Microsoft fixes a Windows 11 annoyance as PC revenue declines
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
ETERNALLY, you read that right. Because thanks to that, I finally dared to try Linux, openSUSE, Doom Emacs and KDE, and I'm IN LOVE with my PC all over again.
Thank you so much, Microsoft!!!
Had to reinstall Windows and could not disable Cortana or even skip some weired voice output during initial setup. Immediately removed Windows again and installed Ubuntu.
But I also had lots of fun when Code Red and Nimda came around - full perm file navigation on computers everywhere. Any Win2k box knocking on my firewall was telling me it was wide open for use.
Then it got a virus.
30 minutes after I finished installing windows.
> Windows leadership should be fired and replaced by people who are actually Windows users, not MacOS users.
As a longtime Mac user, Windows leadership decisions don’t make any sense to me either. I have precisely zero interest in making 11 my primary OS… XP, 7, or 10 wouldn’t have been ideal but if I had no choice but to work with Windows those would be greatly preferable to 11.
edit again: do they even need pc business, they make all their profits from server stuff now, they may as well wrap up the pc os division ;)
loss leader funda in action, prolly.
or, sort of: those who live together, stick together.
aka if you buy window pcs, you're likely to buy windows servers and vice versa.
To be sure, as another Mac user, they make sense in that they want Apple's revenue and reputation. The problem is they categorically refuse to invest in their engineering staff to even remotely the degree Apple does, which is reflected in the "quality" of the products on offer.
Everyone wants to be Apple, and they're all convinced despite ongoing proof to the contrary, that they can do it for pennies on the dollar. It's genuinely kind of pathetic how desperate they are to be Apple.
Can they instead aim to be what Apple was? Being what Apple is or going where Apple is heading is rather gross.
That is what they did. They took windows 10 added the theme and taskbar/start from the triple failed 10x added arbitrary cpu cutoff and released as 11.
No, it's just made it worse for you. You aren't the customer though. Enterprises are customers, you're just a lowly user.
Hopefully one day someone at Microsoft will remember that customers are actually made out of users.
That's fine, but I do not want to tab into an app whose last windows I have purposely closed. I closed it so I have a cleaner slate of apps to work with. If chrome is closed, it should not show up until I open it again. Not just windows but also linux make much more sense in that regard.
It's annoying because the x button on the windows is now a completely useless widget to me, and I have to close apps via cmd+q instead. It's even more annoying that I can't actually close Finder, even though I'm using a different filebrowser.
Mac is the most culturally colonialist minded thing in my experience, its i18n support is terrible for smaller languages.
The "windows bonkers" model is strangely copied by most third party windowsin systems, as it makes sense, with having the recency based tab order, and being a global list. For us who work with more than a single software and often have to work between two different software, maybe an editor and a terminal... it is usually pretty handy.
About telemetry, and ads: It is also present in MacOS, but less invasive indeed. And about not showing something down my throat: the other day my iphone just told me in declarative, with a single accept button: now your system will be updated to ios27 (download of updates was enabled, with manual confirmation).
Also having to unlock every app after every brew update in the applications as they "have been downloaded from the internet"... it is not something i'd call refreshing and not working against me.
So damn true. I never got the point of the MacOS windows management approach. It's a joke.
* Switch between non-minimized application windows: "⌘ + Tab" (but not between windows of the same application!)
* Switch between open windows of the same application: "⌘ + `" <- Yes, that's backtick, a different physical key depending on the keyboard language layout, WTF! (but doesn't work for minimized windows of that application)
* Switch between open and minimized windows of the same application: "Ctrl + ArrowDown" and use arrow navigation.
And yes, there's Exposé button/gesture, which, again, doesn't show minimized windows and doesn't work with an arrow navigation.
I don't share this optimism, Apple has not been a hardware-first/computers company in a very long time and nowadays makes more bucks profiling your consumption habits to sell you "content" on their ever more "content-consumption" oriented devices.
Edit: just to add to that the same ads (for cloud storage and premium services) that people in the Microsoft world get pissy about very much exists on that side of the fence. It's a race to the bottom, Apple isn't there to lead by example.
This is a ridiculous statement given how many people complained about it at the time!
There seems to be a common cognitive bias where things in the past are considered good and things in the present bad. So a few years from now, a bunch of people would say "Windows 12 is so bad, the incredible thing is that Windows 11 was already near perfect", completely forgetting the sentiment at the time.
I feel like this is the point. Microsoft don't want to support a consumer desktop OS anymore, and are pushing people to other devices, where their profitable cloud services are also available.
MS wants you to pay for authentication, office, cloud services etc without having to do consumer support or anything like that. I reckon they see Apple as the perfect partner for this, someone with a desktop experience compatible with their cloud experience.
