And another case of a good Bruce Dawson article spoiled by completely useless and irrelevant hackernews comments.
What? The comments here are very on-topic as far as I can tell.
No Start Menu for You
251–260 of 281 posts
Re: No Start Menu for You
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's actually timely for me, as I just started using Glasswire with a clean ruleset. As I'm typing this, freakin' explorer.exe asked for network access to an outside IP address. It's hard to disallow explorer.exe network access as I won't be able to access SMB shares without it, but I have no idea why it would go outside my network. I don't know glasswire, but on Commodo firewall you can set a rule to allow access…
Yeah I should probably look into it more. Can Comodo's firewall be used standalone, i.e. without its antivirus? What I needed from Glasswire was click-to-allow on each network access, I couldn't find that in any product I tried a few years ago before I decided on Glasswire.
I'm pretty sure you can actually configure the windows firewall the same way, but you would have to it up front, instead of having it prompt you.
Re: No Start Menu for You
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been using DeskPins for "always on top" since I've known about its existence.
I use this AutoHotkey oneliner. WIN+Space pins/unpins the current window. #SPACE:: Winset, Alwaysontop, , A (Save to set-always-on-top.ahk, and create a shortcut to the script in %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup. Optionally add #NoTrayIcon at the top of the script to get rid of the tray icon.)
Yeah AHK can fix a lot of this, but I only really use Windows on my employer's computer and they're very much averse to installing anything to help with QoL issues like this.
Re: No Start Menu for You
#254Reading the comments here makes me wonder why any of you use MS Windows. Is there something that all of you must have that only runs on Windows?
I can't get my gf to use a Mac (she does it if she has to). It's just familiarity, there's no other reason. Macs have a million arbitrary and pointless differences to Windows due to their long history that are grains of sand in the eyes of someone who doesn't care about computers, they just get in the way and frustrate people.
I use Macs though and much prefer it. Apple still has a relatively disciplined and competent engineering org. Everything in Windows is kinda broken/unreliable and it seems to be getting worse over time. Their insistence on using C++ for everything even in 2023 is killing them - bugs like heap corruption in search services shouldn't be happening but stuff like that is everywhere. Windows 10 is indeed abandonware like the article asks, they only really improve 11 now.
Re: No Start Menu for You
#255Why the hell does windows think it's ok to secretly phone home with crash reports by default, especially when sending those makes the problem worse by slowing down the crash recovery? In this case the problem would probably have been insignificant if not for super slow, blocking, error telemetry. At least store these and send them later, sheesh.
They only send crash reports if you opt-in to the customer experience improvement program (or whatever it's called), I believe. In general I think that sending crash dumps is _great_. Sending crash dumps is the number one reason why software is more reliable now than it was twenty or thirty years ago.
But, synchronously sending a crash dump together with not telling the user that you are synchronously sending a crash dump - that is problematic.
But, I can see how they got to this state.
But, if they are going to upload crash dumps they need to promptly address the crashes and I'd love to know why that did not happen.
Re: No Start Menu for You
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was before M1. I'm not sure if there was a technical reason to not have a RAM socket but the chip was soldered directly to mainboard in any case.
Basically sockets add size, weight, and mechanical failure points (they can vibrate loose, you need an access panel, etc.). Since most people never use them over the life of the system it’s basically a bet that the RAM will fail less frequently than those other things, which is probably true but frustrating if you’re in the unlucky group.
It's a small sample size but I've seen more failed RAM chips than other components together. And a socket would make upgrades easier. Which of course isn't great if you're trying to sell higher spec up front instead of giving the option to upgrade later if needed. I'm not sure why a separate access panel would be needed, the whole bottom is easy to remove with a pentalobe bit.
Re: No Start Menu for You
#257Great article. I love Windows deep dives—both because of the supposed inaccessibility of Windows (clearly not true), and because Windows is something I've daily-driven for 23 years, and I've come to really appreciate. If only MS could get its act straight, clean up its UI framework mess (WinUI, WPF, WinForms, Win32, WinRT, MAUI... sheesh) and stop applying stupid regressive updates and dark patterns.
> WinUI, WPF, WinForms, Win32, WinRT, MAUI
Literally the reason why I retired from developing rich/native windows apps. I also got burned when they pulled the rug out from under Silverlight.
Is MFC still a thing? Don't forget to add that to the list!
Re: No Start Menu for You
#258Overly obvious question, but: Why TF is there nobody on the Windows team who does exactly this type of work? Why are these things even slipping through QA over and over again? The user-facing layer of Windows is so full of similar problems, yet nothing ever improves, it only ever gets worse.
Pretty much every engineer on the Windows team does this type of work. When you have 1+ billion computers with an infinite combination of peripherals and environments (what language, what apps are running, etc.), it becomes a game of statistics and prioritization.
I don't think that is true. If they had that many developers burning down performance issues then bugs like this would (IMHO) be getting fixed earlier. Anecdotally it sounds like a lot of customers are hitting this bug and I'd love to know whether it is known, being investigated, or just noticed now.
I'm sure it has been showing up in their start-menu telemetry.
I also wonder why they haven't fixed this issue: https://twitter.com/BruceDawson0xB/status/160716343915961139... And why this was ever allowed to ship: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2022/09/29/why-modern-soft... And why this was ever allowed to ship: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2022/07/11/slower-memory-z...
Re: No Start Menu for You
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> 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 But it won't let you just tile a single window to a side, it is mandatory to select another window for the other half of the screen. Also it moves those windows to a separate workspace for whatever reason, which causes a delay when entering/exitin…
> But it won't let you just tile a single window to a side, it is mandatory to select another window for the other half of the screen. Also it moves those windows to a separate workspace for whatever reason
Hold down the Option key to get it to work the way you want, here.
Re: No Start Menu for You
#260Reading the comments here makes me wonder why any of you use MS Windows. Is there something that all of you must have that only runs on Windows?
Switching is a huge hassle, with uncertainty about whether things will actually be better or not, or if I will just hit different problems. Windows is actually excellent in many ways (see the tools I used to analyze this) so I would definitely be missing some things.
So, momentum plus uncertainty about whether other environments are actually better or just different. Plus my job.