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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

A UI cleanup is needed. What Microsoft needs to do is pick a style and actually complete the transition. They aren't done with the transition to the Win10 look and feel. They never complete the metro migration. The Vista/Windows 7 look was never implemented through out the entire OS. In fact, even Windows XP never removed all the Windows 95/98/NT/2000 components.

At this point I also don't care if it's at the cost of backward compatibility, but they also need to fix the response times in the Windows UI. Given that high end games play very well on Windows, the OS is clearly able to process inputs fast enough. Yet for some reason when you're navigating the Windows desktop, everything seems to react pretty slowly.

Windows 2000 was the last version I was able to use without having my mouse hand cramp up. Something in Windows causes me to tense up my left hand (my mouse hand). It doesn't happen in macOS and it doesn't happen on Linux (Gnome/KDE/XFCE).

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> At this point I also don't care if it's at the cost of backward compatibility

Yeah, no. This is the heart and soul of MS. Apple breaks stuff all the damn time. MicroSoft keeps things working forever. Some people pay for upgrades. Some pay so they never have to upgrade. Consumers upgrade, and apple makes a lot of money. Businesses don't upgrade, and pay for the privilege.

Kinda sucks, but preserving how we got here is a huge deal. 20 year old systems are core to frighteningly important systems.

Sure, make another, good luck handling the zillion battle tested edge cases. Windows may be horrible now, but ancient code still works. Your hand cramp is less expensive than a rewrite.

(this might be a little aggressive. apologies, this is kinda a hot take)

No no, you're completely right. Fixing my complains about Windows comes at a horrific cost.

Microsoft can continue down the current path and Windows will still be hugely successful and widely used. It's will just be terrible and continue to get worse. Most people and businesses will just live with it. I mean if Windows is just the thing that launches Steam, then you don't really care. If it's just the shit SAP/Excel/what-ever launcher your IT department forces you to use, then fine. Windows just won't be a smooth experience or something people enjoy using.

The problem is right now the biggest thing going for Windows is the historic baggage. If Microsoft makes be choose between baggage and something new and possibly better, I'm also going to consider other options. In that case, Microsoft had better offer something amazing, that's worth the cost of removing history.

They've done it from time to time. The benefits of NT outweighed the loss of tools that required the windows 9x models; although not enough for many to switch to 2000; XP made some concessions to seal the deal. The benefits of 64-bit windows are generally worth the loss of 16-bit applications (although winevdm shows that they could have made that work).

But, I haven't seen much from Microsoft lately that leads me to think they'd be able to pull something like that off. If I had to make a choice, I'd probably go to something else that feels like it respects users.

I'm on dev release channel (in order to use WSLg, very nice so far), and it has an updated look&feel in Explorer.

But Settings / Control Panel needs to be reversed. Just got a new computer, and having to look both places to find a knob is annoying. Settings is also too dumbed down and spacey to be usable. And actually slow to navigate.

But don't think they should or can break compatability as you suggest. Firstly, not having shit break every update is one reason I moved off MacOS and back to Win. But also for MS's part that if thing breaks and they have to do big upgrades, users might as well look elsewhere. People keep using Win because it works for them and the incentive to switch vs cost is low.

I sooo agree with this, they f'd the UI up so much with the switch to whatever app crap they were thinking of when they "improved" the control panel. 95-Win7 made sense and I could find stuff even with the consolidation that happened in XP & Vista (well metro). The 8/10 consolidation is crap and hides features in a needless button maze.

>At this point I also don't care if it's at the cost of backward compatibility

Backward compatibility is the entire selling point of windows.

>Windows 2000 was the last version I was able to use without having my mouse hand cramp up.

Hardware accelerated graphics? I've noticed these tend to add a few frames of latency and have a similar reaction.

Backwards compatibility is one of the selling points. Another is the UI, which has remained basically the same since Windows 95. They learned that lesson when they changed it for Windows 8, and immediately changed it back.

It really hasn't stayed the same.

I stopped using it on my computers at windows xp (and windows 98 was the last version I spent any real time in) so the changes in newer versions of Windows are a lot more obvious (and confusing) to me. Here are just a few of the bigger ones:

The control panel has moved around a few times since then (and is way harder to find, I have to use the search feature to get to it) and now they have some windows RT replacement that I have no idea how to navigate. The user home folder (and even C:\) is harder to find now. Everything pushes you to use "one drive" which has non intuitive synchronization/corruption/compatibility/path behavior. The start menu is completely different and has ads now. I have no fucking idea how user creation works anymore but I think it's tied to some online service.

