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The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible

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Re: The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible

#11

Post by eli »

givan wrote: post #3

Not computer users, just the windows users. I never understood the install wizards for windows software, in 99% of the time you just click "next" until it stops asking for more "next". And now they all sneak garbage adware with the check boxes enabled by default because most people just click "next" anyway. Also the whole download and install drivers/utilities etc after installation is very time consuming because the…

This is nonsense fanboism. Modern versions of Windows are extremely similar to OS X from a usability perspective. OS X has plenty of counterintuitive warts. Computers of any flavor are pretty hard to use.

> I never understood the install wizards for windows software...

I never understood why half the time when I download Mac software and double click it, nothing seems to happen because it's a "disk image" (talk about an outdated concept), which means I have to know to navigate to the Finder, find the actual thing I want, and then remember to unmount the image when I'm done.

Re: The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible

#12

Post by givan »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #5
givan wrote: post #3

Not computer users, just the windows users. I never understood the install wizards for windows software, in 99% of the time you just click "next" until it stops asking for more "next". And now they all sneak garbage adware with the check boxes enabled by default because most people just click "next" anyway. Also the whole download and install drivers/utilities etc after installation is very time consuming because the…

>I never understood the install wizards for windows software, in 99% of the time you just click "next" until it stops asking for more "next". Well, if you use the Windows Store to get applications, you can finally get rid of them. >the OS has almost nothing bundled Really? Windows 8, for instance, comes with much of what you'd need. It's bundles a lot more than previous versions of windows >nothing you can choose in…

>I'm not quite sure what this means.

I was referring to the fact that Microsoft does not bundle multiple browsers to choose from and forces everyone to have IE installed and unfortunately most users don't understand what a browser is to fix this.

And this is the reason web developers had nightmares with IE6 in the past and some still have with IE7.

Re: The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible

#13

Post by ChuckMcM »

I enjoyed this rant. The bottom line is that this 'experience' isn't about you, its about who you can be sold too. That is because "you" are too cheap to pay what "we" think should be paid for them. It is like a hotel which sells you room for $100 a night if you agree to let them leave a web cam on 24/7 and sell any useful 'snippets' it catches while you are there.

The bulk of the market doesn't buy "computers" they buy "televisions." Think about that for a minute.

The bulk of the market are entertainment 'consumers' for which you can sell access to their eyeballs for real money. Just like TV did before people got digital recorders and started skipping all the ads. Not so with these new fangled TVs, they don't care if you don't look at their advertising they want to know what you did look at, and when, and after what, and then what did you do? Because all of that is much more valuable than putting up a tasty picture of a cheeseburger in front of you, no, they can phone ahead to your local market and tell them to stock up on cheeseburgers because you've been researching them all day and are now at the point where you want to make a purchase.

But the cool thing? It means that the current 'big' players are leaving the market for computers behind. You can tell that by the fact that the computer company no longer sells a product that a developer would care to use. And that means that there is room again at the bottom.

Time to start a 'developers' company that works very much on the same model that Sun Microsystems started on, hardware designed from the ground up to be developed on, open systems so that folks can easily work with it, and a team dedicated to making sure integration and support is there so that folks like you and I can say "Hey this audio doesn't work when you set the sampling rate to 40Khz" and they can fix it and release that fix.

But for that company to exist, you have to pay for the products you use, and to get to that point you have to not be able to get something 'good enough' by hacking and slashing something else into shape.

Re: The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible

#14

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

givan wrote: post #12
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I never understood the install wizards for windows software, in 99% of the time you just click "next" until it stops asking for more "next". Well, if you use the Windows Store to get applications, you can finally get rid of them. >the OS has almost nothing bundled Really? Windows 8, for instance, comes with much of what you'd need. It's bundles a lot more than previous versions of windows >nothing you can choose in…

>I'm not quite sure what this means. I was referring to the fact that Microsoft does not bundle multiple browsers to choose from and forces everyone to have IE installed and unfortunately most users don't understand what a browser is to fix this. And this is the reason web developers had nightmares with IE6 in the past and some still have with IE7.

Microsoft shouldn't bundle multiple browsers. Now, I can see your point that they don't exactly provide others (except in the EU)... but I'm not sure this is really such a bad thing.

