Hacker News Reader

I think one key factor is that, whereas this article talks about making Windows easy for home users being a priority because of the huge untapped market there at the time, home users are no longer a real concern of MS: they make their real money from large corporate deployments of tens or hundreds of thousands of copies of Windows, not from individuals. MS basically assumes that, once everyone is using a Windows computer at work, they will have a Windows computer at home as well, and that they will learn how to use it at work because they will have to, and their employer will train them as needed to be able to accomplish work tasks, which will then give them enough basic knowledge to use their home computer. In other words, MS has outsourced the job of training people how to use computers to their corporate customers, so their design process no longer worries about it.

In my experience it is definitely a problem that comes up a lot introducing Windows 10 to people who have never used a computer before. They don't know what is running and what isn't, they don't know which window is focused if there are several on screen at once, they are afraid to poke around in the start menu in a way they weren't when it was simpler and clearer, and in general don't understand the meanings of icons and menus that used to be properly labeled. Windows 95 was a lot more clear and discoverable for someone who had never used a graphical computer.

> ... people who have never used a computer before. They don't know which window is focused if there are several on screen at once

This isn't just a problem for beginners: I'm old hat and I sometimes can't tell what Windows 10 has given focus to at times when I have several things on the go, especially over two or more screens where windows overlapping isn't the obvious go-to clue. The distinction between focused and not is sometimes so close to non-existent it might as well be completely non-existent (like the titlebar text+icons being a slightly different shade of grey), and it varies from app to app (even amongst Microsoft's output) so there is not one set visual cue to follow.

It definitely used to be better than this, including in Windows land.

When I get around to it (so probably never!) I intend to write a little tool that scans for the top-most window and draws a bright border around/over it somehow. I know this is possible (and probably not difficult) as I did some similar hacky window decorating back in the Win2K days[‡], but I've been almost entirely a database+infrastructure fellow for more than a decade and my desktop dev knowledge has rotted terribly.

[†] an always-on-top window positioned so it is a line across the top of the focused window would do, four such objects, one for each side, would be the easy hacky way to achieve a border, a single drawing surface with transparency and mouse click-through would be cleaner but with my current skillset more faf working out the relevant API jiggery-pokery or finding a library that wraps that nicely already

[‡] Using Delphi. Anyone else remember that? Does it still exist in a similar form?

In Settings > Colors you can choose an accent color and turn on the "Title bars and windows borders" option - I think that would give you exactly what you want.

Not everything does anything useful with that setting or even respects it at all, not even everything from MS, not even everything common from MS.

It does cover a fair few things, but not enough to calm my irritation!

I have found this option to be surprisingly inconsistent, both with built-in windows apps and with third-party apps. Many UWP apps don’t honor this at all, in addition to many electron apps.

Delphi is still around. A former coworker at my previous job (left this Jan) used it from time to time to make some quick little utilities. Not sure how well it's aged as I've never used it myself.

Delphi is still around in spirit through an IDE named Lazarus.

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

> people who have never used a computer before

To be fair, back in 1995 the number of people who had never used a computer before was huge, so it made sense for companies like Microsoft to cater to their needs.

Today though, the fraction of people who truly have no computer experience must be utterly minuscule, so I can see that MS does not see the beginner experience as a priority any more.

Counterpoint: There was a headline recently in Japan about the fact that (IIRC) 40% of "kids" between 10 and 20 who do have a computer at home never used a computer. All they know is smartphones, Instagram, and Tiktok. Maybe Twitter. Some may be old enough to have used Facebook.

> They don't know what is running and what isn't

And they shouldn't. That's the idea Windows 10 tries to convey. Windows Store apps already stay in the background even after you close them. You shouldn't care which app is running or not. Clicking its icon would bring it up and that's the only thing the user needs to know.

iOS and Android already work that way.

> You shouldn't care which app is running or not.

I know that there is a strong culture that believes this, but this sort of thing drives me nuts. There are very good reasons why you you would both want to actually close programs and know what programs are running and what are not.

> Windows Store apps already stay in the background even after you close them.

This is one of the many reasons why I don't use Windows Store apps.

> There are very good reasons why you you would both want to actually close programs

Other way around: modern OSes don't want to make it look like programs aren't running when they really are (which has been possible ever since installable background services were created); modern OSes want to be able to close programs behind your back, while they seem to still be running, and then restore them to their previous state when you come back to them.

