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How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?

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Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?

#261

Post by bitwize »

sph wrote: post #140
petepete wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how the huge silent majority get on just fine with GNOME but the vocal few act like the devs have poked them in the eye and called their mother fat.

And they are really angry about it! I use GNOME, it's not great, but some people really hate it, go out of their way to tell everybody how pissed they are at it and that GNOME is the worst thing to have ever happened to the Linux world. I guess complaining about GNOME has become part of their identity, a trait shared by the vocal systemd haters that just won't shut up about it. Many Linux users haven't gone past the…

I've despised GNOME since version 1.x. I've developed a solution to deal with all this pent up hate and rage toward GNOME.

I just don't use it.

About as desktoppy as I'll get is XFCE. I gave my girlfriend (now wife) a Kubuntu-based laptop once to hold her over until I bought her a MacBook Air.

Systemd is another matter because Lennart doesn't seem to want me to have the "I just don't use it" option without stuff breaking. But Void seems to truck along quite nicely with runit so I'm content with that.

Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?

#262

Post by EMM_386 »

kemayo wrote: post #221

The single most "oh, Microsoft " moment I had when updating to Windows 11 is actually glossed over in this article without comment. Context menus are restyled, and also now have a "show more options" entry[1] -- if you press it, what happens? The pre-Windows-11 context menu appears. That's right. There's archeological layers of UI design in context menus now. [1] https://ntdotdev.files.wordpress.com/2022/12/image-4.p…

One of the first things I do on a Win 11 install is to revert the context menus back to the way they used to be.

It's the single most annoying thing to me ... the rest of the changes I can live with.

It can be done with RegEdit and some minor changes to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\CLASSES\CLSID.

Information is online.

Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?

#263

Post by IIsi50MHz »

alganet wrote: post #58
mihaaly wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't this corrupted by one of the Windows updates? Or was that the other product? Got the whole UI frozen or such. I read about third party apps that hack back features this way or the other but I am still hoping a bit that MS will get back their senses and not some - potentially fragile to underlying OS structure change - third party app is required to make things functional again. But I am around the breaking poi…

It never broke for me. I've been using since October. There has been a large update since, but the app repatched explorer flawlessly. I also use a lot of other funky stuff (system icon changers, theme patchers, etc gotta get that rice). I also remove a lot of stuff using SophiaApp. There has been some usability turndowns for me in the past years, but two things keep me hooked: snap windows (built in) and powertoys (m…

I like some of the features of AquaSnap, including more window-snapping options, better than the built-in snapping. It does have rather more features than its name implies, like "shake a window to toggle Always On Top" (this enabled one is enabled by default, with an adjustable threshold).

Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?

#264

Post by josephcsible »

ss48 wrote: post #169
adql wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you're UI designer and designed the UIs launched it and all works... what else you're going to do ? Same disease that plagues GNOME, change shit for sake of changing shit, fuck users that got used to the old way, they don't matter, is new way faster ? Who knows, we don't.

GNOME3 was released in 2011, and around then, KDE did the same major overhall. I haven't seen too many major changes in the overall approach to the UI either has taken since then. Probably the most dramatic was the GTK4 update, which took quite a while.

> KDE did the same major overhall

The difference between GNOME and KDE's major overhauls is that KDE didn't get rid of all of their customization options in theirs.

Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?

#265

Post by EMM_386 »

alex_duf wrote: post #245
encryptluks2 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also hide some of the most useful options while keeping the most useless. Rename is now one of the ones hidden by default.

"rename" use to be F2, not sure if that's still the case nowadays

It's still F2, and due to this change I've actually learned to start using this more often.

Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?

#266

Post by EMM_386 »

fareesh wrote: post #249

I use Linux on my desktop most of the time. Recently I've been dual-booting into Windows 10. Whenever I run Windows my HDD usage spikes to 100% until I turn off "real-time virus protection". Does anyone know if this feature still exists in Windows 11, and if it is less buggy on W11? I'm sure there is some registry voodoo I could do to turn this off on every reboot - so far Googling the magic keys and trying them has…

It does, the process is the "antimalware service executable" and I find it can occasionally start running while I'm in the middle of trying to do something else.

I notice it right away because the fans on my laptop will spin up to max speed for a few minutes, even if I'm just doing something basic like editing a document. I'm not sure why it tries to run what appears to be a lengthy scan when it can see the machine is not idle.

Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?

