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Comment by TimTheTinker | Hacker News Reader

The early 2000's were a period of especially low usability for Microsoft's products.

At the time, I had a roommate who was a die-hard Windows user. Over several years, I tried to convince him to switch to Mac OS X, with examples like: (a) Just drag/drop a PDF to a printer spool window, and it will print; (b) to install an app, usually you just have to drag it to the Applications folder; to uninstall it, simply drag it to the trash; (c) the simplicity of System Preferences and Software Update; (d) the composited window manager, enabling things like Expose.

What finally converted him was the horrible experience around updating to Windows XP SP3. Recall at the time, Windows Update opened as a control in an Internet Explorer window. Well, he must have waited a very long time until Windows Update no longer supported IE6. So when he attempted to update to SP3, he got an error that the current version of Windows Update required IE7. But for some reason, he could not install IE7 without updating to SP3 -- again, likely because he waited a long time after the SP3 update became available. He told me "I'm never using Windows again" and promptly bought his first MacBook. To my knowledge, he still hasn't gone back.

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Still to this day people view Windows through the lense of XP experiences. I always wonder how much damage that era did. People claimed to "love" XP, but they are all rose tinted in memory. Everyone hated XP until SP2 and SP3. The Security Center was something everyone hated too. But yeah, some things it did really well, but others not so much. 10 is so much better than people give it credit for, and yes there are still bugs. But, all things considered it without a doubt the strongest OS Microsoft has ever built, and it is moving forward...where I feel like OSX is finally moving backward.

People loved XP coming from '98 which was way more prone to crash, BSOD, data losses etc, from what I recall.

Not to mention plug-and-play finally started coming into its own. XP started the trend of having the massive generic driver repository so you could actually get your NIC to work so you could DL your other drivers without needing the CD/floppy with the NIC drivers :) Oh man, XP was great.

I loved that with XP, that you could actually turn the gui back into something WIN98 like- which ment, it was boring, grey and minimal. And thats how i want my gui to be. I dont want some fashionfacista to redesign it to his/her whims. I dont want it to grab my attention for unimportant crap. I want it laying there in the sun, grey, damp and featureless like a new born island. My work has enough excitment and new stuff to focus on- i dont want to be bothered by what other people consider important- security center rages, advertisements and by bothering i ment to be reminded of there existence in any way (that includes gobbling huge amounts of system ressources) - so in XP you could still shut the worst offenders down permanently. It is, and it was for the user who took time to settle in, the perfect system. Everything that came after, is a lovecraftian horror that trys way to much to please a preconcived user- who wants nothing more then to strangle all this unpleasant attempts of servitude.

I think it's a mix of both? I "loved" XP once two things happened: I got a computer with more than 256mb of ram, and I installed SP2. After that it ran really well and yes, so much better than Windows 98 did.

Don’t forget Windows ME which was truly a turd in a class of its own.

I still don't completely understand why they didn't make Win2k into a "consumer" product. A lot of techies here who installed Windows themselves in that era probably skipped ME and went to that. But all the consumer PCs shipped with 98 or ME.

I remembering hearing at the time that this was about hardware support and/or app compatibility. But my cynical side just thinks they wanted to justify charging more for a workstation SKU for another release cycle.

Actually, ME was the result of a development disaster similar to the one which resulted in Vista.

Microsoft was planning on building an entirely new Internet-focused consumer version of NT. It was too ambitious for its time, so to meet deadlines, most of it was scrapped and some UI elements were backported into an updated Windows 98 which became ME. This is why Explorer for both ME and 2000 look similar despite having little else in common.

Other elements of the scrapped project made its way into XP, but barely compared to what it was supposed to be. I think XP’s fancy login screen was one of them.

If anyone’s interested I’ll try to find where I read all of this. It might’ve been on Paul Thurrott’s Windows Supersite or another site that collected Windows betas.

Windows codename Neptune: https://microsoft.fandom.com/wiki/Microsoft_Neptune

It’s interesting to see twenty year old experiments with flat UI designs considering how dominant that style is today with Android 5, iOS 7, Windows 8, etc.

Indeed. Ironically, I think I remember reading that the Neptune apps’ UI was HTML-based, since Microsoft wanted IE to power everything.

And now many apps use HTML/JS/CSS for styling and rendering.

These apps looks like they are made in IE6-era Electron..

