What does the future hold for Windows if it isn't Windows 10x?
windowscentral.com
windowscentral.com
At this point I also don't care if it's at the cost of backward compatibility, but they also need to fix the response times in the Windows UI. Given that high end games play very well on Windows, the OS is clearly able to process inputs fast enough. Yet for some reason when you're navigating the Windows desktop, everything seems to react pretty slowly.
Windows 2000 was the last version I was able to use without having my mouse hand cramp up. Something in Windows causes me to tense up my left hand (my mouse hand). It doesn't happen in macOS and it doesn't happen on Linux (Gnome/KDE/XFCE).
Is this why every app on Win10 seems to have a different title bar color? And even different active/inactive behavior?
And how do I move a browser window, now that my 8-15 browser tabs consume all of the title bar area?
Keyboard shortcuts?
Alt space brings up the "restore, move, size, minimise, maximise, close" menu.
Windows Key + cursor keys will snap the window to different places.
This is the fault of browsers, not the OS. I think chrome was the first to do away with the actual title bar and put tabs there, then everyone followed. You can change this in the settings I think, there should be a small area you can drag between the minimize button and the last tab (on FF at least), and then you can always hit the "Alt" button to bring up the title bar you can then grab.
Now every application and OS component does its own thing however and whenever it likes, and the whole experience becomes impossible to learn other than as a giant list of special cases and exceptions, which will change with the next round of patches.
This is why I can’t explain to my mom how to use her computer any more, and generally tell her to use her phone instead.
Yeah, no. This is the heart and soul of MS. Apple breaks stuff all the damn time. MicroSoft keeps things working forever. Some people pay for upgrades. Some pay so they never have to upgrade. Consumers upgrade, and apple makes a lot of money. Businesses don't upgrade, and pay for the privilege.
Kinda sucks, but preserving how we got here is a huge deal. 20 year old systems are core to frighteningly important systems.
Sure, make another, good luck handling the zillion battle tested edge cases. Windows may be horrible now, but ancient code still works. Your hand cramp is less expensive than a rewrite.
(this might be a little aggressive. apologies, this is kinda a hot take)
Microsoft can continue down the current path and Windows will still be hugely successful and widely used. It's will just be terrible and continue to get worse. Most people and businesses will just live with it. I mean if Windows is just the thing that launches Steam, then you don't really care. If it's just the shit SAP/Excel/what-ever launcher your IT department forces you to use, then fine. Windows just won't be a smooth experience or something people enjoy using.
They've done it from time to time. The benefits of NT outweighed the loss of tools that required the windows 9x models; although not enough for many to switch to 2000; XP made some concessions to seal the deal. The benefits of 64-bit windows are generally worth the loss of 16-bit applications (although winevdm shows that they could have made that work).
But, I haven't seen much from Microsoft lately that leads me to think they'd be able to pull something like that off. If I had to make a choice, I'd probably go to something else that feels like it respects users.
Backward compatibility is the entire selling point of windows.
>Windows 2000 was the last version I was able to use without having my mouse hand cramp up.
Hardware accelerated graphics? I've noticed these tend to add a few frames of latency and have a similar reaction.
I stopped using it on my computers at windows xp (and windows 98 was the last version I spent any real time in) so the changes in newer versions of Windows are a lot more obvious (and confusing) to me. Here are just a few of the bigger ones:
The control panel has moved around a few times since then (and is way harder to find, I have to use the search feature to get to it) and now they have some windows RT replacement that I have no idea how to navigate. The user home folder (and even C:\) is harder to find now. Everything pushes you to use "one drive" which has non intuitive synchronization/corruption/compatibility/path behavior. The start menu is completely different and has ads now. I have no fucking idea how user creation works anymore but I think it's tied to some online service.
Linux has had a far more consistent UI. Xterm hasn't changed (as far as I can tell) since the version I had on my laptop when I was 12. Neither has FVWM (although they stopped calling it "FVWM2.") Bash has "deprecated" aliases but they still work. I guess GNOME has iterated on its shell a few times but it's not like Microsoft hasn't screwed around with explorer. Also caja is still there and behaves the same (does anyone actually use GNOME unironically anyway?)
