Comment by dmos62 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmos62 | Hacker News Reader

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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).

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

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.

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.

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