I hated the Ribbons. Nothing was categorized where I expected and none of the icons or sizes match their use or frequency of use.
Drop down menus are so much quicker to scan
Drop down menus are so much quicker to scan
Another commenter mentioned OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org/) but i'd also like to suggest LibreOffice (https://www.libreoffice.org/) as a capable and reasonably compatible alternative to MS Office, which retain the old look of dropdown menus.
If you don't have the need to support very particular features of Office, then it might just be suitable to retain your preferred way of navigating the UI of an office suite app - on my personal computers i have just LibreOffice (with which i finished my bachelor's and master's thesis), whereas on my work computer i have both LibreOffice and Word, for those few exceptions when the latter is necessary.
That said, i can understand why many would also find the ribbon UI to be easy to navigate, should they get used to it. That's why some Office clones, like WPS Office (https://www.wps.com/office/linux/) and FreeOffice (https://www.freeoffice.com/en/) seem to copy it with varying degrees of success. That said, personally i like the open source nature of LibreOffice too and the file format itself not being proprietary.
In case anyone would like to try it out, it's under:
View > User Interface > (pick one of the Tabbed options, there are quite a few)
Still i wonder how much it effects my productivity decline in Office since i still search sometimes for functionality. In anyway it made me hate office and made Switch to open Office wherever i can. However I attribute it to having kicked of my quest for a plaintext workflow because beeing f*ked over by feature bloat and Designer circle jerking once to many times.
Simplicity is king. Maybe its just the age that makes me realize that there are just to many layers of complexity.
I feel for the young learners that get thrown into this world and dont even understand the concept of a file system tree anymore. It has been abstracted away. it's not in the cloud! It's in the app with 3 klicks reachable or doesn't exist.
There are around 6 Documents folders/libraries/whatever in File Explorer, going to a combination of my work OneDrive, my personal OneDrive and my local user folder. There's one weird Documents that goes to the Documents in both OneDrives. There's a My Documents that give an error. I've a work Sharepoint folder that was also named Documents. I tried renaming them, which didn't work, and has just left me even more confused how to find things. If I go to the command line and do "dir C:\Users\<me>\Documents" which of this do I find? And how do I get to the others? And which ones get backed up where?
It's a complete mess. I sympathise now with the people who keep every file on the desktop.
Every time I go back to Linux, I feel a wave of relief: I see my files in a single dir tree under /home, searching works predictably.
How did Microsoft get to this?
The UI in regards to navigating files in Windows is indeed a mess. A personal gripe that i have with it, that's even worse than some of what you named is the file open/save dialog - there's not just one (that would let you write the file path in the bar and thus allow you to copy paths from Explorer to it), but many different ones for different programs! This essentially makes it so that using some software like GIMP and navigating around the filesystem with it is needlessly annoying!
Add on small annoyances like Windows search by default trying to look into the contents of many files, thus making search needlessly slow and also things like it not supporting mounting remote directories over SFTP (which should get at least a bit of attention) instead of always having to use SMB or whatever, and you have a somewhat problematic daily experience.
Of course, there are also things that it does better than some other systems/configurations, like having the whole recycle bin concept, with ctrl+Z allowing you to undo file deletions, file moves or even renaming files, which makes dealing with user error on your part more easy! Just checked on Linux Mint - the recycle bin works as you'd expect, but there is no ctrl+z to restore the last deleted file automatically.
> Every time I go back to Linux, I feel a wave of relief: I see my files in a single dir tree under /home, searching works predictably.
About this, i'm also somewhat torn. The filesystem structure on most Linux distros also just feels weird, although it's for historical compatibility reasons (not quite as bad as Windows having two oddly named Program Files directories, but still). I doubt that we couldn't structure things in a more reasonable manner, than having all of the following for just executables, for example:
/bin/
/sbin/
/usr/bin/
/usr/local/bin/
/usr/local/sbin/
Throw in /opt and /usr/share and whatnot and it's a recipe for different bits of software out there using different configurations because of differing opinions about what would be suitable for their use cases. The same mess actually extends to what's in the /home directory - sure, in most cases you can back it up and restore it, but once again every piece of software will have its own opinions about how to structure its data, be it in a visible/hidden config file, a visible/hidden folder for the application itself, or something else.
Of course, Windows also has a similar mess going on with Program Data and AppData folders, as well as Documents and whatnot, so Linux isn't the only problematic system here.
In short, i think that all have their advantages and shortcomings, here's hoping that things improve in the following decade!
At least three, if you inclde "Roaming\Appdata" (or is it "Appdata\Roaming"?), which is also a program files directory nowadays.
As for Linux, yeah... Either stick with the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, or -- if it's time to revolutionise the directory structure -- maybe something like what GoboLinux (et al?) are doing.