Office has changed even more dramatically (which makes me wonder why people still stick with it, at this point libre office writer has fewer UI changes from word 98 than Microsoft word.)
If you want an example of "UI doesn't change much over half a century" look at coreutils. They make changes but people really freak out when they do because there's little difference between the UI and what is essentially an ad-hoc API.
I need to tinker with my Linux machine constantly. Linux is great a server, but desktop? Still a long way to go.
Mostly I've given up on the desktop environments on Linux, not due to response times, but because I don't want to tinker with it, I just want to use the computer. My current home setup is just an OpenBSD machine with CWM, it manages windows and launches programs and that's all it needs to do.
Then again I use KDE Neon and only make to make software, browse the web and occasionally play CSGO.
My biggest annoyance is how everytime I boot either my Windows partition (weeks between) or KDE partition (anytime really) there's a huge stash of upgrades waiting for me.
Updates on Windows is usually more annoying on Windows than on Linux because of the forced updates with reboots, in that regard Windows is more garbage than Linux.
I guess we maybe changed the way package-installer (portage) profiles worked during that time, and I sort of recall something about how repos are configured being changed. Those were each at most a command or two run as root.
Otherwise, I don't really get a sense that I have had to do any tinkering other than what I specifically want to mess around with something, as you say.
E.g., I changed from grub to efi-stub booting, which was fun and took a bit of work. I tried out Conky and some different status bars (cool, but not really my thing).
Now, i3 is really pretty barebones. I can imagine that some desktop environments maybe require more tinkering than i3, but if so then that's not really Linux's fault, is it.
But Settings / Control Panel needs to be reversed. Just got a new computer, and having to look both places to find a knob is annoying. Settings is also too dumbed down and spacey to be usable. And actually slow to navigate.
But don't think they should or can break compatability as you suggest. Firstly, not having shit break every update is one reason I moved off MacOS and back to Win. But also for MS's part that if thing breaks and they have to do big upgrades, users might as well look elsewhere. People keep using Win because it works for them and the incentive to switch vs cost is low.
The person who wrote this article seems to think that progress in OSs taking control away from the users. I'm not a big fan of Windows, but I give it a lot of respect for compatibility and allowing users to modify it to some extent.
This could be my command line bias coming through. But how does a graphical rework and new icons compare to real-world features? WSL1 and WSL2 are both impactful tools added to the Windows desktop. While reading this article would seem to have you believe that a graphical re-fresh is the most cutting edge feature that Microsoft has for Windows.
I am not a fan of the Windows Operating system, but this article seems to criticize and ignore everything I think it's doing right while ignoring everything that it's doing wrong. Like spying on users or not supporting better file systems.
How is Flatpack/Snappy approach helping me?
The way forward is probably to partition off those compatibility layers somehow, and sell support for them as add-on services, with a price escalator balanced so as to encourage migration to modern APIs, while presenting no cliff-edge that would push customers to competitors.
I think the “new” UI is fixable, but the way to do this is to finish it and make it a coherent system, not to add another layer while keeping the old layers hanging around.
They would have spent their time better by reskinning win32.
That's clear to everyone except the author of the article. If Windows breaks backward compatibility, what's the reason to use it?
Windows can be the Android to iOS. Ultimately, most desktops and laptops run Windows, and if Microsoft is able to make it competitive on pricing (#1!), battery life, and performance, it's hard to imagine Chrome OS or the single user iPad seriously eroding Windows.
Most people in the world aren't affluent like the average HN reader. Their biggest consideration when buying a computing device is value, and Windows PC + ARM can win here.
Imagine a $499 laptop with a solid M1-level processor, a nice IPS display, good keyboard, 10+ hours battery life, and Windows 10.
That's serious competitor to both Chrome OS devices and Mac devices.
If Apple ported iOS to x64, I wonder what the battery life on a device would be like compared to ARM?
Of course, one thing Intel and AMD can't catch up on is pure transitor size. Apple has TSMC 5nm, Intel is on the equivalent of TSMC 7nm (Intel 10nm), and so is AMD.
