4 ms·

WP was incredibly smooth and they were willing to reinvent UX from first principles in ways that'll to this day make me reach for Sailfish OS if I didn't need p

by Topfi 5mo ago

WP was incredibly smooth and they were willing to reinvent UX from first principles in ways that'll to this day make me reach for Sailfish OS if I didn't need physical buttons, but I must bring up the desktop version of Windows from that day. I'll never forget the Asus Netbook proudly boasting about its 1024MB of memory via a colorful sticker that'd be considered excessively large on a 17.3" workstation, somehow running Gimp with multiple layers on Windows 8 alongside a few Chrome tabs without a care in the world. UX of 8 and 8.1 was awful, but it was optimized and stable in ways that made me hopeful for what MSFT would deliver in the future. 1gig of memory, a spinning hard drive and a single low powered x86 core were enough to get some image editing for a then school course done with some wiki pages in the background. I'd hardly believe it, had I not lived it. 10 and 11 have been regressions in my book.

markus_zhang 5mo ago
I never used 8 because I hate the UI. But I used 7 for a long time. I recall that 7 was blazingly fast on a 2GB notebook back in the early 2010x. But then that was already way beyond its minimum system requirement.
gucci-on-fleek 5mo ago
> UX of 8 and 8.1 was awful The UX of Windows 8 was amazing on tablets, to the point where it's still my favourite touchscreen UI. The keyboard+mouse UX wasn't very good though, which is all that >99% of users ever used. > 1gig of memory, a spinning hard drive and a single low powered x86 core were enough to get some image editing for a then school course done with some wiki pages in the background. I'd hardly believe it, had I not lived it. 10 and 11 have been regressions in my book. I had a similar experience with the earlier releases of Windows 10 also [0]. I'm not really sure when Windows's performance got worse, but it was definitely some time after that. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743066 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743066
- adithyassekhar 5mo ago
  It’s after the 2019 release, they started optimising for ssds.
  - noahbp 5mo ago
    I’d argue they started doing that a bit earlier. My hard drive from 2011 made using Windows a miserable experience any time the search indexing or windows defender scans kicked on, no later than 2016-2017.
  - kasabali 5mo ago
    That isn't "optimizing for ssds" that's simply irresponsible product development.

by Topfi 5mo ago

markus_zhang 5mo ago

I never used 8 because I hate the UI. But I used 7 for a long time. I recall that 7 was blazingly fast on a 2GB notebook back in the early 2010x. But then that was already way beyond its minimum system requirement.

gucci-on-fleek 5mo ago

> UX of 8 and 8.1 was awful The UX of Windows 8 was amazing on tablets, to the point where it's still my favourite touchscreen UI. The keyboard+mouse UX wasn't very good though, which is all that >99% of users ever used. > 1gig of memory, a spinning hard drive and a single low powered x86 core were enough to get some image editing for a then school course done with some wiki pages in the background. I'd hardly believe it, had I not lived it. 10 and 11 have been regressions in my book. I had a similar experience with the earlier releases of Windows 10 also [0]. I'm not really sure when Windows's performance got worse, but it was definitely some time after that. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743066 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743066

adithyassekhar 5mo ago
It’s after the 2019 release, they started optimising for ssds.
- noahbp 5mo ago
  I’d argue they started doing that a bit earlier. My hard drive from 2011 made using Windows a miserable experience any time the search indexing or windows defender scans kicked on, no later than 2016-2017.
- kasabali 5mo ago
  That isn't "optimizing for ssds" that's simply irresponsible product development.