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Comment by Arainach | Hacker News Reader

This is insulting and trivially untrue. The Windows shell org has a number of excellent engineers. When I was at Microsoft it was one of the most senior and highest-tenured orgs. There are fantastic engineers such as Raymond Chen (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/) and many more.

Do not mistake domains you don't understand as being bad at things. Programs and extensions that are 26 years old are still running strong on Windows 10 today. The economy runs on ancient tools that rely on that compatibility.

Throwing together a pretty context menu isn't as important as making sure that all of the UI elements are accessible to screen readers and other tools. It's also trivial compared to ensuring that old programs that assumed they could just click on the third menu item to make something happen keep working even if you redesign the menu.

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Is your argument that the windows desktop is a good piece of software or that software developers who consistently create bad software are actually good developers?

I realize most of the terrible bloat, adware, security holes etc are probably caused by external factors, but at some point I think it's important to take responsibility for your own work and either push back on or move on.

I certainly consider it a good piece of software. It does more things across more environments than its competitors.

I have and regularly use machines with all the major desktop platforms in my house - Windows, OS X, Linux, Chrome OS. While I cycle between them, I strongly prefer the Windows machines. The alternatives are all are missing all sorts of window management things such as snapping to screen quadrants and multimon borders, keyboard shortcuts for moving and snapping windows. Monitors with different DPIs is a challenge on Mac and hopeless on Linux. There are all sorts of UI affordances in Windows to do things like open new copies of an app (middle click on the taskbar icon), close an app (middle click on the taskbar preview), and so on.

There are a number of changes I strongly disagree with in Windows 11 such as removing the ability to put the taskbar on the side, but as a whole I still think the Windows desktop is an excellent piece of software that's significantly more usable than the alternatives.

With Windows you cant "pin" a window to keep it always visible (always on top). Something that linux distros have had for about 25 years.

Its not ready for the desktop.

...a functionality which was provided by probably thousands of micro, small, and large indopendent utilities over the last 25+ years.

They might have those excellent engineers, but none of them seem to be working on consumer versions of Windows.

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