Comment by lutte | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lutte | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

What mystifies me is that the core of the OS is actually pretty good. I've never had any issue like a blue screen since a decade ago. The kernel and driver subsystems are rock solid. Had a few occasional GPU driver crashes but those are mostly the fault of the driver devs and they don't cause a system reboot since Vista.

Why is the userland so bad in comparison? are they employing much worse developers to take care of the windows explorer/search/browser side of things? it is true that if you really try to pay attention you will notice many quirks and bugs here and there in the user interface interactions, with the start menu search being such a horribly visible offender (also bugs in the explorer search box).

Microsoft managed to make a uniform looking user interface for both win9x and XP/Vista/7, why are they having so much trouble with Windows 10 control panels?

Agree that Windows 10 seems to get the difficult stuff right. Stability, security, advanced graphics infrastructure, and very impressive backward compatibility with old binaries. Also agreed that the new control panels are a trainwreck, offering no advantages whatsoever over the old control panels they're trying to (very gradually) replace.

It's also incredibly bloated. Gone are the days when a few gigabytes would be enough for your Windows partition.

Minesweeper from the Microsoft store is bigger than a standard Win98 install. :)

The original Xbox had 64MB of RAM, with no dedicated graphics memory.

The Microsoft Teams chat application uses 200MB to 550MB of RAM when idle.

My all-time favourite example of high-density software is Super Mario 64, which weighs in at 8MB.

.kkrieger is a full 3D shooter in just 96K (needs slightly more than 96K of memory to run)

That's a good example from the demoscene, but that was done as a tech demo, rather than as a serious commercial product. To illustrate the bloat of modern software, I think it's better to point to examples of highly compact 'real' software.

Of course, a great deal of effort must have gone into squeezing it down to 8MB, and it wouldn't be reasonable to ask modern developers to go to those lengths, but still.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com