Comment by cookiengineer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cookiengineer | Hacker News Reader

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Can we also talk about inconsistencies when it comes to notifications on Windows 10, too, please?

I mean, every app does whatever it wants. An update popup here, a warning there. Some blocking window with full attention here, some imutable "you got a message" there. Anti-virus systray icons even render webpages as popups, that contain even more notifications inside them.

Windows is the worst OS I've ever used in regards to focussed work. Every single program running there has the right to disturb my work, and the user is just a dummy that can't get anything done because the UX guidelines treat users like a click monkey.

Having used both older and newer Linux distros, MacOS pre-Catalina and Windows XP/Vista/7/10 as a main machine for work over the years, I'd choose Linux or MacOS for productive work anytime.

I don't care about an _asynchronous_ email when I'm working on something else...you should start to understand this, designers at Microsoft. If a spammer can literally disturb a work productivity of an OS user while the email app is running in the background, your UX is literally the worst solution possible.

I effing hate notifications and the lack of user-focussed Window management on Windows.

Even MacOS without any real window management is better, because at least the IDE window keeps the focussed state and notifications can be force-silenced.

Sorry for the rant, but it's the truth. Windows is not made for productive work in my opinion.

I completely share your sentiment that Windows' constant nagging and irritating behavior is terrible for productivity.

But I'm not sure that this is a Windows issue per se, in that apps can and sometimes do produce random, custom notifications even on Linux and macOS. I think it's a "cultural" thing: it happens more often on Windows because... it happens more often, so people aren't as surprised when some new app does it, they've been seeing those for years and years. It's kind of "expected", the same way that most Windows users will say "just reboot it" without batting an eye [0]. "It's just how things are".

However, what trips me, is that even Microsoft's own products do this crap. I'm thinking of Teams in particular. I understand they've only recently introduced the "feature" of sending alerts to the notification center, yet Teams is a brand-new product, that appeared in the Windows 10 era.

And they use those same custom notifications on macOS and Linux, too, where they happily ignore any system configuration. Of course, those are actually custom windows that they put up, they didn't even configure the windows properties to be considered a notification (on Linux/X11).

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[0] I know Windows requires much fewer random reboots nowadays, but the people are still trained to reboot it whenever something "doesn't work". They won't even consider that there's something wrong that should be investigated.

Like you I am also continually frustrated at how Windows apps are always trying to demand my attention. In Windows 10 I have the Notification Center set to “alarms only” which helps with a lot of the spam, but not all. There are still plenty of programs that bypass this and pop their own kinds of balloons and notifications.

Then there’s programs that flash the taskbar when they want attention. Teams in particular is super aggressive about flashing the taskbar when it wants something - even when Do Not Disturb is turned on - and I have essentially all notification features turned off.

For years I’ve looked for some sort of OS setting like a magic registry value to turn taskbar flashing off completely but have come up empty. (There’s a few reg hacks out there that purport to reduce the frequency but none that turn it off entirely. And not all applications honor those registry settings … like blasted Teams.)

Man, the sheer number of times I have fucked something up because a background window jumped to the foreground while I was in the middle of typing and striking the spacebar activated whatever option button was highlighted on the pop-up is staggering.

Does it not help to turn the notifications off in the notifications settings?

No, because many of those apps don't actually use the notification center. They just put up random (skinned) windows.

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