This is not a improvement for the users, it's a improvement for Microsoft shareholders, because many users may decide to pay for additional Microsoft services (additional revenue after paying for the operating system) and it allows Microsoft to monetize customer data (Microsoft learned this business strategy from Google).
" Home and Pro (since version 22H2) edition installation requires internet connection and Microsoft account login (only if for personal use on Pro) is mandatory unless manually bypassed to create a local user. However, Microsoft has since blocked one of the last remaining easy bypass methods that allowed local account creation during initial setup, complicating the bypass process further. All other editions are excluded from this requirement. "
It is true that it was a major scam by Microsoft against its users when they forced them to sign into an online Microsoft account during the Windows 11 installation. Especially the stubbornness and determination with which they patch all the loopholes in the installation process (just to make it impossible to install Windows without an online account) is remarkable.
But in all fairness:
* Microsoft practically stopped charging users for upgrades since Windows 10. Windows 10 could be installed for free from older Windows, and Windows 11 is again a free upgrade from Windows 10.
* How many macOS users actually press "Setup later" when setting up a new Mac and use macOS without an Apple account? I think there will be very few of them.
Honestly it's the same for me. Taskbar is a bit weird and start menu is a bit weird, but I was able to turn off unwanted features, so it's not bad right now.
I'm mostly Linux user and my Windows usage is more about gaming, but I did some programming with it as well.
I hope someone at big corp will be so bored one day that he'll just start releasing Win 10 updates after reverse engineering the mechanisms and we will get Win 10 support again.
The rule still alive and stands strong - every second Windows is just a crap. ME, Vista, 8 and now 11.
Like if you dig even slightly below the surface you get a dialog window straight from windows 95. Network settings for example, something I routinely have to deal with. It is absurd VPN companies make full-blown windows desktop software to tweak VPN settings on your PC because the default windows UI is so crap.
Everybody should have simply ignored them. Win 10 yes, whatever you're trying to pull with 11, no. What could MS have done about that? Threaten to end support and then relent when nobody takes the bait?
After a year or so, she is a happy camper, steam works, web works, all is good. Though once we start with the art software, that might be a bit tricky.
Only issue that it had was when after an os update the extra hdd mount points lost their execute flags for some reason, so unfortunately not a 100% technical free experience.
This might be super helpful for her: https://getartcraft.com/apps. Works extremely well as a CC etc. replacemenmt.
Also https://capycanvas.art/ - a lovely native Linux replacement for Procreate, which I've been looking for ever since my 2018 iPad Pro stopped receiving updates.
In the meantime, Krita and a few online apps have been around and very successful.
Depending on interests other solid sw is Inkscape, Blender, and GIMP. But those get increasingly intricate to use. I also wonder how the Adobe AI clones will do after their first one shot publicity.
Something that took me way too long to figure out is that you can have Steam run arbitrary Windows software in a Steam-managed -er- Protonprefix. [0] Perhaps this might remove some of the hassle of handling Art Software if Wine doesn't quite work for you?
To do this, you can use the menu option to "Add a Non-Steam Game to My Library", browse for any old .EXE, and Steam will handle setting up Proton for you. You can also change the .EXE that that Steam entry points to after all that shit gets set up... so I _assume_ that you could first point to the .EXE for the Art Software's installer, let it run through the install process, and then change what the Steam entry points to to the .EXE for the Art Software.
[0] ...it's like a WINEPREFIX, but with Proton... get it???
I did not want a microsoft account for local logins, telemetry, i had already used linux for 15 years for work so.. new gaming computer is running Fedora. Steam is working nicely, Gog is working too. Amd rx9070 with no driver issues.
I just recently installed Windows 11 on a computer and this is the steps that I followed
https://rtech.support/guides/bypass-11/
It's two steps:
1) During Windows setup you push Shift-F10
2) It opens a command prompt and you type OOBE\BYPASSNRO
When you hit enter it reboots and allows local mode.
Microsoft should not have hidden this away like they have and it should be an option for everyone installing Windows, and I recognize this isn't a solution for the non-technical user.. but for you specifically if it's something you're comfortable doing, it's an option to allow you to avoid having to use a Microsoft account when installing Windows.
If we always just say 'Oh, well, if you do XYZ then you can manage to do A despite B' then we're eroding our control and agency. Slowly the bypasses will phase out, as they have slowly been in this case, and then we're really in a poor state.
I had a tech support client who came to be because they valued their privacy and didn't want an account but who had no idea how to make that happen. They didn't even really know what to be looking for.
And yes, I later learned that aka.ms is a real Microsoft URL. But when it was first described to me it sounded exactly like ransomware and had exactly that effect.
