter/search integrated is absurd. Heck they just "redesigned" Task Manager and none of the tabs have filter/search functionality which is annoying to say the least. I suppose you can start typing with the inner tab having focus, and it SOMETIMES finds the correct thing, but it isn't reliable and is hidden functionality that people just need to know is a thing. Props to them adding an address-bar to RegEdit though (in the W10 Creators Update) and multi-tab Powershell terminal. Very welcome and positive improvements. Wish we had more stuff like that.
    • Sakos 4y ago
      That's not quite true. The Event Viewer has always had filtering and search and it's mmc-based. They could easily iterate on the Services UI and add that too instead of just building something completely new that has no new functionality and doesn't improve the interface. I'm tired of Microsoft actively making things worse instead of actually improving what they already have.
• Dalewyn 4y ago
  >The ability to choose icons that are more than 30 years old is still here, with the inclusion of the very important and absolutely critical to the good function of the OS moricons.dll I will happily bet there are programs out there that would crash and burn horrifically without moricons.dll.
  • Eleison23 4y ago
    [dead]
  • layer8 4y ago
    Also, it doesn’t hurt anyone to keep it around.
    • lithos 4y ago
      Sounds like a bigger attack surface for malicious actors.
      • layer8 4y ago
        Processes with write access to moricons.dll are able to do much worse things.
    • whydid 4y ago
      Yes it does "hurt" because it creates an inconsistent visual style. Windows is a mess because of the refusal to deprecate old APIs.
      • layer8 4y ago
        I don't think moricons.dll is actively used by Window itself anywhere? It's a resource DLL you can reference to use icons from in your own program shortcuts and similar. It doesn't provide an API as such. It's more like a collection of known graphics files being shipped as part of Windows.
      • Dalewyn 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• NGRhodes 4y ago
  Windows file version history is an interesting example of UI inconsistent AND being broken as a result. It has been removed from settings (was in Win 10), but still exists in the control panel (where you can't configure folders to be included in file version history).
  • johnwalkr 4y ago
    I had no idea it even had that feature. File revision ought to a basic OS function and basic computer skill. One drive and Dropbox kind of give it to you. MacOS does it (you can save named revisions in addition to Time Machine working pretty well) but it’s not become a well-known feature for some reason. On the other hand these features may cause pain if they aren’t something that will survive copy operations, OS updates etc.
    • rightbyte 4y ago
      Version control is superfluous for simple stuff since you can just have: Report.doc, report1.doc, report11.doc, reportfinal.doc, reportfinal2.doc
• adql 4y ago
  I swear those changes are just designers trying to excuse their employment
• herbst 4y ago
  I rarely use Windows, but every time again I am surprised how they still squeeze most out of their win95 UI concept by only adding new shiny layers. There are dozens of desktops that went into several mostly consistent redesigns in all that time. Gnome Shell nothing feels like Windows 95, Windows 10 still somewhat does.
• digdigdag 4y ago
  The codebase goes back to nearly 40 years. It would be more shocking if it there weren't legacy code hanging around. Windows is one of the most impressive pieces of software I have ever seen. No other platform boasts the kind of backwards compatibility that is seen in this operating system. There are shim layers on top of shim layers and the developers seem to have gone through great pains to keep the operating system backwards compatible. Comparatively, the Linux kernel API is stable, though applications relying on newer system calls are forever stuck requiring minimum kernel versions. On the userspace side, application packages are in a near constant state of flux and can break with a single version/dependency change.
  • kwanbix 4y ago
    Windows NT, is almost 30 years old. That is the OS that the other OSes use today as a base. Unless you want to mention Windows 95, but still, "only" 32 years.
    • vor_ 4y ago
      Well, the Windows APIs date farther back than NT.
  • whydid 4y ago
    GTK and Gnome are almost 25 years old, and they're nowhere as messy as the Windows https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk
    • forgotpwd16 4y ago
      Not surprising. GTK and GNOME doesn't give a single f about backwards compatibility.
      • doodlesdev 4y ago
        It went through less major updates than Microsoft has went through UI toolkits. GTK2 programs such as GIMP still run perfectly in modern GNOME and integrate awesomely. Even if you count Qt applications for the Linux desktop it still is more consistent and stable than Microsoft's megalomaniac search for the "perfect" UI toolkit.
