12 ms·
Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?
- sightofcorbie 2y ago“Comfort food”. That’s so funny. I still use motif window manager with steelblue4 desktop and wheat xterm background since aix into Linux. That was my first default in 1989 college and nothing has improved since. (Gnome, kde and the like make me want to upchuck).
- CorpOverreach 2y agoMy "comfort food" in this article is the realization that no matter how big, how advanced a team can be -- we all make (and ship) really dumb changes to production. A bolted-on wrapper if() statement that spans a bit too far is classic.
- 90s_dev 2y agoI have a certain nostalgia for bb4win, which I learned about during college, and was my first introduction to linux. Nostalgia is a powerful drug.
- ryao 2y agoWhat will you do when you want to use a 4K monitor? This is not to be dismissive. I am genuinely curious if HiDPI works on motif.
- suyula 2y agoI can't speak for Motif but Fluxbox works fine on my 4K monitor
- tedunangst 2y agoYou would set an appropriate size in .Xresources or somesuch.
- hulitu 2y ago> What will you do when you want to use a 4K monitor? This is not to be dismissive. I am genuinely curious if HiDPI works on motif. Yes, xrandr -scale. Works fine for everything. Even better than Windows (which, for some reason, only scales some programs, not all)
- kirenida 2y ago"Nothing has improved since". That's so funny.
- toast0 2y agoWhat's the biggest thing that's improved? We have 4x the pixels, so we spend 4x the rendering time to draw everything with 4x as many pixels, when it works, and complain when it doesn't. Would have been easier to stick with the pixel density we had. Oh, and we have to wait a frame to see everything because of compositing that I still don't quite understand what it's supposed to do? Something something backing store?
- flomo 2y agoYou just have awful taste, but so do a lot of my friends. :)
- 90s_dev 2y ago> Also, I tend to stick with default configurations because it makes bug filing easier. I've learned to use default configurations pretty much everywhere. It's far too much of a hassle to maintain customizations, so it's easiest to just not care. The exception is my ~50 lines of VS Code settings I have sync'd in a mysterious file somewhere that I've never seen, presumably on github's servers, but not anywhere I can see?
- lp0_on_fire 2y agoAgreed. I had a professor once who would say “The defaults were put there by people who probably know more about the software than you”. As long as you understand what the defaults are doing sometimes it’s more hassle messing with every option under the sun.
- meroes 2y agoSame except my teacher’s version was “just hit next/yes” for every option when installing software, in an era before that’d get you Adobe Reader and McAfee malware.
- user3939382 2y agoIt’s probably best decided as a function of frequency. For tools I’m using every day, I know every setting.
- userbinator 2y agoThese days the defaults are almost certainly oriented towards controlling or extracting the most value from you, be it invasive spyware, constant intrusions, or sub-optimal UI.
- bandie91 2y agothose are the same people who let the user change those settings.
- hulitu 2y ago> Agreed. I had a professor once who would say “The defaults were put there by people who probably know more about the software than you”. He surely didn't use any Microsoft product. /s
- shamsuddin786 2y ago[dead]
- shriracha 2y agoGreat read. Raymond Chen's blog is absolutely legendary.
- theandrewbailey 2y agoI feel that Bruce Dawson's blog falls into the same/similar category, though he hasn't had a great technical post in a while. I wonder what multithreading bug he'll find next. https://randomascii.wordpress.com/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/
- jwnin 2y agoBruce retired following the passing of his wife. Good for him; life is short. https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2024/10/01/life-death-and-retirement/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2024/10/01/life-death-and-...
- analog31 2y agoThis relates to something that might have started around that time: The practice of displaying the splash screen for a finite time period, then showing the user environment before the software was fully started. It was suspected that both OS's and apps were doing this, because people notice when "the app takes too long to load." Now you have to guess whether the software has really loaded or not before you start using it.
- cowsandmilk 2y agoEh, in a case like this, without the 30 second “assume loaded” timeout, the system would be forever stuck in the loading screen for those impacted by the bugs. Sometimes it is better for your users to be optimistic that the system did indeed load.
