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Windows needs a change in priorities

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Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#91

Post by Shared404 »

Sakos wrote: post #77
userbinator wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also what's with the excessive rounded corners and slim selection padding? The people who worked on the design use Macs. Seriously. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307

When I first heard about this, everything that's ever bothered me about the Windows 8-10-11 evolution makes so much more sense. They're turning it into MacOS.

But only the bad parts of MacOS - they make something that looks pretty in an image, but is utterly unusable.

The way I usually describe Win11's UI is as the worst of GNOME 3, MacOS, and Windows bundled up in a wrap of spyware.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#93

Post by spaetzleesser »

userbinator wrote: post #79
lordnacho wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish this was true, but there are a heck of a lot of office workers who have grown up with Windows and can never be trained to use anything else. You'll get a lot of resistance and rationalisation about why they don't think Linux or BSD or whatever isn't as good, and that the training time is better used to just work.

who have grown up with Windows and can never be trained to use anything else. When Windows itself is changing so much that it hardly resembles what it used to be, there's going to be a lot of relearning anyway. On the other hand, you can make Linux look like any version of Windows if you really wanted to.

If you want Linux to compete, you need spreadsheet software as good as Excel and a word processor that's 100% compatible with Word. I tried to use LibreOffice for a while but Calc ins't there yet and I had tons of formatting problems when I sent documents to Words users. After dealing with this for a while you just give up and start using Office again.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#94

Post by hackerfromthefu »

Silhouette wrote: post #42
segphault wrote: post #22

Like every Windows user, I have had a lot of frustrating experiences with the abusive behavior and dark patterns that have taken over the platform. Like when they started having Skype silently run in the background logged in with the user's Microsoft account without any notice or human intervention, and removed the setting to disable it from launching at startup so that it couldn't be prevented. I had to completely u…

Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares. Acknowledging this is the first step. The second is figuring out what would make them care or how to remove them so someone who does care can take over. That's a much harder thing to do. Realistically Microsoft is in a similar position to the likes of Google and Facebook. They have such an entrenched monopoly, bought through years of ignored warnin…

As a developer I want to implement everything possible on the web platform.

It's now a viable competitor for enterprise applications, both because web is getting more feature rich and these days has pretty much anything you need, and because desktop is getting worse with anti-features and jank. It's a sad state of affairs but that's where we are.

As a user I want to use cross platform applications as much as possible. I use e.g. libreoffice instead of ms office now by choice. This means that the eventual switch away from it will be easier.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#95

Post by Stevvo »

anonymousiam wrote: post #72

Complaining about Windows UX inconsistency sort of misses the point that the OS and the windowing system should be separate. The function of an OS is not to manage windows, it is to provide an abstraction layer between the applications and the hardware.

It is called Windows, the name does suggest that the product is more than a kernel.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#96

Post by 3np »

Pasorrijer wrote: post #50
lucasyvas wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not wrong, but office users should be locked to a browser in 2022 anyway. What do they need Windows for? They can all use a web browser. Microsoft has done an amazing job convincing the office world they need Windows, when they don't need a single feature that it provides in 99% of cases.

As an officer worker, there are many many things I do that cannot be done in a web browser. File comparison tools, macros and complex excel queries, hard applications for both new and legacy critical programs... Can this be done on Linux? Frequently. Can it be done in a web browser? Rarely effectively and often not at all.

Isn't Excel feature-complete in the browser now, macros and all?

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#97

Post by creakingstairs »

lordnacho wrote: post #38
lucasyvas wrote: post #29

These problems tend to work themselves out naturally - when you purposefully damage your user experience, you lose the early tech adopters that originally drove your product growth. They instead flock to a competitor that leaves you holding your bag of a shitty product. There are a few companies flirting with this dangerous line right now and it opens them up completely for disruption, which is the opposite of what t…

I wish this was true, but there are a heck of a lot of office workers who have grown up with Windows and can never be trained to use anything else. You'll get a lot of resistance and rationalisation about why they don't think Linux or BSD or whatever isn't as good, and that the training time is better used to just work.

That’s true but the new generation have grown up with (for better or worse) web/apps. Once they are the main workforce, they will be much less reluctant to switch to whatever OS.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#98

Post by khaledh »

interstice wrote: post #37
khaledh wrote: post #24

This article nails a lot of the issues with Windows 11. I bit the bullet and upgraded to Windows 11 late last year thinking it must be an improvement over Windows 10. It turned out to be a big step backwards. - Changing the default browser is a lot of work instead of a single click. - I can't move the task bar to the side, even though almost every monitor nowadays has much more horizontal space than vertical. - All a…

I have a theory that the people who used the bar on the side and the people who turned the user metrics off are the same people (myself included). But I’m not sure how I feel about the results. In any case I hope shells like litestep make a comeback as a result of ever more hostile ui decisions, either that or everyone jumps ship entirely to put energy into making something else great.

The problem is that Windows with all its warts now is still far ahead of the competition in that department (desktop GUI). Whether that's due to monopoly or being actually better, it doesn't matter. The fact is competition is almost non-existent.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#99

Post by wolpoli »

Windows 11 looks great in screenshots, but when I actually try to use it, it was terrible.

I tried to move a file in Explorer using the context menu and I couldn't confidently tell Cut/Copy/Rename icons apart because they are just abstract lines that represents the file operation.

I started looking at ways to get the original Context Menu back, and then I just decided to rollback to Windows 10.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#100

Post by kitkat_new »

userbinator wrote: post #67
sbierwagen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The UI inconsistencies are one thing (that you would hope get ironed out over time) Windows 8 was released ten years ago. All the old-style control panel dialogs are still with us. Regedit will never get ported to the new UI toolkit.

One hopes it never will, because everything post-Win32 seems to be much worse. UWP (what is used for the new Control Panel/"Settings") is particularly frustrating. ...which is very strange that MS seems to be continuing to rewrite stuff in it, when it's already started saying things like this a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19873198

whats so bad about UWP? it's way better than win32 (security, API, Windows integration)
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