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Windows needs a change in priorities

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Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#811

Post by anderspitman »

garaetjjte wrote: post #788
derac wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, wsl 2 lets you interact with the Windows filesystem. I believe you can launch exes in wsl1, but not 2. However, I've never needed to do that. It's definitely not groundbreaking, but it is convenient. Using it with the new terminal app is nice. It will load and unload the ram for the instance immediately whenever you pop open a linux shell. IMO opening and closing virtualbox/hyper-v takes longer and is cl…

WSL2 filesystem access is just ordinary 9p mount.

It seems like 9p is the defacto standard for this. With all the network filesystems available, anyone know why that's the case? I personally don't have any experience with 9p.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#812

Post by MonaroVXR »

Zopieux wrote: post #808
hutzlibu wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If I have to fight with a system more than I fight with linux, with it's drivers issues and the problems that I can't fix without googling as I'm not intimate with the SO, what's the point?" Linux with universal good drivers, is probably what most of us would want and need. (except for the lucky few, who never had an issue)

Are you complaining about missing drivers in Linux? For the life of me, I never had to install any particular driver since like 2010 on both laptops and workstations. Not even for printers. Specialized audio/video equipment? Probably, and of course the vendor will only provide them for Windows.

HP Envy x360 2021 AMD Ryzen 5700U

Needs a touchpad driver on both Fedora and Pop?_OS, I'm not sure if this is still true or not. I don't really care, since I can fix this.

I use all the major operating systems.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#813

Post by joe_the_user »

digisign wrote: post #725
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don't necessarily disagree with the initial statement, I will say that Linux Desktop has its own kind of abusive relationship, especially if you have to deal with certain parts of the community. GNOME in particular is pretty user-hostile in both design and in its community interactions, and while you can use a different DE GNOME is the default for the most popular and recommended distributions. Personally I'v…

Agreed on your first paragraph. I use Mate which allows me to sidestep ~80% of gnome's abuse, however some still leaks in through GTK, I think. Re the second, I haven't built an app from source since about 2005? or so.

Yeah, I should have said Ubuntu Mate. It solves most problems.

I've had to build apps from source - but these were free extras, not things I needed for basic functionality.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#814

Post by goosedragons »

mulmen wrote: post #564
YPPH wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but if I want to use one app on my screen and still have access to the menu bar, it means awkwardly dragging the window around to fill gaps. In Windows, it's one click. Similarly, if I want two apps side by side, it's even more awkward. Ideally I would want to avoid wasting pixels by having unfilled areas, so it's a lot of finnicky dragging to make sure they align up. In Windows, it requires two clicks.

Double click the window header. It will fill the space below the menu bar. Double click again and it will return to the previous size. Agreed snapping would be nice. Windows does this well out of the box. MacOS leaves way too much quality of life to third party apps.

It won't necessarily. Double clicking the window header is the green button of yore where apps maximize to the space they feel they need which may or may not be the space below the menu bar. Chrome will fill the space but Safari will just do website width + length.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#815

Post by schmuelio »

dehrmann wrote: post #715
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.

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.

I get your point and I'd raise you the suite of Microsoft products:

- Word, PowerPoint, Excel, all one style - Teams, different style - Notepad, different style - Paint, different style

That's just within the MS ecosystem, leave that ecosystem and you rapidly find the same style mess that you get on Linux. It's basically due to the many different GUI frameworks, not the OS itself, hell MS supplies a whole list of frameworks that look different from each other.

Even MacOS/iOS which are _really_ good at having a cohesive UI style suffer from this problem.

I'd argue that if this is a valid complaint with Linux DEs (be it GNOME/KDE/what have you) then it's an equally valid complaint for Windows.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#816

Post by joe_the_user »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #639
joe_the_user wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While I don't necessarily disagree with the initial statement, I will say that Linux Desktop has its own kind of abusive relationship, especially if you have to deal with certain parts of the community. GNOME in particular is pretty user-hostile in both design and in its community interactions, and while you can use a different DE GNOME is the default for the most popular and recommended distributions. Personally I'v…

While I don't necessarily disagree with the initial statement, I will say that Linux Desktop has its own kind of abusive relationship, especially if you have to deal with certain parts of the community.

As mentioned, I've been using Linux for ten years as my only system and I installed at time over the twenty years before that. At worst, twenty years ago, I would contact people and got "I ignore your bug 'cause you don't have the very latest thing everywhere". In my current experience, I've never had to "talk" to anyone. It's not without hiccups but it's not "abusive" in the sense of Windows 'cause no one is fixing one thing to break another or gaslighting you about bugs.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#817

Post by goosedragons »

ramijames wrote: post #405
shp0ngle wrote: post #238

Well, what are you going to do. Not use Windows? Linux still barely works in 2022 (and if one distro will become really popular, with a big investment of money like Ubuntu did once, they will ad ads, like Ubuntu added Amazon), and MacOS works just on Apple HW (and has ads for Apple services baked-in too, just less obnoxious). You can use ChromeOS! Which is literally ad tech. Pick your poison.

Honestly, I picked my poison in 2010 or so: MacOS. You're right that it does have Apple services baked in, and that it is limited to Apple's hardware. To the former: I never use them and they literally never push themselves on me. To the latter: Apple's hardware is far and away the most pleasant to use. Every windows machine I've used in the last decade (bought an XPS 13 in 2019 out of necessity) is just wonky. Feels…

I mean Apple put a whole stupid ARM chip in my laptop to interface with the keyboard and trackpad (among other things). This has the "fun" benefit of essentially killing support for non-blessed OSs because who wants to use a laptop that doesn't have a functional built-in keyboard and mouse? Oh and I've even had Bridge OS crash a few times knocking out the keyboard and mouse in macOS forcing me to restart.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#818

Post by throwaway684936 »

TonyTrapp wrote: post #507
interstice wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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", n…

I still miss Firefox's "View Image" context menu option. There is no suitable replacement. No, I do not want to open the image in a new tab. No, I do not want to use some janky extension that re-implements it but places the option at the very bottom of the context menu.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#819

Post by throwaway684936 »

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?

My fairly high-end system with NVMe drives is absurdly slow at booting to my minimal Arch Linux installation's (tty) login screen. And I'm not some anti-systemd evangelist, but it certainly doesn't seem to be helping matters. Once the kernel starts being loaded, it shouldn't take more than a couple more seconds to get to login.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#820

Post by roryokane »

> The context menu in File Explorer now gates some of the most useful options behind another extra click […] What’s the point of these changes?

For that specific change, the Windows Developer Blog post “Extending the Context Menu and Share Dialog in Windows 11” (https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/07/19/extend...) hints at the designers’ reasons.

I haven’t switched to Windows 11 due to the many other complaints I’ve heard, but based on various statements in that post I can imagine good reasons for changing the context menu:

# Saving menu navigation time

Having a long menu that contains every option is not free: it requires more time and effort from the user when they locate and click on the common items they use. Depending on how often the prioritized items are clicked and how big the penalty is for, the tradeoff could be worth it.

I don’t have the data on how much menu navigation time a smaller menu saves in the long term, but since Microsoft forces telemetry on users, hopefully they did at least collect such data while they evaluated the new design.

# Encouraging API upgrades

This change also encourages app developers to upgrade their context menu extensions to the latest API by “punishing” them if they don’t, by making their context menu items slower to access. While it’s understandable that developers of such apps would feel annoyed at this increased pressure to upgrade, such a policy might be an effective way to helping end users by solving the last two Windows 10 context menu problems listed by the blog post. That is, this increased pressure to use a newer API might:

• increase the numbers of apps the user uses whose commands are attributable to that app

• increase the number of apps the user uses whose extensions of the context menu have a lower risk of performance and reliability issues

However, I do see the potential for this backfiring if developers of Windows apps think that Windows is requiring too much upkeep for maintaining their software on Windows to be worth it.

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