5 ms·

> windows didn't really get any more usable after that... The old UI is good but I am not a fan of the everything is folders and files idea of the start menu.

by mcny 3y ago

> windows didn't really get any more usable after that... The old UI is good but I am not a fan of the everything is folders and files idea of the start menu. Maybe I'm misremembering but iirc as a child I used to forget which sub menu inside the thing I needed was except for the ones I used frequently. I like being able to just type obs and press enter in the new windows. I preferred the old theme better than windows XP Luna theme. I had a copy of tune up software and it said the old theme is somehow easier on my ram? iirc I only had 128MB on my pentium 4 computer.

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
I don't understand this objection. The Start menu (which was a step backward from Program Manager) really went downhill when it obscured or removed the ability to group your programs into folders. Why do I want my audio & music programs jumbled together with my development tools? Or my graphics programs mixed in with general office apps? People who argue that you should just type into a search bar 100% of the time to find and launch apps are naíve. First of all, unless you have a trivial number of applications, it's absurd to expect everyone to remember the name of every program on his computer. Oh gee, what was that SD-card-formatting utility again? I don't know, but hey in two clicks I'm in my Utils folder and there it is. I'm not scouring a disorganized, flat list of 100 applications to find it.
- zilti 3y ago
  That's why in KDE, you can also search for the program "description". E.g. if I type "Editor", I get back Emacs, Kate, etc.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > People who argue that you should just type into a search bar 100% of the time to find and launch apps are naíve. First of all, unless you have a trivial number of applications, it's absurd to expect everyone to remember the name of every program on his computer. Oh gee, what was that SD-card-formatting utility again? I don't know, but hey in two clicks I'm in my Utils folder and there it is. Maybe you should relook at this again; they don't work like that anymore - you don't need to remember "Brasero" when searching for a CD burning tool, the menu items all have a description field which is also searched. So for your specific example, all you'd need to do is search for "SD Card", even if the name does not have the text "SD" or "Card" in it.
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    Typing something like "SD Card" takes too much time in comparison with launching an application from a hierarchical menu using less key presses (or mouse movements/clicks). In most cases, when you have to type something longer than "SD Card", the difference in launching speed is even greater.
  - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
    Thanks for the info. I don't use Windows anymore, but people make the same argument on Mac; I don't see any description field there, and searches can fail even when you use a word contained in the program title. Even if such a field is 100% accurately and adequately populated for every application (which I doubt), I don't want to invoke a text-based search and have to start typing a query.
justsomehnguy 3y ago
> iirc I only had 128MB on my pentium 4 computer Which is quite strange, because even P2 level machines already had 64-128MBs of RAM, eg look at Quake 3 sysrq.
- Narishma 3y ago
  Not strange at all. I remember having a couple of P4 laptops with just 128MB of RAM. Even one with only 64MB but that one might have been a P3.
- serf 3y ago
  bottom-end (600-900) dollar range in 2001-2002ish got you between 128mb and 256mb of ram. my bottom end pentium 4 presario came with 128 mb and the slowest hard drive in the world. Office XP/2002 and Windows XP both called for 128mb minimum as far as I remember, so a lot of the machines were targetting that number.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    Even our pentium 3 had 512mb as far as I recall. I couldn’t imagine a P4 with less than 1Gb So of course I checked. It’s bizarre that they ever sold them with 128mb…
    - doubled112 3y ago
      I had a Pentium 4 and it was purchased with 512MB of RAM, so I don't have to imagine it with less than 1GB. I was living the adventure.
  - justsomehnguy 3y ago
    Ah, the wonderful world of balanced and effective configurations from the bottom of the barrel PCs... So much time, money and CO2 could be saved by another/bigger atick of RAM.
    - mcny 3y ago
      > So much time, money and CO2 could be saved by another/bigger atick of RAM. I did eventually get a 256 MB stick of RAM. iirc I was already out of high school at that point. One point I don't hear being talked about too much is how hopeful and stupid we were in the late nineties and early two thousands. We were supposed to have 10GHz processors by 2005, or I mean mass market for consumers by the end of the decade, at the latest? https://www.anandtech.com/show/680/6 https://www.anandtech.com/show/680/6 https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/5sqw20/the_future_that_never_was_in_2000_intel_predicted/ https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/5sqw20/the_future... To put things in perspective, my parents practically never used the computer. For all intents and purposes, the computer was for a child to learn by parents who were not very computer savvy in a time when computers were advancing (or at least so we thought) very rapidly.
ethbr0 3y ago
> everything is folders and files idea of the start menu Your comment is Ribbon/magic-search-bar vs hierarchical-organization preference in a nutshell. I've decided there are two mutually-exclusive sorts of people: (a) those who want search to surface things for them, and hate having to remember where to find things & (b) those who want to remember where/how to find things, and hate relying on fuzzy search to surface them. IMHO, there's enough of each type that any given UI should support both. Ribbon would have gotten less flak if they hadn't also simultaneously made a mess of the organizational hierarchy behind the scenes. (MS Office-style "select things to show from a giant list in a tiny scrollbox" is terrible)
- tsss 3y ago
  I also prefer the ribbons, but a real power user of hierarchical menus doesn't click through them. The menus in Windows used to have the first character underlined: this is a shortcut. File->Save could be accessed with an incantation like Alt+fs. The real power of the old menus was remembering the discoverable shortcuts and flying through the menus without using mouse, somewhat similar to how Vim works.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > those who want to remember where/how to find things, and hate relying on fuzzy search to surface them. I'm in this camp, but with a bit of nuance. Fuzzy search tends not to work well for me -- if I can't remember the exact name of the application I want to use (and I often can't), then search is an iffy way to locate it. But mostly, it's about not liking to switch between using the mouse and using the keyboard. If I'm firing up a program, I'm almost certainly using the mouse at the moment. Switching to keyboard adds a bit of unnecessary disruption. > Ribbon would have gotten less flak if they hadn't also simultaneously made a mess My problem with the ribbon is that the contents move around, which means I'm constantly having to search through it for the thing I want to do.
- vxNsr 3y ago
  If there was a keyboard shortcut to focus the menu searchbar I wouldn’t mind ribbon at all, typing ctrl+hekwj is just as fast as typing ctrl+/grou+enter
ptx 3y ago
> I used to forget which sub menu inside the thing I needed was except for the ones I used frequently The trick was to create your own folders to flatten the hierarchy, so you never have to look inside the "Programs" sub menu. You could even move your most frequently used items to the top level, with no folders at all, so they're available with a single click. This got a lot easier with Windows 98 (or with the IE version that included the shell update) where you could just drag and drop to rearrange the menus.
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  Yeah. The default experience was not great, but with a little curation it was super streamlined. When I saw developers using the default setup it was usually a pretty reliable clue as to their skill level. Of course... Linux users would have said the fact that I was using Windows was an even bigger clue about my skill level.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > it was usually a pretty reliable clue as to their skill level. But in which direction? I'm very skilled, and used to customize things like this -- but at a certain point, I stopped doing it because I'd develop muscle memory for my customizations that would really mess me up when using someone else's computer. So now, I don't customize anything. It makes my life easier.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
> I like being able to just type obs and press enter in the new windows. This might be one of the few useful features that I take for granted in modern Windows. That and Win + tab which I think GNOME does better. The "Windows" key in GNOME brings up the overview but also brings up search where you can either click which window you want or type what you want. Intuitive
andrepd 3y ago
You can tack good modern search-launchers (a la spotlight or synapse) onto a Windows 95 interface without bringing over all the other modern UI cancer. It's an entirely orthogonal concern to things like flat icons, excessive whitespace, or bad discoverability.

