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Comment by 1ris | Hacker News Reader

Windows. Not windows applications, but windows itself. Completly incoherent user interface. Impossible to find anything. The wifi dialog in the systray, the new windows 10 wifi control and the old style network interfaces dialog often show conflicting information. Neither of them works. Have trouble with bluetooth (of course you have, it never works)? Windows is kind enough to hide anything bluetooth related so you have not chance to do anything about it. The Start menu. Not only full of ads, but also completely insane. Type word X. add a character. Press backspace. Get a completely different result. Entering notepad.exe works. entering notpad does not. Enter "visual", find no results. Enter "visual studio" et voilat. Ads in the explorer. And the list goes on and on. It's full of nuisances and inconsistencies.

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Came here for this. It's a visual mismatch of varying Windows versions, from modern 10 all the way to some pieces still having a Windows 95 icons and layout. Why such a wealthy company can't afford to get every part of its OS updated in 25 years is beyond me.

The file Explorer is sometimes super slow (especially when dealing with media files, which it insists on analyzing first before displaying their folder), hangs on some FLAC files and frequently crashes.

It somehow can't handle pretty standard media files (again some standard FLAC that work everywhere else, variants of H264 or H265, etc.)

The networking works when it wants to - I still struggle to swap files between two Windows 10 systems on my home networks (one always can't see the other machine, and when I move files it's slow as molasses despite having blazing fast Wifi).

Yes.

Work: Win10 fails to manage windows - doesn't remember where they go, can't reopen a set on startup. Don't allow pinning above other windows anymore. Opening a Word doc maximises the other 4 Office windows I have open and makes me spend time shuffling Windows around. So frustrating. There are 3rd party fixes for these things but work doesn't allow that, be nice if they just weren't broken. Win10 as a window manager seems very limited.

Home: For me the sound settings are weird there's no simple way to choose two outputs (headphones and speakers). I have to use a third-party app to make the volume range over 0-100 rather than 0-1 (1 is too loud, 0 is off). Adjusting mic settings is stupidly complicated, why isn't there a slider in with the output slider in the system tray (as I'm used to in KDE, and I swear they used to have in MS Windows?). Some apps it won't let you start as admin from the Start menu, but that works fine from Explorer, urgh.

In my experience, I frequently launch the Visual Studio Installer instead Visual Studio itself because of the bizarre way the start menu does searches.

Meanwhile it finds my portable Postman install no problem, even before I'd ever run it. I don't get it.

Additionally, it is easily to screw up big with mouse accidents, whether on explorer or dialog boxes. It's so easy to grab the filename of something else while saving, even when most of the time, that is not what you want to do. And I've also experienced accidentally moving files and folders just because of a slip of the mouse.

While, not on Windows alone, and I doubt this will change, I also think that close and maximize buttons on the corner of windows are too close that I had accidentally closed web browser windows many times. Of course we can just use shortcut keys, but I don't think that fixes root of the problem, and I am also now immunized on how window border buttons look that it might look aesthetically unpleasing if we depart from how it is now.

Many other software also suffer from this design quirks where buttons with very opposing outcomes are somewhat too close to each other, that you need to slow down and be careful.

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