261–270 of 271 posts
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a floppy-based Dropbox.
Exactly, right? Can't believe people fell for Dropbox when you could build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
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It also had the side effect that Windows 10 is very nasty to use on a tablet, compared with 8.1 .
Hmm? I’ve used my Surface Book in tablet mode from time to time and see no particular problems with it. Every window becomes full-screen, swipes from the screen edges do meaningful things that are similar in effect to what Windows 8/8.1 had. I wouldn’t describe it as in any way nasty by comparison. Do you have something particular in mind? (Or were you perhaps unaware of tablet mode?)
This was broken for 5 frigging years. The general consensus was that tablet mode was more problems than it was worth. They fixed in some recent release but is still buggy as hell (windows will not return to full height and instead be partially moved off screen for some reason).
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> and resource hogging Memory usage used to be a major complaint (possibly the biggest) even if it was made clear repeatedly that the OS was simply keeping more stuff in RAM instead of dumping it to disk specifically to improve performance. A mechanism that stuck to these days. That memory isn't marked that obviously in the Task Manager now, and memory is is no longer such a luxury so people don't complain anymore. B…
I agree with the general sentiment, but don't agree with the specifics. The NT series has always distinguished between cached/locked memory, so I don't see that as an explanation. Also, consider than, on equivalent hardware, XP actually booted _faster_ than 2k, which led many people (incl those who hated the interface) to actually use it. So this is not simply explainable by the "people just can't take change" argume…
As for XP most people upgraded from 98. The resource usage difference was undeniable and so was the driver incompatibility which made most devices not work properly or at all initially. I did not have the experience of XP booting faster than 2000 even on the same hardware but SP1 fixed a lot of issues, maybe also this. For the first couple of years every forum, IRC channel, BBS, or DC hub I read was full of complaints about either performance and compatibility, or stability depending on what people were upgrading from.
> So this is not simply explainable by the "people just can't take change" argument.
Not only. But it's one big part of the explanation. People are usually skeptical about change and compare around transition time so are inherently biased. They're comparing a stable, fine tuned product with the fresh, rough edged one. The Vista name was dropped because it was already toxic. But Windows 7 is more or less Vista SP3. If Vista didn't flop so hard from the start it would have had the same evolution as XP: launch grumbles grumbles grumbles > SP1 grumbles grumbles > SP2 gru... hey, this is pretty ok > SP3 noice!.
Even Win 10, with all its issues, is a far better product today than it was 5 years ago.
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Sadly the current start menu is far from normal. Normal would a simple menuized view of a folder hierarchy, what we have is some abomination tied into the Windows Store in mysterious ways that cause it to break under a wide variety of circumstances in such a way that an in-place reinstall is the only sure-fire fix.
When I first saw win10's start menu, I promptly removed the tiles (ads, really) as useless fluff then promptly vowed to do everything I can to never use it. My desktop is a mess now, but one of my own doing. (You can imagine what my reaction was when edgy auto-started after an update to tell me the over-engineered Firefox downloader was now "better" than ever. I had to kill the process in order to not see the mandato…
Back when the system settings could be reached with less clicks, were organised in a logical way and didn't use most of the screen as white-space.
To me the omnibox is the only way I know how access certain settings. I have no idea where they are located in this maze of categories and subcategories.
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The split made a lot of sense to tiling window manager fans. Admittedly a small niche to accidentally target a mainstream operating system to, so unsurprising it got so much bad press. In 8 the tiling window manager and non-tiling window manager were separate worlds you switched between virtual desktop style. In 8.1 they made the entire non-tiling window manager desktop a "proper" tile. (In 10 they killed the tiling…
Your comment baffles me. The Metro experience did not behave like a tiling window manager in literally any way I can think of. I switched to Windows 10 purely for the Surface Book hardware a few years ago. Before that, I was a contented Arch Linux + i3 user. (And my next laptop will probably be back to Arch Linux, with Sway instead of i3 because Wayland > X.) The split made, and still makes, no sense at all to me as…
Early on most apps, because of Windows 8's attempted focus on Tablets/Phones typically only supported full screen, half screen, and phone widths. Windows 8.1 added a lot more responsive screen sizes to more of the apps, adding a lot more variety/capability to the ways you could tile apps. The classic Win32 desktop even lived "inside" one of these tiles in Windows 8.1, so you could tile apps on both sides around it.
At various points in Windows 8.1 I'd have a half dozen apps (including the Win32 desktop as a single "app") tiled across two 16:9 monitors. It was actually a very nice dual monitor desktop experience and a good use of all that horizontal space, which I will continue to point out to people that didn't believe the tiling window manager made as much sense for desktop users as it did for tablet users. (I joke that I wish I could turn on Windows 10's Tablet Mode on dual monitor systems still, even as anemic and nearly dead as the surviving tile manager is.)
Back when the system settings could be reached with less clicks, were organised in a logical way and didn't use most of the screen as white-space.
System settings were easiest in the Vista/7 era. Window Key+"sound" brought up sound settings, so you didn't need to know where they were placed in control panel. Now in Windows 10, doing the same brings up "Sound settings" which is a stripped-down settings bar barely more than a master volume setting. The actual sound settings are hidden in control panel, which doesn't come up when searching for 'sound'. This (broke…
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This is why I always install Classic Shell when I boot up a Win10 machine: http://classicshell.net/
FYI, Classic Shell is no longer under development: http://www.classicshell.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=8147 However, there is now Open Shell Menu which was created to replace it: https://open-shell.github.io/Open-Shell-Menu/
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I remember when you could bypass the login prompt and open a web browsing session by going to HTML Help. If I recall correctly you could run executables from the resulting browser's address bar too.
I think that was still a bug in Windows XP.