You're right that I probably made an assumption that someone posting on hacker News would have the technical ability to hit a keyboard combination and type a command on a command line and hit enter, which is essentially what's required currently to utilize the local account ( https://rtech.support/guides/bypass-11/ )
My reply was intended as more of a direct message to OP, as opposed to general advice I think every end user should know and follow. I should have been more clear.
For now I just use a customer-supplied email address which I used to setup a Microsoft account, setup Windows and use that account, immediately create a local-only 'admin' account with full rights, delete the online associated account, and start creating user account(s) from there.
https://rtech.support/guides/bypass-11/
I have a Microsoft account, but I prefer to use a local account to avoid a lot of the "value add" that comes from using the Microsoft account.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11
There are also community projects like NTLite ( https://ntlite.com/ ) and Windows ISO Debloater ( https://github.com/itsNileshHere/Windows-ISO-Debloater ) for the more technically advanced that want full control to prevent the bloat from even making it to your machine during installation at all (instead of having to clean it up after the fact)
That said, the process is:
1) while installing Windows press shift f10
2) a command prompt will open and you type OOBE\BYPASSNRO
When you hit enter the computer will reboot and allow local mode.
I fully recognize that this is a hidden option that most people don't know about, but if you do, it seems pretty straightforward to me for someone that's already at a level where they're comfortable manually installing Windows, but I recognize I have an blind spot due to my own technical abilities.
I'd recommend creating a sysprep answer file (with LLM's its pretty easy, also rufus can do it) instead of the trick mentioned above.
How very Apple of them.
Finally, booted an Linux rescue distro from USB and deleted the folder.
Then had to clean the winsxs folder, which was full of useless files after an update.
In the end I cleaned 700 gb wasted.
That's the universal way to clean up roll back installs and other Windows update related.
If that's not working for you, there's probably a much larger issue at play on her machine and would be much better off backing up her data, wiping all the partitions and installing fresh. You'll likely reclaim more than 700 GB.
The only time I've seen situations like what you're describing is when these are machines that have been in use for years and have major Windows versions on top of major Windows version stacked on top of each other, not just incremental updates.
What doesn't work specifically?
Shift delete bypasses the relocation of files to the recycle bin.
RMDIR [/S] [/Q] [drive:]pathAt this rate (I know I keep beating that drum), I think we cannot have AI: it is too self-defeating from a business pov.
- make money from ad views
- make people place ads on many websites, so a lot of ads can be shown
- use made money to build AI summary
- AI summary prevents people from visiting many websites
At least back then more of the original engineering talent that Microsoft had was still around, and you would even run into them on irc from time to time. 20 years on, I suspect a lot of the foundational personalities that drove engineering decisions have since retired or been made redundant, and that reflects the weird UI fracturing and endless regressions. I doubt they can recover at this point.
I got off on Windows 95.
Support for Gaming - not Wine, but hardware support and performance.
My last few years of Windows were more frustrating than Linux has ever been. Everything locked down and a never ending string of crashes and issues that are impossible to properly diagnose or repair. At least on Linux, when there's an issue, it's clear what it is and where to report it.
(Disclaimer: I have an AMD GPU and I don't play competitive multiplayer games. All other games have just worked so far.)
Well then you look at a random webpage from CNN and I guess they’re all competing for how trashy they can make their products.
There can’t be any pride left at all in that place.
Sometimes, some articles don't have content, but eh. Works for me.
NPR's site is nice too:
Day 2: install Linux distro, total process is like 4 hours because at every step you double check that you won't lose your Windows data because it's your first time installing Linux. Realize that your distro doesn't support modern displays and never will. Call it a day because you're mentally exhausted.
Day 3: install a distro that does support modern displays. The process is only 3 hours because you're already familiar with it. Spend the rest of the day looking up which Linux programs are good replacements for Windows ones. Hint: all of them have bugs that affect your particular use cases - KDE shits itself when it sees a folder with 20k images, DaVinci Resolve has lots of issues with audio drivers and video codecs and gives zero error messages, no native Linux audio player supports all exotic music formats in my library so I need to run foobar2000 which obviously crashes when it sees WMA lossless and then UI fails to scale properly, lots of random shit like Wine installation causing system update to fail.
Day 4: connect $DEVICE. Look up drivers.
Day 44: $DEVICE works.
Day 104: $DEVICE works AND survives system update.
In my case that were keyboard (support for extra keys) and steering wheel.
Day 204: invite friends for video games. Spend the entire evening trying to fix controllers because they're fucked - if I first connect Steam Controller and then run Steam, then Steam shits itself. I need to specifically do it the other way around. Also, Xbox One controller drivers have an incompatibility with X360 controllers so I couldn't simply connect the old dongle and play like that.