They are! The same tech powered Active Desktop and the "smart" Explorer sidebars in Windows XP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application

I think Win2K had higher memory requirements, which meant a more expensive machine for the same performance. (This was always an issue for WinNT and OS/2 versus the DOS/Win9x line)

I think software compat was also lacking. DOS games were still in people's libraries (eg Quake from June '96), and I remember needing an extra 4MB to run those inside Win9x versus booting to DOS mode. That stuff didn't Just Work (tm) on Win2K. For example, http://sandmann.dotster.com/djgpp/DJGPP_W2K.htm is a list of issues with the most popular GCC port to DOS. (The Quake DOS binary was actually built with an earlier version of that compiler)

I remember the WinXP DOS emulation was supposed to be much improved over Win2K, but don't recall specifics.

It's not the bugs that are an issue with 10. It's the mountains of nagware, spyware and advertisements built in to it.

Also the unbelievable amounts of inconsistent interfaces.

There should be some rule internally at Microsoft that institutes a complete ban on new settings UI unless it actually replaces old UI. The amount of times I need to fall back to the old UI is absurd. Also - I'm not sure programmers appreciate how jarring it even is to have the same settings presented in two places. It forces users to construct some kind of mental model of the behind-the-scenes-actual settings, because of course the two dialogs sort of match, but not quite. Usually there are a bunch of settings only in the old dialog, and a few new ones only in the new, and some interactions between settings are meaningful, so... you basically just fiddle till it works or breaks.

Any (significant) UI change is bad. Churn is bad. If you want to change the UI because the old one really isn't good enough anymore, you want to do so as infrequently as possible, and as completely as possible: no two-slightly-inconsistent-UIs-at-once. Realize that every change starts with a serious downside and needs a lot of upside to compensate.

So I get that Microsoft wants to update some of the windows settings stuff (and other integrated apps). But the aim must be for a fairly quick transition; no years of overlap. And if for some reason overlap is absolutely inevitable, then sorry, you're going to have to make both systems 100% equivalent. Yes, that means adding features to the old UI, and adding legacy options to the new UI - but at least that way there's a migration path. The alternative is the mess we have now: little point in even having all those settings, because 99% of users are merely going to be hurt by all those options they cannot actually control correctly.

I'd honestly rather have retained some legacy win95 era controls and have only one control for each option, than this mess. If you're going to fix it... fix it already!

At least you can drop down to the old Control Panel and get at the settings that they haven't bothered to expose in the new UI.

Unfortunately, you have to do so so often that discoverability of where things are in the new UI suffers. It's not worth bothering to learn, particularly when the new UI is in flux and changing often.

I use 10 daily and see no ads. Where does windows 10 show ads?

Candy crush in the sidebar, ads all over the home page/new tab page of the built in browsers. Heavy annoying pushes for Microsoft products like starting Microsoft teams every time you boot when I never installed it or even have an account.

I have yet to see ads also, but I do turn off all the unnecessary stuff at installation time. There is this option on Lock Screen settings called Get fun facts, tips, tricks and more on your lock screen and Show more tiles on the Start settings that can bring stuff out and probably some other more spread around, of course they won't make it nicely like Opt out of all ads across Windows just because.

IIRC, start tiles, explorer bar, stub shortcuts.

Give a non-technical user a copy of Windows 10 and Chrome, wait a few days for the third party ad networks to catch up, and then watch as advertisement after advertisement pop up in the lower right hand corner.

I'd also like to mention the Microsoft News program as being an annoying delivery mechanism for such content (it seems to have some relationship with the browser based on how the user uses the Internet).

Also the logon screen that is now delightful except someone has sold on the idea that they should add clickbait ads for msn and bing - even on pro and enterprise Windows..!

I imagine management in Microsoft is like a fight in the wheelhouse:

Someone trying to make the best OS there is.

Others trying to do ads everywhere like Google.

Some trying to be a reaponsible reliable company, others somehow managing to to crazy price hikes.

Some trying to be friends with open source, others pushing Edge really hard (but, in fairness, still not as ugly as Google was pushing Chrome at its worst.)

Etc etc

If you use the windows search in the bottom left corner, you'll see all sorts of advertisements when you search for stuff on your computer.

Same. I suppose if you view lock screen as an "ad"... I built my own 10 home box which has had no problems for years now.

If you turn them off you dont see them. It's a dark pattern but not completely black.

In the start menu.

XP had a bad start due to relative slowness on the hardware on release (just like Vista).

But as you said, from sp2 days on it was rock solid and reliable. And since everyone skipped Vista, and a notable amount of people even 7, it was "here to stay". While any previous version of Windows was replaced within 2 to 4 years, many used XP for close to a decade. Some grew up on this OS.