Linux has had a far more consistent UI. Xterm hasn't changed (as far as I can tell) since the version I had on my laptop when I was 12. Neither has FVWM (although they stopped calling it "FVWM2.") Bash has "deprecated" aliases but they still work. I guess GNOME has iterated on its shell a few times but it's not like Microsoft hasn't screwed around with explorer. Also caja is still there and behaves the same (does anyone actually use GNOME unironically anyway?)

Office has changed even more dramatically (which makes me wonder why people still stick with it, at this point libre office writer has fewer UI changes from word 98 than Microsoft word.)

If you want an example of "UI doesn't change much over half a century" look at coreutils. They make changes but people really freak out when they do because there's little difference between the UI and what is essentially an ad-hoc API.

I'm talking about the UI for corporate users, who don't use the control panel. They want a start menu that works, a bar along the bottom to get their apps, close/min/max buttons in the same place, a clock that shows the calendar when you click it, etc.

My experience is opposite, Linux desktop is garbage compared to Windows desktop, and I’m not talking about features or looks or anything like that, but core requirements like response time, handling of rouge processes (that can freeze your desktop), login/logout, virtual memory problems, scheduling of processes, memory leaks. List goes on.

I need to tinker with my Linux machine constantly. Linux is great a server, but desktop? Still a long way to go.

To some extend I don't disagree. In general I feel like response time is better on Linux, but I don't have any numbers.

Mostly I've given up on the desktop environments on Linux, not due to response times, but because I don't want to tinker with it, I just want to use the computer. My current home setup is just an OpenBSD machine with CWM, it manages windows and launches programs and that's all it needs to do.

I don't know what I do wrong (i.e. right) but these things just doesn't seem to happen to me.

Then again I use KDE Neon and only make to make software, browse the web and occasionally play CSGO.

My biggest annoyance is how everytime I boot either my Windows partition (weeks between) or KDE partition (anytime really) there's a huge stash of upgrades waiting for me.

KDE is the one desktop environment I haven't experimented with enough to give a fair judgement. I need to put that next on my list.

Updates on Windows is usually more annoying on Windows than on Linux because of the forced updates with reboots, in that regard Windows is more garbage than Linux.

I guess I must be pretty lucky or something. I've been running Debian testing with Gnome on a Lenovo X1C5 for a couple of years now (it used to run Win10 but I got fed up with the forced updates) and the only time I find myself tinkering with it is when I get bored and want to change things up. Go figure.

I have used the same Gentoo/i3wm setup for ... a lot of years. Probably 10 or more by now.

I guess we maybe changed the way package-installer (portage) profiles worked during that time, and I sort of recall something about how repos are configured being changed. Those were each at most a command or two run as root.

Otherwise, I don't really get a sense that I have had to do any tinkering other than what I specifically want to mess around with something, as you say.

E.g., I changed from grub to efi-stub booting, which was fun and took a bit of work. I tried out Conky and some different status bars (cool, but not really my thing).

Now, i3 is really pretty barebones. I can imagine that some desktop environments maybe require more tinkering than i3, but if so then that's not really Linux's fault, is it.

Right. You can’t blame the horse for having a poorly fitted saddle. Unfortunately sometimes we get horse saddles that try to copy elephant saddles, and that’s when we get something like Gnome.

> pick a style and actually complete the transition

Is this why every app on Win10 seems to have a different title bar color? And even different active/inactive behavior?

And how do I move a browser window, now that my 8-15 browser tabs consume all of the title bar area?

> And how do I move a browser window, now that my 8-15 browser tabs consume all of the title bar area?

Keyboard shortcuts?

Alt space brings up the "restore, move, size, minimise, maximise, close" menu.

Windows Key + cursor keys will snap the window to different places.

> And how do I move a browser window, now that my 8-15 browser tabs consume all of the title bar area?

This is the fault of browsers, not the OS. I think chrome was the first to do away with the actual title bar and put tabs there, then everyone followed. You can change this in the settings I think, there should be a small area you can drag between the minimize button and the last tab (on FF at least), and then you can always hit the "Alt" button to bring up the title bar you can then grab.

Remember when software used to have a manual to explain how to use it? Back when you could actually learn some UI principles and have that knowledge transfer between apps?

Now every application and OS component does its own thing however and whenever it likes, and the whole experience becomes impossible to learn other than as a giant list of special cases and exceptions, which will change with the next round of patches.

This is why I can’t explain to my mom how to use her computer any more, and generally tell her to use her phone instead.

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