Hmmm day 2 should be: making a backup of my windows data, that way I can do the f... I want during installation.
> Day 3: install a distro that does support modern displays.
Apart from LTS/enterprise versions, all distros are running the same kernel generations. They all have the same hardware support really.
The rest of your text soup doesn't mean anything. Like this: "random shit like Wine installation causing system update to fail.", this really sounds like hallucinations and inventions.
The part about $DEVICE and drivers is like looking at a kid trying to connect a Nintendo SNES controller to a PS5 and complaining it doesn't work to well.
I mean yes, but an update on my Linux box just installed a new kernel, uninstalled the old video card driver, and didn't install a new video card driver.
I have taken to asking claude "is it safe for me to reboot now?" before restarting after updates. So far 3 times in a row it has come back with "no, your system won't startup".
Edit: I also just woke my desktop up from sleep and the alt-tab service failed to resume. Just... wut.
Also if you are able to know that the new video card driver hasn't been installed, you also know that you can solve this by doing it yourself. In that case why wouldn't you do it?
Ultimately if all those things are too hard for you there are a number of immutable "image" based distros where packages/drivers aren't managed individually during updates and where you can always boot to the previous version. Maybe that is what you need.
Just as an exMple I'm on arch myself and after last update if I use X11 screen saver with lock some service crashes and the computer cannot be unlocked.
Maybe next update will have a fix but then something else will be broken instead.
Linux (as in the kernel+user space of your choice) is a perpetual alpha. Has been for 30 years and will always be.
Whenever GTK/Gnome becomes reasonable stable it's time for a rewrite!
(And I'm a Linux user since red hat 7.2)
For instance, I use RecompLauncher as an AppImage, but I launch the recompilations themselves from a desktop shortcut after closing the launcher to get every CPU cycle for the game.
It's untrue in comparison to Windows, and MacOS (at least for software dev, when I last used it 1.5 years ago).
Linux easily has the lowest maintenance burden if you pick a boring distros. It can be a huge pit of wasted time, _if you actually want to fall into that pit._
Linux, sometimes works without faff. But in my experience it's at best 50:50 if you get that, or constant crashes, hangs, broken peripherals, etc. (Of course any time you mention this the luck 50% pipe up with "it works for me".)
[0]: https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/worldwide-pc-shipments-have...
At the top of the Windows 11 context menu are some small icons without text for high usage actions which I assume are:
1. select-for-moving (cut), perhaps Gnome's "Move to..."
2. duplicate-in-place-with-number-appended-to-duplicate-filename or select-for-copying (copy), perhaps Gnome's "Copy to..."
3. something to do with the clipboard--maybe copy contents to clipboard
4. something to do with text entry--maybe rename the file/folder, perhaps Gnome's "Rename..."
5. share via social media applications or cloud file sharing applications, or move the file/folder locally perhaps Gnome's "Move to..."
6. move to recycle bin (delete)
Menu options with text are unambiguous for "Open", "Open with", "Compress to ZIP file", "Properties", although Gnome will state "Open with {name_of_default_app}" to make it clear exactly how a file will be opened without having to guess.
I guess "Copy as path" might just copy the full filesystem path to the clipboard. I can't remember the last time I wanted to do that.
I guess "Always keep on this device" prevents the file/folder being backed up to some cloud storage provider. I'd rather open up an application dedicated to cloud storage backups and be able to review current backup options there all in one place for all types of data/files.
The "Free up space" option I'm less clear on--will a local application pop up and suggest what I can delete within the folder, will a cloud storage provider application pop up and suggest the file not be synchronised with the local device and only be kept in cloud storage, etc.
The bottom option "Show more options" is not expandable so I assume there are so many other options an entire new window is needed to display them all. Maybe it'll give me useful but rarely used options from a list of hundreds available, such as "count how many words are in this file" for text files...?
I think the analogy to traffic signs is flawed even further. Traffic signs icons are also standardized, have been for many years, and are taught in required safety classes. Not even close to the situation with mystery UIs in computer programs.
That's... exactly how meaningful icons are born. First you put icon with text, and once everyone understands the meaning of the icon, you remove the text, because it's not necessary anymore.
Do you think that US drivers would be left completely clueless when seeing the "yield" sign without the text, or would they recognize the icon?
> Not even close to the situation with mystery UIs in computer programs.
Android UI offers three buttons at the bottom of the screen. There's never been any text there. Yet somehow, most people have no issues using them. How come? Follow-up question: if you wanted to put text there, whete exactly would you do that, and what would it say? In real life, what about public toilets? Many places don't have a text "toilet", they just have a symbol of two stick figures, one wearing a skirt, yet we're all fine. Emergency exit? Sometimes it's without text, just a green light with a white stickman running through a door. Red X is also widely recognized as "closed" or "don't enter".
