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Comment by rusk | Hacker News Reader

> Touching some side of the screen triggers this or that surprising feature

Ah this brings back fond memories of Windows 8 :-)

They even did this silly "corner thing" in the server edition, Windows Server 2012 - I remember the first time I RDP'd onto one, and had no clue how to open the start menu (the Windows key didn't work over RDP)!

I had to google it, obviously whilst cursing profusely the whole time. Microsoft have a lot of UI/UX people - it boggles the mind that someone thought this was a good idea!

I legit had to google how to Shut down / Restart a Windows 8 machine back then! It's insane to think that tech people could not figure out the UI, imagine what the regular people had to go through.

I had to open system Help to try to figure out how to log out of Windows NT 4 the first time I used it. We didn’t even have Google.

Helpfully, choosing Help crashed the system, which accomplished my goal.

Didn't Vista default to suspend when pressing the power button - in the menu?

Not sure why the downvote. This was a legitimate concern. I supported Windows PCs back then, and it was hard enough getting people distilled in the mantra of shutting down their PCs without just pulling the power. And then the default behaviour changes. Inconsistent UIs. https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-change-the-start-menu-power-...

In Gnome-Shell, pointing to the top-left corner of the screen (labeled "Activities" on the system bar) will bring up their Windows-8-screen equivalent, and it's quite intuitive to use once you know the basics. It's slow as hell because Javascript, but other than that it works fine. And yes, you can tap or swipe from outside for pure touch access.

The key distinction there is that there is a visual element that does still respond to taps/clicks, which means that eventually you try to click on it, overshoot to the corner, and discover that you don't need to click at all.

Gnome shell does some of this stuff well, but try using it for real work on a tablet and you start needing those arbitrary gestures again. Need to invoke the on screen keyboard? View the app overview? You're going to be searching the web for those gestures, guaranteed.

Hot corners.

That's what they are called. Not sure why the negativity.

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