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Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
561–570 of 604 posts
Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
#562Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would argue that was less that WPF was the wrong life choice and more that Microsoft shouldn't have bent the knee to Intel's antitrust push to say their crap hardware was sufficient. [1] [1] - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/03/the-vista-capable-de...
Your argument presupposes that we should accept escalating baseline hardware requirements as good or even necessary, for a desktop computing world that was, from the user's perspective, doing pretty much the same thing as before. I reject that.
My recollection of current events at the time was that you were already having a dogshit experience using computers for many common things in the XP era with underpowered video hardware and trying anything complex in a browser, or Flash things with a lot of assets, so it's less forcing escalating a baseline and more recognizing the realities of what people were already expecting in a "good" computer and building thing that could take advantage of that.
I would agree it should have degraded much more gracefully and more readily than it did, but I'm quite confident we hadn't hit the point of minimal returns on improvements in hardware that would be necessary for such an argument yet.
Hell, I probably wouldn't make that argument until large amounts of RAM and VRAM (or unified RAM) are ubiquitous, because so many workloads degrade so badly with too little of either.
Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
My favorite example of that was when WinRT app .exe files could not be launched from the command line. Only via some Windows Store voodoo dance with approvals, signatures and "security" that made WinRT for developers essentially a dead-on-arrival technology. I would not be surprised if you still cannot launch a fricking .exe.
This was sorted out in Windows 10 with the unification of WinRT programming models under UWP.
Nope, it wasn't solved in UWP days, neither it's solved today.
To satisfy my interest, I've tried creating WinUI app (aka UWP/WinRT) in Visual Studio 2026. And this is what I've got on the first app launch after compilation:
"This device needs to be set up correctly to develop this type of app for Windows. If you don't, then you can't install and test your app before you submit it to Windows Store"
I don't want to install/submit, I just want to be able to run my fricking .exe. Period.
So why are you calling this issue solved? To me, it's still right there in the plain sight - the same voodoo dances and delusional expectations of subordination to Windows Store.
Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
#564Earlier quoted context omitted.
We've ended up in a world where power users have been forgotten. Not out of malice, but out of a misguided aim to reduce complexity and achieve consistency with the web. I would argue that desktop is the platform for power users, and its future depends on them. The keyboard shortcuts, the micro-interactions, the window management -- this stuff is all important when you're using a system for 8+ hours per day. Yet we r…
If you become a power user you realize that nothing matches the power of the command line. And at that point you also realize that are better OSes that allow you to fully explode the true computing power that is terribly limited and constrained by a GUI.
>And at that point you also realize that are better OSes
Nothing beats Windows 11+WSL2; literally the best of both worlds.
Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
#565Earlier quoted context omitted.
WinRT was technologically terrible (which immediately flows from "no one at Microsoft was actually using it to make anything useful"). But that wasn't even what sunk it - the whole requirements around "of course your WinRT app is going to be in the Microsoft Store^TM its the future" did that. The fucking store is a joke, and those requirements existed solely to boost a bunch of idiots internal careers.
The Windows Store thing was so terrible that I would argue the only good thing that came out of it was that it made Valve/Steam invest in Linux. I still don't understand why the windows store search sucked so badly. It isn't like they had billions of apps. So why did it suck?
At one point, I worked on an app that periodically appeared in the top 10 of Windows Store sales.
Its income? Around $500 a month.
Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
#566Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. KDE and Gnome both have pretty consistent UI strategies. You may or may not like them but they have clear identities and design guidelines and follow them.
GTK1, GTK2, GTK3, GTK4, GTK5. Qt1, Qt2, Qt3, Qt4, Qt5.
Yes, those are all different versions of the underlying widget frameworks. I don't understand your point. My current GUI is KDE Plasma 6.6. The only libraries I have installed are Qt 6 (which I am not sure why you didn't list). I have no need for version 5 or 4, or any other. The GUI is consistent.
When I last used Windows, on a fresh install, I saw a mixture of different frameworks used for core OS components from the same vendor.
When I last used OS X, it was pretty consistent but I hear complaints from friends that its no longer the case.
Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
#567Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not nobody. KDE has a functional and consistent GUI.
The problem with things from the Linux world is that they never reached the height of commercial desktops to begin with. If you really enjoy worse Windows XP UX with hamburger menus in recent versions then by all means go ahead, it does function.
I thought we're not discussing whether we like one UI over another but whether an OS's UI was (internally) consistent. You may dislike KDE, but it uses it's design language all throughout the UI from window manager, the application launcher, the settings dialog, everywhere. Windows famously has three (or more?) styles of control panel UI. You may prefer that, and to each their own, but it is inconsistent, which was the topic of this thread.
Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not nobody. KDE has a functional and consistent GUI.
Problem is, both Firefox and Chrome look out of place on it when you use a non-standard color scheme. Custom keyboard shortcuts won't work on Chrome. When you change a theme from light to dark and vice versa, both browsers like to have text in their UI stuck on the wrong color. I could use Konqueror, I guess, but its ad blocking plugin (and plugins overall) seems to never have progressed much since KDE 2.
Right, applications can break all sorts of UI consistency. But the question is: do the standard components that the vendor ships do it? I argue: KDE is consistent. I don't want my desktop UI to dictate how an app draws its UI (or games would be impossible).
Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
Widgets looks like whatever you want them to look like, if the feel like they're from the 2010s its because the implementer made that choice, not because of a limitation in qtwidgets.
Could be, but I am mostly speaking about the fact that making a web app looks stylish feels infinitely easier to me.
Qt uses css. Its no different than what you’re describing.
Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
That might have been more significant had the Windows Runtime not been effectively locked off to Metro-style apps. You could technically use it from a desktop app, but almost all of its functionality was only allowed within a Metro-style app, often due to requiring a core window or package identity. Even today the vast majority of useful WinRT APIs, including the entire UI system, require UWP or package identity.
Package Identity isn't that different from Signed COM Registration of the ancient past. Microsoft built up a lot of dislike from it by building it "sandbox-first", but the core of it still isn't that different from COM's ancient footpaths, at least to the COM diehards that hate .NET and didn't learn near enough from .NET's battles with the same things in terms of package signing, CAS (Code Access Security), and the G…
One significant difference is that Metro/UWP requires signing for pretty much everything. Without signing you can't have package identity, and without package identity, you can't even use the UI system. Furthermore, it requires a paid cert, which is expensive and requires publicly divulging your identity. I have major problems with this as it opens developers up to harassment. .NET at least allowed self-signed certs.
It's true that there is no great answer for how to add capabilities and sandboxing after the fact. But what Windows did was build an incredibly restrictive sandbox and then tell everyone who couldn't accommodate even one of the restrictions was "sucks to be you". The result was that developers, when confronted with "all or nothing" for Metro-style apps, were forced to choose nothing. It was also not a good look that Microsoft's own flagship applications like Visual Studio and Office did not show any progress toward adopting UWP, and in the latter case, was specifically exempted from the Windows RT restrictions to continue using Win32 on that platform.
If there had been a better strategy for easing in UWP technology, we might have seen better progress on adoption of Windows Runtime APIs and capabilities so new programs could gradually move toward the new technologies and away from HWNDs. Unfortunately, the technical barriers that were put in place between Win32 and UWP are so large that progress toward breaking them down in the Windows App SDK has been slow.