When 7 came along it was a welcome evolution of Windows without breaking too many workflows that relied on muscle memory, for better or for worse.

8 was a clusterduck just like Vista, but for different reasons. Vista fell behind schedule and was unpolished and also, Microsoft overestimated the advancements in hardware power that would be made during its development time. With 8 the problem was that Microsoft went "all in" with conquering the mobile market. The ambitious idea of creating a unified user experience on every platform, while designing every thing as mobile first and then just slamming it onto Windows on the desktop. Obviously they didn't nail this first try, and although Windows phone 8.1 was a really solid user experience we know how this ended. So the primary reason why this modern UI was conceived was eventually gone, but by the time the decision to scrap Windows mobile was made, it was already on the desktop, but at least now you can make changes to the UI without thinking about phones. (just tablets and game consoles...)

With 10 they're still to this day working on creating a consistent modern UX on desktop. I'm still highly skeptical whether that was the right thing to do at all. Considering the current trend everything seems to be eventually web based, and those couple business use cases probably wouldn't care if Windows 10 still looked like XP.

And that all didn't even address the couple major duckups they introduced with updates. Older Windows had its problems, but that's a whole new dimension here. Some ex Microsoft employee claimed on his YouTube channel that Microsoft massively scaled down their own QA. Wouldn't be too surprised if that was the case.

I grew up with Windows. My jobs used Unix/Linux and I switched to Mac at home before Vista came out. I got a job using Windows during the Windows 8-10 transition. During that 10 year gap I'd help friends and family setup printers and stuff. I was aghast at the things that hadn't changed in the 10+ years. I really wished I had written it up because I fell back into things quickly. One thing I still remember is how often you get updates requiring a reboot--in macOS it's a few times a year and in Linux it's only when a specific component (like the kernel) gets updated.

Clicking around.

For example, setting your computer’s IP or gateway. Control panel -> Network -> right-click on the “IP interfaces” among a list of 5 abscon names -> Details -> Advanced -> Details -> And you can’t freely type the new IP, you have to use their fields with 4 numbers separated by dots.

Everything was like this. Installing Maven? You need to set a system property, it’s 15 clicks including 6 on a “Details” or “Advanced settings” button. They wanted to hide complexity behind “Advanced” buttons but they hid the wrong things, because each dialog was full of info you’d never use, and what you wanted was inevitably under the “Advanced” button.

Installing new software? Welcome to the installation assistant. We’ll guide you through the 20 clicks, including the mass-unticking of additional software we’ll inevitably select by default, notably the Ask Toolbar when you install Java. If you’re setting up a dev machine you had a dozen programs to set up, each of them requiring a dozen steps of a dozen clicks.

Windows+x => powershell => ipconfig

in Linux it's only when a specific component (like the kernel) gets updated

Fair enugh, but depending on what distro you run that seems to be fairly often as well. Like, more than 'a few times' a year.

Then again if you dont run a server for which downtime is a true loss, or something alike, is rebooting that much of a problem (honest question)?

I haven't really paid much attention, but I'm pretty sure CentOS/RHEL only do kernel updates with distro updates. If so, it's about once or twice a year: https://access.redhat.com/articles/3078

In practice, my companies have done them less frequently. Kernel packages are less often about security patches and more often around a magic combination of kernel+GPU driver+software--I think one of them paid Red Hat for custom cuts.

As for maintaining a personal machine, that distro would probably suggest rebooting more often than RHEL (you'd also have to effectively logout/"restart" for any core package for your Desktop Environment or X). I haven't measured, but I feel like my Synology gets updated every few months.

As for the impact of rebooting. Windows Updates (and macOS updates) are more than just a reboot. It's often an unknown amount of time. Even for a normal reboot, it's really really nice to just leave everything open so you can pick up where you left off. Personal or work it's more than just a browser, but terminals I have open, shell history, vim sessions.

It's like a recent article about fast software https://craigmod.com/essays/fast_software/

If I have a few tens of applications open that all have their own separate state that is lost on reboot, then it’s fairly annoying to reboot because one thing updated.

Maybe it's what exactly you do then/how. I.e. apart from a REPL session in which I maually typed a bunch of commands, I don't seem to have that problem. Editors/IDEs/browsers all persist open documents/view state etc between runs.