by mcny 3y ago

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago

I don't understand this objection. The Start menu (which was a step backward from Program Manager) really went downhill when it obscured or removed the ability to group your programs into folders. Why do I want my audio & music programs jumbled together with my development tools? Or my graphics programs mixed in with general office apps? People who argue that you should just type into a search bar 100% of the time to find and launch apps are naíve. First of all, unless you have a trivial number of applications, it's absurd to expect everyone to remember the name of every program on his computer. Oh gee, what was that SD-card-formatting utility again? I don't know, but hey in two clicks I'm in my Utils folder and there it is. I'm not scouring a disorganized, flat list of 100 applications to find it.

zilti 3y ago
That's why in KDE, you can also search for the program "description". E.g. if I type "Editor", I get back Emacs, Kate, etc.
lelanthran 3y ago
> People who argue that you should just type into a search bar 100% of the time to find and launch apps are naíve. First of all, unless you have a trivial number of applications, it's absurd to expect everyone to remember the name of every program on his computer. Oh gee, what was that SD-card-formatting utility again? I don't know, but hey in two clicks I'm in my Utils folder and there it is. Maybe you should relook at this again; they don't work like that anymore - you don't need to remember "Brasero" when searching for a CD burning tool, the menu items all have a description field which is also searched. So for your specific example, all you'd need to do is search for "SD Card", even if the name does not have the text "SD" or "Card" in it.
- adrian_b 3y ago
  Typing something like "SD Card" takes too much time in comparison with launching an application from a hierarchical menu using less key presses (or mouse movements/clicks). In most cases, when you have to type something longer than "SD Card", the difference in launching speed is even greater.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  Thanks for the info. I don't use Windows anymore, but people make the same argument on Mac; I don't see any description field there, and searches can fail even when you use a word contained in the program title. Even if such a field is 100% accurately and adequately populated for every application (which I doubt), I don't want to invoke a text-based search and have to start typing a query.

justsomehnguy 3y ago

> iirc I only had 128MB on my pentium 4 computer Which is quite strange, because even P2 level machines already had 64-128MBs of RAM, eg look at Quake 3 sysrq.