And it's insanely idiotic. In the mobile world we have this due to a vastly different UX, and traditionally very limited resources. Remember the first iPhone didn't allow more than one app running. Today phones have fast CPUs and plenty of RAM, it's mostly about not draining the battery. None of these constraints apply to the desktop. Even on laptops power consumption is much less of a concern, unless you have some program going berserk spinning on 100% CPU.

So trying to bring this same concept to the desktop is insanely idiotic. Microsoft failed miserably by making Windows 8 a phone OS and then bringing it to the desktop with minimal changes. Windows 10 improved so much by actually focusing on the desktop again. Including such no-brainers as allowing store apps to run windowed. I'm not a Windows user anymore myself, but none of my friends who still have it as their daily driver like or use apps.

> modern OSes want to be able to close programs behind your back, while they seem to still be running, and then restore them to their previous state when you come back to them.

I thought they were suspending them, not closing them. Those are very, very different things.

In any case, pretending that applications aren't closed when they are is no better.

What is “suspending”? Like what https://github.com/maaziz/cryopid does? No OS uses such a technique for production process management. (Well, I guess you could say that Genode does if you consider VMs to be processes.) Processes are too non-self-sufficient for this to work with full generality. (For example, what would a process do if it “freezes” in the middle of executing within a shared library’s code section, and then an OS update is applied, replacing that library on disk? The “defrost” process would presumably re-run the dynamic loader, putting the new version of the library into memory; but now the defrosted thread’s PC points into the middle of an instruction. Oops!) CrypPID-like techniques only work in controlled environments, like if you’ve got a machine serving solely as a Docker container host and you want to “pause” containers.

On the other hand, if by “suspending” you mean “the OS asks the program to persist its running state to disk, which it can easily do because it’s using GUI-control and scene-graph frameworks that know how to serialize out their current state”—and then, when it has done this, the OS considers the process “clean” (like a clean page of disk cache) and therefore discardable—then yes, the OS is suspending processes.

Keep in mind that you need to add a flag to your application’s OS-readable metadata (the application manifest in Windows; the Info.plist in macOS/iOS) opting into this behaviour, signalling that your process is okay with being shut down at any time when it’s in the OS-visible “clean” state, and isn’t, say, a host for an RPC server that other applications are expecting to have a stable connection to.

>iOS and Android already work that way.

And honestly, it's annoying as hell sometimes. You never know when the system's going to kill an app or not. Sometimes you think something might stay in the background for a bit then it doesn't, other times you think you've killed something and it's still running, or it's started itself again. Manual memory management options keep getting stripped back in subsequent android versions. I get the idea behind why android works like this, but the lack of control bothers me.

The difference is that iOS and Android will kill apps as it sees fit. People come to expect that and know that reopening their reddit reader after a few hours, it might not be at the same state they left it.

On a desktop, this is different. You have to explicitly close programs. Because of this, it becomes important to know what's running and what isn't.

> The difference is that iOS and Android will kill apps as it sees fit.

Only because iOS and Android are wasting RAM (the former to a lesser extent, but iOS devices also have less RAM to begin with!) and running with zero swap space. (And the latter point in turn is due to the abysmal, bottom-of-the-barrel quality of phone eMMC storage.) This is not progress, it's just the OOM reaper being overactive for lack of a better option.

> and running with zero swap space. (And the latter point in turn is due to the abysmal, bottom-of-the-barrel quality of phone eMMC storage.) This is not progress, it's just the OOM reaper being overactive for lack of a better option.

And all this grief could be avoided by Linux actually allocating memory when its supposed to as opposed to just saying "Sure!" and then sometime later killing completely random programs when someone actually attempts to use memory they requested.

I wish I had more control over the mobile experience though. For example, my run-tracker apps will get closed and stop tracking me if I open too many apps during my run while leaving Spotify, Youtube, and my podcast apps open.

I'd like to be able to somehow pin the run-tracker as top priority. Sucks to realize after a run or bike ride that it stopped recording 20min into it.

Your run tracker should have a proper background service to make that not happen, or a persistent notification widget. If it is still happening, look around your power saving options to exempt it from being killed due to "excessive power usage" when in the background.

