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

What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite

blog.usejournal.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 122 posts

Re: What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite

#31

Post by joyj2nd »

chesimov wrote: post #18
therealmarv wrote: post #2

that are actually the small little things which are fast on a Mac. This seconds of thought are also clearly visible on some Ubuntu machines... Gnome is not always optimized and Snap programs make you think your laptop is frozen.

I have recently moved to a macbook pro for work, having used Ubuntu on my prior machine. In my experience, the mac (despite having significantly more modern specs) is more buggy and just not quite as snappy for these little things. Opening windows, menus, terminals takes longer (even with the swoopy animations turned off). Wake from sleep also takes longer, and a few times a week it is frozen for a few minutes on wak…

Try Bodhi Linux. Then you learn about "snappy"

Re: What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite

#32

Post by dleslie »

piggycurse wrote: post #25

Why is this blog post so negative? Microsoft are trying and giving all of the developers the tools to help affect the project along the way. The Terminal project was only announced 1 year ago[0]. As I understand it, they had to more or less split how the whole conhost.exe work in order to allow Terminal to even exist. The settings UI is far from sexy, but they're working on it[1]. I think it's impressive to know that…

I switched from WSL2 back to WSL1 because the git action times on the NTFS shared drive were _minutes_ long in WSL2.

I didn't use WSL2 for too long and so I wonder: are processes in WSL2 manageable by Task Manager and Windows Defender as in WSL1? That integration with Windows tooling made WSL1 killer for deploying tools to non-programmers; give them a powershell script and they can run the app and manage it in a familiar way.

Re: What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite

#33

Post by fetbaffe »

kfk wrote: post #29

We are 30+ years and Windows Task Scheduler is still broken. Compare that to simple .txt files to schedule anything you need in Linux. Windows took the UI path for users and that's OK, but most of Power users are still much better off with text files and simple utilities (like crontab) that work. This type of ecosystem is completely broken on Windows, I don't think it can be fixed, it is too much of a paradigm shift.…

How is Windows Task Scheduler broken?

Re: What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite

#34

Post by temac »

temac wrote: post #28

> But the first launch of the Linux subsystem after system reboot is unbelievably slow. Proceeds to provide a video showing a 3s startup time to illustrate the unbelievable slowness that happens once after a reboot. I suspect the favorite activity of the author is therefore to reboot their computer, and to quickly rush to WSL2 after that. In which case I agree the user experience is not ideal.

Continuing to read:

> Why is it animated? Or, even if it is, why is animation so slow?

Given it is not animated on my computer, I suspect it is animated when Windows is configured to have animations...

(and it if this theory is good, it is nice that they respect the disabling of animations, by the way, in contrast with the... Start Menu!)

Re: What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite

#35

Post by Dayshine »

snazz wrote: post #10
Dayshine wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not i3 snappy i3 isn't even snappy, the default application launcher can take up to 10 seconds to open on my old laptop. There is a faster application launcher you can use instead, but you have to hunt through github issues to find out about it. The i3 project maintainers seem to actively object to telling users about 3rd party components and simultaneously refuse to integrate them or improve the default behaviour.

Are you talking about dmenu? That's always been fast on my machine (sway, not i3).

Yup, although it's i3 not dmenu causing the problem.

https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/949

Reported 7 years ago...

Re: What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite

#36

Post by oblio »

kfk wrote: post #29

We are 30+ years and Windows Task Scheduler is still broken. Compare that to simple .txt files to schedule anything you need in Linux. Windows took the UI path for users and that's OK, but most of Power users are still much better off with text files and simple utilities (like crontab) that work. This type of ecosystem is completely broken on Windows, I don't think it can be fixed, it is too much of a paradigm shift.…

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-create-task-using-task-sc...

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/scripting/use-powershell-to-c...

Re: What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite

#38

Post by cm2187 »

Can windows terminal be used remotely? The only remote terminal I am aware of in windows is remote powershell but it sucks badly. It takes ages to come online after a reboot, is unencrypted by default, and because of security issues cannot interact with windows update.

Re: What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite

#39

Post by [deleted] »

kanox wrote: post #23
Grumbledour wrote: post #16

I actually don't get Powertoys at all. They provide basic functionality I would not even class as for power users. Yeah, they are nice, they were nice in win95. Why do I need a separate Program 25 years later to rebind some keys or switch windows, yet every new win10 version tinkers with cortana? People say it would add "bloat", but somehow basic functionality beneficial to many users is bloat while candy crush and x…

It's obviously a deliberate decision to keep the basic windows experience "simple".

[deleted]

Re: What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite

#40

Post by Analemma_ »

nmeofthestate wrote: post #30

This seems like a joke article. The 'long' startup time appears to be a second or two. The slow animated menu is quick - I'd like to see someone actually select a menu item in the time it takes for it to drop down. The animation doesn't impact usability. All a bit bizarre.

The article sucks. I was hoping for a serious critique of Microsoft's new direction and the architecture of WSL2, .NET Core, etc., but it's just a handful of very trivial performance gripes, along with things the author simply doesn't understand, like the default application registered for *.json files being Notepad only until you install something better.

I wish there was a higher bar for upvoting articles besides "it bashes Microsoft, to the top with it"

Post reply on HN