It really says something about the underlying issue that caused that, how the relevant managers devolve into I told you sos and ownership fights rather than getting in a room and leaving with a cohesive plan that their individual teams will execute on.
Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)
121–130 of 242 posts
Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)
#122The early 2000's were a period of especially low usability for Microsoft's products. At the time, I had a roommate who was a die-hard Windows user. Over several years, I tried to convince him to switch to Mac OS X, with examples like: (a) Just drag/drop a PDF to a printer spool window, and it will print; (b) to install an app, usually you just have to drag it to the Applications folder; to uninstall it, simply drag i…
After OS X, has anybody ever switched back to Windows from a Mac OS for daily use (i.e. not for a specific application that is only available on Windows)? I don't even want to look at Windows now. It's so unsightly in a way that you don't notice until you switch away.
After 15 years on OS X, I won't be buying another Mac. The MB keyboards with no Escape key and constant breakage, and dropping support for 32-bit apps, would have been enough for me. The newly onerous restrictions on software signing, and Apple's general obsession with sacrificing anything and everything to get thinner and lighter, only make it worse.
Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is just an Ubuntu-ism. Linux doesn't require a reboot for anything other than kernel updates (and dbus in special cases). On a side note it's a bad idea to run Ubuntu on a server in prod. Ubuntu is great for desktop and pretty trash for everything else. You'd be better off just running Debian, it's a lot more stable.
> Linux doesn't require a reboot for anything other than kernel updates You can say the same about Windows updates. Ubuntu has a new kernel update every 3 weeks, unless CVEs force sooner ones. https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kernel/StableReleaseCadence Anyway, parent was saying that Windows is shit because it forces frequent updates. Ubuntu, which as you say it's the closest to a user friendly Linux dist does the same thing…
> Anyway, parent was saying that Windows is shit because it forces frequent updates. Ubuntu, which as you say it's the closest to a user friendly Linux dist does the same thing.
Windows will kill all your apps and reboot your machine in the middle of the night on a regular basis, unless you do some serious digging in the registry. (And they may have closed off even that by now.)
Is that "the same thing" as Ubuntu?
Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)
#124The early 2000's were a period of especially low usability for Microsoft's products. At the time, I had a roommate who was a die-hard Windows user. Over several years, I tried to convince him to switch to Mac OS X, with examples like: (a) Just drag/drop a PDF to a printer spool window, and it will print; (b) to install an app, usually you just have to drag it to the Applications folder; to uninstall it, simply drag i…
2) Right click - print 2) Double click setup 3) open setup again - remove option or the more opaque way, uninstall through configuration - software Your points wouldn't convince me actually.
I thought it was pretty clear this argument was being made in the early 2000s, not today.
But anyway, a few months ago I tried to install Office on a new laptop for my daughter, using a legit code I bought through work. However the laptop had a previously installed demo copy of a different office version. Oh. My. God. I spent 2 hours going through a handful of different Office download, install and upgrade sites, which were completely different in different domains and didn’t refer to each other or even look similar. I entered the product key into a dialog in the pre-installed office and into at least two different office web sites. I tried uninstalling it but it seemed to just end up broken.
Finally I found an MS online support site and got into a chat with a support rep. He remotely uninstalled the pre-install, which had to be done using some power shell command line utility to clean that up properly, then installed the proper version. Unbelievable.
Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)
#125The early 2000's were a period of especially low usability for Microsoft's products. At the time, I had a roommate who was a die-hard Windows user. Over several years, I tried to convince him to switch to Mac OS X, with examples like: (a) Just drag/drop a PDF to a printer spool window, and it will print; (b) to install an app, usually you just have to drag it to the Applications folder; to uninstall it, simply drag i…
Still to this day people view Windows through the lense of XP experiences. I always wonder how much damage that era did. People claimed to "love" XP, but they are all rose tinted in memory. Everyone hated XP until SP2 and SP3. The Security Center was something everyone hated too. But yeah, some things it did really well, but others not so much. 10 is so much better than people give it credit for, and yes there are st…
It's not the bugs that are an issue with 10. It's the mountains of nagware, spyware and advertisements built in to it.
Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)
#126The early 2000's were a period of especially low usability for Microsoft's products. At the time, I had a roommate who was a die-hard Windows user. Over several years, I tried to convince him to switch to Mac OS X, with examples like: (a) Just drag/drop a PDF to a printer spool window, and it will print; (b) to install an app, usually you just have to drag it to the Applications folder; to uninstall it, simply drag i…
Still to this day people view Windows through the lense of XP experiences. I always wonder how much damage that era did. People claimed to "love" XP, but they are all rose tinted in memory. Everyone hated XP until SP2 and SP3. The Security Center was something everyone hated too. But yeah, some things it did really well, but others not so much. 10 is so much better than people give it credit for, and yes there are st…
I grew up with Windows. My jobs used Unix/Linux and I switched to Mac at home before Vista came out. I got a job using Windows during the Windows 8-10 transition. During that 10 year gap I'd help friends and family setup printers and stuff. I was aghast at the things that hadn't changed in the 10+ years. I really wished I had written it up because I fell back into things quickly. One thing I still remember is how often you get updates requiring a reboot--in macOS it's a few times a year and in Linux it's only when a specific component (like the kernel) gets updated.
Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
After OS X, has anybody ever switched back to Windows from a Mac OS for daily use (i.e. not for a specific application that is only available on Windows)? I don't even want to look at Windows now. It's so unsightly in a way that you don't notice until you switch away.
After 15 years on OS X, I won't be buying another Mac. The MB keyboards with no Escape key and constant breakage, and dropping support for 32-bit apps, would have been enough for me. The newly onerous restrictions on software signing, and Apple's general obsession with sacrificing anything and everything to get thinner and lighter, only make it worse.
Work gave me an MBP. I am a vim user, so I need my Escape key.
Mapping Caps Lock to Escape is easy to do now, even through the Settings GUI.
I am not trying to convince you to stay with Mac, I am just saying that this particular thing helped me immensely.
Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)
#128The early 2000's were a period of especially low usability for Microsoft's products. At the time, I had a roommate who was a die-hard Windows user. Over several years, I tried to convince him to switch to Mac OS X, with examples like: (a) Just drag/drop a PDF to a printer spool window, and it will print; (b) to install an app, usually you just have to drag it to the Applications folder; to uninstall it, simply drag i…
I'm not sure if you're serious, but > Just drag/drop a PDF to a printer spool window, and it will print; this is just the most obtuse way of doing things. > usually you just have to drag it to the Applications folder; to uninstall it, simply drag it to the trash; So does this, and unreliable as you noted - i.e. usually . But, ugggh... dragging things to other things to do things though? There's a reason why certain l…
I figured out very early on Windows (this was the days of 3.x) that the Alt key could activate the menu and then let you browse the items with the cursor keys, and the underlined letters (which idiotically have been hidden by default more recently) work in combination with Alt to activate UI elements. I couldn't figure out how to do the equivalent in Mac OS. You had to inspect each menu first with the mouse (and hold down the mouse button while doing so), and hope that there was a keyboard shortcut assigned to the items you needed. It's possible to use Windows almost entirely without a mouse, although I've only had to do that to install mouse drivers or reload a glitched one. The same can't be said for Mac OS.
Some of the Finder keyboard shortcuts seem very counterintuitive; for example, the arrow keys move the selected item (same as in Windows), but although opening the selected item(s) is a very common task and one would expect that to be mapped to a very common key like Space or Enter like all the other file managers I've used, I believe one of those initiates a rename (a relatively uncommon operation) and the other does nothing, and the actual shortcut to open the selected item is Command+DownArrow or Command+O. I guess they make sense in their own way, but apparently I'm not the only one who finds this very unusual and confusing:
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/6727/why-does-the-...
https://superuser.com/questions/59007/enter-to-open-a-file-i...
https://superuser.com/questions/176450/open-file-shortcut-fo...
https://superuser.com/questions/134892/how-to-open-folder-wi...
https://superuser.com/questions/119871/how-do-you-open-a-fol...
Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)
#129Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)
#130The early 2000's were a period of especially low usability for Microsoft's products. At the time, I had a roommate who was a die-hard Windows user. Over several years, I tried to convince him to switch to Mac OS X, with examples like: (a) Just drag/drop a PDF to a printer spool window, and it will print; (b) to install an app, usually you just have to drag it to the Applications folder; to uninstall it, simply drag i…
The early 2000's were a period of especially low usability for Microsoft's products.
If you thought that was bad... look at the "app-ombinations" which pass for productivity software today. Wide expanses of useless whitespace, low-contrast ultra-thin fonts, monochrome hieroglyphic icons everywhere, patronising "cute" and unhelpful messages, the ridiculous levels of bloat, and of course the pervasive spyware --- or "telemetry".