Microsoft is driving users away • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#171

Post by trealira » Sun, Feb 25, 2024, 10:13 PM UTC

netsharc wrote: post #30

firesteelrain wrote: post #4

As much as I like Linux, tides won’t be shifting for desktop to Linux. It will be Microsoft Windows for years to come

Yeah, Microsoft's got a huge majority of users captive and now they can do as they please, "Oh you don't like this obnoxious new 'feature'? Well what are you going to do about it?", like an abusive partner. If only there's some company with money and clout to offer an OS with the same level of user-friendliness... Too bad Google's product managers are just busy trying to advance their own careers, plus it's not like…

> If only there's some company with money and clout to offer an OS with the same level of user-friendliness...

Legit question: do you think there will ever be a new commercial desktop operating system (not one that's given away for free) that isn't Windows or MacOS again in the next 30 years?

Because Linux is free, and Windows is ubiquitous, and because you need a lot of hardware support and support for existing applications to be see usage, it seems hard for any new company to break into the market with something genuinely new.

It seems like the way things are now are how they'll be for a long time. We'll just always use Linux, MacOS, or Windows, with superficial changes, I suppose. Or a BSD.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#172

Post by raincole » Sun, Feb 25, 2024, 10:14 PM UTC

Falmarri wrote: post #163

TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Make bash, zsh, ... native for Windows Why? There is PowerShell, able to run on Linux and MacOS. And compared to Bash it is actually readable language.

I can't believe there are people that actually like powershell

If the alternative is bash then I don't just like powershell, I love it from the bottom of my heart.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#173

Post by Gibbon1 » Sun, Feb 25, 2024, 10:14 PM UTC

dcan wrote: post #137

Gibbon1 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They changed things to hide 'less common' actions when you right click. To disable that you need to hand edit a registry key.

The most bizarre thing in my experience is that they removed "Refresh" from that context menu, yet Explorer will a) not update when an application writes a new file, and b) when you rename a file, it does not get automatically sorted.

Reminds me, recently removed a folder and explorer showed it still being there and you could click on it and see the files.

I'm suspicious that they're trying to move to 'one drive' for the whole file system and so need to cache everything for reasons. Performance and also the files on your drive might actually be only in the cloud. IE your hard drive is for local caching not for storing data long term. Means perhaps if you save a file to disk. And then later pull the drive and put it on another machine those files won't actually be there.

If true this bodes very poorly.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#174

Post by yodon » Sun, Feb 25, 2024, 10:15 PM UTC

TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #149

datagrimx wrote: post #124

For full Disclosure, I once upon was a software engineer at Microsoft. I witnessed first hand the evil decisions around Windows. I left Microsoft in 2006 but I am still part of the Alumni Network. IMO Microsoft can gain users back by: * Not requiring a Microsoft Account * Ending all data/telemetry collection * Not forcing Edge on its users * Stop releasing improved UI updates every week * Make bash, zsh, ... native f…

> Make bash, zsh, ... native for Windows Why? There is PowerShell, able to run on Linux and MacOS. And compared to Bash it is actually readable language.

Ironically, power shell is the most consistent cross-platform scripting environment today. No more wrangling osx bsd grep commandline flags not working with linux gnu grep, and vice versa. Powershell just works cross platform. And this from a guy whose daily driver is an M3 MacBook.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#175

Post by quantified » Sun, Feb 25, 2024, 10:15 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #90

zeroCalories wrote: post #34

It's amazing to me that Microsoft messed up Windows. All they had to do was not not change things, but they continued to force junk on me that I don't need, take power away from me, and spy on me. Honestly MacOS isn't much better. Linux is still crap software, but we've reached the point where most things can be done on Linux, so good riddance. I hope that more people switch and Linux continues to improve. There's ac…