Finally, please tell me what you see in top-right corner of a window in your computer. If you see spelled out words "minimize", "maximize", "close" then yeah. Otherwise I'd like to ask you what makes these three buttons so special that they don't need text.
Payment terminals have green-yellow-red buttons at the bottom. No text, just icons and colors.
Point is, "icon without text" is an idea that exists in the wild and works.
dhx cited Fitts's law, and you answered with "you're just not used to it" and a pompous, hand-waving non sequitur about traffic signs you pulled out of your reactive ass.
Fitts's law doesn't give a shit what you're used to. The time to hit a target goes up with its distance and down with its size. A row of tiny unlabeled icons crammed together is slow and easy to miss on the thousandth click, not just the first. Getting used to them teaches you what they mean. It doesn't make them any bigger.
Paul Fitts published it in 1954. Card, English and Burr used it at Xerox PARC in 1978 to show why the mouse beat the joystick and the cursor keys. It's the first thing anyone who designs pointing interfaces should know. If you've never heard of it, you have no business telling anyone what counts as valid critique of a menu. Neither do the people at Microsoft who shipped that row of icons, whether they never heard of it or heard of it and ignored it.
As for traffic signs: they're standardized by international treaty, you have to pass a test on them before you're allowed to drive, and the European stop sign still says STOP. Show me the treaty and the driving test for the Windows 11 context menu icons.
Familiarity is something a design has to earn, not something users owe it. Pie menus are self-revealing: they lead, follow, and get out of the way:
1) A novice clicks, sees the labels, and the menu leads them to the item.
2) An intermediate starts moving before reading, and the menu follows, highlighting the slice to confirm the direction.
3) An expert flicks in the direction without waiting, and the menu gets out of the way and never even draws. It's the same motion every time, so using it is learning it through rehearsal.
Every item is the same short distance from the click, and every target is a whole wedge out to the edge of the screen.
Jack Callahan, Mark Weiser, Ben Shneiderman and I measured it at Maryland in 1988: pie menus were significantly faster than linear menus with fewer errors, even for novices.
An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus, CHI'88:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie...
I've been building them ever since, in shipping open source and commercial products and reusable components: an X10 window manager (the one we ran that experiment on), NeWS, SimCity in both NeWS/HyperLook and X11/Tcl/Tk, ScriptX, The Sims, ActiveX, a personalizable Palm TV guide and universal remote you could stroke with one finger instead of using the pen, and numerous implementations in JavaScript for web browsers.
The earliest known pie menus were in PIXIE, at Cambridge in 1969, by Neil Wiseman, Heinz Lemke and John Hiles: radial buttons that traveled with the light pen's tracking cross on a PDP-7. Its 1972 program runs again in the browser, so you can try them yourself.
Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective, covering all of these:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1
X10 "uwm" window manager with pie menus, scriptable in Forth (1987):
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/piemenu/uwm/
NeWS pie menus in PostScript:
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/piemenu.ps.txt
Tk pie menus from multiplayer SimCity for X11 (1992):
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/micropol...
ScriptX pie menus (Kaleida Labs):
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/scriptx/piemenu.sx
The Sims pie menus:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-sims-pie-menus-49ca02a74da
ActiveX pie menus:
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/piemenus/ActiveXPieM...
ConnectedTV, the Palm TV guide and remote with finger pies:
http://www.pencomputing.com/palm/Pen44/connectedTV.html
jQuery pie menus:
https://github.com/SimHacker/jquery-pie
PIXIE, running on an emulated PDP-7 and Type 340 display (the mouse is the light pen):
https://hyperties.org/cabinet/applications/pixie-symelec/
PIXIE and FORTH on PDP-7 Cabinet Emulator with Type 340 Vector Graphics Display:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo8kdY-5i6c
Why PIXIE matters: the people, the 1969 film, and how the 1972 listing was brought back to life:
https://hyperties.org/databases/pixie/
Flight of the PIXIE, the 1969 film set to Yuja Wang playing Flight of the Bumblebee:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI
And by your own admission, half the Windows 11 menu is an ad for cloud storage. Get as familiar with that as you like. It'll still be there on every click.
Instead of pulling reactionary bullshit out of your ass and calling it user interface design, you should base your beliefs on empirical science and actual measurements in the real world, not irrelevant metaphors. Like the way the midterm elections just resoundingly proved beyond a doubt, once and for all, that Trump really is a stupid idiot.
The former meant it have higher priority in caching, the latter is just evicting from cache immediately.
