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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?

#281

Post by emsy »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #277
emsy wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The juice is absolutely worth the squeeze. Everybody and their grandmas think Windows is a mess, yet theres no real alternative for most people, so there’s no real incentive for MS to make it better (or for a start, stop making it worse with telemetry, forced restarts and adware).

> yet theres no real alternative for most people I just don't buy that. Everyone I've ever persuaded to buy a Mac or iOS device comes to prefer it to Windows in a couple of weeks, and I stop needing to fix something for them every other month.

I actually did that for my parents and in-laws and it went as you said. But there’s no alternative to Windows for a lot of professionals and gamers and that’s an issue. There’s no need for Windows to be better because they own that segment. Also, as much as Windows Desktop dominance sucks, Linux just isn’t there yet and I don’t want to see the walled garden dystopia that a majority of Mac desktops would bring us.

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

#282

Post by sockaddr »

I grew up with Windows as my daily driver so I feel a bit of nostalgia but after switching over to macOS about a decade ago when I look at Windows it always feels to me like their engineering/design efforts are just alright with getting things 85% correct and then never finishing the job. It's the last 15% where you start seeing attention to detail, treatment of edge cases, and thoughtfulness.

To me it feels like the OS simply doesn't respect the user's time.

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

#283

Post by cududa »

PaulHoule wrote: post #229
agumonkey wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That bill has never been passed it seems, in the mainstream that is. I've been wondering how to design a system that would focus more on this aspect. Opportunities here.

Look at how you get correct progress bars for free with Hadoop. If it is that easy to do for a huge distributed cluster with 100+ machines imagine how easy it could be to do on a small scale. What if web browsers told the user outright which third party services were responsible for the world wide wait? One pet peeve of mine is the CDN distributed JavaScript in which people download 20 files of which they only need 2…

…that’s because you have a set job with constraints and machines dedicated to that sole task in a controlled environment. Personal computing, third party drivers, background tasks, etc all impact this.

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

#284

Post by secabeen »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #246
criley2 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the price of the absolute cheapest MacOS running computer (Mac Mini, with a monitor) one can get basically 2 entire Windows computers. For the cost of the average computer running MacOS, one could buy a TV, a console, a desktop Windows computer, and a laptop. Or whatever it may be. ($1500 on an iMac could be $400 console, $500 TV, $500 computer. Or whatever your break down is. For the lower middle class and worki…

> the cold hard facts of living in the western world is that most people would need to spend irresponsibly to use MacOS regularly. A $900 MacBook Air would probably have lasted far longer and needed less time troubleshooting than a $500 computer made with subpar components. The amortized costs are far lower with Apple products (or other products using higher quality components) compared to buying the cheapest devices…

Perhaps it would have but the Boots theory of wealth from Terry Pratchett still applies.

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

#285

Post by summerlight »

MillenialMan wrote: post #164
refactor_master wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UI and logic are probably not as decoupled as we’d like to think.

So decouple them. Microsoft has annual revenue of $143 billion . Their flagship product should not be a neglected mess.

Perhaps Microsoft doesn't own all the relevant code? Historically, there are too many win32 API users "clever" enough to exploit the coupling between UI, business logic and old assumptions that don't work anymore in modern platforms.

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

#286

Post by jd3 »

formerly_proven wrote: post #144
zamadatix wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dum…

> Windows demands 16 bit apps from the 90s should have a very decent shot at running on Windows 11. 16 bit applications never worked on any 64 bit Windows.

Not natively, but ntvdmx64[0][1] and otvdm[2]/winevdm[3] work fine, albeit a bit slowly.

[0]: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/ntvdmx64.html

[1]: https://github.com/leecher1337/ntvdmx64

[2]: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/otvdm.html

[3]: https://github.com/otya128/winevdm

---

For those interested, Wikipedia says there's no native/builtin 64bit NTVDM due to

> In an x86-64 CPU, virtual 8086 mode is available as a sub-mode only in its legacy mode (for running 16- and 32-bit operating systems), not in the native 64-bit long mode.

...

> The NTVDM is not supported on x86-64 editions of Windows,[31] including DOS programs,[32] because NTVDM uses VM86 CPU mode instead of the Local Descriptor Table in order to enable 16‑bits segment required for addressing[33] and AArch64 because Microsoft did not release a full emulator for this incompatible instruction set like it did on previous incompatible architecture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_DOS_machine#Windows_NT...

---

Personally, since Microsoft still releases 32bit builds of Windows 10, I just dual boot 32bit (~48GB)/64bit (~900GB) partitions and run the 16bit programs natively on an old Thinkpad.

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

#287

Post by MillenialMan »

summerlight wrote: post #285
MillenialMan wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So decouple them. Microsoft has annual revenue of $143 billion . Their flagship product should not be a neglected mess.

Perhaps Microsoft doesn't own all the relevant code? Historically, there are too many win32 API users "clever" enough to exploit the coupling between UI, business logic and old assumptions that don't work anymore in modern platforms.

I don't think it's actually about backwards compatibility, because the logical solution to that would be to provide a unified dialogue with all necessary settings, and keep the old ones for BC. Instead, they've just moved some of the features from the old dialogues into new interfaces, and left others (many of which are vital), so the entire thing is fragmented. It's completely incompetent.

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

#288

Post by alisonkisk »

andrew_ wrote: post #255
criley2 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the price of the absolute cheapest MacOS running computer (Mac Mini, with a monitor) one can get basically 2 entire Windows computers. For the cost of the average computer running MacOS, one could buy a TV, a console, a desktop Windows computer, and a laptop. Or whatever it may be. ($1500 on an iMac could be $400 console, $500 TV, $500 computer. Or whatever your break down is. For the lower middle class and worki…

I don't understand how your views on cost-value are related to my views on the user interface and experience.

I don't understand how your views on the user interface and experience are related to the Microsoft engineering tradeoffs you commented on.

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

#289

Post by alisonkisk »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #279
lotsofpulp wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the cold hard facts of living in the western world is that most people would need to spend irresponsibly to use MacOS regularly. A $900 MacBook Air would probably have lasted far longer and needed less time troubleshooting than a $500 computer made with subpar components. The amortized costs are far lower with Apple products (or other products using higher quality components) compared to buying the cheapest devices…

> A $900 MacBook Air would probably have lasted far longer and needed less time troubleshooting than a $500 computer made with subpar components. I've never seen a more-true statement on this site. Years ago, my wife was using a $500 Acer laptop, which was a cheap plastic POS, which broke after a couple of years. I bit the bullet, and bought a pre-owned Air for $900. She is still using it, 11 years later. I used to h…

That 11 year old Air can't run a recent OS that supports modern web browsers including security patches.

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

#290

Post by unethical_ban »

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…

My beef is mostly with the lack of consistency with the control panel and settings. They have "Win10"ed most of it by now, though, but for several years you had this weird, often overlapping set of UIs from Win7 and Win10.

Minor things like Win10 vs. Metro are less obvious, though.

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