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

Windows needs a change in priorities

den.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 884 posts

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#211

Post by GekkePrutser »

skoskie wrote: post #139
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…

Add MacOS to the list. The continued crippling of the OS for power users keeps pushing us toward the iOS experience, and it’s killing me. I can’t see details of my own log files for privacy reasons. The new Finder design is just awful and accomplished nothing for all the change. Now I learn I can’t make hardlinks for directories on APFS. The list goes on.

Yes, I moved away too. So much dumbing down, so many things changed just for the sake of it. And of course no settings to revert it. Eventually it was just too annoying to upgrade.

A lot of it is security hardening but the problem is I have to give all control to Apple. There is no way for me to change anything in the read only OS part without the whole rigmarole of booting into recovery mode and blessing my changes with every update. There should be a way I can sign my own changes. It's the Apple way or the highway. And I'm running into more and more issues when the Apple way is just not good enough for me.

I'm really so happy with having options again with KDE. No more opinionated software for me.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#212

Post by vxNsr »

userbinator wrote: post #27
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…

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

This is the most embarrassing thing I've ever read. That thread goes on to extoll the virtues of dogfooding, and its absolutely true.

I personally believe the reason that chrome/edge/firefox and apps in general have become so resource hungry is because all the devs have been given beefy machines to allow them to compile on-device and this has lead to the devs basically ignoring the app's resource budget. The ultimate "it works on my machine" shrug. imo windows OS and browser devs should be given i3s w/4gb of ram, let them optimize their code for that experience.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#213

Post by GekkePrutser »

29athrowaway wrote: post #201
jiggawatts wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also that they "decided" that none of their core customer bases actually matter. They no longer cater to the needs of anyone . Some random examples: Enterprise -- It's cloud or the highway. You're either migrating to Azure and Microsoft 365, or stuck in dead-ends with virtually no maintenance/attention. Core products have just been left twisting in the wind. Active Directory for example has had no major featu…

The cash cow will always be Microsoft Office. That's what governments use and because of that companies use it, and because of that everyone uses it.

The cash cow is changing to be M365 and Azure now. I don't think it'll be too long till the web versions catch up and replace desktop office.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#214

Post by GekkePrutser »

the_snooze wrote: post #209
29athrowaway wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cash cow will always be Microsoft Office. That's what governments use and because of that companies use it, and because of that everyone uses it.

Bingo. All these posts that say "oh just use Linux, it's compatible!" must be from naive junior devs who never have had to to deal with external organizations (especially governments) that require you to use their Word templates and share PowerPoint slides on their Teams calls.

Teams works on Linux now.

It's a pig of an app especially on Mac (haven't tried Linux enough to verify) but it runs.

On my Mac it takes a minute to start (fast M1 system), randomly crashes or hangs and often uses more than half my memory. But it is supported :)

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#215

Post by sgjohnson »

wildrhythms wrote: post #172
Sakos wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The difference is that Mac OS actually looks somewhat consistent and has kept much of its familiar paradigms (Spotlight, System Preferences, the menubar, context menus...) the same over the past decade. Microsoft seems to have lifted the aesthetics of Mac OS without any of the UX.

And more importantly, when Apple changes some design guidelines, provided you’re using the Cocoa API (which you likely are, if you’re developing for macOS natively), your application will look consistent with the rest of the OS.

Yes, Apple doesn’t care about backwards compatability, so you might have to update your application so that it runs on the latest macOS version, but there’s no way around it.

You either have a gazillion competing frontend APIs to maintain compatability with shit that was written for Windows 3.1, or you don’t care about any of that and end up with almost entirely consistent visual styles across the entire OS.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#216

Post by GekkePrutser »

hackerfromthefu wrote: post #81
Pasorrijer wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd have to say that, today, all of those can be done in the browser except Excel. File comparison, hard applications, legacy code, can be compiled to WASM and run quite well in the browser. The pieces are in place to do it, they just need polishing and tuning to make it ubiquitous. Even Excel could be compiled like this but again MS wants to own you and pin you over a barrel while extracting everything they can from…

OneNote is still a pig in the browser. Every day it has to reload and loses track of all the folders in the notebook so I have to reload them all again.

Oh and it's soooo slow :(

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#217

Post by sgjohnson »

civilized wrote: post #185
wildrhythms wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that Mac OS actually looks somewhat consistent and has kept much of its familiar paradigms (Spotlight, System Preferences, the menubar, context menus...) the same over the past decade. Microsoft seems to have lifted the aesthetics of Mac OS without any of the UX.

OS X has been great for the past decade. I won't say the same for MacBooks, where there have been some pretty horrible decisions (butterfly keyboard, touch bar), but OS X has kept humming along, very usable, very productive. A few issues with Spotlight and some easily removed nags to use crap like iCloud is the worst I can say.

> butterfly keyboard, touch bar And they admitted their mistake and removed both of these abominations.

They killed the butterfly keyboard in 2019 (almost 4 years after it was introduced), and they killed the touch bar last year.

Yes, it took them some time, but they sorted these things out.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#218

Post by sgjohnson »

grishka wrote: post #150
xattt wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that by 2030, there will be a custom UI framework for every developer out there? Beat that, Apple!

Isn't Apple's SwiftUI just a unified layer on top of AppKit/UIKit/WatchKit depending on the platform though?

Yes, although there’s also Cocoa.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#219

Post by moltke »

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.

Reason driven decision making is better than data driven decision making.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#220

Post by Traster »

The problem I have with windows is two-fold. Firstly, I came to windows before Vista. So I know how powerful the old windows settings/features were. I knew exactly where to access everything I wanted. I have a feeling this is probably the same for many people from all sorts of backgrounds (Personally, I experimented with Apple - Hello touchbar!). But the second issue is the new damn UIs aren't exhasutive! THey're a thin layer on top of the acutal data, which don't tell you what you actually need, and often revert you back to the old UI. If you're going to ship a product that refers me back to the old UI for half the stuff I'm interested in... just don't ship the new UI. It's not worth the time.

It's been 15 years since Vista and this hasn't been fixed. It's difficult to find people to actually just deliver on basic stuff apparently. This is why the commandline works. Becuase if all else fails there is 1 interface. I don't think this is unfixable but it requires a lot of gruntwork.

Post reply on HN