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

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

#181

Post by formerly_proven »

chaos_a wrote: post #170
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…

Try right clicking anywhere. Almost everything has it's own fancy right click menu design for no good reason. Personally I don't find it annoying, but it's just silly that such a large company can't just stick to one design.

It's kinda hilarious/sad that MS Office essentially developed their own UI framework which, as I understand it, was unavailable even for other teams in Microsoft, so stuff like ribbons and "advanced" pop up menus got reinvented even inside Microsoft, not to mention countless times outside Microsoft.

So much of this is self-inflicted on the part of Microsoft.

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

#182

Post by Macha »

exoque wrote: post #135
rocqua wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this inconsistent experience is what is opening the door for competitors like Apple and Linux.

The only way of MAYBE having a consistent experience on linux is to only use applications written for the DE of your choice isn't it? Use firefox on KDE and the consistency is already gone.

Is that any different to Firefox on macOS? In a way Firefox's current UI design aligns with the win 10 modern stuff, but that's more luck for MS than Firefox making a big effort to fit in, since it's mostly the same everywhere

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

#183

Post by formerly_proven »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #169

The sad part is that old win32 UI from the win95 era, rendered with a modern style, are the most useable and nicer looking, in my opinion.

Metro/fluent apps always look "broken" to me. Like someone forgot to add styling and that's why a bunch of stuff ends up with some kind of default 3px solid black border. Transient popups (e.g. drop-downs) have some kind of shadow but it just looks weird and broken. Clicking on "cards" (I believe that's what they're called, e.g. a program in the new software manager) animates them but it just looks completely broken and blurry. Windows are resizable but in most cases it seems like the app isn't using an layout, so the contents don't adjust to match. It all feels a lot like a broken webpage in a standalone window. Including no/bad error handling, infinitely hanging indeterminate progress displays, lack of keyboard usability etc.

That being said the Windows 10 Win32 styling looks horrendous to me as well. Like BS_FLAT in Windows XP, it never looked good, not in 2005, not in 2021.

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

#184

Post by didymospl »

Semi-related: if you enjoy classic Windows UI and feel like going to a nostalgia trip there's a great little game which will make you feel it's the turn of the millennium again - Progressbar95.

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with its creators in any way, just wanted to share some fun.

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

#186

Post by Macha »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #81
ksec wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I thought Windows on ARM or Windows 10X was the perfect moment to get rid of those backward compatibility problem. At least there are incentive / reasons to be doing so. And why can Microsoft goes the same route as Apple's Cocoa and Carbon?

Nope. Because the goal was to make it as seamless as possible to port software to those platforms, ideally by just recompiling with a different flag. The offerings would be DOA without dev buy-in which wouldn’t happen if there was too much friction in porting.

It's not like they haven't tried it - Windows RT and Windows 10S have largely flopped. You could say this is because of the other changes trying to put the MS store as a required middle man, but both boil down to users rejecting Windows when it doesn't run all their existing software

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

#187

Post by binarybanana »

qball wrote: post #156
jolux wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a primary macOS user who has also done professional Windows development, I am simultaneously blown away by the quality of the development environments and tools (PowerShell! C#! .NET! Visual Studio!) available on Windows and more or less disgusted with the inconsistency in using the operating system itself. It doesn’t feel like Microsoft has had a consistent vision for how their UI is supposed to work for longer t…

>I can only conclude either that they do not see it as a problem, or that they are incapable of fixing it. They really shot themselves in the foot 10 years ago when they decided to go all-in on making their desktop and server OSes a giant advertisement for their tablets. Which nobody bought, of course. Didn't help that it took them 4 years to get up to feature parity with what you could do on iOS and Android out of t…

>and home users only got the ability to pass through a subset of consumer-level nVidia GPUs (which IIRC doesn't apply to laptops, so you're still stuck there)

That's not quite correct any longer. Nvidia now supports passthrough on all consumer GPUs that work with their current driver. This also includes laptops with Nvidia chips and they've been actively fixing bugs and compatibility problems in every driver release since then.