Users do not want forced cloud integration and forced “features” added that are clearly designed to maximize connection to Microsoft cloud services.
They may be able to allow more customizations of the UI and back off to some degree but as far as their business model I don’t think they can provide an OS like many users want.
(I maintain that Windows 11's bad UX is a consequence of MS having to make a single UI for everyone, which means it'll be too dumbed-down, simplified, or inflexible for power-users (XP, Win8, Win11); or too complicated and intimidating for everyone else (Win7, Win10), or just bad for everyone (Vista)).
If Microsoft wants me to willingly buy into Windows 12, then I want the option to keep the Windows 10 UI (File Explorer, Taskbar, Start Menu, and Window Management) - I know it can be done in theory[1], I just want proper support.
That's a false choice, and pie menus are the way out of it. The same menu can lead novices by showing them labels, follow intermediate users who know roughly where things are, and get out of the way of experts who flick in the direction without waiting for it to appear. One UI, no "simple mode" and "advanced mode", and the novice turns into the expert just by using it, by self-revealing rehearsal! I went into that and the research behind it upthread.
As I titled my 1998 Xerox PARC talk: "Natural Selection: The Evolution of Pie Menus", reviewed here:
https://baychi.org/calendar/19981013/
> Pie menus appealed to Hopkins because they conform to the rule that the user's attention should not be squandered. A pie menu selection offers direct feedback versus a user selection that brings up intermediate menus. The programmed pie menu ignores users' gestures except the motions to select or cancel. Hopkins uses pie menus because they take advantage of Fitts' Law, which relates fast selection speed and low error rate to the pie menus' large target size and small distance between selections.
The other half is letting users rearrange it themselves, without registry hacks. HyperCard set the precedent in 1987: the user interface was made of the same stuff as the content, so anyone could open it up and change it. Arthur van Hoff's HyperLook took that to NeWS and PostScript and networking: users could build and edit not just their own nested linear and pie menus, but also customize the live user interfaces of running apps, including the SimCity I ported to it, by copying, pasting and configuring scriptable components from "warehouse" stacks. We were taking it all the way to the window frames themselves, with a HyperCard-like window manager where you could build your own frames out of the same parts, a built-in structured PostScript graphics editor you can use in your own stacks, windows with any shape (like my Lava Lamp shaped Cellular Automata Machine), and you can compose your own custom applications inside them.
HyperLook Cellular Automata Machine:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
HyperLook SimCity:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
Why we also need a non-editable runtime system (with a removable UI editor): User Interface Vandalism:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
My comments in the "What HyperCard Might Have Been" discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22282361
I also discussed HyperLook and HyperCard with Alan Kay, who said "This work is so good -- for any time -- and especially for its time", and also "I wish he had done a real end-user language for this":
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
Simon Schneegans's Kando carries that spirit today. Its menu editor is direct manipulation all the way down: you drag and drop items and submenus right into the pie, see exactly where they'll go, and put the things you use most in the directions that feel right to your hand. That's how a power user should customize a menu, and a novice can do it too, because it's just dragging things around:
I took that idea further in MediaGraph, a music navigation prototype I made in Unity for Will Wright at the Stupid Fun Club in 2010. It has two layers of pie menus.
The first layer is ordinary nested pie menus for editing the content, with live feedback: as you move around the menu that sets a song's size or its "biome" (a cellular automaton growing around it on the map), you see the effect in the world before you commit. Same biomes merge, different biomes compete for territory.
The second layer is the content itself. The songs are laid out on a map and connected by roads, and the map is a geographic, networked pie menu. Touch one song to another -- kissing them together -- to make a road between them, and kiss them again to break it. Flick on a song in a direction and it fires you down the road to the next song that way, like the cannons in Super Mario World. Point at a song and it plays an earcon, click it to play.
Following links, editing links, panning, zooming and flicking are all the same kind of gesture, with continuous zoom and pan and inertia. As I wrote at the time, what I was proudest of was the "Fahrvergnügen" of connecting and disconnecting places by bumping them together, and traveling down the roads by flicking between them, "without creating another mode". The menu editor disappears and dissolves into the content, by replacing hierarchy with geography.
MediaGraph demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc
How it works, with a timeline from DreamScape and iLoci to MediaGraph:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
Thank you, Microsoft, for pushing me into Fedora Workstation, which works mostly flawlessly, and whose updates excite me. Updates on Microsoft were always an Oh Man, let's cross our fingers, type situation. MacOS updates are increasingly a groaning trepidation - what new UI experiments are they going to throw at me. With Fedora, innovation comes with every update and where something annoys me (like the minimalist KDE UI that hides window drop down menus and whatnot) I can just download someone's override or plugin to customize it the way I want.
