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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)

#91

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!

IMHO the right-click menu these days seems to get better, at least I can find "Open with Code" or "Open in Terminal", etc. Except that I need the old menu to create a desktop shortcut occasionally.

In my Windows 11 right-click menu, I can choose "Show More Options" at the bottom and then Send To > Desktop (create shortcut).

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

#92

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…

> 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.

Decent operating systems support this, and have for decades. macOS has the spotlight search (cmd-space), and most Linux DEs have some form of it too (eg XFCE's appfinder).

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

#93

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while you type more letters or stuff keeps moving on screen, and then eventually rewinds time by overlaying the now outdated screenshot for you to select a target area Pressing escape can sometimes cancel out of this overlay (in case you bumped print screen by accident).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…

On my very rasonably spec'd laptop it often takes 20 seconds for the snipping tool selection to pop up. Video recording is very nice though, definitely my favorite feature.

New Notepad had a broken typematic that took them 2 years to fix, but they added Copilot at the same patch. Resizing its window still rapidly still flickers and can max the CPU.

If you're using labels in the taskbar the buttons aren't fixed width, they resize to fit the window title - except that until recently they didnt, so if you cd from C:\ to a longer path you got the label "C...". That one is fixed, but not the one where I switch desktops with Ctrl+Alt+arrows and the entries have no icons.

If you have a folder with lots of audio files, sometimes explorer.exe will hang for 30 seconds while it dutifully extracts artist metadata (no way to disable). Possibly an old issue, but I've never hit it before.

Search is even worse than before, I have "alacrity.exe" both in PATH and as a shortcut on desktop, but when I type "alacr" I get a web suggestion until I fully type it out. "Visual..." toggles between VSCode and fat visual studio on every keypress.

I can't express my opinion on the Task Manager changes without using language inapropriate for this forum.

Those are my issues off the top of my head, if I record every single broken thing I see for a week this list would be way longer.

That's just the stuff that doesn't work, there's a similarly long list of things that work but are evil.

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

#94
post #75
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

Windows 11 is much slower for me than Windows 7 or 10. A noticeable sub-second delay to bring up the start menu and respond to typing, about 3 seconds for file explorer to load, 5-20 seconds to start a screenshot. I wouldn't be surprised if antivirus is to partially to blame (only use Windows at work where it is required), but it is the same antivirus we used on Windows 10 and it wasn't this bad.

“A noticeable sub-second delay” lol. I guess you never ran Windows 98 on a pentium 2 like I did. If I had a dime for every sub-second delay I experienced on that machine…

Settings > Accessibility > Animation Effects > Off

5-10 seconds to start a screenshot, yeah man now you’re just lying. You sure you didn’t leave the delay timer on?

Are we going to gloss over the fact that the screenshot interface in old windows versions basically didn’t exist? There was no keyboard shortcut to open snipping tool by default in Windows 7. You had to know to use your print screen key correctly and to paste the image into Paint, and there was no visual feedback. Of course that performed fast because there was no UI!

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

#95
Win2k was one of my favorite OSes of all time... I know there were a lot of security holes in the way some things were done, but it all just mostly fit well together in a relatively consistent way. The last version of windows with nearly this level of consistency. LiteStep on Win2K was amazingly good.

XP really looked like a Fisher Price toy... I liked the Media Center theme (as well as derivatives) so much more as part of that release.

Windows 7 was probably the best start menu of Windows' history, and Win10/11's taskbar enhancements (not the centering default) are pretty great as well. I'm hoping this gets better/similar in COSMIC.

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

#96
post #87

Giving Windows 11 the highest rating and XP one of the worst ratings clearly demonstrates that this author is not a serious person.

Just because you disagree , doesn’t mean that your opinion holds any weight over theirs.

Especially because you’ve provided no rebuttal of substance, and resorted to name calling.

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

#97
post #92

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…

> 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. Decent operating systems support this, and have for decades. macOS has the spotlight search (cmd-space), and most Linux DEs have some form of it t…

Most Linux DE's it's even the same use of the Super/Win hotkey by itself. I do wish Linux distros would add an emoji picker with the Suler+. hotkey (matching Windows')... When it's there, I always forget the hotkey, same on mac for that matter.

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

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Was it significantly customizable out of the box? I remember installing WindowBlinds specifically so I could theme the OS.
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