Before official support the Nvidia kernel driver just crashed Windows with a BSOD on my laptop. Then it suddenly worked, but I wasn't able to open the control panel and worse, the HDMI output didn't work. The driver after that fixed those problems. The only things still not working are voltage and power monitoring, although temps work.

Additionally, and I know this is a special case, performance is actually better than on bare metal. The reason is that in a VM I can inject a modded VBIOS with higher power limits and that gives me a nice 15-20% boost. I can't do that on bare metal because the VBIOS is stored in the system firmware and accessed via an ACPI method by the driver. Sadly only signed firmware can be flashed directly and even a flash programmer wouldn't help because at boot the firmware is verified and overwritten by a clean if it doesn't pass. This doesn't matter for desktop chips, but on a laptop you can actually get way more FPS if the power limits are ridiculously low by default! In my case I went from 30W or so to 75W (PCIe limit) and even though clocks stayed the same, games ran much faster. I guess it was hitting power limits and throttled, but didn't down lock because clocks only depend on voltage and available voltage level on temperature. I also ever saw power limits (via AfterBurner OSD) in furmark, but apparently it was also limited in other workloads without indicating it. With the modded VBIOS I don't even see power limits in furmark. It's either voltage or temps.

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

#188

Post by Macha »

formerly_proven wrote: post #181
chaos_a wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try right clicking anywhere. Almost everything has it's own fancy right click menu design for no good reason. Personally I don't find it annoying, but it's just silly that such a large company can't just stick to one design.

It's kinda hilarious/sad that MS Office essentially developed their own UI framework which, as I understand it, was unavailable even for other teams in Microsoft, so stuff like ribbons and "advanced" pop up menus got reinvented even inside Microsoft, not to mention countless times outside Microsoft. So much of this is self-inflicted on the part of Microsoft.

Not unique to Microsoft here, there was an android police article where they identified like 10 inconsistent action bar implementations from Google apps then a follow up a year later doing the same for navigation drawers when they were the android UX elements Google were pushing most

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

#189

Post by aasasd »

robertlagrant wrote: post #155
vladvasiliu wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, macOS jumping on the "huge UI elements with tons of empty space" bandwagon was the proverbial straw for me that moved my beloved MBP from daily workhorse to random idle browsing machine. I'd say it's still not as bad as Windows, in that at least it's not pure white that burns your eyes, but I still hate how half of my laptop screen is taken up by useless UI elements.

Is this a thing with Big Sur? I haven't moved to it yet, but reading here [1] it doesn't seem like bad changes? [1] https://www.macworld.com/article/234382/macos-big-sur-learn-...

News about Mac are frequently separate from criticism about Mac. Perhaps because they arrive earlier. You might want to look specifically for reviews, opinions, and summaries of critical reaction. Maybe watch reviews on Youtube to get a feel.

Personally I'm thinking of trying BS in a virtual machine to see if I'm ok with it or will stay away until apps that I want drop support for Mojave (likely Brew will begin to compile lots of stuff instead of just installing binaries). Though, seeing as Catalina already makes life harder for developers outside of the App Store, Mojave is probably gonna stay with me for a while.

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

#190

Post by Macha »

shados wrote: post #163
akersten wrote: post #6

I like the Run dialog and the folder properties menu and others that have been untouched since the early days. Their utility has been proven and so much muscle memory has been built up. I can not possibly imagine a revision that could be done to them that would have more benefits than simply leaving them be. All of the Fluent/Metro designs have made things markedly worse. For example, check out the Metro control pane…

This. I would forgive the inconsistencies if the new stuff was better. But it's worse. Its not a "meh I'm used to the old and hate change" situation. It's a "holy shit fire the UX design and product manager leads in charge of this asap". The audio tab is another good example. It's so hard to do anything with the new one, you almost have to know how to get to the old UX to make any kind of change.

I have a 1440p screen. Why do I need to scroll to do anything in the new audio properties dialog? The old one fit more functionality on screen all at once on 768p laptops
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