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Windows needs a change in priorities

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Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#531

Post by Const-me »

jcelerier wrote: post #519
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.

UWP/WinRT was close to the nuclear option. I think the main reason it failed is their app store. They should have allowed to publish these new apps with SetupSomething.exe and I think developers would eventually switch.

A good example of that option is the way they did Linux support in WSL1. Not exactly a new subsystem but technically pretty close. They could do something like that only with GUI, and not based on Linux.

BTW, I still use WSL1 every day. Too bad it’s deprecated, WSL2 is VM based, borderline useless for me.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#532

Post by hef19898 »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #449
chillwaves wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you just make a new local admin account and delete all traces of the other account, including in the registry?

The word “just” is doing some heavy lifting there…

So heavy I abandoned and went for a clean install and new Win10 license. Turned it was faster and easier.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#533

Post by sgjohnson »

bruce511 wrote: post #357
sgjohnson wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's a pretty big thing. I'm still using programs daily that I acquired in the 90's,some of which was last updated in the 90s. Updating the OS is one thing, there will be change, and none of us likes change, but it doesn't cascade down to having to change every detail of my work flow. So maybe it's the only thing Windows has, but for me anyway it's a pretty big "only".

> That's a pretty big thing.

It's also the bane of its existence, because it means that they can NEVER retire anything, because by doing so they would break backwards compatability.

And that's actually how we ended up here. They can never get rid of even Win16 GUI (let alone Win32) because it would break shit written for Windows 3.1 (yes, there are still some dialogs in Windows 11 that use Windows 3.1 file select dialog, namely the ODBC Data Source Administrator (32-bit)[0].

So they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Win32 isn't being used for anything they are making now, but it's used by other people, and more importantly it's used by all the old apps.

So now they have to justify ETERNAL support for an essentially deprecated API. Which they obviously aren't doing, which is why we're here.

> I'm still using programs daily that I acquired in the 90's,some of which was last updated in the 90s.

Unless they are extremely domain specific, surely there are modern alternatives?

[0] https://i.imgur.com/MrvLCSr.png

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#535

Post by sleepycatgirl »

pndy wrote: post #379
ficiek wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Linux still barely works in 2022 I have had zero problem running linux as my daily driver for the last 10 years, care to explain your comment? The only problem that I have is that video games don't always work because the developers don't care.

Not the parent comment but I'm getting random freezes on two different machines with different guts; sometimes system resumes and sometimes it requires a hard reset. Doesn't matter if its Manjaro or Linux Mint or Fedora, or which kernel I'm using. My GPU is no longer supported and I couldn't revert to last working Nvidia drivers in Manjaro because things were changed . Not sure how the open source version is capable…

I can see 3 possible things there 1) Nvidia being Nvidia If both PCs have Nvidia... Back when I had Nvidia, I had exactly same problem. Random freezes, no matter which distro/kernel, sometimes needed reset. 2) RAM issue As much as its unlikely on both machines, testing RAM doesn't hurt 3) Hard drive degradation Similar results as in 1), but buying new disk solved the issue.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#536

Post by selfhifive »

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?

Windows with i5 or less plus HDD with about a year of use (which leads to bloat) is painfully slow.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#537

Post by YPPH »

mulmen wrote: post #477
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…

The current MacOS desktop environment is, generously, a dumpster fire. But it’s also miles ahead of anything else on the market. The last decade of desktop environments feels like a march backwards, or perhaps even vertical, into some kind of alternate reality where the UI is designed to get in the way instead of enable. Modern desktop environments are a painful death by a thousand cuts. This is a rant but a desktop…

All I want is macOS with window snapping and a maximise button. Their absence makes shifting from Windows very difficult. I can't understand why these basic features have not been added, yet the OS receives changes that, as you rightly point out, tend to defile the user experience.

I can't understand why people would want to make windows full screen in ordinary situations. It seems to be something I would only want to do on rare occasions, given that you lose quick access to the menu bar.

Magnet/Rectangle are third-party fixes for the former. But it's a basic function that should be built into the OS.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#538

Post by cyxxon »

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…

Or they do have an idea what the users want, but it is still bad... at my job, the non-technical managers bought the SAP marketing koolaid, promised our internal users the cool new stuff they were going to get with the new software, and we in the IT just want to scream and say, no, you can't get that, that's not supported, or will take a year to build because we would have to revamp almost everything ourselves... and, yes, all because at SAP no one knows what users need. We have had several rounds with SAP PMs already were they basically said "huh, that's interesting, that's how you work with the software? We need to discuss this internally." Well... good thing you didn't ask before launching the new version then.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#539

Post by hulitu »

joe_the_user wrote: post #339
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 mani…

A lot of people stay because it is required by the school or the employer.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#540

Post by DeathArrow »

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…

>What are some specific issues?

Hardware support.

Broken UI experience.

Poorly designed subsystems. See PulseAudio.

Cognitive overload. Thousands of distros with tens of desktop environments using different toolkits. Each desktop environment has its own suite of software. So instead of having a solid set of great working apps there are tons of poorly made apps.

If you need to use Visual Studio, Photoshop, Lightroom, 3d max, Autocad, Premiere Pro, Ableton Live, Mathcad etc., you are out of luck.

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