Windows XP, Vista, and 7 were all fine. I just enabled the classic design and things largely worked and looked the same in key UX aspects. I'm still only using 7 (virtualized) and what I've seen from 10 on colleagues' computers looks much worse and more complicated UI than what xp-v-7 ever did. Don't even get me started how difficult it is to get your hands on Windows 10 LTSC as a private individual -- which would be the sucessor to 7, if any. I sure won't ever touch a consumer version of 10...even if it's called (pseudo) pro.

> Don't even get me started how difficult it is to get your hands on Windows 10 LTSC as a private individual

This is really a damn shame, because it is far away the best Windows distribution ever. If I didn't have access to it through MSDN, I'd pay a couple hundred bucks for a license.

Getting LTSC is as simple as getting Windows Embeded that it replaced.

> People claimed to "love" XP, but they are all rose tinted in memory.

I still boot an XP partition from time to time. To play old games that simply run with issues in more modern Windows. The issue is XP had the right APIs for game development, and then MS deprecated some great technologies in favour of XBox centered ones.

In new games I still miss the hardware accelerated positional audio XP has.

The early 2000's were a period of especially low usability for Microsoft's products.

If you thought that was bad... look at the "app-ombinations" which pass for productivity software today. Wide expanses of useless whitespace, low-contrast ultra-thin fonts, monochrome hieroglyphic icons everywhere, patronising "cute" and unhelpful messages, the ridiculous levels of bloat, and of course the pervasive spyware --- or "telemetry".

This, but unironically.

We haven't made a great deal of progress moving forward, actually. Twenty years of churn and bloating system requirements.

Give me Word 2003, Visual Studio 6, and AIM Messenger again and I don't think I'd be much disappointed compared to what I'm running today.

You’d have a great point if you only mentioned VB6 and left out AIM and that word processor that spat out binary files.

I still have a portable version of Word 2003 on a flash stick, because it still works better.

The most incomprehensible thing to me is how much worse all the IM software I have to use today is.

I think IM has such a low bar to entry (how hard is it to create a TCP connection and send and recieve stuff?) that encourages lots of churn and competing protocols.

Remember Trillian, Adium, or BeejiveIM? Seamless presence on IRC, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, MSN, GTalk...

Are you arguing that hardware is software or something?

Everything enabling your pocket computer is hardware progress, nothing software related.

I'm not sure if you're serious, but

> Just drag/drop a PDF to a printer spool window, and it will print;

this is just the most obtuse way of doing things.

> usually you just have to drag it to the Applications folder; to uninstall it, simply drag it to the trash;

So does this, and unreliable as you noted - i.e. usually. But, ugggh... dragging things to other things to do things though?

There's a reason why certain large classes of disabled users are on Windows. Stephen Hawking used Windows.

Aside from the disabled, the mechanics of Windows have always been better, no matter how bad they actually were. That last bit is my opinion, but it is true that many, many more disabled users are on Windows. If they can figure it out, couldn't your roommate? I'm joking of course, some people just seem to have a completely different way of thinking about things and certainly it is a fact that at least some portion of the population prefers the way macOS does things just like there are some people who can only use their chin to move a mouse.

I figured out very early on Windows (this was the days of 3.x) that the Alt key could activate the menu and then let you browse the items with the cursor keys, and the underlined letters (which idiotically have been hidden by default more recently) work in combination with Alt to activate UI elements. I couldn't figure out how to do the equivalent in Mac OS. You had to inspect each menu first with the mouse (and hold down the mouse button while doing so), and hope that there was a keyboard shortcut assigned to the items you needed. It's possible to use Windows almost entirely without a mouse, although I've only had to do that to install mouse drivers or reload a glitched one. The same can't be said for Mac OS.

Some of the Finder keyboard shortcuts seem very counterintuitive; for example, the arrow keys move the selected item (same as in Windows), but although opening the selected item(s) is a very common task and one would expect that to be mapped to a very common key like Space or Enter like all the other file managers I've used, I believe one of those initiates a rename (a relatively uncommon operation) and the other does nothing, and the actual shortcut to open the selected item is Command+DownArrow or Command+O. I guess they make sense in their own way, but apparently I'm not the only one who finds this very unusual and confusing:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/6727/why-does-the-...

https://superuser.com/questions/59007/enter-to-open-a-file-i...

https://superuser.com/questions/176450/open-file-shortcut-fo...

https://superuser.com/questions/134892/how-to-open-folder-wi...

https://superuser.com/questions/119871/how-do-you-open-a-fol...

You can press Command+Shift+? to open a search box for the menu items. Not the same thing, but I find it useful sometimes. I also believe you don't need to hold down the mouse button to inspect the menus.

