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No Start Menu for You

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Re: No Start Menu for You

#91

Post by happymellon »

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…

You could try Amethyst, it is a tiling window manager for Mac, but it's substantially better than without.

https://ianyh.com/amethyst/

It also adds shortcuts for things like moving windows between virtual desktops. Why is that not a key binding by default in MacOS?

Tiling left and right does sort of exist natively, but you have to make an app only desktop and then add the second one. It's really clunky and doesn't feel like it's intended for actual use.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#92

Post by barbazoo »

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…

That exchange with the Microsoft support account is just such a facepalm.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#93

Post by M1ch431 »

Helmut10001 wrote: post #82

I _really_ recommend Keypirinha [1] for any sane use of Windows. This little tool has rocketed my productivity (I also prefer it above Microsoft PowerToys Run). [1]: https://keypirinha.com/

Its integration with Everything is also very good (arguably the fastest search tool on Windows to my knowledge).

https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/

Honestly, I find the less software/features I use written by Microsoft the better for productivity on Windows. Windows has become shockingly slow and buggy since Windows 7 even though I keep upgrading my hardware.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#94

Post by alkonaut »

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.

Normally the upload is in the background but here clearly the crashed process was considered so vital that the UI had to wait for it, which in turn meant it had to wait for the last instance to quit (after it was dumped). So the lesson here I think isn't that there should never be synchronous waiting for crash dump uploads the problem as I see it is

1) The fact that a process that important could crash.

2) That the upload was synchronous AND silent. Pick one. Just show me a tray message saying "Process blah crashed and we are uploading the crash dump click here to configure your preferences for automatic crash dump uploads".

Re: No Start Menu for You

#95

Post by barbazoo »

etatoby wrote: post #86

> I have a good understanding of the problem, but I do not have a solution REALLY Just don't call background services, unless the user explicitly requested a remote service! My Linux installs and (to a lesser degree) my Windows LTSB/LTSC installs don't have these issues, you know?

Wrong vibe, friend!

Re: No Start Menu for You

#96

Post by happymellon »

tdrgabi wrote: post #57
tablespoon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wouldn't that make things worse? Those applications usually expect to be able to make these calls. So now, instead of lagging once in a while when the home base is having troubles, it will lag all the time. Not necessarily. The lag may be waiting for the remote server to respond to a request, and the app may move on quickly if it can't open a connection at all. It's not totally uncommon to work totally offline (e.g…

In my experience, each time a firewall is blocking a connection, you experience it as a timeout, so the app tries to connect and finally times out. Which would take longer. I haven't tried though

It depends entirely on how the firewall is set up.

If you are getting timeouts then the folks who set up the firewall hate you.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#97

Post by roel_v »

grishka wrote: post #30
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…

I wonder how much improvement can be had by installing an application firewall and restricting everything that doesn't need networking for its primary functionality.

Not much. A lot of this sort of functionality is offloaded onto opaquely named services. So now you have decide if some access should or should not be allowed; but with very little information as to what process will in the end use that access. I used Glasswire for a long time, and when you install it on a new machine you get a lot of allow/block notifications; but then if you go back and look at the 'rule set' that was build up that way some months later, it's really hard to see what was blocked for what reason and if you actually should be blocking it.

One example is embedded IE/Edge views. It seems that those are a process of its own (sometimes), likely out-of-process COM instances. But if you want to allow one program to access the network that way but not another one, well there is (to my knowledge, and I haven't really looked into this) no way to do that. Same for the 'background download' service, the search service mentioned in the OP (although that's only used internally by Windows afaik, but by several sub-components), etc.

Not to mention, there isn't a whole lot of software left that doesn't need at least some networking for its 'primary' functionality. Whether that's by design I don't know. I blame engineers and marketing/product people equally for not showing enough restraint (i.e. the trope of 'just because they could... asked if they should...' etc). But nobody cares about my opinion on this, and the majority of users don't realize or care - and even if they do, they're as powerless as I am, individually.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#98

Post by yellow_lead »

input_sh wrote: post #61
yellow_lead wrote: post #36

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

> At this point, I'm wondering if there's a start menu replacement app Not using Windows for like a decade now, but I always go for a third-party launcher on Linux/macOS. They're fast(er) and more importantly extensible. Instead of trying to index everything all the time, they function via triggers. If I start my query with "em", it searches emojis, if I start it with "=" it does calculations, if with "tr" it transla…

I used Launchy before but got tired of it after a while. Maybe it's time to try it again.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#99

Post by happymellon »

boloust wrote: post #67

The worst thing about the Windows Start Menu search is that it changes the top result without any user input, and it feels like it happens almost every time I use Windows. I'll type the first few characters of a program installed on the machine, and the top result is the program I want. But just as I hit Enter, the top result switches out to a web search, so instead of the program I wanted to start, I'm staring at a…

It has been said that some companies that need to show positive stats will do this slight delay, because all the misclicks show that they are popular. This is why they are top, because everyone uses this feature with an artificial delay!

But that's surely just a conspiracy theory, no company would possibly manipulate their users because that's how you get promoted, or with stack ranking, not fired.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#100

Post by Kwpolska »

xenonite wrote: post #39
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.

The green button isn't a maximize button, it's a full screen button. Full screen on macOS is a separate virtual desktop, so you can't just quickly bring up another window to reference something. Some apps simplify/hide their UI in full screen mode, and until recently, the menu bar would always auto-hide in full screen (it's configurable now).

There's also Zoom, activated by option-clicking the green button. This resizes the window to the app's preferred size, which is random, and usually not the full screen (e.g. full screen height but whatever width it had before).

Turns out operating systems named "Windows" are much better at window management. (The maximizing stuff is one issue, the application-first model is another.)

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