Comment by khaledh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by khaledh | Hacker News Reader

This article nails a lot of the issues with Windows 11.

I bit the bullet and upgraded to Windows 11 late last year thinking it must be an improvement over Windows 10. It turned out to be a big step backwards.

- Changing the default browser is a lot of work instead of a single click.

- I can't move the task bar to the side, even though almost every monitor nowadays has much more horizontal space than vertical.

- All apps are not readily accessible from the start menu; I have to click another button to get to them.

- I have a 2-in-1 laptop, and turning it into tablet mode is wonky.

- I can't choose to not have grouped buttons on the taskbar.

- The context menus UX is horrible. Some context menu items are now two clicks away instead of one. Also what's with the excessive rounded corners and slim selection padding?

- The stacked notifications is confusing, and always shows the calendar when I open the notifications panel.

- Lots of crap pushed on me, like chat (aka Teams), widgets (which require a Microsoft account), 3rd party apps that look like they're installed but actually get downloaded/installed on first use.

I was able to fix a lot of those issues with ExplorerPatcher [0]. However, one day after a Windows update, Explorer didn't start at all after login (black screen, I thought Windows was hosed). This has since been fixed. But I decided enough is enough, and finally "upgraded" back to Windows 10.

The only good thing about Windows 11 is wslg, which provides out of the box support for Linux GUI apps (not available on Windows 10). But I can get the same result with an X server and some work.

[0] https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/wiki/All-features

I have a theory that the people who used the bar on the side and the people who turned the user metrics off are the same people (myself included). But I’m not sure how I feel about the results. In any case I hope shells like litestep make a comeback as a result of ever more hostile ui decisions, either that or everyone jumps ship entirely to put energy into making something else great.

The problem is that Windows with all its warts now is still far ahead of the competition in that department (desktop GUI). Whether that's due to monopoly or being actually better, it doesn't matter. The fact is competition is almost non-existent.

I don't think that's true anymore. Gnome with two tweaks (put the min/max buttons back on the window header and move the main menu to the bottom of the screen so it works like the old win 10 task bar) and it's streets ahead of Windows 11. It's a great blessing in disguise when Microsoft decide your old laptop won't support Windows 11.

Gnome has very excessive window borders though. They're so big they seem to be sized for touch, very wasteful when you don't have a touchscreen.

And it has even less configurability than Windows.. Add-ons don't count because they often break.

I don't mind the big borders, although most of the time I'm using dual 2k screens.

The borders don't seem that much bigger than the ones in Windows 10. As for the extensions, I've been enabling those via extensions.gnome.org and have no problems so far on Buster or Bullseye.

This is the one that makes Gnome useable for me:

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-panel/

Dash-to-panel helps, but it doesn't go far enough for me. It doesn't work well in vertical orientations: for instance, status icons should be arranged in horizontal rows. In a single column they take up far too much space.

Cinnamon suffers from the same problem, FWIW.

Wait, is streets ahead a real saying? I thought Pierce on Community invented it.

Dunno - I never watched community but I can't remember where I picked it up. Might be a commonwealth thing.

edit: google says "british". In fairly common use in Australia.

Very common in British English.

If you have to ask, you're streets behind.

The article mentioned all the UI generations you can find in Windows. Linux is even worse. Once you leave the menus your desktop environment provides, it becomes a design free for all. Sometimes you'll see UI styles from another environment (run Kompare in Gnome), sometimes you get ancient X UIs.

If GNOME bundled Kompare or other KDE programs you might have a point. You wouldn't blame Apple for the look of LibreOffice on macOS so why blame GNOME for the non-GNOME programs?

The GP wasn't blaming Gnome, they were complaining about the Linux GUI desktop in general. Running a KDE app on Gnome was just an example; they could just as well have mentioned the opposite and still not be "complaining about KDE ".

I get your point and I'd raise you the suite of Microsoft products:

- Word, PowerPoint, Excel, all one style - Teams, different style - Notepad, different style - Paint, different style

That's just within the MS ecosystem, leave that ecosystem and you rapidly find the same style mess that you get on Linux. It's basically due to the many different GUI frameworks, not the OS itself, hell MS supplies a whole list of frameworks that look different from each other.