- analog31 2y agoOf course I'm not your typical user, but I'd rather see the error log.
- mattnewton 2y agoThen maybe they would have caught the error in a preview release / QA
- cosmicgadget 2y agoOr, in the corporate information systems world, we have to wait for the half-dozen security and monitoring systems to get done scanning memory and blocking while painstakingly logging to the clould. Only then do you get to watch a catatonic UI thread idly wait for every last piece of the underlying software to load.
- analog31 2y agoYes and everything hangs because the security software is the last to load.
- 2y ago
- pdpi 2y agoA bit meta, but I've come to look forward to the "Why did <bizarre behaviour> happen with <windows version>" headlines that herald a Raymond Chen post. These are always fascinating.
- theandrewbailey 2y agoAgreed. The Old New Thing is such a wonderful collection of Windows oddities. Its the only blog that has explained away computing myths surrounding Windows that I've held since childhood.
- SudoSuccubus 2y ago[flagged]
- alex-mohr 2y agoThe code in question reminds me a lot of my favorite Kubernetes bug: if (request.authenticationData) { ok := validate(etc); if (!ok) { return authenticationFailure; } } Turns out the same meme spans decades.
- jve 2y agoWhere can I read about the bug? And what is the bug? If there is no authenticationData it is authenticated by default or what?
- DHRicoF 2y agoI don't know where you can read about this, but you are in the good track If there is no authenticationData then the if !Ok is never run and the code continues execution as it were authenticated.
- alex-mohr 2y agoIt was in the early days of Kubernetes and long since fixed. I don't recall the precise details, but it was likely the first official CVE we published: https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/issues-security/official-cve-feed/ https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/issues-security/officia... Link to the patch fixing it: https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/commit/7fef0a4f6a44ea36f166c39fdade5324eff2dd5e https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/commit/7fef0a4f6a44... Of course, we'd already fixed other issues like Kubelet listening on a secondary debug port with no authentication. Those problems stemmed from its origins as a make-it-possible hacker project and it took a while to pivot it to something usable in an enterprise.
- grumpyprole 2y agoThe way software is built hasn't changed in decades.
- hulitu 2y ago> The way software is built hasn't changed in decades. Correct. The only thing that changed is the number of level of abstractions.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- necovek 2y agoIt's funny to see this: after avoiding the Windows world for the last 25 years, back in the corporate world in the last few, I see this pattern with Microsoft tools all the time. Teams not loading due to security issues, but notifications coming through with full content of messages. Ability to type a handful of words in cloud version of Word (or paste full documents) before security check catches up and requires me to set up a sensitivity label. Etc. It mostly tells me about MS doing very bad software architecture for web apps, though apparently the desktop apps are not immune to it either.
- Enginerrrd 2y agoIt's not just MS. I think they might have fixed it now, but my personal favorite was when Google photos would send me a notification with a preview of an AI generated album of my photos they made for me even though the app did not now, nor ever have permissions (on Android) to look at said photos. And it too would then "catch up" and ask permission to see my files and I'd say "no" and then the preview would go away.
- chii 2y agoThe team that wrote the preview portion of the app is a different team to the one that wrote the permission requesting part. They communicate asynchronously (as a team/org, but this probably is reflected in the app's architecture!), which means the outcome is eventually consistent! But you managed to observe one of those inconsistent cases!
- mbrumlow 2y agoYah. But I would think the permissions would be a OS level thing that can’t be bypassed simply because Google also wrote the app.
- marssaxman 2y agoWhat OS? The one Google wrote, underlying these services?
- Nition 2y agoI've noticed a current problem in Win 11 where if you start your PC with the monitor off, let it get to the login screen, then turn the monitor on, you get a terribly low-res version of your login window background. I suspect it's taking some fallback default resolution like 800x600 and serving up an "optimised" version of the background for that res, then not updating it.
- vlovich123 2y agoThis is a structural problem in the code. The passed in handle to `DesktopIconsReady` should auto Report as soon as it's dropped. That completely obviates any of the problems of conditional logic.
