7 ms·

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

by 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.
    - FeistySkink 4y ago
      What does this have to do with GNOME?
      - kevingadd 4y ago
        Ubuntu defaults to GNOME for its desktop environment?
        encryptluks2 4y ago
        What does that have to do with Ubuntu updates breaking things? If a tornado hits McDonalds while you're in it are you going to say you hate McDonald's for not being tornado proof?
  - sph 4y ago
    And they are really angry about it! I use GNOME, it's not great, but some people really hate it, go out of their way to tell everybody how pissed they are at it and that GNOME is the worst thing to have ever happened to the Linux world. I guess complaining about GNOME has become part of their identity, a trait shared by the vocal systemd haters that just won't shut up about it. Many Linux users haven't gone past the "it's cool to hate" teenage phase. Goes hand in hand with the obnoxious elitism and anime avatars.
    - encryptluks2 4y ago
      Hating shows their lack of skills. They are the kind that know just enough to complain but lack any significant skills when it comes to development. They probably work in some point and click system administrator job. Eventually they either learn they can lead the change they want to see in open source and shut up because they aren't willing to do it, or they keep throwing a fit like a baby thinking that'll help them get their way.
    - bitwize 4y ago
      I've despised GNOME since version 1.x. I've developed a solution to deal with all this pent up hate and rage toward GNOME. I just don't use it. About as desktoppy as I'll get is XFCE. I gave my girlfriend (now wife) a Kubuntu-based laptop once to hold her over until I bought her a MacBook Air. Systemd is another matter because Lennart doesn't seem to want me to have the "I just don't use it" option without stuff breaking. But Void seems to truck along quite nicely with runit so I'm content with that.
  - hajile 4y ago
    As I recall, the UI designers didn't even ask for feedback. It was a case of "we know what you want better than you do". That design approach is basically always a mistake.
    - bayindirh 4y ago
      Well, yes, but if most people who is going to give feedback are tech-inclined Linux people and your aim is to build something which can be used by anyone at the end? Your initial design might land somewhere very wrong, but starting to ask for feedback from that point on will lead you better since it's wrong for everyone, no?
      - Karunamon 4y ago
        The word for the audience that GNOME developers are targeting is "lowest common denominator". It's the same problem with all excessively friendly interfaces, great if you are a day one user (pretty rare on Linux), obstructive and shitty if you know what you're doing.
        tpush 4y ago
        I know what I'm doing and generally like Gnome.
        Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
        I know what I'm doing and I have no idea how people can deal with gnome on a day to day basis. I can survive only with plugins and those break very often,sadly. Unfortunately I'm too lazy to switch to KDE (way too much stuff is broken if you install it not from the start and I don't want to reinstall), so I stick to gnome on my work computer. I really, really appreciated KDE customization and power user options (hidden but there). It is messy and the UI is worse at times, but it's way ahead.
        smoldesu 4y ago
        Me too. That being said, I no longer use it on any of my devices. I heartily disagree with their development roadmap and feel somewhat lost as a former GTK tinkerer.
  - hulitu 4y ago
    the huge silent majority does not use Gnome.
    - petepete 4y ago
      It should be obvious that I'm referring to the huge silent majority of GNOME users.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  > change shit for sake of changing shit... While I'm a die-hard KDE user, I like how GNOME experiments with new ways of evolving the desktop paradigm and workflow attached to that. Yes, they remove a lot of settings, and have a binary format for storing settings (and I don't like these design decisions), but it looks that they're becoming a very good DE for non-technical Linux user. If any Linux desktop environment had 5% of this inconsistency, they would be battered to hell and back. Today, thanks to efforts of KDE and GNOME, even Qt and GTK apps can be rendered almost identically. One might not like the direction of a particular DE, but I think we can agree that they're putting a lot of work towards a better, more usable desktop experience (and, I had my fair share of 3rd degree burns during GNOME3's teething as a developer). AFAIK, GNOME 2.0 and KDE 3.5.x is still maintained as independent, different projects now, too.
