Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

No Start Menu for You

randomascii.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 281 posts

Re: No Start Menu for You

#101

Post by addandsubtract »

zwaps wrote: post #34

I think search is hard generally. I switched to an M1 Mac pro recently, and it has its own set of challenges. For instance, there is no start menu but a search bar called Spotlight. You do your quick math in there (where you'd call calc.exe in Windows). However, it only accepts your query as math... sometimes. Like 50% of the times. Otherwise it searches the web. If you search for a program, it takes just that tiny s…

The most essential tool I recommend to any new Mac(book) owner is BetterTouchTool. It started out as a tool to allow you to assign and define new gestures on your trackpad, but has become a lot more since. One of the things it does is window management – drag a window to an edge to full/half/quarter-screen it. You can also assign a keyboard shortcut or trackpad gesture to do this, if you prefer. I couldn't use my macbook without it.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#102

Post by addandsubtract »

zwaps wrote: post #34

I think search is hard generally. I switched to an M1 Mac pro recently, and it has its own set of challenges. For instance, there is no start menu but a search bar called Spotlight. You do your quick math in there (where you'd call calc.exe in Windows). However, it only accepts your query as math... sometimes. Like 50% of the times. Otherwise it searches the web. If you search for a program, it takes just that tiny s…

Another pro tip for using Spotlight: you can search by the initials of an app. For example, if you want to open "Private Internet Access", instead of searching for a substring, you can simply type "pia" into spotlight.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#103

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

samplatt wrote: post #53
martin_ky wrote: post #6

It seems to be a pattern with (not just) Microsoft products to hang the UI while waiting for some remote API, usually talking to the home base. Happens a lot to me with Office desktop apps - they freeze sometimes for a good second or so while starting and more surprisingly also when closing. One time it bothered me so much, that I recorded an ETW and unsurprisingly the time during the hang was spent waiting for some…

General question for the class... Is there any way to stop this? Is there some entries we can add to the hosts file so that Windows and Office will instantly return as failed, rather than timing out?

I use W10Privacy. It blocks all MS servers except those needed to get updates and antivirus definitions.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#104

Post by xeonax »

I disabled windows search indexing. I just use voidtools Everything. It just works. You get access to any file on your system in milliseconds instead of 30+seconds of windows search.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#105

Post by grishka »

roel_v wrote: post #97
grishka wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much improvement can be had by installing an application firewall and restricting everything that doesn't need networking for its primary functionality.

Not much. A lot of this sort of functionality is offloaded onto opaquely named services. So now you have decide if some access should or should not be allowed; but with very little information as to what process will in the end use that access. I used Glasswire for a long time, and when you install it on a new machine you get a lot of allow/block notifications; but then if you go back and look at the 'rule set' that…

It's been a while since I used Windows with any kind of seriousness (and the last version I did was 7), so I wasn't aware that this kind of thing is offloaded to separate, shared processes like that.

> Not to mention, there isn't a whole lot of software left that doesn't need at least some networking for its 'primary' functionality.

Case in point, Microsoft Office has no good reason to be aware of the existence of the internet. Its job is to open, view, edit, and save local files. No one I know uses any of the cloud crap they added in the latest versions. The only use case when networking might be needed in Word/Excel/Powerpoint — and even then, it's most probably handled by a system service — is printing to a networked printer.

(when working with a file stored on a remote server, shared over SMB or something similar, that's definitely handled by the system and appears as a local file to applications, albeit on a very slow disk)

Re: No Start Menu for You

#106

Post by alt227 »

alkonaut wrote: post #94
LightHugger wrote: post #2

It probably hasn't been addressed because user experience is depressingly low priority for microsoft... And i wonder if you could actually convince them that letting the start menu hang while a report gets uploaded is actually a bug, rather than a valued feature.

Normally the upload is in the background but here clearly the crashed process was considered so vital that the UI had to wait for it, which in turn meant it had to wait for the last instance to quit (after it was dumped). So the lesson here I think isn't that there should never be synchronous waiting for crash dump uploads the problem as I see it is 1) The fact that a process that important could crash. 2) That the u…

> clearly the crashed process was considered so vital that the UI had to wait for it

This is not a case of it being important enough, this is the case for every single application:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20120611-00/?p=74...

Re: No Start Menu for You

#107

Post by spapas82 »

xeonax wrote: post #104

I disabled windows search indexing. I just use voidtools Everything. It just works. You get access to any file on your system in milliseconds instead of 30+seconds of windows search.

This. First thing I do on a new windows installation is to install everything.

I never use the start menu, windows search or whatever anymore. When I need to run a program that isn't on my desktop or on my quick run taskbar I press ctrl+alt+s and then a few characters of the name. Pick the result I want with the arrow keys and press enter. Done.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#108

Post by coldtea »

zwaps wrote: post #34

I think search is hard generally. I switched to an M1 Mac pro recently, and it has its own set of challenges. For instance, there is no start menu but a search bar called Spotlight. You do your quick math in there (where you'd call calc.exe in Windows). However, it only accepts your query as math... sometimes. Like 50% of the times. Otherwise it searches the web. If you search for a program, it takes just that tiny s…

>Oh and for some reason, it's less stable than my prior windows machine. Apps just crash a lot, but that's probably due to the Arm64.

For what is worth, I use dozens of apps, several big ones and lots of utilities, and no crashes (though I went for all being M1 native). So could just be the choice of apps or some other factor.

Regarding typing to launch apps, you can try Alfred. It's free for basic use, and is what many long time Mac users tend to use for that role, as opposed to Spotlight.

Also, there absolutely is "tiling". There are several third party apps such as Magnet, and there is even a quite basic built-in: click and keep clicked for a second or so the green window button, and it will give you option to put the window in a left/right tile and chose another for the other side, etc.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#109

Post by xeonax »

spapas82 wrote: post #107
xeonax wrote: post #104

I disabled windows search indexing. I just use voidtools Everything. It just works. You get access to any file on your system in milliseconds instead of 30+seconds of windows search.

This. First thing I do on a new windows installation is to install everything. I never use the start menu, windows search or whatever anymore. When I need to run a program that isn't on my desktop or on my quick run taskbar I press ctrl+alt+s and then a few characters of the name. Pick the result I want with the arrow keys and press enter. Done.

Before Everything I used to remember my filesystem. Like wheres what to rapidly access stuff. This was 12-14 years ago. I now just remember the file name. Everything remembers everything else.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#110

Post by cassepipe »

input_sh wrote: post #61
yellow_lead wrote: post #36

There's many other problems with the start menu - specifically search 1) Anything not found opens in Edge™ and not your default browser (WTF?) 2) It loads lazily - so sometimes you hit enter and the highlighted item has already changed 3) Partial searches don't work very well. At this point, I'm wondering if there's a start menu replacement app

> At this point, I'm wondering if there's a start menu replacement app Not using Windows for like a decade now, but I always go for a third-party launcher on Linux/macOS. They're fast(er) and more importantly extensible. Instead of trying to index everything all the time, they function via triggers. If I start my query with "em", it searches emojis, if I start it with "=" it does calculations, if with "tr" it transla…

While I agree with your point I found Ulauncher particularly slow when I tried it a year ago compared to the regularly recommended rofi
Post reply on HN