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Windows needs a change in priorities

den.dev

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Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#331

Post by charles_f »

Traster wrote: post #220

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 t…

> 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.

That's exactly the problem of each iteration on Windows. New overlay on top of the old one that always misses the one thing you need, and you either get lucky and find the right menu right away to get to the old screen that gives you what you want, or you get into hell.

The new network screens are notoriously bad, and it always takes me 5 minutes to find how the hell to get to the adapters screen again.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#332

Post by freedomben »

dimgl wrote: post #287
nwallin wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All my games may randomly freeze for no discernible reason, All ? My experience is that 90% work fine, 9% have weirdness, (for instance, voices in Skyrim are out of sync with mouth movements) and 1% of them have game breaking bugs.

Yeah, I have the experience as OP. Every single game I play on Linux has random hitches for seconds at a time.

Can you keep an htop running by chance? It would be very helpful to see if CPU is maxxing out when the hitches happen, or if the swap file is growing, etc.

Any time it happens to me, it's usually low resources because of something. Most often some chrome tab (or 3) that are going crazy. I also discovered that one of the apps that I thought was using hardware acceleration actually wasn't. The CPU usage made it pretty clear that the CPU was doing a ton of work.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#333

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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…

Would be interestng to know how many non-enterprise Windows users have ever made a direct payment to Microsoft. For that segment, the company suffers from the same problem as "tech" companies. The non-enterprise Windows user is not the customer.

Identitities and personal information are a Microsoft product. Some of that personal data is acquired through Windows or other software and some is acquired through acquisitions of "tech" companies such as LinkedIn.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#334

Post by smackeyacky »

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #320
smackeyacky wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's true anymore. Gnome with two tweaks (put the min/max buttons back on the window header and move the main menu to the bottom of the screen so it works like the old win 10 task bar) and it's streets ahead of Windows 11. It's a great blessing in disguise when Microsoft decide your old laptop won't support Windows 11.

Wait, is streets ahead a real saying? I thought Pierce on Community invented it.

Dunno - I never watched community but I can't remember where I picked it up. Might be a commonwealth thing.

edit: google says "british". In fairly common use in Australia.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#335

Post by jasonjayr »

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.

My kid just graduated high school last year.

She would tell me stories about how impressed her peers were with seeing her do something as basic as copy and paste, and navigating files + folders.

There is a generation of kids that have only ever grown up on tablets + the web, so; the desktop + office app market + ecosystem is ripe for disruption.

Maybe it's done right this time, and not married to a single browser version(ha) or platform runtime.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#336

Post by srvmshr »

ryandrake wrote: post #297

There's been a big shift in the whole software industry from "enable what the user wants to do" over to "we want the user to do this". Back in the '90s, we would go out, talk to customers, find out their needs, gather requirements, and write software that enables them to do what they want to do. Now, in a lot of software companies, it's the opposite. Product leadership starts with "What do we want users to do?" and t…

That misguided notion of product features and integration, where the user has minimum role, started out at Apple. The standard pattern used to be talking to OEMs and discussing what users wanted from them. That review phase generated update ideas for next release and so on. Apple turned that question on its head and made it "the one last thing" show business.

We have employed a generation of PMs now who idolize Steve Jobs' mantra: "Users dont know what they want until you show it to them".

EDIT: We does not mean I am employed by Apple. It signifies the general trend for companies to enable product development by PMs

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#337

Post by Shared404 »

jart wrote: post #324
Shared404 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe many UEFI implementations allow you to replace the secure boot keys with your own. I've not done it personally as most of my machines I just disable Secure Boot, but it's an option if you know about it and buy carefully.

That's why I was used the word consumers. Rolling your own crypto will let you work around the requirement of asking Microsoft for permission to install our own operating system. But it limits the audience for your work to the technical class.

/me removes foot from mouth

I see what you mean now, I screwed up reading your first comment.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#338

Post by freedomben »

ryandrake wrote: post #297

There's been a big shift in the whole software industry from "enable what the user wants to do" over to "we want the user to do this". Back in the '90s, we would go out, talk to customers, find out their needs, gather requirements, and write software that enables them to do what they want to do. Now, in a lot of software companies, it's the opposite. Product leadership starts with "What do we want users to do?" and t…

Absolutely, although something that really grinds my gears is that there's sometimes this weird Orwellian lie that they really start to believe, that they actually are doing it "for the user." There's something deeply disturbing about mass group delusion.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#339

Post by joe_the_user »

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…

It's like being in an abusive relationship.

Indeed, another way it's like an abusive relationship is people's reluctance to leave despite all they've experienced.

I hear all the horror stories and then say "I've been using for ten years and it works well" and I get "oh, but I don't want to have to fiddle with things" (after discussions of how hard Windows is to get to do things).

Linux has glitches but Microsoft manipulates people. Maybe people stay because they think that because Windows hurts them, it cares.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#340

Post by flukus »

userbinator wrote: post #60

This menu is familiar to me because that’s what the Windows API allows you to create (as long as you are not creating it through Windows Forms.) There is no dark theme for this, but at least there are rounded corners. That is just a huge WTF. Since the very earliest versions of Windows there has always been the option of a dark (or white, or rainbow, or ...) theme, where you could adjust the colours and sizes and fon…

In practice it stopped working well long before windows 11 because so few apps were win32 based and/or because developers would explicitly override the theme. I gave it a go on Windows 7 and even apps like outlook and office wouldn't look right.

Gnome/KDE still offer proper themeing that works with proper native apps but even there you've got web browsers and electron apps that ignore it.

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