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How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?

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Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?

#131

Post by kevingadd »

petepete wrote: post #123
adql wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you're UI designer and designed the UIs launched it and all works... what else you're going to do ? Same disease that plagues GNOME, change shit for sake of changing shit, fuck users that got used to the old way, they don't matter, is new way faster ? Who knows, we don't.

It's funny how the huge silent majority get on just fine with GNOME but the vocal few act like the devs have poked them in the eye and called their mother fat.

Well, I'm used to Ubuntu updates breaking my workflow and potentially breaking some of my boot services, which is genuinely inconvenient. So I don't think those vocal few are wrong.

Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?

#132

Post by CoastalCoder »

vasqw wrote: post #95
CoastalCoder wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Windows doesn't cost money because I pirate it. I think the parent was assuming only legal options. If that's not a constraint, then food, cars, etc. are also free.

Where I live it's not illegal to pirate software for personal use. Also, taking someone's car or food deprives them of them. Making a copy of Windows doesn't make it impossible for Microsoft to keep selling it.

I guess I was confused by the word "pirate".

I only use it to mean illegal copying.

Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?

#133

Post by Beltalowda »

vasqw wrote: post #33
daemin wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So does Windows itself. If you're afraid to or don't want to pay for software then you should probably use some variant of GNU/Linux instead.

Windows doesn't cost money because I pirate it. I could pirate this program as well but it's probably going to be harder to find a clean, recent version of it.

How dare people charge money as compensation for their time! Can't they just live off sunlight like everyone else?!?!

Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?

#134

Post by boomskats »

SpacePortKnight wrote: post #126

My biggest issue with Windows 11 UI is the existence of both the control panel and the settings app. Often I don't know which setting takes precedence, for example I can create power plans from control panel and also use different power modes from the settings app.

My biggest issue with Windows 11 UI is the fact that the taskbar sometimes doesn't load the clock/icon tray, sometimes loads two taskbars one over the other (both which respond to the windows key being pressed and neither with a clock/icon tray), and frequently shows a taskbar over a maximised application window (without the maximised window knowing about it and so drawing its contents behind said taskbar, like Chrome is doing now). What it never ever does do is actually behave consistently and predictably. This is after two fresh reinstalls.

The Win 11 OS itself has actually been very solid aside from WSLg, so I could live with the UI inconsistencies highlighted in this post. However it's the taskbar UX, of all things, that kills it for me.

Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?

#135

Post by kwanbix »

digdigdag wrote: post #90

The codebase goes back to nearly 40 years. It would be more shocking if it there weren't legacy code hanging around. Windows is one of the most impressive pieces of software I have ever seen. No other platform boasts the kind of backwards compatibility that is seen in this operating system. There are shim layers on top of shim layers and the developers seem to have gone through great pains to keep the operating syste…

Windows NT, is almost 30 years old. That is the OS that the other OSes use today as a base. Unless you want to mention Windows 95, but still, "only" 32 years.

Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?

#136

Post by mike_hearn »

wadd1e wrote: post #11

I have a bit of a perfectionistic tendency to 'start over' things over and over and do them again as perfectly as possible; the Windows side of MS feels like a corporate embodiment of this habit. They've done this sort of thing with app installers(setup.exe, click once, appv, msi, msix) and UI frameworks(win32, mfc, wpf, winui 2, winui 3). It's like the teams responsible for their respective product keep starting ove…

In fairness, MSIX is very different to MSI and ClickOnce was primarily a way to bootstrap MSIs from the web.

MSI (long since deprecated) is essentially an ad-hoc relational database serialized to a file with embedded blobs that tells a generic engine how to install files and update the registry. It was written for Office in the 90s and was therefore dominated by the retail model of physically shipping CDs.

MSIX is a totally different beast. It's more like a package for Linux. The format is a signed zip file with some embedded XML files. One of them is a "block map", which is basically an index into the zip data by chunk hash. Packages are installed to immutable directories, which lets Windows optimize out the download of data it already has on disk by copying from other packages or even just hard linking files together. Delta updates thus come for free (albeit not as powerful as diff based schemes when inserting data into the middle of a file). Another XML file declares how the app should be integrated into the OS. The old MSI/EXE model of manually patching and unpatching the registry and filesystem to do integration is gone here; for example, if you want to register a CLI command then that's an XML tag, if you want a file association or URL handler, that's a bit more XML. Windows takes care of wiring everything up and removing it on uninstall.