> That's serious competitor to both Chrome OS devices and Mac devices.
$500 is a tough sell vs a $200 Chromebook if Chrome OS does what you need.
Since using Linux all rant she had "aaaaarrrgh, Windows again updating and requires restart!" disappeared. And performance just rocket up agains Windows.
I think, importance of native desktop apps will fade away and Windows can lose this advantage.
But this week I bought new Dell Vostro with Ubuntu 20.04 preinstalled. Although Ubuntu gave me some unpleasant impressions (controversial UI decisions, buggy as hell (can't imagine they call it LTS)) I gave it 2nd chance with fresh install of 21.04.
Anywhere in the world you will find business laptops running windows and the primary work will be done in outlook, excel, word, and PowerPoint.
So why not bring the new Windows Core OS and have backward compatibility with integrated VM?
On the inside the "metro" core runtime (can't remember the name) was not depending on the historical win32 parts, and on the GUI the win32-dependent desktop appeared as a tile i.e conceptually an "app" on the start screen. Like a nested VM, but at the library level. I could have readily imagined multiple desktop tiles being there, one per legacy Windows version, to maintain some sort of perfect backwards compatibility without emulation, Wine style?
You could see a path forward where the start screen OS was not a layer atop the desktop, but the main thing with the legacy desktop boxed inside, possibly in the future only installed when a legacy app required it, and pruneable anytime. It made me think of the Win95+ transition ultimately leading to the MSDOS dependency being turned around and dropped.
Of course mistakes were made, and people cried foul about losing the desktop, so back to the desktop it went, with its legacy cruft.
Maybe indeed it can still move forward that way by using a more "Fusion" like approach where foreign legacy Windows appear on the desktop (like WSL2+GUI).
I guess the future of Windows continues to be the Win32 API.
The whole idea didn't make any sense from the start. There are better devices and operating system options out there that don't run Windows applications. Why should I pick Win10X?
I think this must be one option that is (or was) on table if they are also thinking about rebuilding whole windows.
They may not have the resources to make everything work seamlessly but that's not a problem for Microsoft.
Problem here is not the NT Kernel, the problem is user space.
So building everything on top of the Linux kernel would end up in the exact same position as before because the need of backwards compatibility, this would cost money with no benefit.
And the thing is they have already integrated Linux with WSL2 and can now run Linux desktop applications anyway.
Rebuilding Windows seems unlikely because there is no money in building operating systems, meaning for every operating system you build you need to maintain it indefinitely without getting paid for it.
What Microsoft need to do is to find a new market for their products. With a new market you can package Windows (or whatever) to fit that market specifically.
Windows used to be The platform you would use to run the apps developed with Microsoft technologies. Not sure about trends at large, but personally I would likely just go with Linux if I was creating something new with .net.
Last year the rumours said Microsoft was planning to launch Windows 10X without immediate support for Win32.
https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10x/238014/windows-...
Just as a start.
Device driver universe on Windows may be a blessing or a curse, but entire industries have labored to make it sorta work, and to follow troubleshooting scripts (tech support) when it doesn't.
Aside from that, the leading edge graphics card drivers are their own, multiple OS universes. With their own collection of hacks for specific games.
I'm not familiar with the current state of high end gaming on Linux, but I believe Windows is still the platform for big game titles.
When there is a volunteer army that can go after Meltdown and Spectre orders of magnitude faster than the corporate stable of developers, the business case seems to make itself.
Which might be among the reasons Mr.Softy has been a Platinum Parter of the Linux Foundation the last five years => https://www.itpro.com/strategy/27583/microsoft-joins-linux-f...
Reading about it, it seems ambitious but also kinda risky or unrealistic to pull of, much in the same way Windows 8 with the “modern” apps failed to garner developers and reboot the Windows developer-platform and ecosystem.
Maybe Microsoft concluded the same and decided to can it before investing too much in it?
Windows HPC Server 2008 was decent, does something like that still exist?
While you can buy individual licenses from companies like CDW, some just get it via file-sharing.