In the end, I'd rate both (Windows nad macOS) as equally painful/unintuitive to use without a mouse.

>(which idiotically have been hidden by default more recently)

I can still see the underlined letters. Are you on Windows 10?

CMD O for open, S for save P for print seem fairly intuitive to me.

For max fun though, hold down opt/alt while you have a menu displayed and watch the options change.

CMD O for open, S for save P for print seem fairly intuitive to me.

The majority of Windows applications I've used also follow that (using Ctrl instead), because the unmodified keys will do something else (like inserting the pressed letter, in a word processor/text editor); the difference with Finder/Explorer is that browsing through the filesystem is the primary purpose, and arrows/Enter/Backspace to move selection/select/go back are far more convenient and easy to use than arrows/Cmd+O/Cmd+[.

I wonder if there is almost some sort of vi/emacs divide here.

Dragging things around is not required on macOS. There are always ways to do things without it. It's just that it's a generally pretty intuitive way to accomplish a task, and it's something that macOS embraced in a way that Windows never did. Want to trash an app? Drag it to the trash. Want to print a PDF? Drag it onto a printer. You can do it other ways, of course — right click and "move to trash", or right-click and "print".

the other really great life-saver for me is the proxy icon on windows... just drag it out to another app to open itinerary another editor/viewer, or right click it to get the path and click one of the folders in the pop up to open it in finder.... always miss that in windows and linux... always hunting for where the file i’m currently viewing is

want to remove a device? drag it to the trash where the icon suddenly changes to eject

"intuitive"

Or right click > eject, which I’m pretty sure is the same as Windows.

> > Just drag/drop a PDF to a printer spool window, and it will print;

> this is just the most obtuse way of doing things.

Perhaps that was a bad example of the incredible leg-up Mac OS X had over Windows around printing... all-around, printing was so much more straightforward on the Mac.

To extend the example: (a) printing to PDF has always worked - no need to install a 3rd party "PDF printer"; (b) PDFs and print spool jobs are indistinguishable, hence "drag a PDF to a print spool" works fine. (c) Accidentally printed to the wrong printer? Easy to fix - just open the intended printer and drag the job from the wrong one over.

This kind of thing also got me to OS X. Now I'm looking at fiascos like the MBA/MBP keyboards, the bug-fests that are x.0 OS updates, and the way Catalina kills 32-bit applications for little reason (that I can discern), and I find myself wondering if I should quit the Mac world.

A few years ago, after following the same path as you, I switched to Linux and never looked back.

I'd recommend KDE (e.g. Kubuntu) if you like out-of-the-box productivity, with built-in settings for pretty much everything useful, and a strong ecosystem of default apps.

How long should Apple keep 32 bit support? Apple hasn’t shipped a 32 bit Mac for a little over a decade, warned developers back in the 10.6 - 10.7 era and they cancelled 64 bit Carbon.

Should Apple also still maintain Classic MacOS support? PPC support? 68K support? As far as “no good reason” with as bad as Intel is falling behind ARM - especially Apple’s own ARM designs, it’s widely expected that Apple will move away from Intel to ARM in their consumer laptops. Apple dropped 32 bit support in their ARM chips two or three years ago.

Besides, every bit of code you can get rid of is less of a service area to support, maintain and for security vulnerabilities. The more than half dozen ways of defining a string in Windows has led to security vulnerabilities by itself.

Even MS dropped support for 16 bit apps in 64 bit Windows.

Ditto. I love my MBP, it's still tottering along after 10 years (!), but it's on its last legs. the keyboard fiasco had me thinking that maybe my next backpack computer might not be a Mac...and then here comes Catalina with no 32-bit support and App Store-onerous requirements to get software signed, and fuck that.

MS' Surface Books look pretty cool. Or maybe I'll just get a bigger backpack and tote my 17" gaming laptop around.

Try Windows. I migrated from Macbook to Windows PC and I like it. It's far from perfect as everything seems today, but it works for my needs.

2) Right click - print

2) Double click setup

3) open setup again - remove option or the more opaque way, uninstall through configuration - software

Your points wouldn't convince me actually.

> 2) Double click setup

Press next. Click "I agree" radio button. Press next. Press next. Press install. Press finish.

Ops, you forgot to uncheck the "create link on desktop", and now you have one (if you're lucky, could be more - Register now!) more desktop icon. You can delete it, but if you are running XP I think it would complain that you are not actually deleting the program, just the link. Click yes.

The exercise of installing a pre-xp program with a limited user account is left to the reader.