> It's amazing to me that Microsoft messed up Windows. It is. At Windows 7, they pretty much had desktops right. Everything mostly worked. They'd finally fixed the crashing problems. (How? The Static Driver Verifier validated that third-party kernel drivers would not crash the rest of the system, and a classifier applied to crash dumps routed similar crash dumps to the same maintainer.) The UI was reasonable for a de…

When you have things about as good as they'll reasonably get, having a group as large as that dev organization going full throttle is more likely to make things worse. From the top of the mountain all directions are down.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#176

Post by layer8 » Sun, Feb 25, 2024, 10:16 PM UTC

datagrimx wrote: post #124

For full Disclosure, I once upon was a software engineer at Microsoft. I witnessed first hand the evil decisions around Windows. I left Microsoft in 2006 but I am still part of the Alumni Network. IMO Microsoft can gain users back by: * Not requiring a Microsoft Account * Ending all data/telemetry collection * Not forcing Edge on its users * Stop releasing improved UI updates every week * Make bash, zsh, ... native f…

Microsoft needs to realize that the UI revamps made since Windows 8 have been a degradation for usability, and return to the old values of the WIMP interface, interface consistency, and keyboard-ability, and get their UI framework story back on track for good.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#177

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Feb 25, 2024, 10:16 PM UTC

mejutoco wrote: post #68

thiago_fm wrote: post #47

The issue with Windows that the HN public might have trouble to understand, is how bad decisions are sticky in a company with little to no taste like Microsoft. You can't suddenly change things and expect app developers to accept it like they do in OSX. This means they can't change Windows too much. Any new change creates lots of compromises and just slapping a new UI doesn't fix the underlying issue. This has been t…

> You can't suddenly change things and expect app developers to accept it like they do in OSX Ads in the taskbar indicates that Microsoft has no problem pushing some choices.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#178

Post by doawoo » Sun, Feb 25, 2024, 10:18 PM UTC

hypothesis wrote: post #37

doawoo wrote: post #7

I really agree with this article- I used Windows as my primary OS (not counting work machines) until about 2 years ago, the mess of non coherent design and CONSTANTLY resetting my user preferences every update (like shoving new buttons [see: ads] onto my taskbar) ultimately lead me to buying the first m1 mbp as my new personal machine. Never looked back. I only boot up windows for occasional games now, and even then,…

> CONSTANTLY resetting my user preferences every update (like shoving new buttons [see: ads] onto my taskbar) ultimately lead me to buying the first m1 mbp as my new personal machine. Boy are you going to be disappointed when you discover that settings reset quite aggressively, especially in cases where Apple really thinks it knows better. Want to keep bluetooth off? Both iPhone and macs will not abide. Want to keep…

Oh no company is perfect that’s for sure. I don’t use anything deep integrated stuff like the iCloud Keychain, I mainly use my own password manager of choice etc.

The iOS Bluetooth/wifi never bothered me personally because I use those all the time anyway. Of course everyone’s use case is gonna differ, but for me macOS is far from doing things like pushing huge full page “finish setting up edge” or “buy office” when I log in so, I’m happy.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#179

Post by sombragris » Sun, Feb 25, 2024, 10:18 PM UTC

Linux is my primary OS but sometimes I use Windows, and I really hate the UI changes. A typical example would be the printing dialog used by various apps. It used to work all right from the mouse. Now you can't tell which widget has focus, and can't tell how to activate a given UI element from the keyboard. Worse yet, you selected your print job parameters, press Enter, and nothing happens. You have to click the OK button with the mouse.

And don't get me started on the ribbon UI which was inflicted upon the world in Office 2007 onwards and then shoved upon everyone's throats in subsequent editions of Windows.

Why did they have to change such things? It worked as it was. There's no improvement and, on the contrary, a quite noticeable involution.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#180

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Feb 25, 2024, 10:18 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #40

"To Access the old devices and printer use the run prompt and type the following: shell:::{A8A91A66-3A7D-4424-8D24-04E180695C7A}" And people complain about Linux.

[deleted]