141–150 of 151 posts
The biggest travesty IMHO is the updated Notepad that was rewritten using the modern Win UI. It now takes 2 seconds to start on an 8-core computer with a PCIe 4 NVMe SSD. Oh, and a tab indent and four spaces are almost… but not identically aligned. They’re like… one or two pixels off. With a fixed width font! This is just sad: https://paste.pics/aacb91eda1bfb46f968bed2004ad2328 Notepad can also no longer open large t…
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It's very obvious that pages for the Settings app are being written in some very restricting XML or HTML type markup and they're struggling to give any intuitive structure to settings. Everything is in a very basic single-column layout with virtually no graphics to visually guide your eye and combine or separate items. There doesn't even seem to be a generic table widget with sortable columns available.
I wouldn't call XAML restrictive. It's been used with WPF (their previous UI toolkit) with great effect: it can handle very complex interfaces just fine (look at Visual Studio, it's been using WPF since 2010). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Application_Markup_... The issue is with their newer UI toolkit (WinUI) and the brain-dead design language they've been using along with that. This famous tirade is as r…
It's a perspective. This bit was interesting:
> Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire.
So what's happened to the start menu is cover fire. And the point is to create illusion of progress, progress your competitors feel they have to match(?)
I guess all those database access strategies cost little more than the effort to create them, because they were all thrown away in the end. But cover fire coming from the start menu has come at a cost. It's the Start Menu what finally made me decide Windows wasn't worth revisiting. Like any GUI oriented OS, you have to use the Start Menu repeatedly to get anything done. Which means it has to be fast. Yet sometimes it was taking seconds to respond.
I guess that's what happens to something that gets more and more features added to it to create cover fire. It gets slow, and so bloated that most people wont' use a fraction of what it provides. Yet even though they don't use them, the features still extract their cost.
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I does for me with the default edition. There is no way to delay it indefinitely. I tried editing the registry, the parameters, everything... Literally everything I could find online. The other non Home edition may allow to disable them.
It allows me on the Pro edition without any hacks.
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I'm still not sure I understand what made that so heretical other than being different. I can't really imagine any scenario where I'd be using the start menu and want to see something else at the same time.
The reason why you need to open the start menu is often on screen, then you hit the Windows key and the context that should be driving your next action is hidden. All it takes is a brief moment of distraction and — if you're like me — you'll completely forget why you opened the menu in the first place. It's like walking into a room and forgetting why you had entered. At that point, maybe you return where you came fro…
Hitting a 2x2 pixel magic corner when not full screen and over a 100ms latency link is simply infuriating.
The special “Windows key” would similarly not make it through KVMs, iLO/DRAC, and most cloud consoles.
It was an exercise in frustration topped by only by this little pop up:
“Swipe here to view this notification.”
Okay, I’m swiping. Still swiping. It’s going to work any minute now…
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It allows me on the Pro edition without any hacks.
Which is notably not the Home edition.
Anyway, they're both free, so for personal use might as well use the Pro, instead of limiting yourself to the pesky Home Edition.
The biggest travesty IMHO is the updated Notepad that was rewritten using the modern Win UI. It now takes 2 seconds to start on an 8-core computer with a PCIe 4 NVMe SSD. Oh, and a tab indent and four spaces are almost… but not identically aligned. They’re like… one or two pixels off. With a fixed width font! This is just sad: https://paste.pics/aacb91eda1bfb46f968bed2004ad2328 Notepad can also no longer open large t…
So has Microsoft ever gotten around adding tabs to the Explorer?
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and when you launch any random .bat file.
Or you just change your default program for batch files.
I would pay so much money to just be able to use Windows 7's UI with Windows 10's performance improvements. Try spinning Windows 7 up in a VM sometime. Using it is such a wonderous experience. It's almost perfect. I miss it so much. To me, Windows 8/8.1/10/11 have all been massive downgrades to different extents.
You can have at least Win 7 start menu on Win 10: https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu It's fast, reliable and highly configurable.
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Right click taskbar > taskbar settings > taskbar behavior > taskbar alignment: Left
This functionality was removed in Windows 11 and as far as I know has not yet returned.