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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)

#161

Post by [deleted] »

pavon wrote: post #128
dangus wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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 te…

[deleted]

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

#162

Post by okanat »

amarant wrote: post #113
dagmx wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you disagree , doesn’t mean that your opinion holds any weight over theirs. Especially because you’ve provided no rebuttal of substance, and resorted to name calling.

GP has a point tho. The article ranks vista over XP, and that's just ludicrous. Even Microsoft has admitted that vista was hot garbage. It's even become a slang expression: a app can have a "Vista moment", meaning they released a version that was completely unusable and a stark regression from previous versions. Meanwhile XP is widely regarded to have been the best windows version ever. The only version that even com…

Vista wasn't that bad from purely OS side. On a VM it runs pretty stable.

However, Microsoft made a huge change to how the OS and drivers worked. If you still use Windows, you are still benefitting from some of the changes.

However HW vendors usually ship rather broken drivers, it was doubly bad since Vista overhauled the driver interface. By the time all vendors fixed their shitty and badly tested drivers we already had 7. It is also partly Microsoft's fault since they had absolute chaos in Vista development due to shitty hacks on top of hacks that was the consumer OS (XP).

Similarly Vista was very heavy for its contemporary average hardware. By the time HW caught up, 7 was released.

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

#163

Post by saratogacx »

dpark wrote: post #100
CableNinja wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The upside was that it was 100% customizable, there were tons of themes that redesigned the entire look of the desktop, and lots of resources for it. Naturally, all mine looked like hot garbage, but it taught me about texture and image editing, and how transparencies worked in rendering (though xp themes were a special hell of using neon pink because transparent pixels werent usable yet)

Was it significantly customizable out of the box? I remember installing WindowBlinds specifically so I could theme the OS.

At launch you had 3 themes (blue, green, and silver) as well as classic where you had all the customization of Win2k's settings. Later on (SP3-ish) you got a zone orange/dark theme which was nice.

To do more you either used WindowBlinds or just grabbed a patched UxTheme32.dll which would accept unsigned theme files. Once you did that you had an almost silly number of options to try out from various web sites.

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

#164

Post by miffy900 »

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…

That was exactly the same behaviour in Windows 7 though; it wasn't exactly novel. At least Windows 7 searched your apps, and documents all at once. Windows 8 limited you to just apps. Windows 8 was a huge step down in usability.

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

#165

Post by 1718627440 »

coldpie wrote: post #92
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…

> 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. Decent operating systems support this, and have for decades. macOS has the spotlight search (cmd-space), and most Linux DEs have some form of it t…

A Shell (the UNIX one not the Windows term), is basically nothing other than this, with more features added.

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

#166

Post by miffy900 »

dagmx wrote: post #96
wackget wrote: post #87

Giving Windows 11 the highest rating and XP one of the worst ratings clearly demonstrates that this author is not a serious person.

Just because you disagree , doesn’t mean that your opinion holds any weight over theirs. Especially because you’ve provided no rebuttal of substance, and resorted to name calling.

What name calling? Calling the author 'an unserious person' isn't name calling. Might be worth reading the article:

> "If you like Windows 8’s look, you are a bad person. You are the one Steve Jobs was talking about when he said Microsoft had no taste."

yeah you don't need to read very much of this to know this author hasn't exactly written a substantive article; they certainly aren't bothering to backup their claims with any reasoning. the whole post itself is 'this version of windows was ugly, this one wasn't etc'.

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

#167

Post by throwaway_4747 »

nananana9 wrote: post #93
wlesieutre wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you hit print screen, it takes a screenshot, waits a blatantly visible number of frames while you type more letters or stuff keeps moving on screen, and then eventually rewinds time by overlaying the now outdated screenshot for you to select a target area Pressing escape can sometimes cancel out of this overlay (in case you bumped print screen by accident). But sometimes it doesn’t, because the full screen overl…

On my very rasonably spec'd laptop it often takes 20 seconds for the snipping tool selection to pop up. Video recording is very nice though, definitely my favorite feature. New Notepad had a broken typematic that took them 2 years to fix, but they added Copilot at the same patch. Resizing its window still rapidly still flickers and can max the CPU. If you're using labels in the taskbar the buttons aren't fixed width,…

To add to your list, if you open the start menu and type “add or remove” it will not bring up the add or remove programs section in the settings menu. It will only give an internet search. To uninstall a program you have to literally open the settings menu and search for the right section. In win 10 all you had to do was type “add” and it was the default selection.

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

#168

Post by jerhewet »

mghackerlady wrote: post #136
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 :) .

[flagged]

> JShit doesn't belong anywhere

Or, as I prefer to call it, Kiddiescript.

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

#170

Post by kasabali »

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 :) .

> And yes I will debunk this every time I see it :) .

Being technically correct doesn't make it any less annoying, unfortunately.

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