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Comment by winrid | Hacker News Reader

The whole user experience of installing Windows 10 is abysmal. Wife got a new laptop and I watched her to the initial setup. Stupid things like an "enter your pin" dialog that automatically opens another dialog that closes if you hit enter. So you quickly type your pin and hit enter and just see the dialog flash. Or the confusing "remove" button for the fingerprint scanner setup that just removes all of your fingerprints without confirmation. That's just one UI. It feels like some shitty enterprise software. Pathetic.

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> ... dialog that automatically opens another dialog that closes if you hit enter.

I rarely get upset at computers these days, but this is one of the things that easily boils my blood. It happens with Windows and macOS machines at the most inopportune times. I'll be typing and hit enter, seeing a mysterious dialog appear and vanish in a flash as it stealthily hijacked my "Enter" stroke. "Great, who knows what I just accepted or declined."

It seems like a very basic UI consideration to discard any keystroke if the dialog spawned less than 1 to 3 seconds ago. Make it a global rule (Or better yet, a user setting) for all UI dialogs in the OS that is impossible for developers to override.

This is already done though? It's known as focus stealing prevention. One of my gripes with Linux is that it doesn't work well there, but I've found it is already very well handled in Windows; the trouble only comes up if (a) you pause too long for it to realize you're still typing, or (b) the app goes VERY out of its way to steal your keyboard (like hooking global keyboard messages) which is extremely abnormal. I'm surprised if you regularly experience otherwise.

> One of my gripes with Linux is that it doesn't work well...

Linux is not a window manager.

It happens to me because I have the mouse cursor set to pop to the default dialog box choice.

Could even be a dark pattern. After you type the pin several times it's fairly trivial to time that dialog just right.

Something is very weird about window displays in general. Take the list of wi-fi networks; sometimes the entire thing will just stop appearing, doing nothing when you click the icon! I eventually figured out that if I use Windows Search to pull up the WiFi Settings panel, and manually click the list of networks there, then the list is fixed (it does not appear in the Settings window though; it just pops up where it was supposed to be, near the taskbar icon).

I just don’t understand; I cannot fathom what implementation could be so complex that they can’t achieve full test coverage on something like whether or not a damned window appears when required.

The QA team got folded into the main org a while ago. I'd be surprised if the person today in charge of the full test coverage has anywhere near the resources or weight to make an impact.

> I cannot fathom what implementation could be so complex that they can’t achieve full test coverage on something like whether or not a damned window appears when required.

It does seem that complicated from my observations. Notice that it's not a regular window, but part of the overriding/overlayed renderer (DWM? something else?) that draws stuff on top with grayscale smoothing (Direct2D? DirectWrite? something else?)... which probably involves lots of communication between several processes. It feels like an incredibly heavyweight UI component, just judging from the lag between when the icon is clicked and when the list of networks pops up.

The product key re-entrance (or perhaps it was the first one? I don't remember now) dialog is also stupid in that the moment it detects you've entered the last letter, it immediately starts the activation process. Everyone who is used to typing in or pasting the key and then pressing Enter to submit it will end up canceling the activation, since the automatic focus immediately goes to the Cancel button when it detects the last letter entered. From my vague memory it was not like that in previous versions of Windows (enter product key, then press enter/click the button to continue) so what irritates me the most is that someone deliberately added code to implement this behaviour in opposition to probably every UI guide ever created.

My anecdote: I've painlessly ran trough the windows 10 setup at least 3 times now.

Was going to say much the same thing, except I've probably done it around 10 times - it's always gone fine, and it's so much faster than previous versions of Windows.

At the same time, are you running it on a faster SSD?

Disk IO is a huge bottleneck in the setup process.

Hah, you're right, I never thought of that!

I'm used to quiet and fast OS setup: Win10 doesn't goes well with me. If someone manage to find a way to strangle Cortana to death too, that'd be nice.

Alternatively, you work in a large organization, bake the SSD and clone it to all laptops.

Disabling cortana, xbox, candy whatever, news, telemetry, etc., setting windows not to maximize when dragged... is no fun

Clearly you haven't been using enough shitty enterprise software!

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