• bmitc 4y ago
  Windows is not the only one. Apple and macOS and iOS are just as guilty about this.
• n1vz3r 4y ago
  As a long-time Linux user with habit of throwing everything into the mix, I got quite used to number of inconsistencies that I have, so I don't think that MS deserves criticism for having them too (although article is not very critical, it just counts the inconsisitencies). I have GTK2/3/4 apps, KDE apps, Qt apps, Electron apps, AND Windows apps running under wine. So the only consistency on my desktop is an inconsistency. Also Windows has good track record for backwards compatibility, no surprise that an OS has some "ancient" parts.
  • herbst 4y ago
    Linux user here as well. The thing that upsets me with windows in the inconsistency in the OS not the applications. Take Fedora, Manjaro or Ubuntu with any major flavour like Gnome or KDE and you get a very consistent way of how your OS works and responds to common tasks. It's kinda easy for non experienced user to find the right settings with no UI change on a modern Linux Desktop.
    • noisy_boy 4y ago
      I think with Linux, the amount of OS-level GUI screens is much more smaller compared to Windows. The main OS level GUI screen I interact with is the Settings screen and that basically has been a left-side tree showing the content on the right side or a grid that points to the individual sections. That is comparatively a much easier change in terms of UI level changes. Other OS-level screens are usually separate applications e.g. gparted which looks different from the Settings screen in KDE plasma (and totally understandably so, not complaining).
      • hajile 4y ago
        This MS inconsistency is entirely the fault of MS. You could build thousands of KDE environments with the amount of money MS spends on Windows, yet KDE has managed to update everything across 5 versions of their desktop environment. In fact, EVERY common operating system GUI with the exception of Windows manages to update all the things. If MS had spent some of those billions on updating those legacy apps each generation, they wouldn't be stuck with so much legacy garbage today. It's also telling that MS has never bothered to stick with a framework that would allow them to upgrade UI themes in-place. I'd also note that "complexity" isn't a good reason because MS could have gone with other solutions that were both more simple and more usable, but chose a convoluted design instead.
• nixass 4y ago
  >It’s 2023, and Windows 11 is finally a mature operating system that most people would be happy to use Oof first sentence and it's already a train wreck
• vultour 4y ago
  My favourite was the "Windows Classic" ala Windows 98 theme which disappeared along with Windows 7. These fancy monstrosities keep getting worse every year.
  • nigamanth 4y ago
    Yes, until we think that old is gold so we switch back to the old styles.
• mr-pink 4y ago
  I started using a windows XP theme for windows 10. it's been bliss. what are people thinking these days with the huge waste of screen real estate everywhere?
  • herbst 4y ago
    I am a huge sucker for not wasting screen estate as well. I also am highly annoyed by anything on my screen that can blink or is animated or anything that is not part of whatever I am working on. So taskbars and notifications highly annoy me. I really thought windows 8 could go I the right direction. A metro like approach where applications can take up as screen as possible, with proper tiling and a unobtrusive way ala Mac finder to access everything that is not already open from a single place. However that is exactly what gnome Shell is. Max screen estate, snappy getting to everywhere and everything.
• thrdbndndn 4y ago
  What's more embarrassing than UI is that after 10+ years Win10/11 Settings still don't have the functionality parity with Win7 Control Panel, evidenced by the fact you find links everywhere in Settings to officially ask you to open their equivalent in Control Panel to adjust "advanced" settings. And even at the places they do, arguments can be made about if their UX/UI are actually better; but that's kinda subjective, to be totally fair to MS.
  • orwin 4y ago
    This is now my major gripe with windows with tool versioning (since i admit that IIS is now more than usable, unlike in 2012). The settings are a pain to go through. When i find a powershell command or a regedit/cmd action that can avoid me the pain, i take it (and i'm always bummed that those are often the last proposed options). Also, i think spotlight in mac is way better than Search, and i dislike that it is Win+S instead of Win+Space. I also think that the default itl layout is a smidge better for dev on Mac, but at this point it's too late. Also to be fair as i mostly use linux: search is way worse and the default are even shittier than windows, but since i can import "my" defaults in 45s, basically the time to type `sudo apt install git make; git clone XXXXXXX/my_default.git; cd my_default; make && sudo make install && reboot`, i'm not too cross about it.