I thought it was pretty clear this argument was being made in the early 2000s, not today.

But anyway, a few months ago I tried to install Office on a new laptop for my daughter, using a legit code I bought through work. However the laptop had a previously installed demo copy of a different office version. Oh. My. God. I spent 2 hours going through a handful of different Office download, install and upgrade sites, which were completely different in different domains and didn’t refer to each other or even look similar. I entered the product key into a dialog in the pre-installed office and into at least two different office web sites. I tried uninstalling it but it seemed to just end up broken.

Finally I found an MS online support site and got into a chat with a support rep. He remotely uninstalled the pre-install, which had to be done using some power shell command line utility to clean that up properly, then installed the proper version. Unbelievable.

2) You could (maybe still can I haven't tried it for a while) drag documents onto printers in Windows. There was a printto verb for the shell that enabled this. The problem was not many developers supported it.

After OS X, has anybody ever switched back to Windows from a Mac OS for daily use (i.e. not for a specific application that is only available on Windows)?

I don't even want to look at Windows now. It's so unsightly in a way that you don't notice until you switch away.

After 15 years on OS X, I won't be buying another Mac. The MB keyboards with no Escape key and constant breakage, and dropping support for 32-bit apps, would have been enough for me. The newly onerous restrictions on software signing, and Apple's general obsession with sacrificing anything and everything to get thinner and lighter, only make it worse.

Work gave me an MBP. I am a vim user, so I need my Escape key.

Mapping Caps Lock to Escape is easy to do now, even through the Settings GUI.

I am not trying to convince you to stay with Mac, I am just saying that this particular thing helped me immensely.

It always surprises me when people remap the caps lock key. I find that I use it quite often.

For vim you case use 'C-[' I believe which does the same thing as escape.

I have been on Apple devices since the early days of the shift to Intel, and regularly use a PC for home projects.

Windows 10 has refined the usability while Apple has stagnated recently trying to bring iOS apps into the desktop mainstream. Even though both have plenty of problems, the biggest issue right now is that Microsoft seemingly wants all of your metrics, whereas Apple is marketing heavily that they are building everything around privacy.

I am looking forward to seeing how well the Windows Subsystem for Linux works with the new Console. That is the main reason so many engineers went to Macs in the first place.

I have so far on two occasions swapped work given MBP's for Windows laptops after having made considerable effort to get used to osx. I myself own a MBP and my daily driver OS is manjaro linux.

me. the Java ecosystem used to update too slow and unreliably. After spending many hours wrestling the default jdk and ways to make different programs use a different install I just gave up. I still use my Mac for media production because it's still a power house after this many years but for everything else I'm back in Windows. it's ugly and not ergonomic when you go to the insides, but it sits in the background and let me do my things instead of pretending to know better at every step.

I have. OS X and Windows are similarly usable for me, but there are more apps on Windows.

The windows classic shell is still the best, the kernel is great as well. The layers between, well plenty of garbage mixed in.

This letter is what inspired my similar O365 rant. Usability is just as bad as ever, if you find yourself in the wrong places of the suite.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14160809

Windows 7 with its constant mandatory automatic updates did it for me... Windows, never again, and I switched happily to Ubuntu.

Chrome and Firefox auto updates too. But those are fast, done in the background and they don't require reboots.

Windows is still terrible at this.

I don't think updating an application is really comparable to updating an operating system. The OS is vastly more complex.

Nevertheless, Firefox on Linux via package manager definitely requires a restart. Typically I know when Firefox has been updated because I get a window saying "your browser needs to restart".

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/9s78fh/sick_of_get...

The restart is not the problem, the time it takes is. (And that it prompts rather aggressively to reboot.)

They do require you to restart the application. Same with Windows, it updates in background and requires a relaunch.

I have no problem with the relaunch, but it takes a lot of time to do the actual update at relaunch time. So the launch time with update is at least a magnitude larger than it should be.

This coupled with the fact that Windows update is rather monolithical yet it should be simple to update most of the non-kernel parts without reboot leads to too many slow reboots :/

"The early 2000's were a period of especially low usability for Microsoft's products."

Windows 2000 was actually a pretty stable system, considering MS previous standards.

"user. Over several years, I tried to convince him to switch to Mac OS X, with examples like:"

For me Mac OS was always a terrible system. I was forced to work with some Mac OS during my PhD studies in the lab. Terrible. Today Mac OS is a tax for people who are either to stupid or to lazy to put a decent linux on their machine.

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