#267

Post by jeroenhd »

simion314 wrote: post #151
jeroenhd wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like Linux doesn't allow you to put the QT .so files next to the binary either, Linux applications generally just expect these files to be available system wide. > Compiling this old apps I assume will hit same issue, this time missing even more packages since I will need all GTK2 dependencies. I wish there was a nice, slim way to put in a folder all the libraries from a say 16.04 release and tell this app t…

One question, so if I copy the old libraries from an old distro, will they fail because on my distro there is a new libc or libc++ ? Because I hit this issue too where from my googling you can only have one libc(or c++ I can't remember, but I was forced to upgrade because a software needed a newer library and it was no way to provide a non system wide one -or not an easy way that I could actually find). In my case I…

You can copy over the old libraries, but you also need to copy the dependencies of those libraries and their dependencies. This can even include the old version of libc if the compiled binary doesn't have any special configuration built in.

Your libpangox library can be downloaded from Debian it seems. In most cases, Debian and Ubuntu libraries work pretty well together (as long as you don't install them at the system level). Unpacking the contents and putting them in the right (application specific) paths may solve your problem.

Personally, I'd resort to setting up a virtual machine for software that old, maybe running X11 forwarding to get the GUI on my native desktop. You might also get away with setting up an AppImage/Flatpak image you can then use on your desktop but that'll take even more fiddling around.

If you're in luck, you may also be able to install the modern equivalent of these packages and port the software over. How well that works really depends on the complexity of your application, but I've run old software after fixing a few imports and method names before so it's worth looking into perhaps?

Personally, I don't really like scripting languages for complex tools like GUIs exactly for this reason. Python in particular depends on a lot of native libraries for its script-to-native conversion, which means you need the perfect mix of language support and dynamic library support for old code to work. It's not a problem if your tool is being maintained, but if it's using software as old as Python 2.4, you're often up for one hell of a challenge. Super basic programs with rudimentary GUIs will work easily but once GTK and Qt get involved, you're probably better off with a compiled binary in my experience;

Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?

#268

Post by flohofwoe »

gizmo385 wrote: post #248
flohofwoe wrote: post #190

Funny how the more the screenshots go back in history, the more 'useful' the UI looks like (even though they no longer adhere to the current fashion fad - which should actually be handled through a user-accessible themeing engine, no need to pay some UI designers big bucks to come up with rounded corners). For instance right in the first Task Manager screenshot, I have no clue what those tab icons on the left side ac…

> o need to pay some UI designers big bucks to come up with rounded corners). It’s really unfortunate how dismissive of the entire ui design profession so much of HN is. Not a great look IMO

Respect must be earned, like back when it was called "Human Interface Design" and involved actual scientific research (e.g. between ca the late 70's to mid-90's) instead of just coming up with esoteric essays from time to time about what 'emotions' certain colors, fonts or rounded corners evoke.

Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?

#269

Post by EMM_386 »

0x0 wrote: post #155

I wonder if they kept the ODBC driver installer window with the win3.x-style file tree unchanged, just so they could be compatible with random old legacy odbc driver installer program that might try to programatically automate interactions with that UI? I don't know first-hand of any such program, but it wouldn't surprise me if there was some old important enterprisey installer that expects the file chooser dialog to…

That's why they have to leave a lot of this stuff alone. It's why there is both a Settings application as well as a legacy Control Panel.

There are thousands of applications in the wild that still do all sorts of insane hooks deep into Windows controls, expecting them to be "just so" and would break if they weren't.

So every screen rewrite is a dance with all of the legacy software, and sometimes you end up with a modern version of the screen, as well as the old version for backwards compatibility. Eventually enough of the software is brought forward (or abandoned) and the legacy screens can start being dropped.

Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?

#270

Post by ninkendo »

What I don’t understand is why Microsoft seems to have failed so often at creating the basic abstractions needed to be able to replace the old dialogs (for instance the file browser the ODBC connection UI) with new ones without needing to touch the calling code.

Microsoft’s answer for making new UI always seems to involve making new API’s altogether, leaving the old ones intact for compatibility, and adopting the new ones gradually over time. What’s the point of interfaces if you need to change them to change the implementation? The ODBC dialog should have been able to be changed without the calling software even knowing about it.

I seem to recall the reasons being something about explorer shell plugins and needing to support third party additions to the dialogs, but that just raises further concerns for me: why allow such things in the first place if it causes you to never be able to change the dialogs? Why does the explorer right-click menu (for example) have a plugin interface that prevents you from changing it to use a new UI look and feel?

It all reeks of “the wrong abstraction” all over the place to me. It’s probably getting old to point this out at this point, but macOS doesn’t seem to suffer from any of these issues. If they decide to do a new UI theme for a macOS release, you generally see it everywhere. There’s no 1993-era UI elements in macOS that are significantly out of place (not saying they don’t have UI that has sat unchanged, but it’s usually because the changes aren’t needed, not because they just didn’t get around to it.)

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