Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The End of Windows

stratechery.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 617 posts

Re: The End of Windows

#551

Post by sjapkee »

deno wrote: post #479
sjapkee wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no real need in 4K resolution, so that's why is's not so popular.

People that think they don’t need 4K either haven’t seen a 4K display in person or have poor eyesight. It’s a leap like upgrading from HDD to SDD, in the display world. Unless you just need your monitor for gaming. New gen temporal aliasing mostly makes up for the lack of pixels.

I have a system with 7200 rpm HDD and system with SSD. Not so much difference. It was a waste of money. Just like 4K display.

Re: The End of Windows

#552

Post by Feniks »

whyoh wrote: post #378
cptskippy wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And with every shift towards ads You mean like Apple asking me to use iCloud every single time I unlock my Mac? Or every time I power on my test iOS devices? Or do you mean up I have to open the App Store to apply MacOS updates and click past the ads? Windows 10 adds some shortcuts to the start menu during the bi-annual updates, they're annoying but once they're deleted they don't come back. They also have an add i…

>Windows 10 adds some shortcuts to the start menu during the bi-annual updates, they're annoying but once they're deleted they don't come back. They also have an add in Explorer for OneDrive that also goes away permanently when dismissed. Also ads on the lock screen, ads in the start menu ("app suggestions") and (Edge) ads from the toolbar. Just off top of my head, maybe I missed some.

You can tweak Windows if you spend an hour going through Group Policy. No more ads, no more apps.

Re: The End of Windows

#553

Post by deno »

sjapkee wrote: post #551
deno wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People that think they don’t need 4K either haven’t seen a 4K display in person or have poor eyesight. It’s a leap like upgrading from HDD to SDD, in the display world. Unless you just need your monitor for gaming. New gen temporal aliasing mostly makes up for the lack of pixels.

I have a system with 7200 rpm HDD and system with SSD. Not so much difference. It was a waste of money. Just like 4K display.

I don’t believe you. There must be something pathological with your SSD or something else in your system.

SSDs have an order of magnitude faster random access performance (both read & write) and you can measure that. NVMe drives additionally increase parallelism by a significant margin. Typical workloads are very sensitive to this metric. At least at cold boot you should see significant improvement in performance.

Font rendering, likewise, you can just see[1]. See the full page[2] for more examples.

If you have good eyesight, you will see a difference. I could see how 4K to “retina” (>260 PPI) might not be worth paying extra to some (though I personally want the highest PPI I can afford), but 96 PPI to ~185 PPI is a world of difference. It goes from blurry to sharp.

That’s not all—because LoDPI text rendering often involves subpixel rendering techniques, HiDPI also brings significant improvement in contrast.

For crying out loud, some people even get headaches from the blurry subpixel rendering! [3]

[1] https://www.eizo.be/eizo-pixeldichte-im-zeitalter-von-4k-e5....

[2] https://www.eizo.be/knowledge/monitor-expertise/understandin...

[3] https://www.w3.org/WAI/RD/2012/text-customization/p7.html

Re: The End of Windows

#554

Post by HugoDaniel »

bhauer wrote: post #243
cpeterso wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see a nice graph showing (Firefox) users steadily upgrading from Windows 7 to 10 from Mozilla's Firefox telemetry: https://hardware.metrics.mozilla.com/#goto-os-and-architectu...

That hardware report is surprising to me in many ways. * In 2018, the most popular resolution for users of Firefox is still 1366x768. And only 1920x1080 is making any headway against the dominance of 1366x768. As much as I am surrounded by the culture of multiple 4K+ displays, apparently this is not at all commonplace. 4K doesn't even get listed, presumably lumped into the "Other" category. * In 2018, the most popula…

640k ought to be enough for everyone

Re: The End of Windows

#555

Post by conradfr »

avtar wrote: post #233
simonh wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would have helped if they hadn’t done everything they could possibly imagine to fragment windows as much as possible. Six SKUs of Windows desktop, then on top of those two entire desktop UI environments in desktop and Metro, then Windows on ARM, then shifting from one new development stack to another, then another. Then mandating store apps. This was foot shooting on full automatic, clip after clip. I switched to…

> Six SKUs of Windows desktop Here's hoping they'll rethink that at some point and follow Apple's approach of having just one desktop OS instead of nickel-and-diming the masses for features such as BitLocker.

