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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)

#121

Post by the_overseer »

sunaookami wrote: post #83
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!

It's not made in React, only the "recommended" section is made with React Native which compiles to native XAML. No web technologies involved. And yes I will debunk this every time I see it :) .

It's slower. It's laggy. The taskbar and menus need to be native code of the highest optimization. Anything less than instantaneous means that PMs, managers, coders and everyone there should not have a job working on OSes if they can't get this simple idea through their thick skulls.

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

#122

Post by CommonGuy »

patapong wrote: post #69

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…

Yes the start menu is now very slow with the web stuff enabled.

If you disable it, it becomes snappy again. Pretty crazy to me that Microsoft allows the default option to be that slow

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

#123

Post by hbn »

patapong wrote: post #69

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…

I don't even bother using the start menu to sleep my PC anymore. I used to hit Win, then navigate with arrow keys to sleep, but at one point an update broke it so you couldn't navigate to the power menu with arrow keys. I don't know if it's fixed now, but regardless it's way faster to hit

Win+x -> u -> s

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

#124

Post by the_overseer »

felixgallo wrote: post #73
speedgoose wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not web but react native.

Whatever product manager team decided to jump into React Native with both feet for the Windows experience needs to be ejected from the industry permanently. Think of how many thousands of human hours per day are now spent waiting on React Native jank, all in order to save the Windows developers from having to program in Windows using Microsoft products.

Most likely saving Windows developers from learning programming. They are just javascript monkeys because that is what Microsoft is hiring these days and you can't trust monkeys with native C++. The thing would leak memory and explode immediately if those idiots tried to write native code. So in the name of hiring cheap idiots that can't program we all have to put up with this slow, bloated garbage.

There is no universe in which I should see lag between a click and a menu appearing in File explorer, taskbar or anywhere in the OS. Not on a machine with 8 idling cores.

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

#125

Post by jasonvorhe »

chasing0entropy wrote: post #111
arcanemachiner wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is everyone who disagrees with you an unserious person, or just on this particular topic?

The disagreement isn't what makes him not serious; the hubris to declare Windows 11 the most usable OS does. No one who has any real experience with *nix, legacy ios, legacy Windows, and modern Windows/ios UI/UX would rate win11 top without serious qualifiers

Agreed. Something has to be wrong with you if you were to prefer Windows 11 to basically anything else. GNOME 3, Ubuntu's whatever desktop environment, KDE, Omarchy, macOS, Windows 8-10 - it's all more consistent, easier to grasp and also looks better than Windows 11.

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

#126

Post by hbn »

the_overseer wrote: post #121
sunaookami wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not made in React, only the "recommended" section is made with React Native which compiles to native XAML. No web technologies involved. And yes I will debunk this every time I see it :) .

It's slower. It's laggy. The taskbar and menus need to be native code of the highest optimization. Anything less than instantaneous means that PMs, managers, coders and everyone there should not have a job working on OSes if they can't get this simple idea through their thick skulls.

I've shared this on HN before, but starting with Windows 11, they seemingly started making the new UI essentially a separate process that runs on top of the existing Windows 10 UI and just modifies it.

I learned this from a video where a guy was seeing how much of the Program Files folder you can delete before Windows breaks, and at some point it reverts to the Windows 10 UI.

https://youtu.be/BVIN_PJu2rs?t=565

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

#128

Post by pavon »

dangus wrote: post #94
pavon wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ver…

> I guess you never ran Windows 98 on a pentium 2 like I did.

If you have to compare to a 20+ year old processor to look good, your system has problems. But since we are comparing old computers, Finder opens quicker on a 30 year old Macintosh 512k than Explorer opens in Windows 11.

> 5-10 seconds to start a screenshot, yeah man now you’re just lying.

Nope. I actually just updated that number up to 20 seconds after testing, because I thought my memory was exaggerating. This started in Windows 10 when they introduced "Snip & Sketch" to replace the old Snipping tool, but it was easier to go back to the old one in Windows 10.

Edit: Oh, and I just remembered another detail. Our library folders are mapped to network shares at work. Again, this has been the case for 15+ years now, and performance has just recently cratered. It would not surprise me if most Windows developers today assume everything is on SSD, and don't think about slapping low-importance file I/O in critical sections.

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

#129

Post by hbn »

wink wrote: post #59
dag11 wrote: post #32

I'm surprised nobody caught this, but both the screenshot for Windows 8.1 is not Windows 8.1, it's Windows Threshold, the development phase of Windows 10. The specific screenshot they show is the very first start menu they cobbled together for Threshold, which would later be redesigned again before shipping as Windows 10. The screenshot is also showing off early adaptations of Windows 8 apps running in movable window…

I am not surprised, from memory I only know like 3 people who ever willingly used 8.x. The active user base must be tiny compared to Windows 7 and 10 users (if we just stick to that range). I have personally not used it for more than an hour total (on anyone's PC combined) and I have (co-)owned and used at least one Windows PC continuously since 1995.

Windows 8 was fine if you used StartIsBack which just added the Windows 7 start menu back and you could happily ignore the big stupid fullscreen start menu that yanked you away from your desktop. But at that point, yeah no point in upgrading.

Interestingly whoever made StartIsBack is still developing a start menu replacement for Windows 11 (called StartAllBack for some reason), and it's made my usage far more tolerable. You can also get a normal file explorer again, with the normal native right click menu that doesn't hide a bunch of stuff behind a "more options" option

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

#130

Post by strongpigeon »

rchard2scout wrote: post #25

In hindsight, I really love the way Vista looks. I don't think I ever used it as a daily driver (I went from the family XP computer to a Win7 laptop, I think), but the glassy transparency is certainly something .

I think there is a lot that was well done in the Vista UI, but I find the gradients on the buttons and the task bar to be too hard.
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