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Windows needs a change in priorities

den.dev

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Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#501

Post by thow-58d4e8b »

Silhouette wrote: post #83
rbut wrote: post #56

Talking about dark patterns, here are a couple I've noticed. In Windows, I'm very careful about NOT signing in to anything Microsoft, unless I have to. I make sure I use a local administrator account instead of a Microsoft account. Yesterday I had to open Microsoft Edge for something that would only work in Edge, and lo-and-behold, Microsoft had taken my Xbox Game Pass sign-in and applied to Edge, then informed me th…

Yesterday I had to open Microsoft Edge for something that would only work in Edge, and lo-and-behold, Microsoft had taken my Xbox Game Pass sign-in and applied to Edge, then informed me they are syncing all my browser history to their servers for my benefit.. I'm not sure how that sort of behaviour isn't a clear violation of all kinds of privacy laws in 2022.

Just because a criminal hasn't been caught and sentenced doesn't mean they didn't commit the crime

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#502

Post by DeathArrow »

sgjohnson wrote: post #210
khaledh wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In what ways is Windows desktop GUI better than macOS? The only thing Windows has going for itself is backwards compatability.

I can't speak for Windows 11 as I didn't use it, but Windows 10 feels better. macOS feels very dumbed down and Apple takes decisions instead of letting the user do it.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#503

Post by NhanH »

choward wrote: post #440
dimgl wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this argument in every thread about Linux. There's always this one magical user where everything "just works", has had 0 issues and everything's just dandy.

What are some specific issues? Most of the stuff I hear is either hardware related or some software someone used on Windows doesn't exist on Linux. For hardware issues it depends on the hardware you're using. Since most drivers aren't open source, full Linux support often comes a while after it's released. I don't use the most recent hardware and haven't had a problem where something doesn't "just work" in years. I d…

4k + 1080 monitor on nvidia gpu is very difficult to use (wayland doesn’t support nvidia until very recently, I’m not even sure if it is merged yet). X doesn’t support per monitor dpi, and fractional scaling per monitor is buggy on most distros.

Ubuntu keeps forgetting the sound devices output I set, and I have to config it every single time the machine comes back from sleep (I’m using sound via hdmi on my monitor, I’m guessing it has something to do with the monitor sleeping in different way).

And the usual, sleep/ suspend doesn’t work. There are 50% chance of my 4k monitor doesn’t come back up after sleeping, and I have to unplug and replug it in for it to work.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#504

Post by m_mueller »

DeathArrow wrote: post #494

It seems Windows releases come in series of two, one good, one bad. Windows XP, Windows Vista. Windows 7, Windows 8. Windows 10, Windows 11. After each successful release Microsoft pull a bunch of crap. Users aren't happy and they rather use the older version than upgrade to the new one. Microsoft comes to its senses, release a better version and the cycle repeats. So we should kind of wait for Windows 12.

to me it seems more like the pile stuff on top of each other, trying to make bad stuff below the surface go away after it's sufficiently plastered over. but it never is 100% complete and you can still find components even from the Win3.x era. it's just that some releases they have plastered it a bit more completely (7) and others where it's most superficial (8, 11); Vista is a special one as it brought a major new kernel version, which afaik they are still using to this day.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#505

Post by hulitu »

apetresc wrote: post #364
the_snooze wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>File comparison, hard applications, legacy code, can be compiled to WASM and run quite well in the browser. Not when you're working on proprietary/confidential/classified information. >But many/most Spreadsheets can be done in Libreoffice, or code or no/low code alternatives. Not when you're working on spreadsheets that you need to send to organizations that heavily rely on MS Office.

> Not when you're working on proprietary/confidential/classified information. Why not? The WASM approach the OP is suggesting works entirely locally, the web is simply pushing client code to your browser.

> Why not? The WASM approach the OP is suggesting works entirely locally, the web is simply pushing client code to your browser

Because "the web is simply pushing client code to your browser". Untrusted code. Which may violate the confidentiality of you document. I still don't get it why companies which deal with "confidential information" are very happy to put those documents in the cloud. But ... it is their data and they decide what to do with it.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#506

Post by DeathArrow »

donmcronald wrote: post #369
vxNsr wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> windows OS and browser devs should be given i3s w/4gb of ram And slow HDDs. The gains of going from an HDD to an SSD have been squandered. The time it takes my computer to boot to a usable desktop feels the same as the bad old days with spinning HDDs. I remember when SSDs where new and YouTubers were making videos of booting into Win7 with Office, etc. open in seconds. WTF happened?

I still boot in seconds with Windows 10 and NVMe disks.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#507

Post by TonyTrapp »

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.

> 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)

I keep telemetry enabled in Firefox in the hope that they see that I use all of the features that they later remove anyway. It seems like nobody is using metrics to prove that it's not safe to remove a feature. Or they say "oh, it's only 1% of users using that feature", not realizing how much 1% really is.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#508

Post by sph »

Joeri wrote: post #460
neltnerb wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to frequently be true that Microsoft releases a horrifying nightmare OS, polishes is up and removes hated features, and then releases a new version. It's been a bit of a pattern. Windows 8 -> Windows 10 Windows Vista -> Windows 7 and even before that: Windows Me -> Windows 2000 -> Windows XP was a pretty solid chain that shows it over three releases (personally I think XP was buggier, I don't know what the i…

Microsoft has a tick tock approach to consumer OS releases, where every other OS is “the good one”. Windows me - bad Windows xp - good Windows vista - bad Windows 7 - good Windows 8 - bad Windows 10 - good Windows 11 - bad For a bad release windows 11 is pretty good. This gives me hope that windows 12 will be their best ever. This is why it would have been smart of them to stick to windows 10 like they planned, but l…

The "good" releases are good relatively to the crap ones they've succeeded, not on their own. As if they wanted to pay for QA only every other release.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#509

Post by hulitu »

zo1 wrote: post #442
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.

Just wait till they start running those "native" programs in a VM on a server and streaming the UI to you in a browser for interaction.

Last i heard they experimented with windows running in the cloud and the user having just a kind of thin client. It is hilarious that 20 years after SUN's "The network is the computer" and some years after freedesktop's initiatives "wayland", "X is obsolete" "X on network sucks", Microsoft is coming doing just this.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#510

Post by 1_player »

apatheticonion wrote: post #471

Kinda at a loss for OS/DE at the moment. Lived on Windows for over 2 decades (completed work via a Linux VM). Windows 8 was horrid and Windows 10/11 is hostile towards user experience (etc, etc privacy, but mostly user experience). Used MacOS for half a decade after that and loved the Unix terminal and tight desktop experience but underpowered and overpriced hardware had me running a hackintosh for over half of that…

> It has some user application UX issues (like Google Chrome mouse scrolls slowly)

Try the "Chromium Wheel Scroll Smoother" extension. It's a hack, but I've managed to make scrolling as fast as Firefox is, which I much prefer.

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