    • noveltyaccount 4y ago
      Try MS PowerToys, enable Everywhere search in the Run utility. Win+space will be nearly as good as Spotlight. Edit: I think this is now called Windows Search or File Search. Sorry been a while since I've used windows full time. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/run https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/run
    • easrng 4y ago
      if you start typing with the start menu open it searches automatically so you can just hit Win.
• jostmey 4y ago
  Would I prefer an OS with a consistent UI? Yes. Would I prefer a more user friendly OS? Yes! Will I still use Windows? Yes. Why? Because I spend 50% of my time in Microsoft office, which works far better in Windows than other OS
• SpacePortKnight 4y ago
  My biggest issue with Windows 11 UI is the existence of both the control panel and the settings app. Often I don't know which setting takes precedence, for example I can create power plans from control panel and also use different power modes from the settings app.
  • boomskats 4y ago
    My biggest issue with Windows 11 UI is the fact that the taskbar sometimes doesn't load the clock/icon tray, sometimes loads two taskbars one over the other (both which respond to the windows key being pressed and neither with a clock/icon tray), and frequently shows a taskbar over a maximised application window (without the maximised window knowing about it and so drawing its contents behind said taskbar, like Chrome is doing now). What it never ever does do is actually behave consistently and predictably. This is after two fresh reinstalls. The Win 11 OS itself has actually been very solid aside from WSLg, so I could live with the UI inconsistencies highlighted in this post. However it's the taskbar UX, of all things, that kills it for me.
    • crispyambulance 4y ago
      One thing that I find incomprehensible is the fact that you CANNOT place the taskbar vertical to either side of the monitor. It's so infuriating. Such a small thing, but that capability was present since at least windows XP.
  • omgomgomgomg 4y ago
    After a few years of working on a mac, I started using a windows machine today and found out about this, I was very surprised, thought control panel is a relict from w7 times. I actually liked w7. Either way, all in all I am very happy to not having to deal with "numbers" , the crappy file system on a mac amongst many other things. I think w11 is pretty solid apart from the old known issues.
• npteljes 4y ago
  It was always worth it to me to be a late adopter of Windows, they just take a really long time ironing things out, especially so since they made their users their QAs[0]. I think I'll be fine with my Win 10 LTSC 2021 until the support runs out in 2027, and then I'll see where Win 11 stands. [0] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140806183208-12100070-why-did-microsoft-lay-off-programmatic-testers https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140806183208-12100070-why-d...
• 0x0 4y ago
  I wonder if they kept the ODBC driver installer window with the win3.x-style file tree unchanged, just so they could be compatible with random old legacy odbc driver installer program that might try to programatically automate interactions with that UI? I don't know first-hand of any such program, but it wouldn't surprise me if there was some old important enterprisey installer that expects the file chooser dialog to be just so and would freak out if the UI didn't still follow win 3.x conventions..?
  • justsomehnguy 4y ago
    I think it was the thing somewhere in the earlier 00's, with the move to Vista/7 they didn't touch it and then anyone who could or cared to change it already left the company and the cool guys who decided what 04 Apr 04 is a fucking great placeholder for choosing between M/D/Y and D/M/Y format didn't knew what ODBC even means.
  • EMM_386 4y ago
    That's why they have to leave a lot of this stuff alone. It's why there is both a Settings application as well as a legacy Control Panel. There are thousands of applications in the wild that still do all sorts of insane hooks deep into Windows controls, expecting them to be "just so" and would break if they weren't. So every screen rewrite is a dance with all of the legacy software, and sometimes you end up with a modern version of the screen, as well as the old version for backwards compatibility. Eventually enough of the software is brought forward (or abandoned) and the legacy screens can start being dropped.
    • Alupis 4y ago
      This cannot possibly be true. Yes, legacy software is a big deal for Windows, but legacy software is not literally clicking buttons in these old archaic menus. A shim or compatibility layer should have been added, and all settings migrated into the single Settings menu. There is no reason to have multiple versions of the same thing... especially when one of them is permanently hobbled and users have to guess which version exposes the buttons they need. How long has Win10 existed? Nobody smart at Microsoft has figured out how to unify Settings and Control Panel in all that time? Literally means they have not tried. All of these things hack on the registry when you get down to it... What probably actually happened was someone found out all the deeply nested menus and ad-hoc buttons in Control Panel didn't cleanly port into their "elegant" Settings app, so they just stopped there and left it to rot. We want to look beautiful more than we want to be functional, apparently.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• kajaktum 4y ago
  I never quite understood the point of redesign. The only reason I can think of is marketing. Other than that, it's always, always a big mess. Why does everything need to be freaking round which makes it very ugly in low resolutions?
