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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?

#151

Post by simion314 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #121
simion314 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Windows Qt developers will put the Qt dlls in the application , not statically link. So in general you will probably be able to run an old Qt app on Linux by using Wine. Yeah, the issue is missing dependencies, the 32 bit versions, Linux Gamers complained so there still are some 32 bit packages around but not all of them. Compiling this old apps I assume will hit same issue, this time missing even more packages s…

It's not like Linux doesn't allow you to put the QT .so files next to the binary either, Linux applications generally just expect these files to be available system wide. > Compiling this old apps I assume will hit same issue, this time missing even more packages since I will need all GTK2 dependencies. I wish there was a nice, slim way to put in a folder all the libraries from a say 16.04 release and tell this app t…

One question, so if I copy the old libraries from an old distro, will they fail because on my distro there is a new libc or libc++ ? Because I hit this issue too where from my googling you can only have one libc(or c++ I can't remember, but I was forced to upgrade because a software needed a newer library and it was no way to provide a non system wide one -or not an easy way that I could actually find).

In my case I run this python2.4 app, it complained about a missing library, I googled it, found what package had it, installed it, then repat and repeat. Now I am stuck at "libpangox1.0" can't find it on the apt repos , so maybe I will waste more time on google or just give up.

Is a good lesson as a developer, either use some "modern" stuff or if you use c/c++ and care about the users try to build an AppImage or something similar.

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

#152

Post by GuB-42 »

n1vz3r wrote: post #93

As a long-time Linux user with habit of throwing everything into the mix, I got quite used to number of inconsistencies that I have, so I don't think that MS deserves criticism for having them too (although article is not very critical, it just counts the inconsisitencies). I have GTK2/3/4 apps, KDE apps, Qt apps, Electron apps, AND Windows apps running under wine. So the only consistency on my desktop is an inconsis…

Linux distros are a mix of mostly independent projects, there is no central authority telling them how it should be done and therefore inconsistency is inevitable. It applies to the command line too (looking at you "ps"). And yet, the parts that the distro vendor controls, usually the default desktop environment and settings screens are usually rather consistent.

For Windows, I don't think anyone complains about the fact that if you run an ancient Windows app, it looks like an ancient Windows app. In fact, backward compatibility has always been one of Microsoft strongest selling points. What people complain about is that Windows itself is inconsistent. Windows branded components, made and owned by Microsoft, included in the main OS with no alternative offered are inconsistent. The worst part is the control panel, it is a mess and they have no excuse, it is an unfinished job that shouldn't have been out of beta.

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

#153

Post by xaldir »

input_sh wrote: post #111
hoseja wrote: post #19

I was promised 10 would be the final version and I will make sure to keep it that way, one way or another.

> I was promised 10 would be the final version Funny thing is this was absolutely never said by Microsoft. If you dig deep enough you reach a single throwaway quote by some employee that said something along the lines of "Windows 10 is the last version released and we're focusing all attention to it, not 8.1".

Oh come on. I've been talking for years with Microsoft representatives and they were balls-deep on the windows-as-a-service scheme for years, until they weren't.

You could argue that Microsoft was betting on Windows 10 as a platform and that Windows 11 is in fact built on this platform (and the 11 is just marketing lingo for 10.x). But despite Microsoft revisionism, the fact is that they changed there mind along the way.

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

#154

Post by 323 »

alentred wrote: post #30

To be fair, I think some examples, and specifically those from 95/NT and then 3.1 times, are too far-fetched. I agree that consistency is important, but it doesn't mean that every screen needs to be redesigned altogether. For instance, I don't think that examples of Screen Saver Settings or File Properties are relevant, as long as their styling is in line with the rest of the OS. One thing that surprises me a lot, th…

One universal solution that works for all apps - you render the app in an off-screen buffer and pass that to AI to re-render it in the new style. This way you don't need to touch the code.

AI could also translate mouse clicks/coordinates accordingly if it moves stuff around.

You could even have "UI themes", tell the AI to re-render in Windows 2000/XP/11 style.

EDIT: the downvotes I'm getting with no comments are funny. This will happen in the next 7 years because solving this problem once it's much cheaper than fixing all the apps one by one.

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

#155

Post by 0x0 »

I wonder if they kept the ODBC driver installer window with the win3.x-style file tree unchanged, just so they could be compatible with random old legacy odbc driver installer program that might try to programatically automate interactions with that UI?

I don't know first-hand of any such program, but it wouldn't surprise me if there was some old important enterprisey installer that expects the file chooser dialog to be just so and would freak out if the UI didn't still follow win 3.x conventions..?

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

#157

Post by orthoxerox »

xaldir wrote: post #115
Dalewyn wrote: post #35

>The ability to choose icons that are more than 30 years old is still here, with the inclusion of the very important and absolutely critical to the good function of the OS moricons.dll I will happily bet there are programs out there that would crash and burn horrifically without moricons.dll.

I will bet that almost* no one at Microsoft (*well maybe Raymond Chen) knows that it's there and what it does, they are too busy piling up (not-so)shiny new things.

I imagine that Raymond's day at the office is basically him going from room to room saying hello and telling people stuff that everyone else forgot. Then he has lunch with someone else of the old guard, pops into random meetings to unblock the discussion and finally spends the last hour of the day writing another blogpost for TONT.

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

#158

Post by sylens »

agilob wrote: post #14
sylens wrote: post #5

This is a really great documentation of how far back various pieces of the UI go. If you’ve been using Windows for a long time, you remember when different pieces of the UI got introduced or changed and then frozen in amber until today. Crazy to think they are still recovering from Windows 8 and the pivot to Metro UI.

Pretty sure some of these screenshots show Windows Vista design.

Oh they definitely do. And even some XP ones. But all the time that could’ve been spent updating those to a more modern UI style, they instead reinvented the wheel with Windows 8 and then had to roll it back, wasting about 5 years

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

#159

Post by FeistySkink »

kevingadd wrote: post #131
petepete wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What does this have to do with GNOME?

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

#160

Post by whywhywhywhy »

Someone1234 wrote: post #76
alentred wrote: post #30

To be fair, I think some examples, and specifically those from 95/NT and then 3.1 times, are too far-fetched. I agree that consistency is important, but it doesn't mean that every screen needs to be redesigned altogether. For instance, I don't think that examples of Screen Saver Settings or File Properties are relevant, as long as their styling is in line with the rest of the OS. One thing that surprises me a lot, th…

I agree, but I do want to point out that some of these "not updated" things are still heavily used and offer a bad user experience. For example the Services (or any mmc based) UI with no filter/search integrated is absurd. Heck they just "redesigned" Task Manager and none of the tabs have filter/search functionality which is annoying to say the least. I suppose you can start typing with the inner tab having focus, an…

Task Manager not having a modern filter/search for the gigantic list isn’t only an annoyance and a productivity killer but also a security issue.

If I suspect a nefarious app is running in the background somewhere I have to manually read the list to find it and kill it.

End of the day one of two things is happening, either no one influential at MS uses Windows or their structure is so broken that pointing out something like this it isn’t even possible to action the feature to be built.

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