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Windows 11: Just say no

computerworld.com

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Re: Windows 11: Just say no

#151

Post by mypalmike »

GuB-42 wrote: post #147
squarefoot wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do they keep messing with the UI? The UI that remains unchanged in a few years is perceived as old and obsolete, hence the purely marketing driven need to change it even when it works. And then there are new courses and new support contracts. Governments are a significant part of MS customer base; every time MS changes something, it's new money pouring in. As someone once said, Windows is not an operating syste…

I think I've seen an old article by a Microsoft employee saying "if you didn't change the UI, you changed nothing". They used the calculator as an example, saying that it saw several improvements but since it always looked the same, people thought nothing had changed. Improvements included things like better arithmetics, so that (10/3-3)*3=1.

Dream job: full time engineer on Windows Calculator team.

Re: Windows 11: Just say no

#152

Post by gregmac »

deeplowdock wrote: post #60
jjoonathan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite is when I see the result I want flash by and then I accidentally type the next character -- correctly -- due to momentum, and the result disappears. Then I delete the last character in an attempt to bring back the result, and then I try retyping the whole thing, but the correct result never reappears. It is gone. Only useless web results remain.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search] "BingSearchEnabled"=dword:00000000 "CortanaConsent"=dword:00000000 ^ put this into a .reg file, run it, and never see those bullshit web search results again. Have been doing this first thing after a fresh install on every PC.

Much simpler is to just paste to a terminal:

    REG ADD HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search /v BingSearchEnabled /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
    REG ADD HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search /v CortanaConsent /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

Re: Windows 11: Just say no

#153

Post by Jach »

olah_1 wrote: post #49

Proton[1] is the reason my next machine will be Linux. [1]: https://www.protondb.com/

Between Proton and WSL we're getting closer to a true "write once run anywhere" world where host platform won't matter so much. Devs will be free to develop with whatever tech stack they like most, make a canonical build, and other platforms will be able to run it.

What's going to be hilarious is that much like dosbox became the best way to run old dos programs even if they might still technically run on windows, wine/proton will be (and sometimes already is) the best way to run many older windows programs. Particularly I'm in love with proton's fullscreen magic that doesn't actually mess with your display mode, so e.g. I can run Touhou games fullscreen in proton with my display at 4k despite them only supporting 480p fullscreen -- running on Windows will try to set my display mode to that with varying success. At some point we'll be running old Windows programs on Windows with wine/proton through WSL.

Re: Windows 11: Just say no

#155

Post by 0-_-0 »

pjmlp wrote: post #79
thrower123 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VS Code is like the absolute greatest Electron app that has ever, or will ever be written. And yet it had an issue for quite some time where animating the cursor flashing was taking an enormous percentage of CPU.

It is also one that has big chunks of C++ and Rust code, and WebGL based rendering to make it actually usable.

Oh you can do that with Electron? This is not my area of expertise... Are there any other ways to have GPU acceleration?

Re: Windows 11: Just say no

#156

Post by aqfamnzc »

hbn wrote: post #89
jjoonathan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite is when I see the result I want flash by and then I accidentally type the next character -- correctly -- due to momentum, and the result disappears. Then I delete the last character in an attempt to bring back the result, and then I try retyping the whole thing, but the correct result never reappears. It is gone. Only useless web results remain.

Yeah Windows Search is useless. I'd recommend Everything[0]. Though, it's more for general file searching than searching for programs. Can't remember if it learns your habits and pushes them to the top or not. Regardless it's instantaneous and I almost never use the Windows search since I discovered it https://www.voidtools.com

Everything is pretty much the only thing I miss from Windows. Maybe paint.net too. I haven't found a suitable Linux equivalent for either.

Re: Windows 11: Just say no

#157

Post by II2II »

mypalmike wrote: post #151
GuB-42 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I've seen an old article by a Microsoft employee saying "if you didn't change the UI, you changed nothing". They used the calculator as an example, saying that it saw several improvements but since it always looked the same, people thought nothing had changed. Improvements included things like better arithmetics, so that (10/3-3)*3=1.

Dream job: full time engineer on Windows Calculator team.

Developing a calculator that one could be proud of would be a pretty sweet job. By that I mean producing a product that consistently produced correct results, offered useful features, and had a user interface that is more pleasant to use than a four function calculator.

Re: Windows 11: Just say no

#158

Post by saurik »

dylan604 wrote: post #139
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody gets paid to leave things alone and maybe that's a big problem with the world.

Farmers can get paid to not grow crops.

Damn... the idea that maybe we should be banding together as a democracy and cutting deals to subsidize the engineering work of companies that are willing to "lay fallow" their design teams is fascinating.

Re: Windows 11: Just say no

#159

Post by corty »

foobiekr wrote: post #108
alkonaut wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not broke, stop trying to fix it. There could have been better ways to keep it modern, but just leaving everything alone because “it works” isn’t really an option. First comes Unicode, then 4K/High-dpi scaling, then touch support and so on. Once high DPI screens arrived, UIs that scaled poorly literally don’t work.

NT 3.1 (that is, the _first_ release of Windows NT in 1993) supported Unicode, at least as far as the UI elements were concerned (that it was UTF-16, well, ...)

Nope, UCS-2. Which is UTF-16, but just the BMP, so only the first 65k codepoints and all characters are fixed-length 16bits. Only later windows versions at some point learned UTF-16.

Re: Windows 11: Just say no

#160

Post by Causality1 »

amackera wrote: post #48
Causality1 wrote: post #39

You know I used to follow Windows news rabidly. The new features were incredible, I looked forward to every release. Somewhere around the time Microsoft added a lock screen to a desktop computer without going "only joking, haha", I started dreading every update.

I'm sorry, what? Why wouldn't you want a Lock Screen? That's a basic security measure, without a lock screen Windows would be a non-starter for any secure enterprise.

A lock screen is not the same as a login screen. A lock screen is the functionless screen you have to dismiss before being presented with the login screen.
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