There is two constant declarations for each new Windows :

- There will be less SKUs

- Updates won't require to restart the OS

Well ...

Re: The End of Windows

#556

Post by deno »

snerbles wrote: post #167
mmjaa wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not having any problems running two monitors in HiDPI with my Ubuntu Studio workstation .. everything just works and I enjoy it immensely. Curious what your issues are...

To be fair, some applications on some distros have HiDPI issues. LibreOffice [0], icons in GTK2 apps, anything that uses Java Swing, etc. Particularly galling is the oft-suggested fix of temporarily reducing desktop resolution and fowling up all the other apps that are supporting the proper DPI. [0] https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/showdependencytree.cgi?i...

> anything that uses Java Swing

OpenJDK 9 supports HiDPI out of the box[1].

[1] http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/263

Re: The End of Windows

#557

Post by deno »

izacus wrote: post #344
_lbaq wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Fedora and two HiDPI monitors, one landscape 4k screen and one portrait 2k screen, Gnome works great in this setup.

More common setup of one hidpi screen with another normal dpi screen (laptop + external screen) tends to break horribly in many cases though.

Don’t know about GNOME but recent KDE can handle that case just fine.

Re: The End of Windows

#558

Post by deno »

Fnoord wrote: post #533
deno wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t see any (spectacular!) difference between 4K & 1440p you need to have your eyesight checked. I’m not being sarcastic. The last time there was a thread like that on HN a bunch of people figured out they need glasses. I have a 4K @ 24in monitor (180ppi) and a 267 ppi netbook and when I switch between them the 4K starts looking like a blurry mess!

> The last time there was a thread like that on HN a bunch of people figured out they need glasses. Its fair advice, but some eyesight issues cannot be solved with glasses.. if they can be solved at all. Also worth noting that with TVs the distance matters a lot. With monitors, laptops, and gadgets it is relatively stable.

For TV/Multimedia HDR makes much more difference than 4K in my experience.

Re: The End of Windows

#559

Post by coonery »

bhauer wrote: post #243
cpeterso wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see a nice graph showing (Firefox) users steadily upgrading from Windows 7 to 10 from Mozilla's Firefox telemetry: https://hardware.metrics.mozilla.com/#goto-os-and-architectu...

That hardware report is surprising to me in many ways. * In 2018, the most popular resolution for users of Firefox is still 1366x768. And only 1920x1080 is making any headway against the dominance of 1366x768. As much as I am surrounded by the culture of multiple 4K+ displays, apparently this is not at all commonplace. 4K doesn't even get listed, presumably lumped into the "Other" category. * In 2018, the most popula…

4k is overrated. 27" 1440p is good enough, plus current GPUs are able to push 100+ FPS with such resolution (they fail miserably with 4k resolution).

Re: The End of Windows

#560

Post by [deleted] »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #490
cornholio wrote: post #94

I would love for Microsoft to launch it's own Android-compatible ecosystem, starting from the open source base of Android and building alternatives to Google's proprietary technology (location & mapping, email, browsing, app store etc.). They are one of the few companies who have the capacity to do that and already have products in place to cover 80% of what is required. While I'm not exactly a fan of Microsoft, ther…

I'm always baffled whenever someone comes up with these wacky Google Android replacement suggestions. It's as if they selectively choose to ignore history and the billions, that would be futilely squandered, pursuing something that has absolutely zero chance of ever succeeding or even being profitable. I'm not sure what fantasy world you reside in, but replacing Google's proprietary apps and services with Microsoft's…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN