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Windows needs a change in priorities

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Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#831

Post by jiggawatts »

wolpoli wrote: post #825
jiggawatts wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Win32 is on life support. Many new features added since Vista don't work with it at all, or require complex code to enable in Win32 apps.

I got the impression that Windows used to make APIs so that others could use the same UI elements as the OS in their programs. Have they stopped doing that?

More or less... yes.

Win32 was the one and only GUI framework. If you wrote your app for Windows, it would look like Windows. This was true for Windows NT, Windows 2000, and XP.

Then Office got the Ribbon UI but they decided not to let anyone else use it. Then Vista got the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), which was a lot like HTML, but used XML and had a more powerful styling+templating system. At one point they even tried to make JavaScript Windows applications a thing over a decade before it unfortunately did become a thing (Electron).

The problem is that WPF, like HTML, allowed nearly "anything". You could style any control any way that you wanted. So WPF apps looked somewhat... random.

Worse, it turned out that WPF was just too slow for applications, to the point that Microsoft themselves almost never used it. Instead, they used incompatible bits and pieces of it with C++ so that they could have something reasonably fast. But this wasn't WPF, and didn't look the same as user apps, and wasn't even internally consistent!

Now there are something like 10+ UI frameworks from Microsoft alone, not including third-party ones that can run on Windows.

This is why the Windows 11 interface is such a mess.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#832

Post by alecmg »

fleddr wrote: post #699

As a lifelong Windows user (since 3.11), Microsoft has always sucked at Windows. It started as a single user, non-networked OS with an OK UI, followed by 25 years of duct tape. They've never had "taste". Even their attempts at modern flat design are a total disaster. Security for the longest of time was an afterthought, an entire industry was created to fill this fundamental gap. Even "internet" was an afterthought.…

Its ironic and scary how 3.11 was the last Windows with consistent

a) UI design. It was either a DOS box or a Win 3.11 style window

b) file sharing, simple and intuitive

c) integration with browsers. Browser was standalone. There was no integration.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#833

Post by catfishx »

tssva wrote: post #610
catfishx wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using auto-cpufreq or other cpu frequency scaling services can make my laptop run way longer than with windows.

I have tried tlp which includes cpu frequency scaling on numerous distributions over the last couple of years with little if any noticeable difference.

Well for me the time running on battery jumps from 2 hours to +10 hours.

On an AMD Ryzen 5 5500U

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#834

Post by pjmlp »

jerf wrote: post #711
banana_giraffe wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 foc…

Every time Microsoft does something that a couple of people aren't happy with the trumphets of "now is the year of Linux" sound everywhere, in the end the large majority of consumers and the developers that care to get money from those consumers, keep using Windows.

When XP came to be, when Vista was released and DX 10 was vista only, when Windows 8 arrived, when all the talk about WinRT started, .... now Windows 11 with these issues.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#835

Post by pjmlp »

jiggawatts wrote: post #198
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…

There's also that they "decided" that none of their core customer bases actually matter. They no longer cater to the needs of anyone . Some random examples: Enterprise -- It's cloud or the highway. You're either migrating to Azure and Microsoft 365, or stuck in dead-ends with virtually no maintenance/attention. Core products have just been left twisting in the wind. Active Directory for example has had no major featu…

Vulkan tooling is still quite poor when compared with DirectX, thanks the way Khronos always leaves to the community to do the needfull.

Hot reloading with C++ outside Visual Studio? Good luck with that if not willing to shell out some bucks for Live++.

Other frameworks are still relearning the ways of WPF and Blend tooling.

Many things make me angry how Microsoft management is dealing with them, yet the alternatives are even worse.

Only the Java ecosystem is a sound alternative to MS tooling, regardless of their current misdirection.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#836

Post by pjmlp »

jiggawatts wrote: post #831
wolpoli wrote: post #825

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got the impression that Windows used to make APIs so that others could use the same UI elements as the OS in their programs. Have they stopped doing that?

More or less... yes. Win32 was the one and only GUI framework. If you wrote your app for Windows, it would look like Windows. This was true for Windows NT, Windows 2000, and XP. Then Office got the Ribbon UI but they decided not to let anyone else use it. Then Vista got the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), which was a lot like HTML, but used XML and had a more powerful styling+templating system. At one point th…

Ribbon UI is availabe in Win32 as a COM library.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#837

Post by zuhsetaqi »

throwaway684936 wrote: post #818
TonyTrapp wrote: post #507

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) 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.

What did "View Image" do? I only know "Open Image in new Tab"

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#838

Post by tokamak-teapot »

mring33621 wrote: post #683
tokamak-teapot wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not just OneNote. They are absolutely confused, as an organisation, about accounts, data privacy and data security. I can’t, in theory, access my work’s OneDrive from my personal machines, due to a required SSO on top of Microsoft’s, and a VPN requirement. But somehow there are some of my personal files in my work’s OneDrive. I don’t know how this happened. I can’t log into our VPN as it’s machine-locked (it che…

"emails from Microsoft about an Azure Enterprise agreement" == phishing

They're really not. It's a real person at Microsoft, and they don't know how to fix it.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#839

Post by goosedragons »

hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #673
barbs wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what games do you play? Would wine and/or a virtual machine suffice?

I actually play a lot of old school games so 1) Dosbox solves a lot of them and 2) Never tried that but maybe Wine solves the rest. A list of freq games: 1) Baldur's Gate EE Trilogy (And their EE cousins) 2) Quake I (this I'm sure can be played in Linux directly) 3) Diablo 2 (Also think there is a Linux version, they even have a MacOS one) That's pretty much it, and TBH I don't really play them frequently, maybe a fe…

There's a Linux version of Baldur's Gate EE and all the other Beamdog EE titles including NWN. If you bought them on Steam or GOG you already have the Linux version. Only Icewind Dale 2 is left on Windows but they lost the source code which is why there's no EE version of that.

Diablo 2 doesn't have an official Linux version but there is a source port called OpenDiablo 2. Diablo 2 also runs well under Wine.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#840

Post by lproven »

chithanh wrote: post #755
lproven wrote: post #741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strongly agreed. WSL – both versions – are MS attempting its age-old "embrace & extend" move. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... I called it a distant relative of the NT POSIX environment and some senior MS bod disagreed and – when I said [[citation needed]] – eventually linked to a bunch of videos and stuff that say that WSL1 is a whole new translation layer and not a kernel personality…

> I called it a distant relative of the NT POSIX environment and some senior MS bod disagreed and – when I said [[citation needed]] – eventually linked to a bunch of videos and stuff that say that WSL1 is a whole new translation layer and not a kernel personality at all. As far as I understand it, WSL1 was a complete reimplementation and did not use any code from the old POSIX subsystem/SUA/Interix. In particular, SU…

Fair enough, and thanks for the insight!
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