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Windows GUI – Good, Bad and Pretty Ugly (2023)

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Re: Windows GUI – Good, Bad and Pretty Ugly (2023)

#61

Post by CableNinja »

spankibalt wrote: post #8
adastra22 wrote: post #3

I cannot accept this slander of Windows XP.

It is, strictly going by looks, one of Microsoft's ugliest UIs. I will never understand how people tolerate it, let alone defend it publicly. Shameful, absolutely and thoroughly shameful!

The upside was that it was 100% customizable, there were tons of themes that redesigned the entire look of the desktop, and lots of resources for it.

Naturally, all mine looked like hot garbage, but it taught me about texture and image editing, and how transparencies worked in rendering (though xp themes were a special hell of using neon pink because transparent pixels werent usable yet)

Re: Windows GUI – Good, Bad and Pretty Ugly (2023)

#62

Post by CableNinja »

vrighter wrote: post #54
cubefox wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This begs the general question: why were PCs (and monitors, keyboards, mice etc) always sold in ugly grey, for decades? Before they finally relented and switched to black?

Bring back the 2000s transparency in the hardware. Transparent phone (nokia 3310, of course), transparent PC, transparent everything!

Dont forget the transparent landline phone, alarmclock, and tvs!

Re: Windows GUI – Good, Bad and Pretty Ugly (2023)

#63

Post by M95D »

karhuton wrote: post #21

Give the Windows 2 a second look and try to ignore the colorful GAME in the screenshot. It’s actually pretty ”elegant” design with white, black, grey with two shades of primary color: dark blue and light blue/cyan. Then complementary orange for active selection. The cyan is light enough for black text and blue is dark enough for white text. Really good palette choices. Remember this was only 16 CGA colors, of which o…

I really liked the fact they had full menu bars on resolutions far lower than phones had 15 years ago. No hamburger menus.

Re: Windows GUI – Good, Bad and Pretty Ugly (2023)

#64

Post by RankingMember »

thefz wrote: post #22

I still consider Windows 2000's UI to be the peak of computer interfaces and nothing else has come close to its effectiveness and clarity for day to day work.

So much so that one of the first things I do in fresh 10 and 11 installs is turn off all the transitions/whiz-bang visual effects to try to get back to the pure snappy functionality of that era of Windows.

Re: Windows GUI – Good, Bad and Pretty Ugly (2023)

#66

Post by blackhaz »

derleyici wrote: post #5

8 for Windows 11? An OS that includes ads in the Start menu, made with React. I'm not even mentioning right-click, which has basically two views: you open it and see some uselessly chosen tools, and you still need to open the old version (with the old design, breaking design consistency) to access actually useful things. Viva Windows XP!

This is the most atrocious rating article I've stumbled upon in a while!

Re: Windows GUI – Good, Bad and Pretty Ugly (2023)

#67

Post by dangus »

derleyici wrote: post #5

8 for Windows 11? An OS that includes ads in the Start menu, made with React. I'm not even mentioning right-click, which has basically two views: you open it and see some uselessly chosen tools, and you still need to open the old version (with the old design, breaking design consistency) to access actually useful things. Viva Windows XP!

Does the end user care that the system is made with React? What is the tangible negative impact?

My start menu doesn’t have ads, it really isn’t hard to manage that sort of thing.

OneDrive is fully uninstalled, Copilot is fully uninstalled, I find my system to be quite clean.

And if you don’t like the start menu, there are ways to replace the start menu entirely with something else. Good luck replacing entire major elements of the macOS UI.

In contrast, Apple puts advertisements at the same urgency level as critical system updates in the settings. There’s no setting to disable them and they sometimes come back with a new version release, you just have to know the magic actions to get them dismissed.

Haters dog on Windows 11 for various things but it really is the best version of the OS since 7. It has some of the best updates to traditional Windows tooling in years: tabs in notepad, git preinstalled, finally the settings pane is in a good place, brand new command line interface, and Microsoft has had a great habit of putting new features in separate apps that can be installed optionally. (E.g., you can’t uninstall Apple News on a Mac, but you can uninstall ClipChamp on Windows)

Re: Windows GUI – Good, Bad and Pretty Ugly (2023)

#68

Post by isaacdl »

wlesieutre wrote: post #16
derleyici wrote: post #5

8 for Windows 11? An OS that includes ads in the Start menu, made with React. I'm not even mentioning right-click, which has basically two views: you open it and see some uselessly chosen tools, and you still need to open the old version (with the old design, breaking design consistency) to access actually useful things. Viva Windows XP!

When you hit print screen, it takes a screenshot, waits a blatantly visible number of frames while you type more letters or stuff keeps moving on screen, and then eventually rewinds time by overlaying the now outdated screenshot for you to select a target area Pressing escape can sometimes cancel out of this overlay (in case you bumped print screen by accident). But sometimes it doesn’t, because the full screen overl…

I'm glad it's not just me struggling with the screenshot functionality. I've encountered the bugs you're describing, and recently, I've been encountering an incredibly frustrating one where hitting print screen just...doesn't do anything. The only way I've found to temporarily fix it is to manually open the Snipping Tool (via the Start menu) - then the print screen key starts working again for some indeterminate period of time.

Re: Windows GUI – Good, Bad and Pretty Ugly (2023)

#69

Post by patapong »

One underappreciated thing about Windows 8 is that even if the start menu was ugly and blocked the entire screen, you could press the windows key, immediately start typing, and then press enter to somewhat deterministically pick the top app. This made it feel quite fast.

Now on more recent windows editions, I find that I often need to wait for the menu to visually appear before it will accept any keyboard input, and the ranking shifts over time and includes web stuff, making this workflow basically useless.

I also really miss the aero look of windows 7... Eye-candy, sure, but I thought it was pretty, clean and modern looking. I am sad they moved away from it.

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