Back when the system settings could be reached with less clicks, were organised in a logical way and didn't use most of the screen as white-space.
That full screen start view was one hell of an abomination....
So the homepage doesn't even load.
So the hapless admin who needs to download a file off the web (with no other browsers installed, and no firewall) would open IE and boom, exploit!
Is this what you're referring to?
More importantly people who suffer from to those interfaces are not in position of power to make switch operating systems. Forcing them to eat what MS feeds them seems like good way to experiment. If experiment fails, you don't have to hurry and repair it.
The default homepage for it should be msdn or bing or whatever, but msn makes zero sense.
Weak!
I actually really liked that.
Edit: took me way too many brain-cycles to work out the emphasis in this comment.
Linux got this standard arbitrary menu categories thing but in the end people use menus to launch a program so I believe a simple A-Z list with a search box should be enough.
Throwing app store stuff in there is not okay though (as in the current windows situation and the previous ubuntu affiliate links in the dash bar).
(You can imagine what my reaction was when edgy auto-started after an update to tell me the over-engineered Firefox downloader was now "better" than ever. I had to kill the process in order to not see the mandatory new features tour. It did it again after the recent update to make sure I hate it as much as possible.)
It's interesting to see how strongly change-averse most people are when it comes to those things.
Today, GNOME Shell is a default DE for major distributions, and while people have their preferences, it's more popular than the 2.32 fork, Cinnamon, which I think is good evidence of change-averseness.
I had my differences with the GNOME Foundation's handling of things, but I have few complaints about the convenience of their DE today.
Perhaps in a vacuum it might work. But this is the real world were hypothesis are just that.
> A similar thing happened with Vista, people were overwhelmed with the wildly different UI
No. People were apparently overwhelmed by system instability and resource hogging (mainly hard drive grinding). I don't remember people complaining about the UI's usability. Though there were UI complaints which were mostly echos of the same complaints leveled at the glossy "Teletubby" XP theme.
> It's interesting to see how strongly change-averse most people are when it comes to those things.
Interesting? It's human nature. We develop habits and routines which take time to memorize and get right. It's work which we personally invested. I'm sure you have routines that if changed by an external force without choice would be upsetting to you.
The biggest fault of Windows Vista in my opinion was Microsoft made one too many compromise. There were machines that came with Windows Vista pre-installed that should have never gotten Windows Vista. My roommate in college had a Compaq machine on which the screen completely blanked for over three minutes at a time as it tried to display the user access control overlay. Of course, over three minutes later the screen would turn on as if nothing had gone wrong at all. iirc it was something about the processor/integrated graphics being too weak for Windows Display Driver Model. [1]
I think Microsoft is making a similar mistake today by allowing OEMs to ship Windows 10 on new machines with anything less than a SATA SSD (mechanical hard disks or eMMC).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Display_Driver_Model#:.... Off-topic but if the url looks weird it is because it is a Chrome only thing: more at https://wicg.github.io/scroll-to-text-fragment/
Memory usage used to be a major complaint (possibly the biggest) even if it was made clear repeatedly that the OS was simply keeping more stuff in RAM instead of dumping it to disk specifically to improve performance. A mechanism that stuck to these days. That memory isn't marked that obviously in the Task Manager now, and memory is is no longer such a luxury so people don't complain anymore. But on my 16GB machine I have 4.1GB in use clearly marked on the graph, and another 7.5GB cached that is not at all made to jump at people. People want the added goodies and expect absolutely no impact on anything else.
When XP was launched we heard the same grumbles. XP was bloated, had higher resource usage than 98/2000, less stable than 2000, not compatible with a lot of hardware, weird GUI. By SP3 people were loving it and by the time Win 7 arrived nobody wanted to let go of XP. Win 7 was bloated, had higher resource usage than XP, less stable than XP, not compatible with a lot of hardware, weird GUI. By SP2 people were loving it and by the time Win 10 came along nobody wanted to let go of Win 7. And no, it's not an issue of OS quality going down. Like you said, people just get used to stuff and can't take change and when you combine it with the lack of understanding you get all kinds complaints.
Reminds me of an anecdote about a certain car made for the low end market, targeting a segment of owners of 20+ year old clunkers. Everyone would buy it and complain that the fuel consumption was huge. Strangely enough this was a modern engine, certainly more efficient than the old ones it was replacing. The problem? The fancy computer was showing instantaneous fuel consumption. When accelerating? 25 liters/100Km. Outrageous! The company just hid the instantaneous counter and left only the very reasonable average. Problem solved. Then there were the "I can't feel the road with this power steering" complaints which worked themselves out, although to this day there are people who swear the old cars were better (they were most definitely not).