Windows Store apps follow the same semantics. When you close them, they are not unloaded from the memory and they restore their state at the startup even if you kill them. The "green leaves" next to the process name in Task Manager means that the app is suspended, but not killed, despite that it isn't open anymore.

As much as I dislike the general Windows UX, which is largely because I can't run a custom window-manager, I feel like I'm the only person that thinks Windows 10 is a big improvement. Maybe we don't have to look at it as a subjective like/dislike type of thing and just say that for me it's an improvement.

I use the classic non-contracted-to-an-icon task-bar, in the small variant. That's just to say that my task-bar looks and feels the same as it would on Windows 95.

The big improvement for me is the start screen. I use the fullscreen start-menu (I call it screen since it's fullscreen), where I put the shortcuts I want easy access to. It was introduced in Windows 8, but later the defaults were reverted to a 95-style mini-menu.

I have desktop disabled (desktop icons, more specifically), because I find that a desktop has a negative effect on organization, so all my icons are in the fullscreen start.

When I need a shortcut that's not pinned to my start, Win-S pops up the search dialog.

Apart from bloat, I'm pretty content with this UI.

I was a big fan of Windows 95 (I was at the Launch Event!). I was working at Adobe then, porting Mac apps over to Windows.

But I also like Windows 10. In fact, I switched "back" from Mac OSX to Windows 10 several years ago when there was no decent "Pro" desktop option from Apple anymore and am completely happy. I then switched laptops over to Windows 10, too, from Macbooks because there are some great Windows laptops out now.

The UI is very good. Sure, every now and then you delve deep into control panel and see an old wonky UI that's a holdover from a prior OS, but 99.5% of the time, everything is consistent, stable, and rational.

The Windows 10 computer I'm using right now has 4 different audio settings screens, all stock, all equally accessible, and it's not at all clear from the names and menus which screen will set volume and which will switch audio devices (those are different settings screens).

Its not just that... There are people here who claim win10 is "nice" but have obviously never really _looked_ at it. It takes about 1 minute to start 4-5 different applications which are the equivalent of a 20 year history lesson in windows UI's. There are the win3.1 interface which is basically a menubar, there is the 95 era ones which have a menubar and button bar, and maybe even right click works, then there are the ribbon applications, and the modern/metro ones. All shipped with windows, so we aren't even talking about 3rd party apps at this point. Even then we haven't even talked about MDI, or the mishmash of shortcuts for doing the same operation depending on which application.

Yeah, I was only giving the example that came fastest to mind, given that it bites me the most often.

That's a good point, naming of settings sections is quite bad in Windows.

and some of the groupings are so weird! (looking at you, "Update & Security".) i mostly just give up and text-search for the setting i want

Maybe it's my particular setup, but I've had nothing but problems using a Windows 10 workstation which I routinely remote into. Graphical scaling is unstable and screwy, I constantly have to select "reset view" in outlook, programs routinely decide to start off screen, and my two identical monitors behave differently for reasons I've been unable to discover in settings.

I'd just use Linux, but at my organization everything is Outlook-centric.

you could certainly run a custom window manager in win95. That's what I did during the best years of my life. No idea if with the windowses of today is still possible.

Sure, people still do it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/desktops/comments/52402v/windows_10...

It's just less common.

I tried to google around, but info was very thin. The bbzero github repo was last updated 4-5 years ago. Is this something that's bolted on top of the current WM, or is it a veritable replacement, in that the vanilla WM is unloaded and doesn't use resources?

The concensus, whether correct or not, is that Windows WM is tightly coupled with the rest of the system.

That's how it's always been. Litestep/bbZero/etc have always just replaced explorer.exe, but ultimately the Windows system is much more coupled than the Linux one. So you're still going to be using functionality beyond the "window manager".

it seems litestep is still alive.. just.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon

go to the shell key and replace it with whatever you want.

This has been supported since at least Windows 2000!

It actually has been supported since about forever. You could even do that in Windows 3.0, albeit in an .ini file.