Re: The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible

#15

Post by ajross »

karpathy wrote: post #6

I feel that this is one of the major reasons I find myself using tablets more often. The UX on PCs has turned to crap. All programs want to run in the background, they all compete for my attention every 30 minutes, they all want to be updated all the time and they all want to install some stupid toolbar into my browser that you can't remove, or even if you do it will somehow come back. Installing new programs has tur…

There are other perspectives, though. I've been on a Linux desktop almost exclusively for 19 years now. I continue to be amazed at the amount of spammy crap I have to put up with on my phone and tablet (running CM10 and stock 4.0.2 respectively, so it's not like I'm beholden to a manufacturer). Seems like every game wants to tell me about new features in the status bar every day. All the online services want to connect me to all the others. Every day or so some app has an "upgrade" available that inexplicably needs new permissions authorized. And frankly it seems to be getting worse.

And my desktop distro just goes on, doing what it's supposed to do, year after year.

Re: The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible

#16

Post by eli »

RyJones wrote: post #7

Unfortunately, the profit in those laptops comes from the shovel ware, so there's no incentive for OEMs to sell a pro-user experience.

At one point Sony offered a $50 fee to get your new PC with a "fresh" install. Unfortunately that was a tough sell from a marketing perspective.

Re: The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible

#17

Post by givan »

eli wrote: post #11
givan wrote: post #3

Not computer users, just the windows users. I never understood the install wizards for windows software, in 99% of the time you just click "next" until it stops asking for more "next". And now they all sneak garbage adware with the check boxes enabled by default because most people just click "next" anyway. Also the whole download and install drivers/utilities etc after installation is very time consuming because the…

This is nonsense fanboism. Modern versions of Windows are extremely similar to OS X from a usability perspective. OS X has plenty of counterintuitive warts. Computers of any flavor are pretty hard to use. > I never understood the install wizards for windows software... I never understood why half the time when I download Mac software and double click it, nothing seems to happen because it's a "disk image" (talk about…

>This is nonsense fanboism I'm not a fanboy, I didn't mention apple or anything else, I used ubuntu for a long time and it doesn't have this kind of problems.

Re: The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible

#18

Post by rhplus »

RyJones wrote: post #7

Unfortunately, the profit in those laptops comes from the shovel ware, so there's no incentive for OEMs to sell a pro-user experience.

Microsoft got the message and their retail stores only sell computers as "Microsoft Signature", i.e. no crapware.

http://signature.microsoft.com/

Re: The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible

#19

Post by derleth »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #13

I enjoyed this rant. The bottom line is that this 'experience' isn't about you, its about who you can be sold too. That is because "you" are too cheap to pay what "we" think should be paid for them. It is like a hotel which sells you room for $100 a night if you agree to let them leave a web cam on 24/7 and sell any useful 'snippets' it catches while you are there. The bulk of the market doesn't buy "computers" they…

> The bottom line is that this 'experience' isn't about you, its about who you can be sold to

To be honest, I didn't jump from Windows to Linux because of this. I jumped because Windows ME was just that bad. However, this makes me increasingly happy I jumped with each new version of both Windows and MacOS.

> Time to start a 'developers' company that works very much on the same model that Sun Microsystems started on, hardware designed from the ground up to be developed on, open systems so that folks can easily work with it, and a team dedicated to making sure integration and support is there so that folks like you and I can say "Hey this audio doesn't work when you set the sampling rate to 40Khz" and they can fix it and release that fix.

Bits and pieces of this are already here. We need a Wozniak to find the best way to put them together and create the new pieces we need. Too bad that of The Two Steves, Jobs gets the accolades and Wozniak gets ignored.

Re: The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible

#20

Post by notatoad »

eli wrote: post #11
givan wrote: post #3

Not computer users, just the windows users. I never understood the install wizards for windows software, in 99% of the time you just click "next" until it stops asking for more "next". And now they all sneak garbage adware with the check boxes enabled by default because most people just click "next" anyway. Also the whole download and install drivers/utilities etc after installation is very time consuming because the…

This is nonsense fanboism. Modern versions of Windows are extremely similar to OS X from a usability perspective. OS X has plenty of counterintuitive warts. Computers of any flavor are pretty hard to use. > I never understood the install wizards for windows software... I never understood why half the time when I download Mac software and double click it, nothing seems to happen because it's a "disk image" (talk about…

Modern versions of windows are extremely similar from a usability perspective, sure. But that's windows as defined by microsoft, and OSX as defined by apple. The problem occurs because third parties try to shoehorn all kinds of crap into windows applications and onto the windows desktop. There's nothing wrong with windows in theory, but in practice there sure are a lot of people trying to fuck up windows. It's much less of a problem on other operating systems.
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