Windows 11 was an attempt to turn the hardware we own into hardware owned by Microsoft. I should say pwn3d.
Microsoft just stops investing in innovation once they take over a market. You saw it with IE, with office, with windows even.
There was a Word for DOS, but Word for Windows was a port of Word for Mac. Excel started on the Mac (their DOS spreadsheet was called Multiplan). PowerPoint started out as a Mac product funded by Apple, which Microsoft acquired.
None of this can be described as "knocked out by Microsoft in a year".
The actual search results were a scrollable list with 5 rows visible of the content I was searching for.
I wonder what skills must one posses to rise to places that give one the authority to make such decisions? Are there incentives that drive these or are these borne of Kafkaesque bureaucracies? Does no one object to such monstrosities? Are the ones responsible so bereft of empathy and/or common sense? I know this is meandering and pointless but I wonder and struggle to understand the thought processes. This apathy, sure it presents itself in something so mundane but it permeates everything. i guess its the human condition.
My entire UI workflow is top right orientated (menus, windows size/close buttons, docks) for muscle memory, so the Win10 stopped security updates forced me to switch.
Ironically a week later they extended security support for Win10.
I'm still waiting for Mozilla to give back the option to delete MRUs from the Firefox navbar.
Oh, it's absolutely has nothing with how they push sponsored links there. Absolutely.
Good, though doesn't seem to be include the ability to control icons, name and accelerator keys, so still a long way to reach the user ergonomic heaven...
- Cleaning my drive from unwanted files → One app
- Organizing files based on type → another app
- A good voice-to-text → another app
- A better launcher → another app
- An incredible terminal → another app
I mean is this the way it's supposed to be? Wasn't the whole point - unwrap the macbook, load up Mac OS and LFG?
They have some AI stuff that they try to push on you during the install, but it can all be disabled so day to day it doesn’t bother you.
At this point both Windows and OSX are rent seeking, squeezing as much money as they can out of their users.
(I think it was actually 10, but 8 really started the lean away)
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/servicing/os/windows-11/...
>New! This update introduces an updated context menu that is faster, simpler, and more customizable. The updated menu opens more quickly, reduces clutter, and gives you more control over the commands and app extensions that appear when you right-click.
>You can now customize the context menu to better fit how you use Windows. Select Customize menu at the bottom of the context menu to open its Settings page.
1) Paying for a licence and still being treated like a marketing target
2) Windows update is ridiculously slow end-to-end and takes a whole morning once per month to update our platform machines (even though we are 80% Linux)
3) Search is really, really, really bad. I mean honestly, search for a program and it might take 10 seconds to load a result if it loads anything at all. Partial matches? Nope. This has never worked on any of my windows 7-11 machines and has never been fixed.
4) The whole "reinstall Windows" attitude at Microsoft Support if they cannot work out why something isn't working
5) The half-arsed attempts to harmoize the UI which just leads to weirdisms like network in 3 different places, remote desktop still in a windows 32 bit dialog, and the fact that things got renamed and moved with every major release for what can only be assumed to be a shit reason breaking muscle memory for 1000s of people.
6) Not having the Virt IO drivers included in the base windows installer.
I think that is enough for now!
Not that Microsoft isn't a terrible company IMO but they also finally see the need to optimise due to the ram crisis.
Try an OS that's designed for people rather than for tracking, and you'll be amazed at how fast an OS can be.
And yes I use FOSS privately. I just have one big gaming PC with windows because I love VR and VR on Linux is not ready for primetime.
It also seems silly to tie the decline of Windows to UI discontent. Windows is in decline because it's increasingly irrelevant in the post-PC, post-USA world, and sucks in general.
I have a dozen or so myself, probably two dozens, that I meet daily. Yes, daily. Using Windows feels like trying to run in muddy water with Lego bricks in the bottom here and there. It wasn't like this much earlier. Not even when the blue screen of death was commonplace.
10 was better, but I’d pay for a modern version of windows 2kpro UI. Bring back msn messsenger.
It’s basically a gaming box, everything else is on a Mac or Linux machine, all on my desk.
And somewhat excel because excel is badly implemented on mac
I'd pay for this, compatible with Windows 11 apps, but basically works like NT4.
Old machines from the last 10 years are still capable of all normal daily tasks, even development tasks. This has the 95% covered through existing or cheap second hand machines.
The only new use-case is local AI, which for most people is simply out of price range right now with the current GPU and RAM prices. There’s some people who’ll want this, but they are a minority. Not enough to drive sales at scale.
So whatever remains as a segment is business - which in these cost-aware times are mostly doing like the other 95% and only buy new machines if needed to cover new hires.
