Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm still able to download the PDF. (USA here)
The 451 is probably GDPR-related.
I am from Russia (sadly no GDPR here) and I get 451.
Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)
181–190 of 242 posts
Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)
#1822003 was the pinnacle of MS Office for me. The introduction of the ‘Ribbon of Confusion’ in 2007 around the time of the adoption of 16:9 screens was appalling. The ribbon was welded to the top of the screen leaving a letterbox sized area for your documents. It was like using a toolbar encrusted IE. This all happened when Adobe were demonstrating excellent UI design in their pro apps with pallets that could be docked…
Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 oft…
Clicking around. For example, setting your computer’s IP or gateway. Control panel -> Network -> right-click on the “IP interfaces” among a list of 5 abscon names -> Details -> Advanced -> Details -> And you can’t freely type the new IP, you have to use their fields with 4 numbers separated by dots. Everything was like this. Installing Maven? You need to set a system property, it’s 15 clicks including 6 on a “Details…
Windows+x => powershell => ipconfig
Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, but it is a typical experience for many developers that need to test our versions of IE. Why do Microsoft think it is OK to waste our time when we are validating against their software? Why is MS making the work developers and testers need to do so hard and wasteful? At the time I was using Windows, and downloaded these VMs, and I swore black and blue at Microsoft for the very same thing GP noticed. And the VMs e…
I use the Microsoft IE vm's to do IE testing in virtualbox and I have never had to install an update.
Great, so I guess the rest of us must be imagining it then?
Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Windows XP, Vista, and 7 were all fine. I just enabled the classic design and things largely worked and looked the same in key UX aspects. I'm still only using 7 (virtualized) and what I've seen from 10 on colleagues' computers looks much worse and more complicated UI than what xp-v-7 ever did. Don't even get me started how difficult it is to get your hands on Windows 10 LTSC as a private individual -- which would be…
Getting LTSC is as simple as getting Windows Embeded that it replaced.
Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have an Ubuntu dedicated server. I reboot it every Sunday, yet there is rarely a week where on Friday I don't see this when SSHing in due to auto-updates: 0 packages can be updated. 0 updates are security updates. *** System restart required *** Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS Linux ubuntu 4.15.0-34-generic #37-Ubuntu SMP Mon Aug 27 15:21:48 UTC 2018 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
You reboot your server every week? Whatever for?
This is the real WTF of this subthread.
Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
I installed Manjaro xfce recently and have been extremely impressed by how easy so many things are. I had been using gnome before that, Mac before that, and yet earlier Microsoft had not added telemetry so I used windows
Take a peek at KDE sometime; it's my favorite (and IMO most usable) DE of the pack. Xfce is at the "light but jank" end of the pool. Try changing your password via Settings: you can't. Thunar, its file manager, is extremely basic. Dolphin, KDE's file manager, is even better than Windows's Explorer (you have split directory views, way more options, terminal integration, etc.), which always amazed me. How is this free…
I remember trying a linux desktop (same time frame I mentioned in my original comment, I had a department issued.. HP(?) and was sick of dealing with windows bullshit.
As a Novell shop I figured I'd give their desktop distro (effectively a customised SuSE from memory) a run a couple of times, and it used KDE. I seem to recall it was nicer than Gnome I'd used under RH a few years prior as a student, but felt much heavier on resource usage?
Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)
#188Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows 7 with its constant mandatory automatic updates did it for me... Windows, never again, and I switched happily to Ubuntu.
Chrome and Firefox auto updates too. But those are fast, done in the background and they don't require reboots. Windows is still terrible at this.
They do require you to restart the application. Same with Windows, it updates in background and requires a relaunch.
Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)
#190The 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…
> People claimed to "love" XP, but they are all rose tinted in memory.
I still boot an XP partition from time to time. To play old games that simply run with issues in more modern Windows. The issue is XP had the right APIs for game development, and then MS deprecated some great technologies in favour of XBox centered ones.
In new games I still miss the hardware accelerated positional audio XP has.