Even MacOS/iOS which are _really_ good at having a cohesive UI style suffer from this problem.

I'd argue that if this is a valid complaint with Linux DEs (be it GNOME/KDE/what have you) then it's an equally valid complaint for Windows.

In what ways is Windows desktop GUI better than macOS?

The only thing Windows has going for itself is backwards compatability.

That's a pretty big thing.

I'm still using programs daily that I acquired in the 90's,some of which was last updated in the 90s.

Updating the OS is one thing, there will be change, and none of us likes change, but it doesn't cascade down to having to change every detail of my work flow.

So maybe it's the only thing Windows has, but for me anyway it's a pretty big "only".

> That's a pretty big thing.

It's also the bane of its existence, because it means that they can NEVER retire anything, because by doing so they would break backwards compatability.

And that's actually how we ended up here. They can never get rid of even Win16 GUI (let alone Win32) because it would break shit written for Windows 3.1 (yes, there are still some dialogs in Windows 11 that use Windows 3.1 file select dialog, namely the ODBC Data Source Administrator (32-bit)[0].

So they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Win32 isn't being used for anything they are making now, but it's used by other people, and more importantly it's used by all the old apps.

So now they have to justify ETERNAL support for an essentially deprecated API. Which they obviously aren't doing, which is why we're here.

> I'm still using programs daily that I acquired in the 90's,some of which was last updated in the 90s.

Unless they are extremely domain specific, surely there are modern alternatives?

[0] https://i.imgur.com/MrvLCSr.png

Actually windows 64 bit won't run 16 bit programs, that part has been gone for a decade or so.

Yes there are probably alternatives, but that's the point, I like the way it's working now - I don't want to find new equivalents and then discover what's missing from them.

But I'm not sure what the existance of win32 has to do with anything - it's not like it stops win64 from working.

You also can't run macOS on most hardware, so...

I can't speak for Windows 11 as I didn't use it, but Windows 10 feels better. macOS feels very dumbed down and Apple takes decisions instead of letting the user do it.

In my opinion, Window management on Mac is bad compared with everything that isn't Mac. On the other hand, there's lots to like about Macs, so I keep using them.

Spectacle used to fix that, until it went EOL. https://www.spectacleapp.com/

So I switched to Rectangle, which has optional Spectacle-compatible keybindings. https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle

I also add RightZoom: https://www.blazingtools.com/right_zoom_mac.html

With them, window management becomes basically as good as any other desktop I use, and delivers most of what I like from tiling WMs.

GNOME is way better the Windows UI, checked out what options there where when win11 came out and i have been on fedora ever since, really modern UI and none of the Microsoft bs

Totally disagree with that

Plasma Gnome MacOS Windows

That would be my pick top to bottom of best UIs

Windows is a shambles and it mentally destroys a piece of me everytime I use it

I say KDE is the best desktop if they could just get their shit together and debug it on all hardware configurations. It's absolutely miles ahead of Windows in features, however, as a power user I can fix it if it gets wonky, but a regular user shouldn't be expected to.

Windows 7 was a GUI horror show compared to pretty much anything else at the time. Ugly font rendering, e.g. Especially if you have a ton of open windows, Windows has always been amazingly bad at helping the user manage them. Multiple / desktops can finally be enabled since Windows 10 (without hackery), but are still a pain. The font rendering has improved but is nowhere near MacOS. I could go on for a while. In my experience, the only people who think Windows has superior GUI have never truly worked with other desktops.

> The problem is that Windows with all its warts now is still far ahead of the competition in that department (desktop GUI)

Same with Windows Explorer. Finder in macOS is still terribly crippled compared to it:

-It can't even perform folder merges in many cases, only allowing you to "Replace" the entire folder.

-You can't pause/resume file transfers.

-Cancelling large transfers is like canceling a print job in the 00's - it might cancel, but if it does it will be when 95% of the job is done anyway and you're screwed.

-You aren't shown metadata of any files you are prompted about.

-Batch management of file conflicts/actions not possible.