- vlowrian 2y agoAs someone who prefers a solid color background, I’m always surprised by how often this simple preference leads me into bizarre rabbit holes. Some additional examples beyond the OP: - In the latest macOS, trying to set a custom solid color background just gives you a blinding white screen (see: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256029958?sortBy=rank https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256029958?sortBy=rank). - GNOME removed all UI controls for setting solid color backgrounds, but still technically supports it if you manually set a bunch of config keys — which seem to randomly change between versions (see: https://www.tc3.dev/posts/2021-09-04-gnome-3-solid-color-background/ https://www.tc3.dev/posts/2021-09-04-gnome-3-solid-color-bac...). The pattern here seems pretty clear: a half-baked feature kept alive for niche users, rather than either properly supporting or cleanly deprecating it. Personally, I’d love to simply set an RGB value without needing to generate a custom image. But given the state of things, I’d rather have one solid, well-maintained wallpaper system than flaky background color logic that’s barely hanging on.
- nandomrumber 2y agoI recently acquired a ThinkStation P910 dual CPU Xeon E26xx with 64GB RAM and 1080GTX Quite a capable machine for my uses. Not supported in Windows 11. Maybe with some additional config? Can’t be bothered with something hat might turn out to be fragile and need more maintenance than I can be bothered with. That’s a young man’s gane. Ok, I’m about due to give Linux another tickle anyways. Hmm, which distro… can always give a few a spin. Keep it simple, Pop!_OS. Installed fast, no issues, runs fine, stable. Seems entirely usable. Customisations? Nah, keep it simple. I’ll set a black background though. Nope.
- methuselah_in 2y agogo with gnome fedora! and rest will be history or debian stable.
- RedShift1 2y agoPar for the course with Gnome though, if you like customization, KDE is better.
- 2y ago
- josephg 2y agoTo me, this falls in the category of bugs I think of as "systemic bugs" or "type bugs". If login components were passed a token, then you could make the token's destructor automatically flag that the process is done. Then this bug would be more-or-less impossible to write. Because they made it a runtime thing - "components just have to remember to do this", the code structure itself affords this bug. There was a similar bug at facebook years ago where the user's notification count would say you had notifications - and you click it, and there aren't any notifications. The count was updated by a different code path than the code which inserted notifications in the list, and they got out of sync. They changed the code so both the notification count & list were managed by the same part of the system, and the all instances of the bug went away forever.
- nly 2y agoBad notification icons happen on Reddit all the time. I've always assumed it was just bad caching
- hbn 2y agoFor as long as I've used the official app on iOS (since they killed third party apps... which also got me using reddit SIGNIFICANTLY less) it's had the issue where it'll send a push notification for a message reply or whatever, you can click it, view the message in the thread, reply to it, whatever. The push notification will be gone from your iPhone, but it never actually clears the notification from within the app. So you'll still see the notification in your in-app inbox so you have to go in there manually and click it again.
- widforss 2y agoI always assumed it was a dark pattern to get more engagement.
- matejn 2y agoOn my Windows 10 work machine, solid color backgrounds sometimes get reset to black after connecting to it via RDP. I "fixed" it by creating a solid color .png and using it as a background picture ...
- emmelaich 2y agoI really love the last paragraph. I tell this to people fiddling with their system all the time. Typical response is "Well it should just work anyway!". Which is theoretically true -- the worst kind of true.
- est 2y agoOfftopic I really liked the auto-refreshing "Windows Spotlight" wallpaper on logon screen. I even wrote a script to sync it as my desktop wallpaper. But on my Win10 it stopped working idk why, so I wrote a script to download Bing Image of the Day instead: https://blog.est.im/2025/stdout-03 https://blog.est.im/2025/stdout-03
- xnx 2y agoThere's an official Bing Wallpaper App (https://www.bing.com/apps/wallpaper https://www.bing.com/apps/wallpaper) for this, but it has all kinds of nuisances / dark patterns to switch your default browser to Edge and other nefarious things.
- est 2y agothere's RSS and JPEG directly available for download so nah, I'd stick with few lines of script instead of a bloated app.
