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Windows needs a change in priorities

den.dev

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Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#511

Post by DrBazza »

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.

I don't know if it started with Ballmer, but they do care, but it is just about sales, and making money. It's not as if selling and making money is antithetical to making good software either.

It's always the same in the IT industry. The "non technical" managers are invariably higher in the org chart than developers and they have no concept of what people actually want, and make disastrously poor decisions. Falling sales... improve product, increase the price, or introduce ads?

I haven't booted Windows at home for close to 3 years. KDE on Ubuntu is rock solid for me, all the peripherals work, powers both my screens, has all the software I need.

And best of all, it's still 100% offline and I don't have to sign into anyone's "cloud".

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#512

Post by robertlagrant »

> After all, what else are you going to do if you need to run Photoshop or Premiere for your work - switch to Linux? Good luck with that.

I now believe that you can't like Windows because of exactly this. Linux gives you choice, and if someone wants to create a competitor OS from the Linux kernel (or even from another OS) they can. That is incredibly healthy and sustainable.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#513

Post by 1_player »

holyyikes wrote: post #447
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.

Quoted post unavailable.

I play the latest games on my high-end GPU I sold a kidney for, watch 4K movies, use a Sony DS4 gamepad via Bluetooth, with two 4K monitors at 200% scaling and an external USB audio interface with standalone microphone and automated compression, equalization and noise cancellation setup.

You were saying?

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#514

Post by pjmlp »

emptysongglass wrote: post #457
pjmlp wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all, showing that it isn't the walk in the part that gets sold even when buying hardware that is shipping with Linux in the box, and far from what most people get at best buy and friends with other desktop OSes. It is always the other people's fault that Linux doesn't quite work, but "my system works just perfectly", when in reality keeps being the same hit and miss as always.

No, it's not your fault and that's not what I'm saying. I also think people often fall victim to selective amnesia for what doesn't work well on their Windows or macOS machines. Off-hand I can recount an Xbox app that will fully freeze my system often enough to be annoying and a macOS work machine that would completely freeze when waking up from deep sleep while docked to my monitor. What I am saying is that most peo…

Both are right and both are wrong, that is the whole point with Linux Desktop since forever.

My anecdotes are also based on hardware bought with Linux pre-installed on them.

While System76 and Tuxedo are good options for technical users, the best buy audience will never get to them, at very best they will buy an Android or ChromeOS based device.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#515

Post by DrBazza »

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…

> 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.

There's the challenge.

Who cared about "hardware"? Jony Ive and Jobs perhaps?

Who cares about OS performance? Linus Torvalds. I'm sure there are MS insiders who we don't know.

Who cares about the desktop? .....

The funny thing is the desktop was a solved problem with the mother-of-all-demos, and everything else is sugar on top, and yet there has to be this continual awful rebranding. Ok we went from VGA, to HD, to 4k HDR, but the underlying design and UI doesn't have to change so poorly each time.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#516

Post by robertlagrant »

DrBazza wrote: post #511
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. I don't know if it started with Ballmer, but they do care, but it is just about sales, and making money. It's not as if selling and making money is antithetical to making good software either. It's always the same in the IT industry. The "non technical" managers are invariably higher in the org chart than developers and they have no concept of wh…

Making money and caring about users are related, but there's definitely a difference between making a good product that people would like to use, and trying to make money. The latter may well make you rich, but it may make your product much worse, which you shore up with lots of salespeople and complex pricing schemes and dealmaking to keep people locked in.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#517

Post by rkagerer »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #66
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…

Looks like switching to linux when win 7 support ended was the right move. All my games may randomly freeze for no discernible reason, but at least I don't have to deal with that BS.

Stayed on Win7 in hopes MS would get their sh*t figured out by now. Looks increasingly like my next PC will need to be Linux and some VM's.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#518

Post by Const-me »

Good article, one remark, still.

> breaking from the legacy is hard for the sake of backwards compatibility

Generally yes, but in case of Windows the hard part of the problem is already solved. I think it was just the wrong priorities. Specifically, Windows SDK could do following things to enable new styles/controls/behavior:

1. Require new apps to call an API to switch to new stuff, like InitCommonControlsEx

2. Require new apps to include an XML manifest with some flag or version number, like they did with high DPI support

3. A nuclear option — implement new userland, write new apps against that one; NT kernel supports multiple subsystems at the same time, Win32 is one of them.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#519

Post by jcelerier »

Const-me wrote: post #518

Good article, one remark, still. > breaking from the legacy is hard for the sake of backwards compatibility Generally yes, but in case of Windows the hard part of the problem is already solved. I think it was just the wrong priorities. Specifically, Windows SDK could do following things to enable new styles/controls/behavior: 1. Require new apps to call an API to switch to new stuff, like InitCommonControlsEx 2. Requ…

isn't all of this what they tried with UWP and WinRT ? It utterly failed. People want their useful win32 apps. Those are the only reason I boot on that OS once in a while.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#520

Post by wanda »

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…

> no side taskbar

This is literally the first thing I do on a fresh install. What the hell were they thinking

> start menu further ruined

but whyyyyyyyyyyyy

I honestly never had a problem with Microsoft Windows over its UI decisions until Windows 8.

Windows up to and including Windows 7 were actually ok, because you could put the start menu on the side, switch to classic UI, turn off the graphical embellishments that your shit laptop didn't like, and so on.

Windows 8 became very tabletified, but with options to switch to classic UI, and Windows 10 is the same but arguably a bit more bizarre.

Neither UI was really consistent or knew what it wanted to be, and worst of all, the user can't decide what it should be.

But whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

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