- ss48 4y ago
  GNOME3 was released in 2011, and around then, KDE did the same major overhall. I haven't seen too many major changes in the overall approach to the UI either has taken since then. Probably the most dramatic was the GTK4 update, which took quite a while.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    > KDE did the same major overhall The difference between GNOME and KDE's major overhauls is that KDE didn't get rid of all of their customization options in theirs.
- wadd1e 4y ago
  I'm not complaining about the visual appeal of the UIs, I think they look great. I think MacOS is a good example of iterating on your UI experience and improving it, but not changing it to the point where half your OS ends up looking out of place due to tiny inconsistencies like the colour of titlebars or because the entire style of your OS keeps changing upon every new version. Imagine if the next version of MacOS had square icons for close/minimise/maximise and to update your app to use that new style, you had to switch UI frameworks. Then you'd end up with 2 different styles of apps on your system because not every app out there made the switch, and one would now look very out of place. That's the sort of thing Windows seems to do every major release.
mike_hearn 4y ago
In fairness, MSIX is very different to MSI and ClickOnce was primarily a way to bootstrap MSIs from the web. MSI (long since deprecated) is essentially an ad-hoc relational database serialized to a file with embedded blobs that tells a generic engine how to install files and update the registry. It was written for Office in the 90s and was therefore dominated by the retail model of physically shipping CDs. MSIX is a totally different beast. It's more like a package for Linux. The format is a signed zip file with some embedded XML files. One of them is a "block map", which is basically an index into the zip data by chunk hash. Packages are installed to immutable directories, which lets Windows optimize out the download of data it already has on disk by copying from other packages or even just hard linking files together. Delta updates thus come for free (albeit not as powerful as diff based schemes when inserting data into the middle of a file). Another XML file declares how the app should be integrated into the OS. The old MSI/EXE model of manually patching and unpatching the registry and filesystem to do integration is gone here; for example, if you want to register a CLI command then that's an XML tag, if you want a file association or URL handler, that's a bit more XML. Windows takes care of wiring everything up and removing it on uninstall. Most importantly, MSIX takes care of online updates. MSI never did this. You can register a URL for a package that points to yet another XML file, and Windows will download deltas and apply them in the background even if the app isn't running (a la Chrome). So Microsoft's packaging tech hasn't churned that much. There were CABs from the Win3.1 days, then later MSI from the late 90s, and starting in Windows 10-ish timeframe MSIX. All of these are very different technologies. One of the nice things about MSIX is that it's feasible to create them from other platforms, because although Microsoft's tools are Windows specific the format is simple enough to reimplement. Not simple - the way they compute the block map and signature data effectively requires you to write your own ZIP library to create them - but it can be done and that's why the new Conveyor tool [1] is able to create Windows self-updating desktop apps from Linux and macOS. If you have a pre-compiled runtime like Electron or the JVM then you can push out updates with one command from your Mac/Linux dev laptop, it's no harder than publishing a static website by rendering Markdown to HTML, and that makes it feasible to develop quick lightweight desktop apps in a convenient manner. With the old MSI or InstallShield tech it would have been much harder to create a cross platform tool like Conveyor. [1] https://hydraulic.software/ https://hydraulic.software/ (it can also do Linux and macOS apps from Windows, but those are a bit easier)

