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Windows 10 seems to be one huge example of this. It's a travesty of an OS. Below are some of the things which it does to make me want to chuck the entire computer out of a window:

- Overlay the huge "you need some updates" panel, with no option to close the window. Every key input brings you to the update installer.

- Windows Defender frequently ignores my exclude lists, which causes it to start scanning my VM's .vmem files, reading and writing several megs per second to disk, causing my VM to be unresponsive for 20+ minutes if I do not restart my entire system.

- The new search options in the task bar seem to have gotten worse since Windows 7. Whenever I start typing something like 'not', it shows me Notepad++. When I then add the 'e', the options disappears.

- Lately, my Windows 10 has decided whenever I boot up a system, it should restart all processes that were active when I shut it down before I have had time to even log in, which is kind of a fucking bother when I had loud music playing in the background when I shut it down.

- All the goddamn bloatware on it. I know that when I buy a DELL or HP, I'll have to completely reinstall the system to get rid of the bloatware, but Win10 comes with its own set of it for some reason.

- All the 'smooth' animations, which slow the UX just enough to be frustrating. Don't slowly slide up the start menu, just pop it into place!

It also has many outstanding unfixed bugs. For instance, occasionally and for no readily apparent reason the Start button will stop working. It simply won't do anything anymore. It may or may not be fixed by rebooting, reinstalling all store apps, or other various nonsensical steps, which almost never actually work. Ultimately, the only reliable solution is to reinstall the OS. If you search google for "Windows 10 start button doesn't work" you will see that this bug dates back nearly a decade now.

Let that sink in for a minute. Microsoft has somehow managed to screw up a goddamned menu so badly that it can break in multiple ways they don't know how to fix, and rather than fix this bug they have devoted their resources to bringing us features we never asked for.

That's today's Microsoft. Adding (broken) new things no one wants, changing things for the sake of change (see: new settings panels), and never fixing any bugs. It's as though they've embraced the worst qualities of open source developers, only they charge you for the privilege of using their OS and still have the gall to force ads on you.

Windows peaked in quality around Win7. Everything they've added after, with possible half-exception of Metro UI[0], seems to have made the user-facing experience much worse (I'm not claiming they didn't improve the inner workings of the system, though).

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[0] - half-exception, because while it made the desktop experience worse, it also enabled Windows to work well on mobile devices, and it turns out Windows is the only OS for tablets that's not a toy, but a tool for productive use.

How the fuck do you break the start menu? I'm eagerly awaiting better gaming support for Linux system, so I can finally leave this POS OS behind for good.

Recently I was troubleshooting someone's Windows 10 computer and initially I remember thinking that the start menu's blur-transparency background effect looked nicer than what I'm used to on MATE, but then when I actually clicked one of the options the menu had totally frozen! It remained that way until a restart.

"...this bug dates back nearly a decade now."

A good trick, considering Windows 10 went RTM in 2015!

You're right, I don't know how my Googlefoo failed me so badly, but I could have sworn I had results from 2010 for Windows 8.

PS: Seems it was because of this: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/start-...

which appears to be a similar problem on Windows 7.

Hmm. I haven't run into that one directly, but I have found that Start menu/taskbar issues tend to be very effectively solved by killing the explorer.exe process that's running the taskbar and starting a new one. It's a garbage way to have to solve a UI problem, I agree! But it's preferable to rebooting, or reinstalling, or what-have-you, I think. Might be worth a try with the Win10 issue, too.

Oh believe me, it is one of the two dozen or so bullshit steps that is often recommended and it doesn't work. At least it has never worked whenever I've encountered the issue. Given that there are apparently so many different failure states for a fucking menu, I'm sure it's worked for some people.

Yes! Why the hell does windows defender have exclude lists if it's not going to respect them? Drives me nuts.

I haven't seen the full screen update modal recently, though. I thought it had been removed. Maybe it was only removed in enterprise?

Oh God, speaking of hating VS: I recently had to nuke it and reinstall (partially my own fault), and missed the option to set file type associations. So it set any and all source files it could think of, including .py files, to VS. That is when I discovered the old functionality of setting associations by program is broken for non-store applications, as notepad++ was missing from the options list. One has to manually set the association for each and every file type. If I'm opening a source file in explorer rather than opening a solution file, it generally means I just need to take a quick peek and don't appreciate the startup delay of something as heavy as VS. And the file association panel is only half broken, since setting association per program is UWP only, while per file type still has the older control panel available.

Maybe I'm just stupid, but I refuse to waste 2 hours of my life googling what has always been a relatively straightforward task. And it seems that every UWP program has to have ~40% of its "advanced" features removed like this in the name of ease of use.

> Clearly the developer(s) didn't have a clear idea of how to design software and abstract it into pieces that are independent and reusable.

Is this not often the case because you have people that are not actual developers involved in the process of software creation? In the sense of, you don't get budget to fix/refactor something because business says so; you have to make your app comply with some shitty legacy standard because business wants to have your software work with some stuff from 20 years ago - and so on, the list is basically endless.

Don't get me wrong, developers (myself included) are probably more than enough at fault themselves, but if 'creating software' was only about making nice, clean, awesome code that really does what it's supposed to do, devs in general would probably make a better work out of it compared to what is happening in the real world - where non-dev people also have a say in what/how you create software.

for example try to find a symbol and it pops up a modal dialog

Which one is that? Ctrl-T ('Go To All') isn't modal. And it goes to symbols only by prefixing the search with #. So it might be a better fit than whatever you're using?

I did wonder - perhaps it is "Find in Files"? (Ctril-Shift-F).

Do you write bug-free code?

Hey there! The point I was trying to make in the first place was "must it really be so hard to make systems that work?" but I'm afraid it got a little lost) Should try better next time