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Comment by StreamBright | Hacker News Reader

I wish they launched an OS that has bare minimum interruption with things I do not care about. I seriously do not need anything from an OS than just a super lightweight interface to interact with applications and filesystems. Why is it so hard?

The mail.app vs outlook is a great example of useful and useless UI. Both app does the same.

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I’ve seen firsthand the amount of work that goes into building a complex, scalable system and the problem with your statements are that 1) It’s hard to measure at scale what each of your users cares about. This is especially true with “lightweight” interfaces - simpler UI means you have to carefully decide what you want to expose. 2) Generally the older software is, the more bloated it becomes - this is inescapable. The only real solution to this problem is full rewrites which rarely happen because they’re so expensive and time-consuming. By the time you ship an OS it might already have some bloat. 3) People like what they are used to. Remember the backlash with the Metro interface? Windows users would never get behind a major change to the Windows UI - everyone has been using it for almost 20 years now.

Especially 1). So many different people view what is an MVP differently, especially for an OS.

Outlook isn't part of Windows 10. The default Windows 10 mail application is actually pretty comparable to Mail.app.

I agreee with the interruptions - I don't understand how they can accept popping up reminders over full screen games, or asking me whether i would "recommend windows 10 to a friend" etc.

But the mail/outlook comparison doesn't work: outlook is an old and enormous enterprise piece of calendar/mail thingy. Not a mail application. Even though many use it for just email, that's not what it is - and they can't change that.

This isn't an OS difference between Mac and windows. Windows has a simple/clean mail app, just like Mail.app. http://uk.pcmag.com/windows-10-preview-release-date-news-fea...

Also, seems Outlook will get a makeover to be more like Mail. https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/16/16481190/microsoft-outlo...

"I wish they launched an OS that has bare minimum interruption with things I do not care about. I seriously do not need anything from an OS than just a super lightweight interface to interact with applications and filesystems. Why is it so hard?"

Monetization. Linux distributions can be produced at very low cost and don't need to make a profit, but a version of Windows has to make money to be worthwhile for Microsoft, so features that are effectively adverts or tie-ins for other products and services are inevitable.

How is this remotely relevant to the ARM support announced?

I’d say that Mail.app and Outlook have different use cases. Mail is much more lightweight and can be used for simple personal email. Outlook was designed with enterprise in mind - eg meeting room scheduling, wider confidentiality settings, event scheduling, etc.

The Windows 10 Mail app is actually pretty decent. The Metro style deterred me at first (most UWP/Metro apps I tried were underpowered and had clumsy interfaces), but I saw some colleagues use it recently and gave it another chance. It works really well, and does exactly what I need and not much more or less.

On Mac, I rediscovered Mail.app, and on Windows the Mail application. Both look very different, but fullfil the same function: You can manage multiple accounts from one place, they support conversations and archiving flawlessly, the interface is clean and efficient. Thanks to those two, I use desktop clients instead of webmail again.

So in otherwords, you want a Linux machine but with app compatibility for Win/Apple/whatever.

- If you do mostly web stuff, Linux fits all the bills.

- If you NEED compatibility (Office/Photoshop/whatever), you can often still run many programs with "Wine" in Linux.

I really recommend trying it by downloading a "to go"/"live" version to a USB drive. Ubuntu (the most popular user flavor of Linux) is really user friendly out-of-the-box. Being on a USB drive it'll be a little slower to load, but yeah. I use it every day on a Chromebook converted to Linux.

Exactly, for most people they want the OS to get out of the way. Microsoft never seemed to get that. Constantly interrupting.

Windows 2000 was this. Or at least measured by every windows before and after it.

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