Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

ntdotdev.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 335 posts

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

#91

Post by fifticon »

koyote wrote: post #49
overgard wrote: post #29

The only consistency issue that really has bothered me is the constant mauling of the control panel. Windows 95 basically got it right, and every major release they just hide things further and further. And now the competing "Settings" thing is just an embarrassment. So now we have two competing ways of configuring the system, except the new one sucks and is incomplete, and the old one is kinda unmaintained.

I agree and am actually surprised that several years in there is still a bunch of stuff that is not configurable in the new Settings screen. I am obviously speaking without extensive knowledge of the underlying internals but surely it can't be that difficult to wrap some settings in a new UI if you dedicate a team to it? I actually spent 15 minutes the other day trying to remove an additional keyboard layout that som…

I had this too. I found and fixed the setting in the registry. They seem to have arrived at an UI design that cannot correctly represent the possible states of the underlying "real" model. Their current GUI for managing installed language keyboards is unfortunate. It appears to be optimized for a perceived majority of users only needing a single layout, in a way that makes it difficult to manage multiple layouts. Somehow their UI mix the keyboard layouts together with the GUI display language. I don't quite understand, why they don't just let the user manage a simple list of installed keyboard layouts (I believe it used to work that way, and behind the scenes it probably still does?)

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

#92

Post by gogopuppygogo »

meowkit wrote: post #45
neelc wrote: post #36

Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but not on Windows (and I deal with a SaaS at MSFT). I am a FreeBSD committer and help maintain FreeBSD's GNOME packages and (very recently) the graphics drivers. The reason why Windows is full of UI inconsistencies is (largely) because of one thing: backwards compatibility. While backwards compatibility has it's perks, it also means having lots of old code in Windows that can't be to…

I work on the core OS. This is the answer. Now it could be done to maintain backwards compat and have everything completely up to date, but the juice is not worth the squeeze and there are more important things to focus on (such as making the OS work/build in such a way that there won’t be inconsistencies in the future).

Could you ever see Microsoft dropping the registry?

My probably unpopular opinion is that the registry is the worst feature in Windows. It’s bloat directly impacts the speed of the operating system.

Seems like such a waste for so many advancements in Windows but the registry sticks around like a bad hangover.

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

#94

Post by Closi »

numpad0 wrote: post #75
curiousmindz wrote: post #14

This issue is way overblown here on HN. In day-to-day usage, I have rarely been annoyed by these "inconsistencies". The best example to illustrate this article is: Installing a driver with the Windows XP layer. That's probably something that will only happen to people installing very old hardware with drivers from over 10 years ago. I consider that a backward compatibility win: It is great that it even works in Windo…

Isn’t it interesting that the inconsistency arguments mostly surfaces around software configuration, like “_Settings_ app is stupid” “I still use XP style _driver installation_ screen” etc? It makes sense why it’s not much of an issue on other GUI environments: in GNU/Linux and macOS, only what’s available on GUI is available on GUI, and the rest goes to the unified scary black screen with very task specific procedur…

It's a good point - I wonder if the actual user really sees an old-looking GUI screen as worse than an arcane terminal configuration.

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

#95

Post by Stratoscope »

aasasd wrote: post #84
Stratoscope wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know Enterprise customers require extreme backward compatibility, but it must be a fairly small number who are still running legacy code written in 1771.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/jacquard-loom-simulator/ https://github.com/jfinkels/analyticalengine https://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/emulator.html

I stand corrected, and awed. Thank you!

I had the good fortune to see the Babbage Engine in action when it was at the Computer History Museum. Only got a few photos, but here they are (plus an unrelated photo of a core memory plane):

https://geary.smugmug.com/Computers/History/

https://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/

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

#96

Post by jpeter »

meowkit wrote: post #45
neelc wrote: post #36

Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but not on Windows (and I deal with a SaaS at MSFT). I am a FreeBSD committer and help maintain FreeBSD's GNOME packages and (very recently) the graphics drivers. The reason why Windows is full of UI inconsistencies is (largely) because of one thing: backwards compatibility. While backwards compatibility has it's perks, it also means having lots of old code in Windows that can't be to…

I work on the core OS. This is the answer. Now it could be done to maintain backwards compat and have everything completely up to date, but the juice is not worth the squeeze and there are more important things to focus on (such as making the OS work/build in such a way that there won’t be inconsistencies in the future).

Is this also the reason why there are no tabs in windows explorer?

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

#97

Post by paavohtl »

cutchin wrote: post #7

I've been primarily a linux user for some time, so I've gotten pretty desensitized to various applications looking vastly different on the same system. But in the last several years that's mostly gone away - Gnome knows how to change the theme for QT apps and KDE can configure GTK themes so things are actually remarkably uniform. But then when I fire up Windows, it is just this bizarre mix of all these different UI f…

As far as I know Project Reunion is not really a UI framework - it's more about refactoring Windows APIs into individual libraries which can be used across different OS versions. This should enable apps targeting all versions of Windows 10 to use the latest stuff, in a similar fashion to polyfills in browsers.

This is probably to encourage developers to build software using the new Windows 10 APIs. Which is something they definitely have a problem with - I've been using Windows 10 quite heavily since the first beta and I don't think I've ever seen or used a third party Windows 10 (fluent / modern / metro) application.

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

#98

Post by for_xyz »

gogopuppygogo wrote: post #92
meowkit wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on the core OS. This is the answer. Now it could be done to maintain backwards compat and have everything completely up to date, but the juice is not worth the squeeze and there are more important things to focus on (such as making the OS work/build in such a way that there won’t be inconsistencies in the future).

Could you ever see Microsoft dropping the registry? My probably unpopular opinion is that the registry is the worst feature in Windows. It’s bloat directly impacts the speed of the operating system. Seems like such a waste for so many advancements in Windows but the registry sticks around like a bad hangover.

If you drop something, then you need some kind of replacement for that.

I don't see any alternative on where entire OS could be configured other than registry.

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

#99

Post by IshKebab »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #47
overgard wrote: post #29

The only consistency issue that really has bothered me is the constant mauling of the control panel. Windows 95 basically got it right, and every major release they just hide things further and further. And now the competing "Settings" thing is just an embarrassment. So now we have two competing ways of configuring the system, except the new one sucks and is incomplete, and the old one is kinda unmaintained.

TBH I don't really see how the Settings app is an embarrassment at this point in time. This was definitely true in Windows 8 and early Windows 10 versions, but with the leaps and bounds it's made since, I feel like 'settings app suxx' is a meme that has overstayed its welcome.

I've used it fairly recently and it still has only the absolutely most common settings you'd want to change. 90% of the settings are still in the control panel.

It will continue to suck until they've actually moved all the settings from the control panel into settings.

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

#100

Post by nwmcsween »

overgard wrote: post #29

The only consistency issue that really has bothered me is the constant mauling of the control panel. Windows 95 basically got it right, and every major release they just hide things further and further. And now the competing "Settings" thing is just an embarrassment. So now we have two competing ways of configuring the system, except the new one sucks and is incomplete, and the old one is kinda unmaintained.

The settings app completely mauls things as well, turning off static DNS will just completely remove _all_ DNS servers instead of using dhcp like adapter settings
Post reply on HN