  • jdthedisciple 4y ago
    My personal theory is because that's how Apple does it and people absolutely love it. Also people love "new shiny" things. So you're spot on: Marketing. You gotta go w the Zeitgeist. If in 20 years sharp corners will be the new shiny thing again you bet Windows 14 will go back to using those.
  • Arainach 4y ago
    Because when you change the insides no one notices: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040525-00/?p=39193 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040525-00/?p=39...
• teekert 4y ago
  Though I indeed experience this in Windows, in macOS I feel the same about buttons, especially when you mix in an external keyboard (I have a Logitech MX keys). It's always a mistery when and how home/end work (does nothing in terminal, it's page down/up in some apps, in Word it's like Windows), when cmd-arrows do home/end (not in terminal [annoying that ctrl-a/e are the only ways!], does work in FireFox), what button gives me ~ (shown on 2 buttons on the MX keys) and when I can paste with crtl-v (ok, yeah I shouldn't but if you switch OS a lot... strangely it sometimes works). Oh and three finger down-swipe is undo on iOS! Very handy! Just not always, more like sometimes.
  • johnwalkr 4y ago
    MS office is the only time I’m frustrated by keys being different. Otherwise control/alt/fn + arrows is a pleasure to use for text navigation. For terminal its pretty easy to remap keys, in iterm at least as far as I remember.[1] I stopped doing this because it was annoying when switching between MacOS and Linux. [1]https://emilyemorehouse.com/blog/001-iterm-keybindings/ https://emilyemorehouse.com/blog/001-iterm-keybindings/
• bitwize 4y ago
  Few years back I tried writing Win32 code under Windows 10 to see if I still "had it". I set up my main window with an event loop and then, for shits and giggles, added a button. It entailed calling CreateWindow again with the proper button window class, which I did, and when I ran it... there, on my screen, appeared a small, flat Windows 9x button. With a label in the Windows 3.x system font. Never change, Windows. Never change.
• KingLancelot 4y ago
  [dead]
• AlexandrB 4y ago
  > Last, but not least, the boot screen has been updated to the new Windows logo, as well as the new WinUI loading circle, which replaces the dated spinning dots. I guess this is why I'm not a designer, but why are the spinning dots dated and why is that bad?
  • kevincox 4y ago
    My understanding is that the spinning dots are dates because they launched a new UI style which uses a different spinner. They are dated simply because there is something newer.
• flohofwoe 4y ago
  Funny how the more the screenshots go back in history, the more 'useful' the UI looks like (even though they no longer adhere to the current fashion fad - which should actually be handled through a user-accessible themeing engine, no need to pay some UI designers big bucks to come up with rounded corners). For instance right in the first Task Manager screenshot, I have no clue what those tab icons on the left side actually mean - with one exception: "users". There are two icons that both look like hamburger menues FFS.
  • majewsky 4y ago
    The newer UIs also seem to be lacking a clear visual hierarchy. The Task Manager screenshot feels quite cluttered to me, not because of the amount of information presented (which is actually well-balanced IMO), but because different parts of the view are not properly separated from each other visually. The biggest offender is probably the scrollbar between the stack of summary graphs on the left and the stack of CPU graphs on the right. This scrollbar would work way better in the "old" style, with a frame that extends over the entire height of the scrollable viewport, since that frame would provide a clearer boundary between left and right.
  • akersten 4y ago
    It's not just looks, there are real features missing from the new control panel activities too, and I don't look forward to the day the old ones are removed. For example, to disable a network adapter, you have to go into the Vista/7 version of Network settings so you can right click it and get the context menu. It's a mess!
    • csours 4y ago
      ncpa.cpl forever baby
      • procarch2019 4y ago
        I work as a “contractor” and when I sit down to work with some sysadmin they watch me and ask out I bring up the old style config windows. One of them had started a sheet while watching me with all the run commands and helper phrases (North Carolina PennsylvAnia). Run commands are great for me, but it sucks when I have to walk someone through something over the phone. It’s gotten to the point where I can’t walk people through the gui methods anymore and it’s actually easier to explain how to open a run prompt and type xyz
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  Why do we care so much about this? I daily Fedora, so I'm far from being a Windows fan, but they have an envious amount of backwards compatibility.
