891–900 of 1001 posts
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Its one of the first things I turn off.
How? I feel like every time I do my ~1 yearly Windows reinstall I need to google it and then alter half a dozen registry keys and a bunch of group policy settings, and some of them are the "old" settings now replaced with something even more vaguely named (probably on purpose).
However, saying you're committed is not the same as being committed.
Furrowing your brow and saying you'll try harder, even when you mean it, doesn't necessarily work, either.
It needs trade-offs, and a willingness for abandon certain things as trade-offs. It requires an honest assessment.
Stop updating the system every 5 minutes, stop with the advertising, stop with the user is the product mentality. Stop changing the interface. Stop with requiring a user account. Stop with the all your data are belong to us. Simplify.
None of this will happen, of course. Corporate imperatives militate against it.
Wanna improve Windows? How about having a two-year release cadence? Developers can get a technology preview, full of cavaet emptor achey breaky changes if they want. This allows them to develop for the next release.
Sync the development tools (more importantly the libraries) like C++ in with the release. Include those libraries. The pay-off is, as if by magic, if a user downloads a program for Windows N, it will work. No extra libraries will be required because they'll already be included in the OS.
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Apple achieved it with Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Apple then spent ~15 years un-achieving it. It started with iOS 7, and has culminated in the Liquid (Gl)ass era: a mess of unintuitive menus, terrible and inconsistent UI patterns, the lobotomite twins Siri & Apple Intelligence. Although, surprisingly, built on top of absolutely incredible silicon.
Snow Leopard was riddled with bugs. Take a look at all the updates it had following its release to confirm that.
Quality is not the issue. We should be more specific - Microsoft has been consciously employing dark patterns that they know will be harmful to users but they do not care because their incentives are misaligned. Employees of Microsoft have surely had meetings scheming of ways to degrade user experience for some internal metric they are trying to hit. A decade+ of conscious, willful decisions which negatively impact u…
They're saying all the right things here. Fixing long-standing complaints, removing Copilot from obnoxious places, improvements to Windows Update and Windows Explorer stability/microstutter/lag, etc. I congratulate them on seeing sense, and I congratulate Apple on another victory with the Neo. Kind of frustrating that's what it took for Microsoft to finally listen to their userbase.
Are they? I see nothing about privacy, spying, forced microsoft accounts and continued locking down of windows that they've been doing. I see that they're bringing back _some_ of the taskbar options you had in windows 10 (termed it as "introducing"), they promise to make Explorer faster, great. But they also say they're bringing more AI into windows and something about widgets that I don't think anyone cares about. A…
Can you imagine actually using that as an excuse when managing one of the most important software companies in the world? I'm just in awe at how little self-relfectio they have at that company.
The implication is that they weren't focused on "genuinely useful and well-crafted" features 40 years into their company's history and it's unbelievable to read.
Used Windows since forever because "it just worked for me". Last year switched to Fedora + Plasma, as I started to consider staying on windows was risky. The feedback/forum tool, has been a thing for years. Submited many bugs that I wanted fixed, and always been ignored. Thanks, but Im not looking back.
> The feedback/forum tool, has been a thing for years. Submited many bugs that I wanted fixed, and always been ignored. Just like the dialog that searched for a solution to why my program just crashed. Of all the times I saw that (maybe every other day), it found something precisely 0 times, but wasted my time every time. Did it work for anyone or am I alone?
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I really hope you're right. The challenge with Linux still seems to be practicalities -- like in particular, does Zoom run well on most distributions? Reports seem to be of system crashes and degraded performance. I imagine there are lots of 'it works for me' stories, but think: for Linux to eat into Windows user market share (which I would greatly support), critical things like Zoom have to work at least as reliably…
> like in particular, does Zoom run well on most distributions? It works fine (tested on Arch), but at the very least you should run that kind of malware as a separate user, or better yet, in a VM.
No one wants copilot. You can make it an app, but any OS level integration is a non-starter. My next laptop will be a MacBook Pro. My Surface Laptop 5 will be collecting dust in case I need it, but that’s highly unlikely.
I just don't think people like having something shoved down their throats. The dedicated Copilot button on keyboards and adding Copilot shortcuts all over the OS (and automatic popups/ads) was far too far. I think OS level integrations that are opt-in, not opt-out, may even be popular. But they have to be done carefully and tastefully.
Microsoft has spent over a decade swimming against their users interests at this point and during that time frame Linux has been improving its desktop and improving kernel performance. We are now at the point where Linux emulating Window's entire API space for games with worse drivers is dangerously close on performance with none of the privacy invasion and anti user features. Its pretty late in the game for them to…
Much of big tech became Product leaders running amok. Somehow It shifted from users know best to "Product" knows best. I think this all stemmed everyone wanting to be Apple except no one actually achieved it and now we have 3 different versions of the audio control panel in Windows, the start button is somehow in the middle of the screen, and windows search no longer searches your PC. Deleting "Product" might save wi…
If you take a look at the size of widescreen monitors, you can kinda guess why someone decided to move the start button/menu to the middle of the screen.
I know Samsung and Dell have ginmorous 49 inch monitors. Start menu that pops up from the lower left corner of the monitor would be a bad UX - the user might not even notice that a menu had popped up if that lower left corner of the monitor is out of their peripheral vision.
Moving the Start menu to the middle of the screen does go against years of muscle memory... moving your mouse/trackpad to the lower left, using the monitor border as a stop-zone though.
I guess they didn't want to make it an option/toggle hidden in some dialog box somewhere...