Narishma 3y ago
Not strange at all. I remember having a couple of P4 laptops with just 128MB of RAM. Even one with only 64MB but that one might have been a P3.
serf 3y ago
bottom-end (600-900) dollar range in 2001-2002ish got you between 128mb and 256mb of ram. my bottom end pentium 4 presario came with 128 mb and the slowest hard drive in the world. Office XP/2002 and Windows XP both called for 128mb minimum as far as I remember, so a lot of the machines were targetting that number.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  Even our pentium 3 had 512mb as far as I recall. I couldn’t imagine a P4 with less than 1Gb So of course I checked. It’s bizarre that they ever sold them with 128mb…
  - doubled112 3y ago
    I had a Pentium 4 and it was purchased with 512MB of RAM, so I don't have to imagine it with less than 1GB. I was living the adventure.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  Ah, the wonderful world of balanced and effective configurations from the bottom of the barrel PCs... So much time, money and CO2 could be saved by another/bigger atick of RAM.
  - mcny 3y ago
    > So much time, money and CO2 could be saved by another/bigger atick of RAM. I did eventually get a 256 MB stick of RAM. iirc I was already out of high school at that point. One point I don't hear being talked about too much is how hopeful and stupid we were in the late nineties and early two thousands. We were supposed to have 10GHz processors by 2005, or I mean mass market for consumers by the end of the decade, at the latest? https://www.anandtech.com/show/680/6 https://www.anandtech.com/show/680/6 https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/5sqw20/the_future_that_never_was_in_2000_intel_predicted/ https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/5sqw20/the_future... To put things in perspective, my parents practically never used the computer. For all intents and purposes, the computer was for a child to learn by parents who were not very computer savvy in a time when computers were advancing (or at least so we thought) very rapidly.

ethbr0 3y ago

> everything is folders and files idea of the start menu Your comment is Ribbon/magic-search-bar vs hierarchical-organization preference in a nutshell. I've decided there are two mutually-exclusive sorts of people: (a) those who want search to surface things for them, and hate having to remember where to find things & (b) those who want to remember where/how to find things, and hate relying on fuzzy search to surface them. IMHO, there's enough of each type that any given UI should support both. Ribbon would have gotten less flak if they hadn't also simultaneously made a mess of the organizational hierarchy behind the scenes. (MS Office-style "select things to show from a giant list in a tiny scrollbox" is terrible)

tsss 3y ago
I also prefer the ribbons, but a real power user of hierarchical menus doesn't click through them. The menus in Windows used to have the first character underlined: this is a shortcut. File->Save could be accessed with an incantation like Alt+fs. The real power of the old menus was remembering the discoverable shortcuts and flying through the menus without using mouse, somewhat similar to how Vim works.
JohnFen 3y ago
> those who want to remember where/how to find things, and hate relying on fuzzy search to surface them. I'm in this camp, but with a bit of nuance. Fuzzy search tends not to work well for me -- if I can't remember the exact name of the application I want to use (and I often can't), then search is an iffy way to locate it. But mostly, it's about not liking to switch between using the mouse and using the keyboard. If I'm firing up a program, I'm almost certainly using the mouse at the moment. Switching to keyboard adds a bit of unnecessary disruption. > Ribbon would have gotten less flak if they hadn't also simultaneously made a mess My problem with the ribbon is that the contents move around, which means I'm constantly having to search through it for the thing I want to do.
vxNsr 3y ago
If there was a keyboard shortcut to focus the menu searchbar I wouldn’t mind ribbon at all, typing ctrl+hekwj is just as fast as typing ctrl+/grou+enter

ptx 3y ago

> I used to forget which sub menu inside the thing I needed was except for the ones I used frequently The trick was to create your own folders to flatten the hierarchy, so you never have to look inside the "Programs" sub menu. You could even move your most frequently used items to the top level, with no folders at all, so they're available with a single click. This got a lot easier with Windows 98 (or with the IE version that included the shell update) where you could just drag and drop to rearrange the menus.

JohnBooty 3y ago
Yeah. The default experience was not great, but with a little curation it was super streamlined. When I saw developers using the default setup it was usually a pretty reliable clue as to their skill level. Of course... Linux users would have said the fact that I was using Windows was an even bigger clue about my skill level.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > it was usually a pretty reliable clue as to their skill level. But in which direction? I'm very skilled, and used to customize things like this -- but at a certain point, I stopped doing it because I'd develop muscle memory for my customizations that would really mess me up when using someone else's computer. So now, I don't customize anything. It makes my life easier.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

> I like being able to just type obs and press enter in the new windows. This might be one of the few useful features that I take for granted in modern Windows. That and Win + tab which I think GNOME does better. The "Windows" key in GNOME brings up the overview but also brings up search where you can either click which window you want or type what you want. Intuitive

andrepd 3y ago

You can tack good modern search-launchers (a la spotlight or synapse) onto a Windows 95 interface without bringing over all the other modern UI cancer. It's an entirely orthogonal concern to things like flat icons, excessive whitespace, or bad discoverability.