Bring back the classic start menu and UI and call it a day. The Windows UI is so inconsistent, tedious and un-metaphorical today.
Sure, everything loaded slow off disk, but once you got your basics into RAM it felt so much faster by comparison to how Win10 responds today. Explorer.exe in particular. What a gem that implementation was. I could play folder tetris at lightspeed with that thing, because it actually felt faster than I could ever go. Today, I am sad to report that despite my reflexes not being what they used to, I now wait upon file explorer to do its thing on a regular basis.
To see what I'm talking about, just run something extremely lightweight like mspaint, then right click it in your task bar. Be sure to have a stopwatch handy. It might take a little while for the context menu to appear and you don't want to lose track of your seconds. It's the perfect amount of delay right between complete disengagement (e.g. walking off to get coffee) and proper instantaneous feedback. I sometimes wonder if psychologists working at Microsoft have specifically tuned this delay to be as misanthropic as possible. I used XP not too long ago and I recall a visceral emotional experience due to the realization that we will never have a UI that feels that snappy again branded by Microsoft.
I realize I can probably get my low-latency UI fix with various Linux installs... Anyone have any recommendations? Who has the fastest window manager these days? With .NET Core working on Linux and any code targeting it being largely portable... I could maybe get used to a new normal on Linux for purposes of software development, which is also when I'm looking for a snappy UI. Visual studio on windows being the bloated nightmare it is... Some days I spend a few minutes writing specifications for a new IDE just as a means of catharsis. There is zero excuse for the kinds of delays I regularly see between keypress and UI feedback.
LXDE (the original, not LxQT) is still well-supported on Debian Stable, and that's probably the closest thing to a 'XP-like or better' experience on Linux these days. Xfce is not far behind, though. Or you can experiment with more niche stuff such as WindowMaker, Fvwm95, IceWM and whatnot, but you're more likely to run into unimplemented stuff and these are simple window managers, so utility programs must be installed separately.
Of course, you should be mindful of RAM requirements. A modern Linux install will need at least 1GB to feel really snappy, which is far above the typical XP machine.
Mint + XFCE is really a fine combo.
Not picking on KDE specifically -- I'm mentioning it because I use it on a few machines and it's the one that I'm most familiar with.
Compositing will inevitably give you some lag, but there's cap on how much, depending on the Vblank time. Extra lag is entirely self-inflicted :-).
I usually disable it on my work machine, too. I don't use flat themes anywhere, so I don't really need shadows, and I'm more than happy about the reduced latency.
>I'm looking for a snappy UI.
Problems like these I think stems from poor design decisions made at Microsoft as a whole.
Take ARC compared to Garbage Collection as an example. Not sure why Microsoft chose a Garbage Collector design when implementing .NET, but given how Garbage Collection works, there's always risk of it causing UI stutter when it's doing its thing. Apple in comparison chose an ARC design when implementing Swift to avoid potential responsive UI issues... even if ARC is overall less performant.
Then you also have the decisions to support backwards compatibility and you have a mess on your hands.
Frankly, I hate it somedays when I click on my windows calculator app and it opens a blank window and just sits there. I have to kill it and restart it 2-3 more times before it actually opens up. Stuff like this should never happen!
Same UI issues can happen in reference counting with deeply nested data structures.
Sorry you're right, I meant tracing garbage collection.
>Same UI issues can happen in reference counting with deeply nested data structures.
Only if done poorly. The difference is this is deterministic and therefore an issue you can control and avoid with ARC (albeit at a cost to overall performance). The point was that ARC doesn't have the potential for a uncontrollable random process kicking in, stopping your app and causing UI stutter as it cleans up memory, whereas tracing GC does.
A good comparison: http://developer-toolbox.blogspot.com/2017/12/garbage-collec...
To me, the "advancement" of the human-computer interface came to a screeching halt at that time. People grok menus. Memorizing sequences of Mnemonic accelerators is natural when overlaid on a haptic path created by mouse movement/menu navigation.
Then you take everything and throw out the baby with the bath water by trying to put every past bit of functionality on screen at the same time when what one needs is to be able to set up a work bench quickly, and just do your work, and if necessary save said work bench state to return to later.
I've seen more and "better" advancements in UI design in exactly 1 place, in all the different software suites I use, and that is in IDEs. Ironically, the one place that programmers have to make due day in, day out.
It makes me wonder whether anyone who presides over these programs is actually proficient in the non-computing version of said task. A Typesetter/document composer for instance. Nothing about the modern interface leads me to believe that any actually invested individual is involved, and that the design was pushed by the need for someone at Microsoft to be seen as needed in order to change something.
Then again... Can"t judge 'em for that. We all want to be wanted.
What I hate is the save / options / preference / file menu of office 2016 upwards. It's a nightmare - just too many steps to save a simple file to disk. Even after using it for years, I still need to pay full attention in this menu rather than muscle memory.
Just because they are pushing OneDrive.
Even after years I prefer menus and toolbars over the ribbon. With them you can scan in one direction whereas with the ribbon you have to up and down, left and right. I find it really difficult to find something there.
No, what happened is Microsoft placed a bet on us moving to a multi-platform future where there are many fewer PCs and more tablets, hybrid devices, whatever, all with the need to use touch, pen as well as keyboard for input. The existing start menu and taskbar would be hideous on mobile devices.
The problem is they were wrong. But I'm not going to blame "designer types". If you ever used Metro UI on a Windows Phone device you'd see that it was a truly remarkable system... that was bent to fit a task it didn't fit.
For choice, they finally relented with windows 8.1 and allowed people to boot to desktop directly rather than the start screen. Windows 10 took off the start screen completely.
Choice matters. I liked the start screen but the horizontal scrolling killed it. Like pouring salt in Tea.
Too many changes.
Facebook's learned this lesson well. They no longer do large overhauls. Small changes at a time and in a few months, it's a whole different interface. Only infrequent users would notice.
That's what they are doing with Windows 10 - many small interface changes. The little changes are mainly minor inconveniences.
One last thing.
When they released windows 8 - hardware support was almost non existent. Touch screen PC from that era really sucked. Now with detachable screens, Win 8 style pc interactions might be cool.
> The problem is they were wrong.
They weren't far off either. While PC sales haven't crashed as many feared, the majority of growth in larger form factor computing has been iPads & Chromebook. That plus the fact that a big percentage of desktop software has moved to Javascript/ Electron.
I admit being sad that Metro was wasted though because it really was very nice on phones.
Unfortunately that’s not what Windows does any more. It lags. It does weird stuff. It keeps moving things around.
This isn’t just one installation. I’ve installed W10 a few times over the past few years and the lag, weirdness and cheese-moving continue in whatever installation I try to get along with.
There are plenty of useful things that can be done below the surface that would make Windows better over time. Breaking the interface due to incessant fiddling isn’t adding value: it’s removing it.
And yes, these are the main reasons I’m currently sticking with MacOS everywhere. I just need the OS to work and let me run my stuff in peace.
Besides a shit UI, the creepy phoning home and ads created many a defector away from MS.