- adithyassekhar 2y ago11 can set spotlight as the desktop wallpaper.
- JBiserkov 2y agobut is not supported on millions of otherwise working systems.
- Kholin 2y agoOn KDE Plasma, that's a built in feature.
- est 2y agowin7 used to support dynamic wallpapers with an RSS inside some .theme file. It didnt last long. Looks like the hole "theme" idea was abandoned by Microsoft. Then we have double context menus on Win11. Sigh!
- zombot 2y agoIf-Then Considered Harmful. Seeing how that complicated if-then logic is just too stiff a challenge to your average developer, we should probably just dispense with it.
- herbst 2y agoI've spent a few hours reading and installing random software I never heard of before to get my windows machine into the basic state of "I can boot it without getting heavily triggered" - Half of each boot time was wasted for a copilot 360 dialog. On every fucking boot, no copilot no office installed. Or rather copilot installed itself without notice and started to spam me - In several places the OS would show me "news" like death messages, war updates and economy details. Definitely far from a productive environment and honestly heavily triggering, I don't read news anywhere but my PC is full of it and there is no option to disable? What about kids? - I have updates or a broken system about every second time I boot the PC. I know it's because I just cut the power, but I hate when it asks 3 times if I want to actually shut down (and then still breaks it, or never actually shuts down) - I constantly end up in a variety of login screens that want me to login to an Microsoft account I don't have and want - There are soooo many ads. I've been on Linux for years, instead of traditional TV I almost always stream with ad blocker. The country I live in isn't plastered with Ads either. But this shithole of operating system is. It literally pops up ad notification above apps on default. If anyone wonders most problems where solved with "ShutUp10" others with chatGpt and regedit. It was actually pretty hard when you have no idea about this OS and it's dark patterns. On my Linux machines I don't even change the wallpaper, but windows defaults are unbearable and upright productivity killers
- greenavocado 2y agoIf you're willing to take the risk and trust the developer there is a fully prepared Windows distribution called Windows 11 24H2.3775 16in1 x64 - Integral Edition 2025.4.9 on zone94 Their other distributions are very good as well, especially for Windows XP because they bundle a lot of important drivers for old software to work correctly
- herbst 2y agoI am using windows only for rekordbox. I tried a few like that like tiny10 but in the end I would always run into driver issues.
- hbn 2y agoOn top of the news headlines being shoved in your face everywhere in Windows, they do the same with stocks, showing you trade values of random stocks in various places which I can't help but find hilarious. I think they're trying to emulate Apple who has had stocks integration by default for years, including being alongside the other pre-installed apps like SMS and Mail on the first iPhone. I imagine Apple did it to cement themselves as a high-class lifestyle brand, even though I'm sure there was never a time where most iPhone users were doing a lot of day trading. I wonder what percentage of Windows users rely on the stock ticker in the start menu though...
- redbell 2y agoAs a software developer, I’ve occasionally felt ashamed when it takes me hours—or even days—to fix a stubborn bug. But whenever I see that even big tech companies struggle with similar issues, I regain confidence in myself. After all, this is what being a software engineer often looks like: wrestling with unpredictable behavior until something finally clicks. Just yesterday, I ran into a bizarre bug on Windows where the mouse cursor would move every time I pressed the arrow keys—almost like I was controlling the mouse with the keyboard. It drove me nuts. I checked all the usual mouse and keyboard settings, but everything looked normal. At one point, I even wondered if my machine had been infected by a virus. Desperate, I Googled "mouse pointer moving on arrow keys". The first result had only one answer, which blamed... Microsoft Paint. I was skeptical—Paint? Really? That couldn’t possibly be it. Still, with no other leads, I gave it a shot. As it turned out, I did have Paint open in another Desktop View, where I’d been cropping a screenshot. The moment I closed it, the problem vanished. Instantly. I still can’t believe that was the cause—and I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, even though no one was around to see it. _____________________ 1. https://superuser.com/questions/1467313/mouse-pointer-moving-on-arrow-keys-pressed-in-windows https://superuser.com/questions/1467313/mouse-pointer-moving...
