State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?

Mac UI elements don't move around much—afaik they use about the same positioning that was decided when OSX was made. So the looks change but the layout not so much, and thus apps don't break on updates. Big Sur is probably the biggest change in the layout, in all these years.

Whereas MS keeps rearranging the layouts that were perhaps too complex to begin with. Especially the toolbars, with the row upon row of buttons and whatever other stuff MS crammed in there. My pet theory is that MS treats all UI as tables of various sizes, because it's easy for devs to just slap whatever they think up into rows. Apple was much better at the ‘proximity principle’ so avoided cramming from the start.

It also helps that MacOS is slimmer in terms of GUI apps—there's no ‘management console’ for admins and such heavy stuff. My litmus test of GUI environments is the control panel—and it's much lighter and more comprehensible in MacOS. (A similar telling exercise is comparing control panels of Gnome and KDE, at least it was when I last touched KDE in the 2000s.)

macOS isn't afraid to deprecate or completely remove things even if that means old things won't work. Windows demands 16 bit apps from the 90s should have a very decent shot at running on Windows 11. That level of "it'll always be there" means for the vast majority of old UI it has no technology pressure to be redone, only pressure of what most average users will see day to day. E.g. nobody at Windows is going to dump control panel (need 3rd party add-ons to work) and nobody is going to rewrite it in a backwards compatible way when most users can do everything via Settings these days and it works with all quirks for legacy apps as is.

That's not to say a lot of the Metro stuff shouldn't/couldn't be made to be Fluent but it also isn't as out of place as some of the older stuff. The only one that is really surprising is File Explorer - but again a lot of legacy app integration that wouldn't work with a new one (though maybe it is time anyways).

> I believe the only way to position child HWNDs remains manual absolute positions? so while your button might look native, your collection of two buttons won't.

I thought the native APIs provided some kinds of constraints, like ‘these go into corners, and this is next to that’? Such approach is sorta necessary when windows can be resized. And I thought that UI builders like Visual Basic depended on these constraints. However I didn't do much manual UI, so perhaps the programmer indeed has to recalculate everything in pixels when something moves or is resized—like we did back in the day before we knew better.

Can we also talk about inconsistencies when it comes to notifications on Windows 10, too, please?

I mean, every app does whatever it wants. An update popup here, a warning there. Some blocking window with full attention here, some imutable "you got a message" there. Anti-virus systray icons even render webpages as popups, that contain even more notifications inside them.

Windows is the worst OS I've ever used in regards to focussed work. Every single program running there has the right to disturb my work, and the user is just a dummy that can't get anything done because the UX guidelines treat users like a click monkey.

Having used both older and newer Linux distros, MacOS pre-Catalina and Windows XP/Vista/7/10 as a main machine for work over the years, I'd choose Linux or MacOS for productive work anytime.

I don't care about an _asynchronous_ email when I'm working on something else...you should start to understand this, designers at Microsoft. If a spammer can literally disturb a work productivity of an OS user while the email app is running in the background, your UX is literally the worst solution possible.

I effing hate notifications and the lack of user-focussed Window management on Windows.

Even MacOS without any real window management is better, because at least the IDE window keeps the focussed state and notifications can be force-silenced.

Sorry for the rant, but it's the truth. Windows is not made for productive work in my opinion.