- here is my production grade setup for agentic ai on windows 11
- setup windows 11 with Rufus boot to disable online MS account creation https://rufus.ie/en/
- [download window 11 x64 iso from here ](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11)
- then download vmware workstation pro (you ll need to create a free account to get the download link on their website)
- install vmware workstation pro
- turn internet off
- plug your pendrive in with the rufus w11 x64 iso on it (mind ya, this pen drive ll first need full formatting before burning a w11 image to it)
- press f2 to reach bios in vmware settings and make it boot from pendrive
- turn internet off on your machine (DO NOT keep it on)
- install w11 (keep a 100gb for vmware)
- without updates it ll load real fast and you wont need an MS account (rufus takes care of it)
- while it installs, download revo uninstaller pro on a separate machine https://onefiles.net/9d170d01078634b5 (latest version 5.4.x) and put it inside a second pendrive / portable hdd
- once w11 loads, it ll ask you to enter a password, keep existing password blank and enter literally anything for a new password
- voila you are done with w11 setup inside vmware
- now connect the 2nd pendrive with revo and install it (need to clean uninstall many tools, hence we need this one)
- now go to search bar and type check for updates and update everything on w11 inside vmware
- next stop get unigetui from ms app store or from here https://devolutions.net/unigetui/ (it is a package manager responsible for installing just about everything else with auto updation of all packages)
- the open unigetui and search for the following packages vlc, winrar, winhance
- winhance is the fully customizable debloater you ll need to turn off all telemetry (we ll debloat after installing all the other requirements)
- next go to ms app store and install python or open powershell and type python
- the open unigetui and search for the following packages vlc, winrar, winhance
- winhance is the fully customizable debloater you ll need to turn off all telemetry (we ll debloat after installing all the other requirements)
- next go to ms app store and install python or open powershell and type python
- mind you this installs a python version manager that lets you install and uninstall multiple python versions
- after this python version manager is setup, install a specific version of python like
``` py install 3.13 ``` - next we need a node.js version manager, use fnm for it
https://github.com/Schniz/fnm - once installed, it may need to be added to environment variables manually
- once again choose a specific version of node.js and install it using
``` fnm install 23.12.0 ``` check fnm --help for commands - next we need a java version manager, use jvms for it
https://github.com/ystyle/jvms
- pretty self explanatory
- now install git and again it ll give you some trouble over environment variables, command not recognized etc, fixable with some gpt help
- at this point, we got git, node version manager, java version manager and python version manager and are ready to rumble
- install vscode/ visual studio whatever
- install codex
- install claude
- install opencode (both cli via npx and desktop app) and check their plans out https://opencode.ai/console/go
- install ghidra , ghidra-mcp (mind you open ghidra-mcp first because it only works with specific versions of ghidra and java) this is the reason we installed a java version manager
- check out setup for rea https://github.com/morluto/rea requires npx setup for rea and ghidra both, read documentation
- run winhance, check recommended settings under optimize and every other tab and restart the vm a few times for full debloat with 0 telemetry services
- congrats you have a full blown agentic environment at this point (if I missed anything i ll come back and update)
The end of windows has been heralded since it exists, but it’s still not going anywhere.
What a heaping pile of you know what. You need Microsoft accounts to download basic apps from the App Store
You get nagged and nagged to enter a windows account
Having grown up with it, it’s an incredibly odd feeling using it. Modern ui…modern ui…modern ui…and then BAM a weird screen directly ported from windows 98 (or 2k, you get the point)
An OS that was always incredibly intuitive to me all of a sudden just felt like a disorganized mess. Want to see your Ethernet adapters? Good luck, you’ll open 10 other settings menus/search results before finally getting to the options you need. Advanced sound settings? Same
My headset wasn’t working, after clicking through a bunch of options at some point I loaded a wizard with very specific questions that I’d never seen before and wouldn’t how how to get back to, it randomly worked
Still a bunch of bloatware, still can’t be on for more than a day without having to reboot, everything I remembered that was bad with made worse by bad ux
These days they even tried to remove the option of installing windows with an internet connection, aka ms account
Just bad, there are a lot of annoyances to fix
Several factors come together. For me, Spy-Recall was the dealbreaker. I can not use an operating system that constantly reports to the USA what I am doing. But the increase in RAM prices also means that I fail to see why I should overpay now due to greedy US AI corporations. These corporations all us folks money here. It is like a racket. This is not a "free market" either, since it is so heavily skewed in favour of corporations. The whole idea about capitalism, which the USA once claimed to worship before selling out to the TechBros, has been that free market competition leads to lower prices. Right now we see collusion, a mafia - why the TechBros aren't in jail already beats me. Too much financial kickbacks into the judicial system.