- dankwizard 2y agoAh, the glamorous life of a software dev—where we spend half our time building the future and the other half wondering why the future’s on fire. Years ago, I had a bug so bizarre I nearly convinced myself the machine was haunted. My mouse pointer started drifting—not randomly, but only when I pressed the arrow keys. Up arrow? Cursor nudged north. Down arrow? There it went again. I was convinced some accessibility setting or keyboard remap had gone haywire. I rebooted. I checked drivers. I even briefly entertained the idea that my codebase was cursed. Three hours in, I realized the true culprit: MSPaint. I had opened it earlier, and because the canvas was selected, the arrow keys were actually moving the selection box—which, by delightful Windows design, also moved the mouse cursor. I wasn’t losing my mind. Just... slowly drawing rectangles in the background every time I hit an arrow key. I closed MSPaint, and poof—my “haunting” ended. I haven’t trusted that application since. Great for pixel art, less great for your sanity. ------------ You and ChatGPT sound identical.
- jacobgorm 2y agoOr why your software should never use arbitrary timeouts. Without the 30s timeout this bug would have been caught and fixed before release.
- berkes 2y agoIn one project, we had an ENV var (a few actually) for timeouts of network requests. Most places would raise an exception if they hit this timeout. In test and CI we had this set to a very low number. In acceptance (manual testing, smoke testing) to a very high number. This was useful because it showed three things: - Network- and services- configuration bugs, would immediately give a crash and thus failing test. E.g. firewalls, wrong hosts, broken URIs etc. - Slow services would cause flickering tests. Almost always a sign that some service/configuration/component had performance problems or was misconfigured itself. Quick fix would be to increase the timeout, but re-thinking the service - e.g. replace with a mock if we couldn't control it, or fixing its performance issues, the proper- and often not that hard- fix. Or re-thinking the use of the service, e.g. by pushing it to async or a job queue or such another fix. - Stakeholders going through the smoke-test and acceptance test would inevitably report "it's really slow" showing the same issues as above but in a different context and with "real" services like some external PSP, or SMTP. It was really a very small change: just some wrappers around http-calls and other network calls, in which this config was used, next to a hard rule to never use "native" clients/libs in the code but always our abstraction. This then turned out to offer so much more benefits than just this timeout: error reporting, debugging, decoupling. It wasn't javascript (Ruby, some Python, some Typescript) but in JS it would be as easy as `function fooFetch(resource, options) { return fetch(resource, options) }` from day one, then slowly extended and improved with said logging, reporting, defaults etc. I've since always introduced such "anti-corruption" layers (facades, proxy, ports/adapters) very early on, because once you have "requests.get("http://example.com/foo/bar http://example.com/foo/bar")' all throughout your python code, there's no way to ever migrate away from "requests" if (when!) it gets deprecated, or to add said timeout throughout the code. It's really a tiny task to add my own file/module that simply imports "requests" and then calls it on day one, and then use that instead.
- bornfreddy 2y agoI wonder what happens if some operation genuinly takes more than 30s to complete in sone cases? I'm sure the system handles it gracefully. /s
- sirnonw 2y ago[dead]
- djoldman 2y agoThis is the kind of thing that leads technical folks like me to do absurd things, like creating a 1x1 pixel jpg/png of the color they want just to be put into the normal-and-thus-tested-and-maintained parts of code.
- phkahler 2y agoThis is the kind of problem that can be prevented by using "better" coding patterns. Not to say it will be prevented, but that some ways people like to structure code are more prone to these kinds of bugs. I quoted the word "better" because I work with a competent but less experienced guy that tends to write more complex code, or what some claim is just a different style than I would prefer. I make claims that "this way is better" and it's often very difficult to articulate why it's better. Sometimes I am convincing, other times not... I'm not immune to these kinds of bugs either, but I shudder to think I might one day inherit this other guys code and a collection of these weird bugs.
