151–160 of 276 posts
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I actually like the newer interface... when it isn't trying to take over my entire 32" screen to show me information that would have fit in a 2" square window, or doesn't bother exposing more than a quarter of the functionality you get with the older UIs.
How many parts of Settings do you actually like then? I think that almost every part falls into one of these categories for me.
It's not related to the actual article but the footnote about advertisment is what strike me the most : > Advertising revenue is falling fast across the Internet, and independently-run sites like Ghacks are hit hardest by it. The advertising model in its current form is coming to an end, and we have to find other ways to continue operating this site. It's no wonder Google is pushing to remove (partially) the ability…
One could leap to the assumption that ghack's target demographic are more likely to embrace ad-blockers, which is why they're being hit hard.
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They can't remove it. It's insane the amount of code that would break without the registry.
Gotta start somewhere, - they should announce that it's being deprecated in future version of Windows.
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The registry is a fantastic idea - it's a great pity software developers misused and screwed it up so badly, and a shame other OSs haven't copied it and built on it. Instead of every tool making its own incompatible, undocumented, non-standard config file/database/format/tools.
GNOME used to have GConf, which is basically the same thing as Windows Registry. GNOME 3 replaced that with dconf/gsettings which serves very similar purposes.
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The registry is a fantastic idea - it's a great pity software developers misused and screwed it up so badly, and a shame other OSs haven't copied it and built on it. Instead of every tool making its own incompatible, undocumented, non-standard config file/database/format/tools.
>> it's a great pity software developers misused and screwed it up so badly So the Registry is a great idea and great software design, but developers are "holding the phone wrong"? I think applications should be standalone and not tied into some giant central spaghetti shared knot of chewing gum. The beauty of Linux/Unix is that stuff is configured by text files. Windows was on that path i the early days when everyth…
A central configuration database with standard ways of accessing it, doubling as an early 'service-discovery' place (e.g. registration of COM components), with system-wide config and per-user hives loaded when needed, is a great idea, and the registry is tolerably good software design as a way to do that, considering it came from the early 1990s, but developers have carelessly misused it for years, and Microsoft take the blame for that.
Imagine you logged onto a server by SSH and your /home/.program/program.conf file is from a newer version and the program doesn't run. Nobody would attack "the concept of storing configuration in a text file" for that - but people would attack "the registry" when that equivalent happens on Windows.
How many times have people written scripts to "parse" and add/remove lines of config from text files, without ever saying "we're reinventing the wheel for the hundred thousandth time, what a miserable waste of human life, if only there was a standardised key/value store we could put data in with a standard tool"?
And I put "parse" in scare-quotes because how many actually implement a full and correct Apache/Bind/iptables/etc config file parser, instead of a quick regex/sed/AWK/Python hack? JSON changed this a little, but now you'd easily expect to configure a server/service using a REST interface, and the config would be persisted in some unknown not-user-facing database behind the scenes, and that's just "fine".
I just booted up a windows 10 machine earlier today for the first time in many months. It absolutely bewilders me how terribad the UI is. You have this fancy UI but if you ever click one or two options deep you end up getting these alternately styled legacy interfaces. It's so incoherent. It really makes windows 10 feel like a skin on top of windows xp. So when the article says Microsoft wants to push users into wind…
It's definitely inconsistent, but I'd disagree with it being incoherent. IMO, Windows has done a fantastic job at making complex functionality accessible through reasonable GUIs.
My biggest issue is not that the interface is incoherent (and the consistency is a minor gripe to me). I struggle much more with _navigating_ the interface than interacting with any given dialog.
That said, I've never used Linux distro or macOS iteration that came anywhere close to making features accessible to users via graphic interfaces. GUIs may not always be the _best_ interface (that's another discussion), but you gotta hand it to Microsoft for how much work they've put in to get where they are when it comes to GUIs. I do not envy anyone tasked with "reskinning" it all.
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Except if you start typing just after booting, the search service (or something) isn't running yet and it doesn't give you any results even if you wait... I hate using Windows 10 because I am constantly hitting new unique bugs in the UI, and regularly enough I run into complete show-stoppers. Windows UI is just so broken. I do run into bugs on Ubuntu, but usually there is a workaround. And I have lower expectations w…
I would prefer if it would just give me no results. Half the time when I hit the windows key, type what I want and hit enter it will open an Edge window with Bing search results for what I typed.
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> The Control Panel isn't that deep. It really, really is.
There are still dialogs for configuring 56k dial up connections in Windows 10. NETBIOS is probably somewhere in there, too.
The Registry is the biggest architectural mistake in Windows - it's a great pity they haven't had the courage to remove it entirely.
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I just booted up my Surface Book for the first time in months. It attempted to download and install Windows 10 update 1903. The update failed with a large dialog telling me my system isn't ready to install update 1903. I'm going to sound like the naive end user now, but isn't it the job of the update manager to only download and install updates that are ready to be installed? It did eventually install 1903 after abou…
In my case there is a glitch in the 1903 install where having external drives attached forces a fail as the installer can't determine which is the Windows drive or something (per an error/forum I read at the time). I had coped the ISO from a USB so removing the USB drive resolved the error. I think it's picky to prevent issues similar to 1809 install. That was a mess and I'm sure MSFT would rather have an error befor…
(For anyone who doesn't know the context: Windows has the ability to redirect the various documents, music, etc directories away from their default locations. Some genius at Microsoft decided that any data left in the original location after such a move was junk and got a Windows 10 update to delete it. Unfortunately, Microsoft's own OneDrive software, which was bundled with and heavily promoted by Windows 10, intentionally redirected some of these folders without moving the contents in older versions and also often failed part-way through leaving some files behind in newer versions which promised to move the existing documents too. So a whole bunch of people who'd clicked Yes when Windows 10 pestered them to put their documents in OneDrive found that not only did it fail to do that, they got all their non-cloud-backed-up documents deleted a few Windows updates down the line.
Making matters worse, some of the members of their crowdsourced beta-testing program had apparently hit this problem and warned them that the update was deleting people's documents, and Microsoft just ignored it and went ahead with the update anyway.)