• sandworm101 4y ago
  Lol. Anyone else notice that in the first screenshot the CPU is at 18% and is using 10.4gb of memory? Ah windows. You will never change.
• alberth 4y ago
  macOS I posted this yesterday, macOS is also at fault. Here’s an interest blog post from a former Apple UI employee talking about the growing inconsistency in macOS UI. https://www.corbinstreehouse.com/blog/2021/10/macos-12-monterey-and-user-interface-inconsistencies/ https://www.corbinstreehouse.com/blog/2021/10/macos-12-monte...
  • sintezcs 4y ago
    Comparing to the level of inconsistencies that you see in Windows (terrific), that slight UI bugs are almost unnoticeable. Imagine that you will see “aqua” buttons and striped background when you open some built-in app or UI in Mac OS? It absolutely impossible.
• kyriakos 4y ago
  a bit unfair to complain about Windows Media Player 12 having the same UI when the application is clearly included for backwards compatibility even though it has already been replaced by newer application (called just Media Player) with the new UI.
• rejectfinite 4y ago
  RDP, Run dialogue, MMC.exe and Services.msc should stay the way they are thank you very much! These are work tools, in guides and SOPs all over. Rather no redo those.
• kemayo 4y ago
  The single most "oh, Microsoft" moment I had when updating to Windows 11 is actually glossed over in this article without comment. Context menus are restyled, and also now have a "show more options" entry[1] -- if you press it, what happens? The pre-Windows-11 context menu appears. That's right. There's archeological layers of UI design in context menus now. [1] https://ntdotdev.files.wordpress.com/2022/12/image-4.png https://ntdotdev.files.wordpress.com/2022/12/image-4.png
  • encryptluks2 4y ago
    They also hide some of the most useful options while keeping the most useless. Rename is now one of the ones hidden by default.
    • nikanj 4y ago
      The default list is created at the marketing department, not the usability lab. Actually it does follow the faux usability trend where ”options confuse user”, and the perfect UI is just an uniform off-white screen with no controls
    • Uehreka 4y ago
      It actually isn’t, but I wouldn’t blame you for thinking it was. It’s now an icon of a text cursor and a tiny text box.
      • kemayo 4y ago
        Huh, I'll admit that I hadn't even noticed that button-ribbon at the top of the context menu yet. :D
        • chinabot 4y ago
          Better not get used to it, it will probably change by Windows 12
      • kube-system 4y ago
        This is why buttons should always have text.
• encryptluks2 4y ago
  Windows 11 is getting worse not better. I went to type Windows Fax in the start menu since Windows Fax and Scan used to be included. It showed up as an app in the latest Windows 11 but then tried running it and they removed it but left the shortcut.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• fareesh 4y ago
  I use Linux on my desktop most of the time. Recently I've been dual-booting into Windows 10. Whenever I run Windows my HDD usage spikes to 100% until I turn off "real-time virus protection". Does anyone know if this feature still exists in Windows 11, and if it is less buggy on W11? I'm sure there is some registry voodoo I could do to turn this off on every reboot - so far Googling the magic keys and trying them has not worked unfortunately.
  • EMM_386 4y ago
    It does, the process is the "antimalware service executable" and I find it can occasionally start running while I'm in the middle of trying to do something else. I notice it right away because the fans on my laptop will spin up to max speed for a few minutes, even if I'm just doing something basic like editing a document. I'm not sure why it tries to run what appears to be a lengthy scan when it can see the machine is not idle.
  • efreak 4y ago
    I have process hacker installed and configured to start automatically as administrator on every login (via task manager) simply so I can set msmpeng.exe CPU and IO priorities to below normal. You can probably automate this with PowerShell as well if you don't want a third party application. Personally, I run too much software downloaded off the internet to disable it entirely, and don't trust myself to remember to turn it back on.
• aliqot 4y ago
  Windows 98se with their Plus! themes was peak Windows era for me. I miss the sit and wait for my theme to color in and for Eudora to start up.