- jameshart 2y agoLet’s be honest this is the kind of thing that can happen to anyone. We all like to think we have picked up habits that immunize us from certain kinds of error but large software systems are complex and bugs happen. The number of people in here taking ‘Raymond Chen tells an anecdote about the time a dumb bug shipped in Windows and was fixed two weeks later’ as an indictment of Microsoft’s engineering culture is frankly embarrassing. Trading war stories is how we all get better. It would be better for us all if culturally, the reaction to a developer telling a story of how they once shipped a stupid bug were for everyone to reply with examples of worse stuff they’ve done themselves, not to smugly nod and say ‘ah yes, I am too smart to make such a mistake’.
- phkahler 2y ago>> Let’s be honest this is the kind of thing that can happen to anyone. I didn't say I'm immune to doing this myself, nor did I condemn anything about the particular scenario in the blog. My pain is in trying to articulate why some ways are better when any code that works is in some sense just fine. >> We all like to think we have picked up habits that immunize us from certain kinds of error but large software systems are complex and bugs happen. We sure do, although "immunize" is too strong. We try to minimize the likelyhood of these kinds of things. Experience is valuable and sometimes it's hard to articulate why.
- 2y ago
- bluedino 2y agoMachines were often so slow back then, 30 second logins were 'normal' (or maybe even quick), especially once you load a bunch of crap like AV and other enterprise crap. If I had dollar for every minute of my life I spent troubleshooting random group policy quirks during my previous life as a sysadmin... > Personally, I use a solid color background. It was the default in Windows 95,¹ and I’ve stuck with that bluish-green background color ever since. My thoughts exactly, but I think it goes back to the Mac LC's we used in a school computer lab, and the palette of colors you could have with 16-bit graphics was so vast compared to the 16 color PC's I was used to. Plus, you always have so much stuff open you're never going to see your wallpaper anyway. That's what screensaver are (were) for that rotate through a folder full of images.
- scblock 2y agoOn my fairly recent corporate laptop a 30 second login would be massively faster than my corpo-malware-ridden experience. 5 minutes to Windows 10 desktop this morning. A similar (slightly older) laptop I own boots from fully off to the KDE desktop in 25 seconds total including typing my password.
- jayd16 2y agoLoad curtains can be pretty annoying if you handle them like this. One pattern I've had success with is using handles they need to be returned. If you never grab a handle you don't have to worry about returning it. Seems to work better than the fire and wait for side effects approach.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agoMany, many years ago, when I still used Windows recreationally, I used to edit the value of a specific Windows registry key, replacing "explorer.exe" with "cmd.exe". This would prevent Windows from runningg explorer.exe and launching the "desktop" with wallpaper, icons, etc. This produced what seemed more like a UNIX window manager, a solid backgground, where each window is a Microsoft cmd.exe shell, a classic Windows black box with a blue bar across the top and thin grey borders. I could then launch applications, such as the ones in the C:\windows\system32 folder from a command prompt, e.g., taskmgr.exe. For me, this made Windows feel much faster and more robust that when using explorer.exe. Certainly it was lighter weight. More recently, long after I stopped using Windows but still many years ago, I was reading an article about Arthur Whitney. It had a photo which seemd to be at home, maybe in a furnished garage, and in the background was a desktop computer running Windows. The only window open was a cmd.exe. I am not suggesting anything. It is just something I always remember. Perusing some recent Microsoft documentation I noticed this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/configuration/shell-launcher/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/configuration/shel...
- MisterTea 2y agoThere is/was a mode for this in Windows server. I also seem to remember a low cost/free windows for server or embedded meant for iot or whatever that featured cmd only without explorer.
- geocar 2y agoYou guys see your desktop background?
- nubinetwork 2y agoI could swear that this also affected Windows 10...
- elzbardico 2y agoWhen I think about it, if I hadn't lived this time, I would find it pretty hard to believe we had full-featured desktop environments in machines with paltry 8MB of memory and 50Mhz CPUs, and not only that, but we even indulged in the luxury of having bitmaps as wallpapers.
- danadam 2y agoI use a picture with a solid color because with pictures the text under the icons is white with a black shadow. The "Solid color" option (instead of "Picture") chooses either white or black font color and there is no shadow and I don't like it.