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Windows needs a change in priorities

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Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#711

Post by jerf »

banana_giraffe wrote: post #148
gruez wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK WSL 1 isn't actively being worked on anymore, now that there's WSL 2. As for your issue with WSL 2, it runs off hyper-v, so my guess is that there's something with your BIOS/UEFI/firmware settings that's breaking it (eg. secureboot/CSM, TPM, virtualization).

You might be right about WSL 1 being dead, which is just annoying since it's useful for me. Ironically with your comment about Hyper-V: I moved to using Linux in a Hyper-V VM for now for this workflow. It's in that category of category of "ugh, not worth the time to figure out" for now, which probably means I won't bother for quite a while. Honestly, when things slow down again, I'll probably just flatten this machin…

"Honestly, when things slow down again, I'll probably just flatten this machine and install Linux. MS is kinda killing whatever inertia I had for dealing with their quirks."

In 2028, we'll be reading news articles about how the Year of Linux on the Desktop never really came, but the Year of Anything But Monetized Microsoft Windows sure did.

If I were making a list of companies and software packages that should be focusing on long term value rather than trading short term value for everyone hating your product, Windows would be a strong contender for top of the list. Microsoft may not want to depend on Windows, but throwing away so much user value for so little money is a stupid decision.

I just can't hammer on this point enough. There isn't that much money in advertising. The best advertisers in the world are looking at ~$10-20 per user per year at scale [1]. Advertising makes a lot of money because there's a lot of those users, not because they make that much per user. (That's why all the plans to "share the revenue" with the ad consumer are just hopeless. The money can't support it.) Windows ads can not necessarily jump to that level of performance right away, either. I really don't see how they could possibly be making enough money in their OS ads to make up for the goodwill they're pissing away. They're trading a money stream that still has at least a good decade in it, quite possibly more, for short term gain that isn't even all that impressive. Who is pressing for all these ads? What kind of analysis is being done internally that shows this is worth it? I find it hard to believe. Even a Windows in decline picking up licensing fees on new computer sales should be bringing in vastly more revenue than advertising possibly could. Ruining your 2025 sales for not really all that much money right now seems a very bad decision for a product coming up on 30 years old and still making lots of money.

[1]: You can do better for very targeted things like mesothelioma ads, but at scale, that's what Facebook is looking at.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#712

Post by logbiscuitswave »

I couldn't agree with many of the things stated in this article more. I really disliked Windows 8. Windows 10 was what made me move to a Mac for my next personal computer acquisition (I'm still stuck with Windows at work), but at least it grew on me after a while. I mean, I'm still not a huge fan of it but many of the rough edges got ironed out and I've gotten used to many of its quirks. Windows 11 on the other hand -- it's just so aggressively terrible that I actively dread using it. Just simple things like changing the volume, or changing the power settings on a laptop have become excruciatingly slow or require much more effort than before. In so many places text has been removed for the sake of "cleanliness" -- like in File Explorer, the Ribbon is now just a set of largely indistinguishable buttons with no labels that I'll never use. The Explorer context menu has been reduced to mostly things I don't care about and a more indistinguishable buttons I'll never use while burying the context menu things I really want behind another mouse click. (Thankfully there's a magic registry key that restores the old-style context menus.)

It's easy to point out the consistency issues -- and yeah, they are really bad, and everywhere making Windows 11 feel like an early beta, not a full fledged release. More than anything even basic stuff that's worked well for years or decades has regressed to a point where so many things are barely functional or even recognizable anymore. It's like some designer had MacOS described to them verbally and decided to redesign Windows to look similar. Unfortunately, the latest versions of MacOS aren't all that awesome either when it comes to consistency or usability. In so many ways the design decisions in Windows 11 feel like solutions in search of problems -- they certainly don't make my experience using it any better -- all they do is make me appreciate Windows 10 more than ever (never thought I'd have that sentiment). I keep hoping Windows 11 will get better but even on the latest Insider builds I see very little in the way of improvements to things I really care about so it gives me little confidence.

The article brings up a some great points about how there's no "one" UI framework and the difficulties for developers to make their applications look consistent -- and this is totally true. There's so many different UI frameworks from Microsoft with different levels of maturity, abandonment, usefulness, usability, and use. I'm a big fan of WPF and I think it's one of the best desktop UI frameworks out there -- and sadly it's largely been left to rot which is a real shame and it doesn't support many of the newer aspects of Windows without a lot of hacks. UWP is simply awful -- I swore it off after using it for one project. WinUI and MAUI have huge problems of their own and still feel beta. It makes you wonder what are you supposed to use for new projects when you're stuck with either a great framework that seems dead , or a bunch of new ones that don't feel production ready. This nearly 20 year old blog post from Joel Spolsky is just as relevant and prescient as ever: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#713

Post by the_snooze »

goosedragons wrote: post #695
the_snooze wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It "works," but not well enough for my purposes. I need to be able to share PowerPoint on Teams with my full slides visible to participants, and speaker notes visible only to me. There's no native PowerPoint for Linux, so that's a no-go.

PDFs? Unless participants need to edit the actual slides themselves what's wrong with PDFs? Most half decent PDF readers these days have a presentation mode where it goes full screen and arrow keys page through. Yes, you lose swoopy animations, sound effects and video but that's arguably a plus. And participants can read the slides on a wider range of devices with little hassle. Your speaker notes can stay with whate…

My government funding overlords require me to send them PPTXs and DOCXs. And MS Teams on Linux only supports full-screen sharing, not window-specific sharing, so I can't do presenter view on my screen and slides-only on the call.

I feel a lot of responses here are missing the point. Linux doesn't do what I need it to do with respect to the established MS Office norms I have to conform to. Linux is a bad tool for my required workflow (a workflow that isn't all that uncommon), so I keep Windows around because it's a more suitable tool for that.

I'll repeat what I said: Linux is a great tool when you're a junior individual contributor, but it sucks when you're responsible for external communications with MS Office organizations.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#714

Post by digisign »

scarface74 wrote: post #619
raxxorrax wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have long understood that security is always an argument to throw into the pot to justify their changes. Boot malware isn't really a widely spread problem in 22 and MS still pushes TPM 2.0. It is probably less about user security than control about users and machines.

This is what can happen when you turn off SIP on the Mac. You can’t trust developers to not be careless and/or malignant. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/no-it...

Poor security design. App installers should definitely be sandboxed, "sip" or not. Preventing the local admin from making any changes due to lack of that, is fixing the wrong problem. Or perhaps not in a granular enough way.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#715

Post by dehrmann »

smackeyacky wrote: post #160
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.

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.

The article mentioned all the UI generations you can find in Windows. Linux is even worse. Once you leave the menus your desktop environment provides, it becomes a design free for all. Sometimes you'll see UI styles from another environment (run Kompare in Gnome), sometimes you get ancient X UIs.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#716

Post by tonguez »

pie_flavor wrote: post #684

I am the most ardent Windows evangelist I know. I have spent so much time learning Windows's APIs and idiosyncrasies because they're just so cool. I love the APIs, I love the system, I love the software and I love the way everything Just Works. And I'm not installing this shit. It's a skin. It's Windows 10, but retvrned to rounded corners, and with a tenth of the customizability. It's an attempt to put Mac in Windows…

“I love [Windows]… I love the way everything Just Works.”

Stopped reading here.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#717

Post by dehrmann »

sgjohnson wrote: post #217
civilized wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They also spent years telling people how the butterfly keyboard were amazing, despite the feedback they got. It came off like they ignored their customers and said "we know what's best." You can do that in development, but once your customers actually get their hands on the product, it's time to listen to them.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#718

Post by trey-jones »

amarshall wrote: post #710
trey-jones wrote: post #678

Of course I agree with these confounding decisions, and I've written about it before. I must, however, point out that yes, you do in fact need an Apple account to log into your Mac device on recent versions of macOS. Not only that, but you won't be able to download any apps (free or not) without adding a credit card to your account. I found the mac setup experience to be even worse than Windows 10 (both of these done…

> I must, however, point out that yes, you do in fact need an Apple account to log into your Mac device on recent versions of macOS. This is false, at least as of macOS 12.3. However, the install process does encourage signing-in. Unlike Windows, though, it doesn’t require non-obvious shenanigans—like disconnecting from the Internet—to bypass it during the installer. Reportedly, the latest Windows 11 Insider builds d…

I guess I should be more specific about what I could and could not do. I could not download XCode without adding a credit card. I've already mentioned that it seemed broken, which it did. I spent time with support trying to figure it out. Ultimately, once I added a credit card I was able to download. Perhaps I was already acknowledging that I would have an AppleID, since the machine was expressly for iOS development.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#719

Post by bastardoperator »

banana_giraffe wrote: post #44
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…

Even stuff like WSL is loosing it's shine now for me. I've personally hit a bug on multiple computers that I can reliably repo a blue screen if I attempt to update a specific package. The github bug for this issue last had activity from MS 4 months ago. Kinda makes it hard to take it seriously if such a major blocker is treated with such low priority.

Try doing anything I/O intensive in WSL and it all falls apart. I have a 32 core machine with 128GB using nvme disks and it's getting murdered performance wise by an 8 core AWS instance with 16GB of ram on gp2 disks.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#720

Post by 6yyyyyy »

rbanffy wrote: post #632
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…

The one thing I find the most terrible is the "10 different UI conventions" thing. Dig enough and I bet you'll find a control panel or some other thing the has Windows NT 3.1 look and feel. It says a lot how low the abstraction levels must have been that it's impossible, even to Microsoft, to update the UI widgets of a long-dead Windows release without breaking something else.

Open "ODBC Data Sources" from the start menu

Click "Add..."

Click "Finish" with "Microsoft Access Driver" selected (no, you're not finished)

Click "Select..."

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