• rolph 4y ago
  godmode still seems to exists https://www.xda-developers.com/how-to-enable-god-mode-windows-11-what-is-it/ https://www.xda-developers.com/how-to-enable-god-mode-window... https://lifehacker.com/you-need-windows-11s-god-mode-1848007324 https://lifehacker.com/you-need-windows-11s-god-mode-1848007...
• ninkendo 4y ago
  What I don’t understand is why Microsoft seems to have failed so often at creating the basic abstractions needed to be able to replace the old dialogs (for instance the file browser the ODBC connection UI) with new ones without needing to touch the calling code. Microsoft’s answer for making new UI always seems to involve making new API’s altogether, leaving the old ones intact for compatibility, and adopting the new ones gradually over time. What’s the point of interfaces if you need to change them to change the implementation? The ODBC dialog should have been able to be changed without the calling software even knowing about it. I seem to recall the reasons being something about explorer shell plugins and needing to support third party additions to the dialogs, but that just raises further concerns for me: why allow such things in the first place if it causes you to never be able to change the dialogs? Why does the explorer right-click menu (for example) have a plugin interface that prevents you from changing it to use a new UI look and feel? It all reeks of “the wrong abstraction” all over the place to me. It’s probably getting old to point this out at this point, but macOS doesn’t seem to suffer from any of these issues. If they decide to do a new UI theme for a macOS release, you generally see it everywhere. There’s no 1993-era UI elements in macOS that are significantly out of place (not saying they don’t have UI that has sat unchanged, but it’s usually because the changes aren’t needed, not because they just didn’t get around to it.)
  • djur 4y ago
    MacOS has also been much more willing to break backwards compatibility. You haven't been able to directly run 1993-vintage software for a long time, much longer than the equivalent Windows period. And the difference gets even clearer for more recent software.
    • neilalexander 4y ago
      The other big factor here is that Apple have used four entirely different processor architectures since 1993 — M68k, PowerPC, Intel and ARM — whereas Windows has only ever really enjoyed widespread popular use on Intel and compatibles.
  • Arainach 4y ago
    >If they decide to do a new UI theme for a macOS release, you generally see it everywhere The corollary is that any Mac application that hasn't been touched in 5 years will quite likely break when Apple makes some sweeping API change. I'm much happier to be able to run my Win95-era utilities whose developers are long gone at the cost of some older UI elements. >why allow such things in the first place Many of these things were built and designed at a time when computers had 4MB of RAM. Every additional layer of abstraction has a very real cost.
• comechao 4y ago
  I've tried Windows full-time again in 2022. I'm a developer. I bought an XPS 13 9310 UHD and activated Windows Pro. WSL2 make the life of a developer pretty easy, specially if you need Docker, it runs better on WSL2 than on Mac. But Lord! What a crappy UI/UX experience, but it is at least getting better. The battery management is terrible, make traveling with a "Thin and Light" laptop a bad experience, you have to be nearby a power outlet. On Dec 29 I bought another Mac. About same price of my XPS. Battery is amazing and the UI/UX still way better. Note: People say that the XPS FHD has a good battery life. I don't care, I don't want a FHD, and UHD is a pretty bad product. Fix it.
• russellbeattie 4y ago
  I can't believe he didn't show the Device Manager window. You know the one that you go to in hopes of figuring out why that USB peripheral or PCI card you plugged in isn't working, only to get a tree menu with a hierarchy of random categories, then a property dialog with zero real info? That thing has been a decades old nightmare to me, and it still hasn't changed.
• wrs 4y ago
  Yes, the Windows UX is a sedimentary landscape of decades of leftover stuff that still works and nobody will fund updating. But the inconsistency is even deeper. Just in the examples in the article you can see the whole history of Windows system fonts, which are all (at least back to MS Sans Serif) still there and in use. And if you try hard enough, you can find a single window using two or three different text rendering algorithms!
• pmarreck 4y ago
  Is Windows "themeable" anymore?
• FatActor 4y ago
  The bottom of the screen, I literally lol'd over the moreicons.dll and the STILL persistant Win3.1 MFC-ified file properties.
• khaledh 4y ago
  The biggest setback in Windows UI was the "tabletization" of the UI (for the lack of a better word) introduced in Windows 8. IMO, this attempt at making Windows mobile friendly made a lot of compromises which made Windows worse for both mobile and desktop. And because Microsoft takes backward compatibility seriously (they have to, for their enterprise customers), the Windows UI ended up being this hot mess that we have today.
