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Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

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Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#131

Post by 0___0 »

pastrami_panda wrote: post #17

Honestly Windows 11 is getting better all the time. It's much cleaner and less cluttered compared to 10 as well. It's not perfect of course, but it's the best one so far imo, and it keeps getting better. I really like the new way to connect and manage Bluetooth devices from the taskbar that was recently added. But then again, it's Windows, so when you look underneath the shiny new surface and realize e.g there's no w…

Actually, the "seconds feature" is coming back. https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2022/11/18/announc...

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#132

Post by wlesieutre »

midoridensha wrote: post #89
wlesieutre wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Windows 8 was pretty good at the time, in hindsight because I had a Surface Pro and that was the computer that it was entirely designed for. Their three-column splitscreen layout was neat, if you could look past only having about 5 of the newfangled-touchscreen-UI-apps worth installing in the entire store. Or if you treated the OS as mostly being a OneNote launcher. These days I'm inclined to agree with you…

Why does customer goodwill matter at all? Even if they make everyone absolutely hate using Windows, what are customers going to do, switch to a different OS? Decades of experience has shown that people will whine and complain endlessly about Windows, that this is the last straw, and how they're going to switch to Linux "real soon now", and they never do.

These days? They won’t lose all their business users immediately, but the shitty $300 laptops with 15” 1366x768 displays are being chipped away at by iPads and Chromebooks, and the less shitty laptops could mostly be replaced by a MacBook Air which is a frighteningly capable computer. I do think making their OS worse is accelerating this.

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#133

Post by devmor »

vetinari wrote: post #126
devmor wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The terminal app and functional WSL are both available in Windows 10, though. 11 didn't add either of those.

In 11, the terminal app can be set as default console app, so you won't see conhost.exe, ever. That's not possible in 10.

That's a very marginal improvement, since the only time you'd see conhost in 10 now is when a program explicitly launches it.

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#134

Post by nathanaldensr »

drewcoo wrote: post #98
jiggawatts wrote: post #82

The biggest travesty IMHO is the updated Notepad that was rewritten using the modern Win UI. It now takes 2 seconds to start on an 8-core computer with a PCIe 4 NVMe SSD. Oh, and a tab indent and four spaces are almost… but not identically aligned. They’re like… one or two pixels off. With a fixed width font! This is just sad: https://paste.pics/aacb91eda1bfb46f968bed2004ad2328 Notepad can also no longer open large t…

Notepad used to really just be a Windows edit control. And I could swear RaymondC owned it at some point.

Yep, it was just a barest-bones user32.dll API app--essentially a demo.

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#135

Post by vetinari »

devmor wrote: post #133
vetinari wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 11, the terminal app can be set as default console app, so you won't see conhost.exe, ever. That's not possible in 10.

That's a very marginal improvement, since the only time you'd see conhost in 10 now is when a program explicitly launches it.

and when you launch any random .bat file.

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#136

Post by hyperman1 »

emodendroket wrote: post #77
hyperman1 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I consider 2000 the version where windows peaked. They did add some good things since then, but did more damage than good in total. So as we differ this clearly in opinion: What makes you appreciate the windows UI more today?

Adding a search to the start menu is huge and completely changed how I use it -- I almost never do anything besides hit the Windows key and start typing a search query. Besides that, the way nested menus worked was frustrating and I'd frequently waste time doing things I didn't intend trying to navigate them.

That explains it. I use win+R (the hotkey for run) the same way since I think win95.

When I search the start menu, it does the weirdest things, e.g searching notepad via bing instead of starting it, or preferring the uninstaller above the real program. So I learned that the start menu is basically broken for search, and became harder to use as a menu. I mostly abandoned it.

Meanwhile, the gui widgets, built in windows and control panels became much worse and dumbed down. It pretends to be a helpfull assistant, but behaves more like an arrogant drunk. I want to do some work on the machine, not be told about some experience it really wants to shove in my face.

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#137

Post by fuzzfactor »

orthoxerox wrote: post #86
svnpenn wrote: post #6

I work in IT. The Windows 10/11 "settings" are a hole pile of shit. It seems like Microsoft almost purposefully took the 10 things you would most often use, and nested them so deep that you cant even memorize how to find them anymore. So you get forced into using the god awful search, which returns results FROM THE GOD DAMN INTERNET. If I am in Windows setting, or hell even on just the normal Start Menu, I DON'T WANT…

> The Windows 10/11 "settings" are a hole pile of shit. Hear, hear. Every time I want to do something with my networks, I have to guess which settings window I need. Win 10 settings window? Network and Sharing Center? Change adapter settings, aka Network Connections? Hyper-V Manager? Wrong! If you want to make your Hyper-V virtual Ethernet switch a private network, you have to bust out PowerShell!

In Windows 10 it took a few versions before the Settings UI would agree with the underlying Control Panel for ethernet IP address.

For quite some time when you set a fixed IP in the Contol Panel that's still what you got, but in Settings it still indicated DHCP.

Eventually they got it right in Windows 10.

But it's defective again in Windows 11.

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#138

Post by aliswe »

tinco wrote: post #85
jiggawatts wrote: post #82

The biggest travesty IMHO is the updated Notepad that was rewritten using the modern Win UI. It now takes 2 seconds to start on an 8-core computer with a PCIe 4 NVMe SSD. Oh, and a tab indent and four spaces are almost… but not identically aligned. They’re like… one or two pixels off. With a fixed width font! This is just sad: https://paste.pics/aacb91eda1bfb46f968bed2004ad2328 Notepad can also no longer open large t…

4 spaces and tab not being perfectly aligned sounds like a feature, not a bug to me. In what scenario would you want them to be aligned? Surely any scenario would be improper use? 100% agree with the rest of course, it's always been a shock to me how little love the essential tooling gets in Windows. You'd think with all the budgets and the fat salaries they'd simply have a competent engineer or two on every (categor…

Notepad uses a monospace font though. it should align.

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#139

Post by kryogen1c »

jiggawatts wrote: post #82

The biggest travesty IMHO is the updated Notepad that was rewritten using the modern Win UI. It now takes 2 seconds to start on an 8-core computer with a PCIe 4 NVMe SSD. Oh, and a tab indent and four spaces are almost… but not identically aligned. They’re like… one or two pixels off. With a fixed width font! This is just sad: https://paste.pics/aacb91eda1bfb46f968bed2004ad2328 Notepad can also no longer open large t…

> It now takes 2 seconds to start on an 8-core computer with a PCIe 4 NVMe SSD.

The same is true of the snipping tool, which I find truly astounding.

Microsoft is really staying on track for alternating good and bad OSes.

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#140

Post by emodendroket »

hyperman1 wrote: post #136
emodendroket wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding a search to the start menu is huge and completely changed how I use it -- I almost never do anything besides hit the Windows key and start typing a search query. Besides that, the way nested menus worked was frustrating and I'd frequently waste time doing things I didn't intend trying to navigate them.

That explains it. I use win+R (the hotkey for run) the same way since I think win95. When I search the start menu, it does the weirdest things, e.g searching notepad via bing instead of starting it, or preferring the uninstaller above the real program. So I learned that the start menu is basically broken for search, and became harder to use as a menu. I mostly abandoned it. Meanwhile, the gui widgets, built in window…

Well, the difference is Windows + R I would need an exact command and the search bar I don't. I share some of your frustrations about the relevance of the top result but still, partial matches are important to me.
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