Comment by dstaley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dstaley | Hacker News Reader

I honestly don't envy Microsoft. On one hand, you have the people who don't want Microsoft to break backwards compatibility. They want Microsoft to retain the ability to run programs written a quarter of a century[1] ago. This is why all this legacy stuff sticks around in Windows. Then, you have those who want Microsoft to radically reinvent Windows, either by embracing WinUI 3 fully (what most people mean when they say UWP) or through something even newer. Windows 10X was a sort of middle ground: a OS that pushed all the old cruft into isolated containers. Sadly it looks like that approach isn't going anywhere (unless we see it come back in Windows 11). Project Reunion is a nice attempt to give developers an incremental upgrade path to modern Windows, so I'm hopeful that within the lifecycle of Windows 11 we'll start to see Microsoft develop a reasonable separation between modern and classic Windows apps.

[1] Edit: quarter of a century, not quarter of a decade.

> They want Microsoft to retain the ability to run programs written a quarter of a decade ago.

Enterprises expect to run programs developed a quarter century ago... if a quarter decade was all that was required, MS could have abandoned a lot more cruft.

2.5 years?! Who wants stability that short?

...android security/version updates??

yes, I understand - bring on the downvotes

Blergh, was trying to decide between "two decades" and "quarter of a century" and my brain went with both!

> retain the ability to run programs written a quarter of a decade ago

I think I've seen computers with more uninterrupted uptime than that, even if servers. Or at least approaching this figure.

Perhaps you meant ‘quarter of a millennium’ or something like that.

I know Enterprise customers require extreme backward compatibility, but it must be a fairly small number who are still running legacy code written in 1771.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/jacquard-loom-simulator/

https://github.com/jfinkels/analyticalengine

https://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/emulator.html

I stand corrected, and awed. Thank you!

I had the good fortune to see the Babbage Engine in action when it was at the Computer History Museum. Only got a few photos, but here they are (plus an unrelated photo of a core memory plane):

https://geary.smugmug.com/Computers/History/

https://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/

What about me? I don't care about backwards compatibility - but I don't want "UWP" because it's impossible to make great apps following the guidelines.

I'm on the same boat, and would like to see proper design instead of supporting 200-years-old programs. But apparently we are minority and not the best interest of Microsoft. (Which is okay, BTW)

UNIX is older than Windows, and most people still expect to run their UNIX CLI applications on APIs that exist since UNIX V6.

> something even newer

;) Sadly I think this is the group Microsoft is least likely to attempt to cater towards.

Sounds like you might want to look into MacOS. Or at least might've wanted before Big Sur, dunno about now.

Yeah, macOS jumping on the "huge UI elements with tons of empty space" bandwagon was the proverbial straw for me that moved my beloved MBP from daily workhorse to random idle browsing machine.

I'd say it's still not as bad as Windows, in that at least it's not pure white that burns your eyes, but I still hate how half of my laptop screen is taken up by useless UI elements.

Is this a thing with Big Sur? I haven't moved to it yet, but reading here [1] it doesn't seem like bad changes?

[1] https://www.macworld.com/article/234382/macos-big-sur-learn-...

News about Mac are frequently separate from criticism about Mac. Perhaps because they arrive earlier. You might want to look specifically for reviews, opinions, and summaries of critical reaction. Maybe watch reviews on Youtube to get a feel.

Personally I'm thinking of trying BS in a virtual machine to see if I'm ok with it or will stay away until apps that I want drop support for Mojave (likely Brew will begin to compile lots of stuff instead of just installing binaries). Though, seeing as Catalina already makes life harder for developers outside of the App Store, Mojave is probably gonna stay with me for a while.

Fair enough. It feels a bit like the bits of MacOS I care about are nowhere near this sort of stuff, but then I was also baffled by the Facebook UI riots :-)

As a Mac user, I find us (other Mac users) to be much more critical of UIs. Lots of people went crazy about the extra space in the menu bars with BS, but tbh it's not a big (pun? :D) deal.

After using BS for a year+ now (since the early betas), the biggest UI/UX issue IMO is around notifications. After making other UI elements larger and 'touch friendly', clearing notifications require hitting a tiny X or a hover over to clear all. I'm not on the Monterey beta yet, but hopefully it is addressed.

While macOS has consistency issues (why can't I resize the preference pane?!), and windowing problems (when plugging in an external monitor sometimes my windows don't go to the right spots), they are nothing compared to the inconsistencies in Windows. I'm sure Windows users would love to mainly complain about the size of a close button vs. wondering why they still see dialogs from the 3.11 days.

Thanks, that's good feedback. The program I get the most notifications from is Teams, and you can't do the nice swipe it away to the right you can with all the other MacOS notifications, so I'm used to pain there already!

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