• mdmglr 4y ago
  It seems like every few weeks I see posts on HN criticizing Windows about privacy and it’s inconsistent UI. It’s getting a little old. It’s trivial to use Group Policy Editor to disable windows “spyware” as HNers like to call it. As far as the “inconsistent” UI goes, it’s funny to me how no one talks about Linux and it’s inconsistencies which are much more significant. Windows is an OS a tool to get things done. My customers could care less about any of these things. Articles like these are interesting but pedantic.
  • magic123_ 4y ago
    > no one talks about Linux and it’s inconsistencies which are much more significant. Except that with Linux you actually get to choose the desktop you want to use, and it's very possible to customize it yourself if you don't like the baked-in design.
    • neilalexander 4y ago
      This is an argument I hear a lot in places like HN by power users but almost never by anyone else anywhere else. Put technical people aside for one moment, how is a novice supposed to “choose the desktop” they use? How are they supposed to “customise the baked-in design”? I believe that the average user at home or at work values consistency, intuitiveness and attractiveness far more than the potential for customisation. They need the user interface to be clear and explicit, they need patterns that are repeatable and easy to remember and they need to not hate looking at it. They need to feel confident enough that they can either guess how it works or to reuse some knowledge they already have learned from elsewhere on the system. Customisation is so often touted as the be-all-and-end-all solution to outright deficiencies in design — if you don’t like it, just do this and this and this and this — but that totally misses the point because then the underlying problems never get solved. Just look at the significant behavioural differences between apps built in Qt, Gtk, Electron, wxWidgets, …
    • mdmglr 4y ago
      Yes I agree. It’s good to get to choose your display server, DE, WM, and whatever else. I’m just conveying the complaint of an inconsistent UI is stupid. Considering these are tools that enable getting real work done. Icons reused from the 90s isn’t getting in anyone’s way to get work done same with Gtk themes don’t apply consistently across apps.
• sombragris 4y ago
  Even more: There are some parts (especially some 3rd-party drivers) whose UI still have the Win95 Classic UI widgets (with grey-like base color, square 3D buttons, etc). Another point is one shown by the case of the sniping tool. The previous version had UI standards not aligned to the current version, but it was small and fast. The current version has a somewhat consistent UI but it's slower and way more bloated.
• chazeon 4y ago
  I have really mixed feeling about these inconsistencies really. On the one hand, I care deeply about the consistency and love the fresher look of the new Windows 11, a breath of fresh air from the ugly Windows 8–10 style. On the other hand, I am really afraid if some of the settings / careful curated wizards are gone -- I recently has to reset network settings because I switch to a different router, and I have bridges from Hyper-V, the resetting wizard is buried in a Vista-era guide to diagnose internet. I am sure it will be gone if they refurbish that area of the control panel, the whole "experience" need years to refine which would not be allowed in the speed of corps today. And there is also the performance issue. Just look at the fresh macOS System Settings app, what a mess it is.
• gwern 4y ago
  Note to OP: your page breaks PgDwn scrolling because it 'traps' PgDwn in scrolling endlessly through the image carousels and never PgDwns again. (FF 108.0 & Chromium Version 108.0.5359.71)
• Shish2k 4y ago
  > Explorer (which finally has tabs!) This is great, but I do wish people would stop adding tabs to applications and start adding them to window managers instead...
• MrMan 4y ago
  I think windows Xp was probably the best UI for windows, if I remember correctly. I am still feeling sad about the ribbon interface in Office
• traveler01 4y ago
  It was just so refreshing when I switched from Windows to MacOS. A system that's actually well designed it's a must.
• OOPMan 4y ago
  I find the phrase "outdated spinning dots" design weirdly hilarious. Why is it outdated? It can't be because it doesn't convey the concept properly anymore, since it still does just fine in this regard... I don't think I'll ever understand the minds of UI designers...
• Kukumber 4y ago
  If Microsoft employees can't fix it, something Apple fixed already for their OS years ago, then they should not be working on Windows I don't understand how incompetence is being protected and empowered at Microsoft, it's suspiciously worrying, i hope the military isn't dependent on Microsoft software, i'd be worried if they use their tech in the battlefield, HoloLens is another evidence things are fishy within that company
  • Kukumber 4y ago
    > I don't understand how why, not how can't edit the comment..
• kinghko 4y ago
  [dead]