Between lack of knowledge, nostalgia goggles, unreasonable expectations ("all of it, for free"), and a few more things these popular opinions of tech of the past aren't all that useful. It says a lot about the commercial success of a product, not its actual qualities.
In 2009 when Windows 7 was launched, Vista's market share (all desktop OSes) reached the all time peak of 18%. At the same time the (then) 8 year old Windows XP had 72%.
The NT series has always distinguished between cached/locked memory, so I don't see that as an explanation.
Also, consider than, on equivalent hardware, XP actually booted _faster_ than 2k, which led many people (incl those who hated the interface) to actually use it.
So this is not simply explainable by the "people just can't take change" argument.
As for XP most people upgraded from 98. The resource usage difference was undeniable and so was the driver incompatibility which made most devices not work properly or at all initially. I did not have the experience of XP booting faster than 2000 even on the same hardware but SP1 fixed a lot of issues, maybe also this. For the first couple of years every forum, IRC channel, BBS, or DC hub I read was full of complaints about either performance and compatibility, or stability depending on what people were upgrading from.
> So this is not simply explainable by the "people just can't take change" argument.
Not only. But it's one big part of the explanation. People are usually skeptical about change and compare around transition time so are inherently biased. They're comparing a stable, fine tuned product with the fresh, rough edged one. The Vista name was dropped because it was already toxic. But Windows 7 is more or less Vista SP3. If Vista didn't flop so hard from the start it would have had the same evolution as XP: launch grumbles grumbles grumbles > SP1 grumbles grumbles > SP2 gru... hey, this is pretty ok > SP3 noice!.
Even Win 10, with all its issues, is a far better product today than it was 5 years ago.
Well, that's because they fixed most of the issues in SP1 and SP2.
Also is there a specific reason you skipped certain versions such as Windows ME, Windows Vista etc? Maybe it's not only "people just can't take change" and some products are legitimately bad?
People complained about memory usage even tho it was just windows precaching. Something they don’t complain about now.
The issue with vista was drivers. And then when 7 came out everyone is like oh yay everything works. Even tho it was using the Drivers from vista.
Majority of the vista complaints are silly. It was never as bad as everyone made out to be. Just the same old cool fad to hate on MS.
Lots of people internally knew it was a mistake in real time before realease but it was strongly backed by exec Steven Sinofsky, iirc.
Change is only good if it improves things. Win8 and later were a massive usability regression for keyboard+mouse/trackpad users. Windows 10 rolled some changes back, but those that weren't rolled back are still an inconsistent mess (and with no signs of improvement, that's the actually worrying part). There's no rational way to call the Windows 10 start menu or system settings an improvement over Windows7 all the way back to Windows95. And both the start menu and the control panel area weren't all that great to begin with in Win95+, but somehow Windows 8 and 10 still managed to make it worse.
PS: The main reason why the Win8 start screen and Win10 start menu are bad seems to be that they assume that a Windows application is just the executable, like on macOS. But Windows applications usually have more files associated with them, mostly other tools, readme files, uninstallers. Visual Studio is the best example, it's nearly impossible to find the tools associated with Visual Studio in Windows 10 without installing a proper start menu replacement. And Visual Studio is a Microsoft product. Go figure.
Ok, a search-focused menu is fine, but what I can't understand is how is it possible that the in 2020, on a new computer the search in the start menu can still lag??? What is this? There are menus in some linux desktop managers that haven't been lagging for decades, and the newest windows reliably takes 0.5s-3s for showing any results, upwards of 5-10 seconds to showing every result... What are people paying for? Apparently it must also be that it doesn't even properly separate the drawing code from the search/IO/sync code because while it lags away I can clearly feel the lag even in how the text cursor moves and responds... Reliably! Wtf this is the world's most used OS? (Sorry, rant over.)
There are definitely major problems in Windows, be it incentive structure, or some wrong people at key positions in the UX department, or legacy, or whatever it is, but after experiencing a good desktop manager it is obvious that Windows is not getting better in this regard... It's not about tablet or no tablet, it is just worse, in many ways.
Windows 8.1 made some improvements, so that users will probably be able to find their way from Win32 to Metro. Getting back is still a pain. It retained the fundamentally bad paradigm.
Windows 10 was the proper fix: abolish the ecosystem split, as a disastrously failed experiment, and return to a unified experience. You still have the UWP apps (though their design is finally somewhat more in line with the rest of the OS), but they are properly windowed like everything else now.
