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Comment by jagermo | Hacker News Reader

Good points and well written (not the usual troll rant).

However what I dread most are the vendors and their crapware bundeling programs. Uch.

However, here's the thing: Windows are useful. An UI which pretends you shouldn't use them isn't good for anything complicated, when you use more than one application at a time.

Hierarchical start menus are also useful, for that matter.

> However, here's the thing: Windows are useful.

I'm increasingly convinced that overlapping Windows are not particularly useful (they are better than one-thing-maximized-is-the-only-option), but tiled windows are very useful.

That's a really interesting observation. Coincidentally, if you look at pre-Win3.1 it only supported tiled windows. Tiling support has always been there since, but largely ignored until Win7 gave us Aero Snap (which I love btw). I know Win10 is suppose to further improve on this feature.

I'm torn between tiled and overlapping windows. A lot of the time I just don't have a big enough screen to go fully tiled, because it forces things to squish when I would rather just keep one partially visible underneath (e.g. a browser window, a text editor, and a terminal).

One thing that makes overlapping windows infinitely nicer for me is a feature in a lot of Linux WMs where window borders "catch" on other windows and the edge of the screen when being moved or resized. That, and having a key to move windows from anywhere, rather than just the titlebar.

edit: And focus-follows-mouse/x-mouse.

> One thing that makes overlapping windows infinitely nicer for me is a feature in a lot of Linux WMs where window borders "catch" on other windows and the edge of the screen when being moved or resized. That, and having a key to move windows from anywhere, rather than just the titlebar.

I also like the feature of using the scroll wheel to change window position (above/below), especially if I'm browsing and have a few related windows open on a desktop. I didn't realize how much I missed the feature until I tried Plasma 5 on KDE briefly (it has it, too, but it didn't migrate my configuration).

Ah, yes. I should have included focus-follows-mouse, that's pretty crucial to how I work too.

There's actually a registry setting to enable it on Windows, but so many things are so completely unaware of it in their design that it breaks a lot of stuff.

Yes, precisely!

Tiles are useful. Using a tiling window manager or splitting Metro or vim with splits or emacs with splits you see what's useful. Windows is not imho; tiling very much is. Tiling with virtual desktops.

Edit: To me Metro tablet size without desktop or iOS with tiling would be the best.

This is why Microsoft introduced their Signature series. If you purchase any hardware with that identifier, there is no OEM bloatware. I picked up an HP Stream for my daughter and I was shocked to see it really was _just_ Windows and nothing else.

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