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No Start Menu for You

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Re: No Start Menu for You

#31

Post by type-r »

martin_ky wrote: post #6

It seems to be a pattern with (not just) Microsoft products to hang the UI while waiting for some remote API, usually talking to the home base. Happens a lot to me with Office desktop apps - they freeze sometimes for a good second or so while starting and more surprisingly also when closing. One time it bothered me so much, that I recorded an ETW and unsurprisingly the time during the hang was spent waiting for some…

happens a bunch on mobile for me too. if I'm on unreliable wifi / cellular, it's easier to go into airplane mode than wait for Spotify to try to complete a remote call when searching my library

Re: No Start Menu for You

#32

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

martin_ky wrote: post #9
LightHugger wrote: post #2

It probably hasn't been addressed because user experience is depressingly low priority for microsoft... And i wonder if you could actually convince them that letting the start menu hang while a report gets uploaded is actually a bug, rather than a valued feature.

I'd say the reality is even more ironic - they collect so much data and reports, pretending this is to help to improve the user experience, but in the end it makes the experience so much worse.

It still irks me to no end when a Microsoft product asks me to rate my experience. Teams is constantly badgering me to rate the call quality. Is there a threshold percentage of users indicating good/bad that would lead to any change?

Re: No Start Menu for You

#33

Post by tryfinally »

It sounds like a good idea to preemptively disable Windows Error Reporting. I usually do it (and kill all other telemetry I can find) on all Windows machines I set up.

Microsoft’s going to need to try harder than this to convince me to keep it enabled.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#34

Post by zwaps »

I think search is hard generally. I switched to an M1 Mac pro recently, and it has its own set of challenges.

For instance, there is no start menu but a search bar called Spotlight. You do your quick math in there (where you'd call calc.exe in Windows). However, it only accepts your query as math... sometimes. Like 50% of the times. Otherwise it searches the web.

If you search for a program, it takes just that tiny second to update results such that if you type one letter too much, your top result goes from program to web search, and pressing enter opens Safari.

Relevant results (folders + files) do appear, but usually you have to scroll.

The search bar itself comes up very quickly though.

If you do consider switching, one warning about Mac is this: Window management is utter garbage. Maximizing is actively discouraged. Tiling left / right etc? Doesn't exist. Everything must be random size and overlap weirdly. Instead, each new version brings a new quick switch or workspace functionality that I have never seen anyone use.

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. I mean, remarkably stable compared to computer back when, of course, but compared to Windows 10, I have more crashes and even had to restart a couple of times!

Re: No Start Menu for You

#35

Post by sterlind »

bitwize wrote: post #4

Meanwhile, an Amiga with a half meg of RAM and a 7 to 25 MHz processor never fails to respond instantly to user input unless it's totally hosed. We seem to have forgotten this very fundamental principle: the user's desires, expressed through input, are paramount for a desktop OS, which means that the OS must be designed from the ground up to respond to input at a very high priority. Mainframe operating systems like U…

Fucsia's kernel (Zircon) is hard real-time I think, which is what you want if you value predictability and low latency over all else.

Though you don't need an RTOS to make a responsive app, of course. It's just there's such a tendency for systems to bloat and become a tangled mess of RPCs and process activations, while using an RTOS tends to tie your hands and keep you from getting into such a mess.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#36

Post by yellow_lead »

There's many other problems with the start menu - specifically search

1) Anything not found opens in Edge™ and not your default browser (WTF?)

2) It loads lazily - so sometimes you hit enter and the highlighted item has already changed

3) Partial searches don't work very well.

At this point, I'm wondering if there's a start menu replacement app

Re: No Start Menu for You

#37

Post by vladvasiliu »

esalman wrote: post #3

Can confirm that start menu random lag happens on Windows 11 too. I don't know if this is a good solution but I keep shortcuts to my most used programs on desktop. I don't necessarily click on them to open the apps, but if I hit Windows key, the text completion is faster for those shortcuts on desktop.

I sometimes encounter a slightly different situation: when I type something in the start menu, it finds it quickly. But then, when I press enter, nothing happens. There's the "select" animation, but the menu stays on-screen, and the app doesn't start. I will then proceed to press enter multiple times in frustration, each producing just the animation and no other discernible effect. Then, after a while, I'll get X times the app started all of a sudden. This also happens on the settings menu coming up when clicking on the network icon in the taskbar: if I click the gear to open the settings app, it will animate, but nothing else would happen. Click X times, and X settings apps pop up after a while.

This is on a newish computer, 11th gen i7, fast-ish NVMe, etc. It was reinstalled when 11 22h2 came out. I also don't have much junk installed (nothing apart from intellij, teams and the rust build chain).

Re: No Start Menu for You

#38

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

viraptor wrote: post #28
delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #16

Great 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.

> because of the supposed inaccessibility of Windows (clearly not true) It's a mixed bag and it's far from not true. You get great tools for performance debugging, you get some system symbols, got get system wide tracing... Unless you don't get the symbols. And even then, you often find the element which doesn't work properly and... that's all. Now you know what fails, but not why and you can't do anything about it a…

The debugging tools and symbols are mostly available, but that we can't verify why these bugs happen or fix them is down to the closed-source nature of Windows, then, isn't it?

Another pipe dream to add to the pile: open-source Windows.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#39

Post by xenonite »

zwaps wrote: post #34

I think search is hard generally. I switched to an M1 Mac pro recently, and it has its own set of challenges. For instance, there is no start menu but a search bar called Spotlight. You do your quick math in there (where you'd call calc.exe in Windows). However, it only accepts your query as math... sometimes. Like 50% of the times. Otherwise it searches the web. If you search for a program, it takes just that tiny s…

Yes, this is why I turn off search in Spotlight (also for privacy).

For window management, please consider using the Rectangle app or some other keyboard window manager. Otherwise, I believe its possible to long press on the maximize button to put your windows on the left or right half.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#40

Post by azalemeth »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #32
martin_ky wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say the reality is even more ironic - they collect so much data and reports, pretending this is to help to improve the user experience, but in the end it makes the experience so much worse.

It still irks me to no end when a Microsoft product asks me to rate my experience. Teams is constantly badgering me to rate the call quality. Is there a threshold percentage of users indicating good/bad that would lead to any change?

I've been giving it one star consistently since it was introduced. It's still shit. I'd love to know what happens to that feedback.

I once had a teams bug wherein I couldn't join a call whenever Google Chrome updated as it would fail the version number check and give me an error telling me I needed to use Google Chrome. I took a screenshot of this patent insanity and sent it to Microsoft support. A bit of discussion later and the response was something like "we know that Teams is continually evolving software and is not perfect at this time".

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