In 8 the tiling window manager and non-tiling window manager were separate worlds you switched between virtual desktop style. In 8.1 they made the entire non-tiling window manager desktop a "proper" tile. (In 10 they killed the tiling window manager.)
As a tiling window manager fan, it's easy to sometimes wish they'd gone down the other path in some AU 10 and "promoted" more Win32 applications to proper tiles in the tiling window manager, rather than "demote" all the tile capable apps to the chaos of traditional non-tiling window manager.
(Keyboard included and especially. Do you know the keyboard shortcuts to move/resize/arrange windows and when was the last time you tried to use them? Part of my love for tiling window managers came from daily use of a laptop with a bad trackpad and wanting to automate more things with the keyboard.)
This was broken for 5 frigging years. The general consensus was that tablet mode was more problems than it was worth. They fixed in some recent release but is still buggy as hell (windows will not return to full height and instead be partially moved off screen for some reason).
I switched to Windows 10 purely for the Surface Book hardware a few years ago. Before that, I was a contented Arch Linux + i3 user. (And my next laptop will probably be back to Arch Linux, with Sway instead of i3 because Wayland > X.)
The split made, and still makes, no sense at all to me as a tiling window manager fan. It maintained two separate worlds that you could not easily switch between, which is fairly antithetical to a tiling window manager. And functionality like, y’know, tiling, was non-existent. (And tiling does exist just a little bit on the other side, with window snapping.)
It was a window-management disaster, wholly unmitigated.
Early on most apps, because of Windows 8's attempted focus on Tablets/Phones typically only supported full screen, half screen, and phone widths. Windows 8.1 added a lot more responsive screen sizes to more of the apps, adding a lot more variety/capability to the ways you could tile apps. The classic Win32 desktop even lived "inside" one of these tiles in Windows 8.1, so you could tile apps on both sides around it.
At various points in Windows 8.1 I'd have a half dozen apps (including the Win32 desktop as a single "app") tiled across two 16:9 monitors. It was actually a very nice dual monitor desktop experience and a good use of all that horizontal space, which I will continue to point out to people that didn't believe the tiling window manager made as much sense for desktop users as it did for tablet users. (I joke that I wish I could turn on Windows 10's Tablet Mode on dual monitor systems still, even as anemic and nearly dead as the surviving tile manager is.)
Take for example the fluent design, which by itself is a good design, but after three years is still not consistently applied in windows, let alone microsoft’s first party apps. Meanwhile apple has redesigned all of the ui of the os and all first party apps, in one year. That is what following through looks like. It is embarrassing for microsoft how much better apple is at rolling out design changes.
This (broken search) is the single biggest complaint I have with Windows 10. Everything else I can overlook.
Search in Windows 10 is garbage. I install Everything on ever y PC I use for home or work and it does wonders: https://www.voidtools.com/
Inside the Sound Settings I see almost all of the controls I expect to see from the Sound Control Panel, though they are broken into multiple pages in the way that the old Control Panel was broken into tabs. A lot of the Sound Control Panel is the Devices list, and there are multiple links to the "Manage Sound Devices" page that I see in Sound Settings. The link to the app-specific volume mixer is under Advanced Settings and labeled about you would expect "App volume and device preferences".
If that weren't enough I also see on Sound Settings as the second item down under "Related Settings" is "Sound Control Panel" to get back to the one you hoped for if you wind up searching and pulled up the wrong one from the one you preferred. (I don't think that is a Dev Mode thing and always is there.)
(Bonus: the best app-specific volume mixer in Windows 10 is the Audio widget in the modern multi-widget Xbox Game Bar which you pull up with Win+G or the Xbox "Home" button on Xbox controllers. If you've never used the Xbox Game Bar or remember only a flat single bar without a variety of widget windows, trying the new Xbox Game Bar is a good idea, even for people that don't necessarily use Windows for gaming some of the Widgets like Audio and Performance are generally useful and faster or as fast to access than their Task Manager or Settings equivalents. Of course, likely to be disabled by group policy on Enterprise systems; it's unfortunate when Power User tools are Gaming focused/branded.)
For me, without the OmniBox Windows would be unusable by now. I consider Windows 2000 to be peak Windows UX. It was all downhill from there.
If you're on 2004, it's HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows, DisableSearchBoxSuggestions = DWORD(1)
If you're on 1909, it's HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search CortanaConsent = DWORD(0), and BingSearchEnabled = DWORD(0)