Win10 is particularly bad. I have recently started to maintain some Windows infrastructure and have been simulating a new deployment with Server 19, Win 10 clients, Win 7 clients, etc... and the start menu on modern Windows is absolutely unbearable. That combined with the constant full screen takeover modals for basic permissions, and the default icon collapse task bar ... it’s definitely a high bar for a new user.

you can change the way permission modals display to make them a pop-up window w/o the fullscreen! makes them much less jarring

How?

when a permissions popup appears, click "More details" -> "Change when these notifications appear", then take the slider down one step, to "Notify me [...] (do not dim my desktop)".

that's on Windows 10 though, not sure if it's possible on older versions

Don't forget that the start menu has regressed into a CLI because it is too ponderous to find anything by graphical navigation. Regressed, because typed querys take seconds to complete.

I loved this feature in Windows 7, because all it did there was an exact substring match over the items in the Start menu. As a result, it was instant.

The Windows 10 one where it's trying to do a Bing search, look through the Microsoft Store for apps to buy and who knows what else is... I can see what they're trying to do, but if you have 24 years of ingrained habit of only using Start to launch programs it's annoying having the feature made so CPU and disk intensive to add options you don't use. At least Microsoft have put a lot of work into improving it. Using some of the early iterations on a slow spinning-rust laptop would frequently result in the process searching your installed programs timing out, leaving only the web search option.

Nondeterministic keyboard search is infuriating.

On both Mac and windows, I start programs by typing the first few letters in the search box and clicking.

About 25% of the time on Windows, this takes me to an internet search.

So pretty much the only thing I boot into Windows for nowadays is to play FF14.

My routine is always the same: log in, open Chrome if it didn't open already (happens 50% of the time), and then open the start menu, type fi, and click the first icon that appears.

Similar thing happened in Apple with iOS 7. Before they used skeuomorphic design using realistic images to represent UI which was supposed to help people using computing devices first time. E.g. leather notepad to represent reminders application, 3D buttons, etc. They abandoned this design paradigm and switched to minimalist one probably because most of their users became computer-literate and did not need those analogues to understand UI.

I think going with a simple icon is far better. Consider the design of symbols such as corrosive or the street is icy, or s-curve coming up ahead. They do not look like real-world images but they are so wonderfully intuitive. We do not need to stare at the detail to understand what it is.

Likewise, the new icons are brilliant. The reminders app has basically a list. Music is a musical note, etc. The only one that really sucks is "photos". It looks more like a colour wheel.

I still get a kick out of the clock icon.

They reverted some of the things because the paradigms around them have changed, such as "running applications". That paradigm is dead on iOS and Android and is slowly dying on desktop operating systems too. We're getting over the times when we have to carefully consider which apps we should be running to conserve memory, CPU etc. That's not something users should be thinking about.

Modern equivalent of the Start Menu is still the start menu. When you click on it, it shows a list of applications available on the system. Shut down is also the nearest available option there.

So, I disagree with your sentiment that Windows 10 has rolled back good ideas. Windows 10 is simply the best Windows to date ever in all aspects.

The problem is that it is worse. The system begins guessing what users want, and that means the system will be wrong. It often is.

For example, on my Pixel 3, Spotify is terminated if I open the camera app around 80% of the time. Is it a resource issue? Who knows! The system gives me no insight.

Is this what users really want? I'm very doubtful.

> Windows 10 is simply the best Windows to date ever in all aspects.

Wow.

My opinion is very, very different. The best Windows to date, in my opinion, in Win 7. I even consider Win 95 to be better than Win 10.

But have there been long and deep usability studies with users from all ages and experiences to determine if this is the most comfortable and easiest to use system? Or did Steve Jobs go on stage, show the iPhone tailored to his preferences and usage style and then everyone copied that? Because I kind of feel like the systems you describe are doing little more than cargo-cult programming mixed with envy for whatever is "cool" at the time.

The main issue is organizational incentives. Microsoft has thousands of employees in the windows division who need to justify their jobs by constantly changing things. They call this innovation but it’s really just busywork to minimize the chance that they get fired or their boss’s boss’s boss loses clout in the company. The major innovations in windows over the past 20 years have been increased stability, an App Store, better security, easier control in corporate deployments, and some cloud and local backup features, the rest were mostly unnecessary.

Man, if you assume knowledge and expect people to type what they want why not just use a decent CLI?

press the "start" button to stop your computer? i really doubt this was this helpful to new users. it does make sense for most other things though, like launching programs and maybe even the restart option, but for the shutting down option its fairly illogical so its strange that it took them so long to switch to an icon instead.

I have so far only seen computer nerds complain that "shutdown" is under "start". Regular users have no problem starting the shutdown process.