by wadd1e 4y ago

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.
  - FeistySkink 4y ago
    What does this have to do with GNOME?
    - kevingadd 4y ago
      Ubuntu defaults to GNOME for its desktop environment?
      - encryptluks2 4y ago
        What does that have to do with Ubuntu updates breaking things? If a tornado hits McDonalds while you're in it are you going to say you hate McDonald's for not being tornado proof?
- sph 4y ago
  And they are really angry about it! I use GNOME, it's not great, but some people really hate it, go out of their way to tell everybody how pissed they are at it and that GNOME is the worst thing to have ever happened to the Linux world. I guess complaining about GNOME has become part of their identity, a trait shared by the vocal systemd haters that just won't shut up about it. Many Linux users haven't gone past the "it's cool to hate" teenage phase. Goes hand in hand with the obnoxious elitism and anime avatars.
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    Hating shows their lack of skills. They are the kind that know just enough to complain but lack any significant skills when it comes to development. They probably work in some point and click system administrator job. Eventually they either learn they can lead the change they want to see in open source and shut up because they aren't willing to do it, or they keep throwing a fit like a baby thinking that'll help them get their way.
  - bitwize 4y ago
    I've despised GNOME since version 1.x. I've developed a solution to deal with all this pent up hate and rage toward GNOME. I just don't use it. About as desktoppy as I'll get is XFCE. I gave my girlfriend (now wife) a Kubuntu-based laptop once to hold her over until I bought her a MacBook Air. Systemd is another matter because Lennart doesn't seem to want me to have the "I just don't use it" option without stuff breaking. But Void seems to truck along quite nicely with runit so I'm content with that.
- hajile 4y ago
  As I recall, the UI designers didn't even ask for feedback. It was a case of "we know what you want better than you do". That design approach is basically always a mistake.
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    Well, yes, but if most people who is going to give feedback are tech-inclined Linux people and your aim is to build something which can be used by anyone at the end? Your initial design might land somewhere very wrong, but starting to ask for feedback from that point on will lead you better since it's wrong for everyone, no?
    - Karunamon 4y ago
      The word for the audience that GNOME developers are targeting is "lowest common denominator". It's the same problem with all excessively friendly interfaces, great if you are a day one user (pretty rare on Linux), obstructive and shitty if you know what you're doing.
      - tpush 4y ago
        I know what I'm doing and generally like Gnome.
        Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
        I know what I'm doing and I have no idea how people can deal with gnome on a day to day basis. I can survive only with plugins and those break very often,sadly. Unfortunately I'm too lazy to switch to KDE (way too much stuff is broken if you install it not from the start and I don't want to reinstall), so I stick to gnome on my work computer. I really, really appreciated KDE customization and power user options (hidden but there). It is messy and the UI is worse at times, but it's way ahead.
        smoldesu 4y ago
        Me too. That being said, I no longer use it on any of my devices. I heartily disagree with their development roadmap and feel somewhat lost as a former GTK tinkerer.
- hulitu 4y ago
  the huge silent majority does not use Gnome.
  - petepete 4y ago
    It should be obvious that I'm referring to the huge silent majority of GNOME users.
bayindirh 4y ago
> change shit for sake of changing shit... While I'm a die-hard KDE user, I like how GNOME experiments with new ways of evolving the desktop paradigm and workflow attached to that. Yes, they remove a lot of settings, and have a binary format for storing settings (and I don't like these design decisions), but it looks that they're becoming a very good DE for non-technical Linux user. If any Linux desktop environment had 5% of this inconsistency, they would be battered to hell and back. Today, thanks to efforts of KDE and GNOME, even Qt and GTK apps can be rendered almost identically. One might not like the direction of a particular DE, but I think we can agree that they're putting a lot of work towards a better, more usable desktop experience (and, I had my fair share of 3rd degree burns during GNOME3's teething as a developer). AFAIK, GNOME 2.0 and KDE 3.5.x is still maintained as independent, different projects now, too.
ss48 4y ago
GNOME3 was released in 2011, and around then, KDE did the same major overhall. I haven't seen too many major changes in the overall approach to the UI either has taken since then. Probably the most dramatic was the GTK4 update, which took quite a while.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  > KDE did the same major overhall The difference between GNOME and KDE's major overhauls is that KDE didn't get rid of all of their customization options in theirs.
wadd1e 4y ago
I'm not complaining about the visual appeal of the UIs, I think they look great. I think MacOS is a good example of iterating on your UI experience and improving it, but not changing it to the point where half your OS ends up looking out of place due to tiny inconsistencies like the colour of titlebars or because the entire style of your OS keeps changing upon every new version. Imagine if the next version of MacOS had square icons for close/minimise/maximise and to update your app to use that new style, you had to switch UI frameworks. Then you'd end up with 2 different styles of apps on your system because not every app out there made the switch, and one would now look very out of place. That's the sort of thing Windows seems to do every major release.

mike_hearn 4y ago

In fairness, MSIX is very different to MSI and ClickOnce was primarily a way to bootstrap MSIs from the web. MSI (long since deprecated) is essentially an ad-hoc relational database serialized to a file with embedded blobs that tells a generic engine how to install files and update the registry. It was written for Office in the 90s and was therefore dominated by the retail model of physically shipping CDs. MSIX is a totally different beast. It's more like a package for Linux. The format is a signed zip file with some embedded XML files. One of them is a "block map", which is basically an index into the zip data by chunk hash. Packages are installed to immutable directories, which lets Windows optimize out the download of data it already has on disk by copying from other packages or even just hard linking files together. Delta updates thus come for free (albeit not as powerful as diff based schemes when inserting data into the middle of a file). Another XML file declares how the app should be integrated into the OS. The old MSI/EXE model of manually patching and unpatching the registry and filesystem to do integration is gone here; for example, if you want to register a CLI command then that's an XML tag, if you want a file association or URL handler, that's a bit more XML. Windows takes care of wiring everything up and removing it on uninstall. Most importantly, MSIX takes care of online updates. MSI never did this. You can register a URL for a package that points to yet another XML file, and Windows will download deltas and apply them in the background even if the app isn't running (a la Chrome). So Microsoft's packaging tech hasn't churned that much. There were CABs from the Win3.1 days, then later MSI from the late 90s, and starting in Windows 10-ish timeframe MSIX. All of these are very different technologies. One of the nice things about MSIX is that it's feasible to create them from other platforms, because although Microsoft's tools are Windows specific the format is simple enough to reimplement. Not simple - the way they compute the block map and signature data effectively requires you to write your own ZIP library to create them - but it can be done and that's why the new Conveyor tool [1] is able to create Windows self-updating desktop apps from Linux and macOS. If you have a pre-compiled runtime like Electron or the JVM then you can push out updates with one command from your Mac/Linux dev laptop, it's no harder than publishing a static website by rendering Markdown to HTML, and that makes it feasible to develop quick lightweight desktop apps in a convenient manner. With the old MSI or InstallShield tech it would have been much harder to create a cross platform tool like Conveyor. [1] https://hydraulic.software/ https://hydraulic.software/ (it can also do Linux and macOS apps from Windows, but those are a bit easier)