- / is on tmpfs
- the OS is mounted on /gnu
- system data is mounted on /var (and /etc is populated from /var/etc)
- user data is mounted on /usr
This way, I can avoid the plethora of separate tmpfs filesystems on most distro's (at least /dev, /run, /tmp, /dev/shm).
But I'm not running any desktop systems on Guix right now, just service containers. I'm would expect there to be plenty of Linux desktop software that can't handle /usr being for user data.
Note that even in the older-style file dialogs, that don't have that new (relatively speaking) breadcrumbs-style file path display at the top (like in Windows Explorer), you can still paste a path into the file name input box and it'll navigate to that folder. Relative paths also work. The only drawback is that the file name will then be reset to whatever it was when the dialog was initially opened, but other than that it works nicely.
> but many different ones for different programs! This essentially makes it so that using some software like GIMP and navigating around the filesystem with it is needlessly annoying!
The problem is a) backwards compatibility – programs can customise the file open/save dialogs to quite some extent, so they need to explicitly opt into using the new dialogs. Plus software that wanted to support older Windows versions (pre-Vista, so these days it's probably not that relevant any more, but during the Vista/7-era it definitively mattered) then needs to have code to handle both kinds of file dialogs. b) as far as I can tell, some cross platform frameworks use completely self-written file dialogs, which 1) usually mimic the older (Windows XP and older) style of Windows' dialogs and b) usually don't manage to copy all the features of Windows' native file dialogs, and instead often get some things subtly (or less subtly) wrong.
My personal gripe with the breadcrumbs file path navigation is that the breadcrumbs dropdowns don't support keyboard navigation like the main explorer window (or the file list in the file open/save dialogs) does, so when you have a folder with lots of subfolders and want to use the breadcrumbs to change the path, you then need to do lots of scrolling instead of simply being able to press a key.
Avoid the "My Computer" paradigm.
I still have my muscle memory tuned to creating and using only:
C:\Games
C:\Music
C:\Movies
C:\Pictures
C:\Torrents
C:\Workspace C:\Users\ChuckNorris89\Pictures\ or whatever.
Or maybe this just shows how old I am.
%CSIDL_MYPICTURES%
%USERPROFILE%\Pictures
You can also add your own environment variables.
setx pix "%SYSTEMROOT%\Pictures"Distros and package managers putting binaries in completely different spots. Is it /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin? Who knows!
If anyone is curious:
Historically /bin and /sbin contained the binaries that were necessary to bring up the system (especially to mount the /usr partition, which was "best practice" to have separately from the root and /boot partitions). Nowadays most distros just symlink them to /usr/(s)bin
/usr/sbin is for utilites that only root should use, whereas /usr/bin is for regular applications managed by your system (i.e.: your distro's default package manager).
C: System
D: Data (business data and main work area for product design data)
F: Library (stuff you rarely touch, PDF's, books, references, "knowledgebase", etc.)
G: Backup (external)
S: Swap and Scratch Files (this is actually a RAM-based 128 GB drive for speed)
Z: Development (mostly for web development, VM storage, etc.)
The other thing this facilitates is backup. You can backup and restore each of the logical/functional units separately, as full drives.
This also makes upgrading the system or the entire computer far simpler. The separation between OS and data makes it so.
Way back when, before the registry was a thing, you could upgrade your OS without having to reinstall the applications. While I understand the advantages of common DLL's and the centralized management of common settings and code, I do miss the ability to not only separate data from the OS, but also applications. I don't think that is ever coming back.
Isn't it better to just have the RAM as RAM than to have the same RAM used to provide swap space on a RAM disk?
One of the primary motivations for using a RAM disk was to not beat-up SSD's with the kind of access swap space gets.
The advantage of a hardware RAM-based drive is that it is extremely fast. When these machines were built, this was the fastest way to get data on and off a swap drive.
Today SSD's are super fast. On some machines we now have a separate dedicated 250 GB SSD for swap. If it craps out, you throw it away and pop in a new one. No worries about comingling valuable data with swap space.
My Computer paradigm is long gone. They call it "This Computer" or just "Computer" now. There is no "My".
It still baffles me though how the Windows designers assumed it would be a great idea to bless me with a predefined "3D Objects" folder (right under "This PC"), which comes at the top of the list due to alphabetical ordering, and can't be removed. I wonder what percentage of users actually need this.
Linking to my previous rant on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28994133
I do think the categorization takes a little getting used to but once you do it’s fairly trivial.
It’s also important to recognize the horizontal categorizations within each ribbon, something that can easily be missed until you know about it.
I thought the ribbon was great, but obviously you had to get used to it.