301–310 of 475 posts
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> It gets a major update every year? Yeah, so where is OpenGL 4.5?
Exactly. It's a shame Apple didn't adopt Vulkan and went with their own proprietary Metal API. Yet another reason for game developers to keep ignoring the platform.
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The dual control panels are ridiculous. I shouldn't have to go through two totally different interfaces just to change the mouse pointer speed. Type 'mouse' in the start menu, click the result, option isn't there, click 'Additional mouse options', totally different interface appears, go to the Pointer Options tab, drag the slider. And I know this one has been done to death, but the privacy issue really is a major one…
There's a lot in the Control Panel. The more you move to the new Settings app, the more complicated Settings gets. And if Microsoft didn't provide all those settings, or dropped the whole Control Panel, there would be a tornado of criticism. Life is hard when you have 1.5 billion users, especially when a lot of them resist attempts to modernise or even update the system. Do it all at once, they'll complain bitterly.…
Apparently Misrosoft has said that they do want to drop the old-style control panel eventually. I realise it's a huge job, but it feels very like a half-finished feature right now.
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Your second point doesn't really hold up - I'm a Windows 10 user, and I don't spend any time even considering Linux UI alternatives because you could show me one that I liked twice as much as Windows and I still wouldn't want to use Linux for my day to day stuff. I actually don't mind the Windows 10 UI as it happens, but if there were the variety of options for Windows that there are for Linux, I'd certainly see if I…
She wasn't implying you should switch to Linux to get the UI alternatives available there. She was saying that there is nobody working on UI alternatives/innovations except for a few people in the Linux space. That everyone had settled on the same basic UI.
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I agree with you, but looking at the problem from Microsoft's perspective, they have to sell you something, whether you 'need' it or not. It's interesting that Microsoft is the only company still selling a consumer OS, everything else comes free with the device, including updates. This problem might be part of the reason for that.
The best way to maximize sales is to align your interests with that of your customers. I wish Microsoft would realize that, because Windows 10 is heading in the opposite direction.
Windows 10 has moved heavily into mobile, touch-screen operations, use of sandboxed apps from online stores, AI assistants, cloud integration, biometric security etc etc.
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And before that people were vowing never to upgrade to XP, and before that people said 98 would be the last version of windows they would ever run...
The difference is that after XP, the majority of users didn't upgrade.
Windows 10 will get a majority of the Windows market. In fact, in some areas -- the USA and the UK, for example -- Windows 10 overtook Windows 7 late last year, on StatCounter's numbers.
I am a manager at a small architecture firm and Windows 10 has brought nothing but woe to my office. We have spent dozens of hours and thousands of dollars troubleshooting and fixing problems (many of which remain unresolved) that occurred as a result of this draconian forced upgrade (and updates that followed). So what if we got the upgrade for free. I've paid for it many times over in labor!
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Thousands of programmer years went in to Win10, and the most positive comment on it is "It's perfectly tolerable if you turn off all that stuff they added." This should be in the dictionary to illustrate the phrase "Damning with faint praise."
Just because he isn't using the new features, doesn't mean they aren't useful. WSL is great - still needs work but on the insider previews it's on 16.04 LTS and they're slowly knocking out the nagging little issues with it. If you've got a 2-in-1 like a surface book, the switching from desktop to tablet mode is awesome. If you aren't paranoid (and completely understand why some people are) about the security possibil…
Those are some of the things that I find most annoying. I don't want my OS tied into other platforms. I don't want a local search to also be an online search. I don't want a file search to also be a Windows Store search. I don't want a dozen opportunities to link my local user account to be connected to my Windows Live ID. I want the OS to provide a convenient environment to run my software in, and no more.
WSL is cool, and I'd like it on my Windows 7 machine. It's a lot nicer to use than Cygwin, and it's enough that I'm not planning on setting up my Win10 netbook to dual boot Linux. The generally lower memory requirement is nice too. Other than that, 10 feels a lot like 7 with more things that I want to disable but can't.
I got a Windows 10 laptop (Razer) for Christmas for gaming / media / browsing purposes (been a Mac user for 10+ yrs). It's buggy as hell. The shortcut icons on the desktop and taskbar kept going away (replacing all the icons with a "not found" placeholder), forcing me to reinstall the OS. Now none of the search functions work (e.g. windows key -> search for app.. no results). Whatever, I just use 2 apps anyways (Chro…
>Windows settings panels have at least 2 diff ways to configure anything, the "old" and the "new". Graphics settings have 4 places to change stuff (Intel, Nvidia, built in old and new). It's just a jumbled mess. They're well aware of that, and if you follow the insider previews, every new build is moving more of the features into the "new" way of doing things. Is it annoying there are two places? Absolutely... but th…
The Control Panel started transitioning to a 'browser-style' interface with Windows Vista. 10 years later, I'm still waiting for everything to be 'rolled up'.
In both cases, the old paradigm was 'fine', and a bifurcated UI made for a worse experience than either alternative.
In the current state, tons of settings are only available in one of three UIs, where all three are named identically and serve the same purpose. EG: To change the name of your computer, you might go, Settings > System > About > 'System Info' --> System [Vista] > 'change settings' --> System Properties [Win95].
I'd rather have the Windows 95 control panel workflow to this mess. If it takes 5 years, they'll take 5 years. There's no reason to make the system worse in the meantime.
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The dual control panels are ridiculous. I shouldn't have to go through two totally different interfaces just to change the mouse pointer speed. Type 'mouse' in the start menu, click the result, option isn't there, click 'Additional mouse options', totally different interface appears, go to the Pointer Options tab, drag the slider. And I know this one has been done to death, but the privacy issue really is a major one…
There's a lot in the Control Panel. The more you move to the new Settings app, the more complicated Settings gets. And if Microsoft didn't provide all those settings, or dropped the whole Control Panel, there would be a tornado of criticism. Life is hard when you have 1.5 billion users, especially when a lot of them resist attempts to modernise or even update the system. Do it all at once, they'll complain bitterly.…
That's true, but it's probably a lot harder when you've proven to be untrustworthy in what you include under "modernisation" or "updates".
Plenty of techie people warned that user-hostile behaviour like the GWX campaign or including non-security things in updates advertised as security patches would damage that trust and come back to bite them later. I think a lot of people didn't really believe that would be the case at the time, but as the article here notes, the adoption rates suggest otherwise.