Most importantly, MSIX takes care of online updates. MSI never did this. You can register a URL for a package that points to yet another XML file, and Windows will download deltas and apply them in the background even if the app isn't running (a la Chrome).

So Microsoft's packaging tech hasn't churned that much. There were CABs from the Win3.1 days, then later MSI from the late 90s, and starting in Windows 10-ish timeframe MSIX. All of these are very different technologies.

One of the nice things about MSIX is that it's feasible to create them from other platforms, because although Microsoft's tools are Windows specific the format is simple enough to reimplement. Not simple - the way they compute the block map and signature data effectively requires you to write your own ZIP library to create them - but it can be done and that's why the new Conveyor tool [1] is able to create Windows self-updating desktop apps from Linux and macOS. If you have a pre-compiled runtime like Electron or the JVM then you can push out updates with one command from your Mac/Linux dev laptop, it's no harder than publishing a static website by rendering Markdown to HTML, and that makes it feasible to develop quick lightweight desktop apps in a convenient manner. With the old MSI or InstallShield tech it would have been much harder to create a cross platform tool like Conveyor.

[1] https://hydraulic.software/ (it can also do Linux and macOS apps from Windows, but those are a bit easier)

Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?

#137

Post by piyush_soni »

kzrdude wrote: post #127
piyush_soni wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not from "just my expectations". I can understand that things work differently in different OSs, and having the same expectations from it won't be correct. There are also many on the internet who defend this design choice of giving no 'Cut' option for files saying "it is more natural/intuitive this way for how humans think", well, then you should not give 'Cut/Paste' even in your built-in Text Editor just to…

I'm no impartial judge for these things, but the expectations are learned and I don't know how we can judge this objectively. I think the choice of what to do with the return key is pretty arbitrary. For a declaration of my own bias, as a kid I was put in front of macs, so it impressed me during important years (8-15 years old). I don't use any macs nowadays. I use file-cutting-enabled linux systems. With this backgr…

Forget about the 'return' key. My point is, for an operation one potentially does a hundred times a day (arguably the *most* common operation you can do in a File Explorer!), it should have required a single key press, I'm pretty fine with it being any other key. (However, 'return' key has a significant size so easy to hit anytime from anywhere without needing a lot of attention or looking at the keyboard, so that's just a good candidate IMO, and keys like 'delete' won't be a good choice for it ;) )

Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?

#138

Post by mihaaly »

KronisLV wrote: post #57
mihaaly wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am getting very repetitive here but my first addition to your good list is the taskbar. (and not the center alignment as default - mimicking macOS -, not at all, that's marginal and still can be reverted).

As far as I know, you can't have a vertical taskbar in Windows 11 either, which is unfortunate for those with widescreen monitors that like vertical screen space to be used efficiently (e.g. seeing more lines of code, but being able to switch windows easily as well).

I know so, too.

Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?

#139

Post by yourusername »

phpisthebest wrote: post #85
fest wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like Windows is heading towards Linux in this matter- having to know weird commands to get things done effectively. I only use Windows occasionally, but when I have to set up a printer (shared from another computer) or file sharing, I often have to resort to either creating obscure registry entries based on random internet tutorials or use command line to figure out what exactly the GUI wizard means by "the…

Windows is heading towards linux in that most of the "new" settings app is calling powershell under the hood. Just like in the linux where all GUI's are more or less just wrappers around command line utilities or have 1:1 cmd line alternatives, Windows is becoming powershell first then GUI. Where before ALOT of functionality was only accessible from the GUI

But then sometimes powershell is just a wrapper around WMI.

Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?

#140

Post by sph »

petepete wrote: post #123
adql wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you're UI designer and designed the UIs launched it and all works... what else you're going to do ? Same disease that plagues GNOME, change shit for sake of changing shit, fuck users that got used to the old way, they don't matter, is new way faster ? Who knows, we don't.

It's funny how the huge silent majority get on just fine with GNOME but the vocal few act like the devs have poked them in the eye and called their mother fat.

And they are really angry about it!

I use GNOME, it's not great, but some people really hate it, go out of their way to tell everybody how pissed they are at it and that GNOME is the worst thing to have ever happened to the Linux world. I guess complaining about GNOME has become part of their identity, a trait shared by the vocal systemd haters that just won't shut up about it.

Many Linux users haven't gone past the "it's cool to hate" teenage phase. Goes hand in hand with the obnoxious elitism and anime avatars.

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