Most of these features were added to Explorer all the way back in Vista 15 years ago.

Reason driven decision making is better than data driven decision making.

> I have a theory that the people who used the bar on the side and the people who turned the user metrics off are the same people (myself included)

I keep telemetry enabled in Firefox in the hope that they see that I use all of the features that they later remove anyway. It seems like nobody is using metrics to prove that it's not safe to remove a feature. Or they say "oh, it's only 1% of users using that feature", not realizing how much 1% really is.

I don't use telemetry in the hopes that they'll see that only X% of users use telemetry and that they thus remove telemetry as a feature.

Not working well so far.

To be fair, it's hard to see how many users are not using telemetry when they're not using telemetry.

I still miss Firefox's "View Image" context menu option. There is no suitable replacement. No, I do not want to open the image in a new tab. No, I do not want to use some janky extension that re-implements it but places the option at the very bottom of the context menu.

What did "View Image" do? I only know "Open Image in new Tab"

Left clicking on "View Image" would open it in the current tab, Middle clicking on it would open it in a new tab. I used both options regularly.

Exactly that, minus opening it in a new tab. It opened in the same tab (and maybe new tab if you middle-clicked the menu item? I don't quite remember).

Opened the image in the same tab so you could go back. It was just more convenient, especially when you already had a ton of tabs open.

I understand. That's for sure more convenient. I really miss one feature of Safari: When something triggers a new Tab open and you do swipe right to go back in history, it actually closes the new opened tab. That's in generally very convenient

Also what's with the excessive rounded corners and slim selection padding?

The people who worked on the design use Macs. Seriously.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307

When I first heard about this, everything that's ever bothered me about the Windows 8-10-11 evolution makes so much more sense. They're turning it into MacOS.

But only the bad parts of MacOS - they make something that looks pretty in an image, but is utterly unusable.

The way I usually describe Win11's UI is as the worst of GNOME 3, MacOS, and Windows bundled up in a wrap of spyware.

The Macification of Windows has been in progress for years -- and it makes no sense! When Microsoft designed the UI for Windows 95 they did extensive user studies and everything from how the start menu worked and the task bar was carefully figured out.

They've spend the last few decades undoing all that work piece by piece until nobody actually knows how to use it anymore.

Windows 95 is under-appreciated in the GUI histories I feel - it had many things that became 'standard' pretty much immediately afterwards (I even have a shortcut to Applications in my Dock which mimics a Start Menu).

But it's hard for a company to justify "paying to leave shit alone" so even if a maximum was reached, it will recede.

I agree. There's a lot of people paid to re-design Windows every year, they all use Macs, and none of them are doing any user studies at all.

I suspect user studies are being done - and coincidentally confirming whatever it is management wants to do.

Or they focus on new users and not on the amount of things people have already learned.

If anyone is wondering about the user studies that Microsoft did for Windows 95, you can read about it here: https://web.archive.org/web/20060615110538/http://www.acm.or...

The difference is that Mac OS actually looks somewhat consistent and has kept much of its familiar paradigms (Spotlight, System Preferences, the menubar, context menus...) the same over the past decade. Microsoft seems to have lifted the aesthetics of Mac OS without any of the UX.

OS X has been great for the past decade. I won't say the same for MacBooks, where there have been some pretty horrible decisions (butterfly keyboard, touch bar), but OS X has kept humming along, very usable, very productive. A few issues with Spotlight and some easily removed nags to use crap like iCloud is the worst I can say.

> butterfly keyboard, touch bar And they admitted their mistake and removed both of these abominations.

They killed the butterfly keyboard in 2019 (almost 4 years after it was introduced), and they killed the touch bar last year.

Yes, it took them some time, but they sorted these things out.

They also spent years telling people how the butterfly keyboard were amazing, despite the feedback they got. It came off like they ignored their customers and said "we know what's best." You can do that in development, but once your customers actually get their hands on the product, it's time to listen to them.

Except the constant ui changes with no reason other than change, with no option to switch them back.

Or the ever more locked down environment, or the iOS style dumbed down apps they prefer now..

I think it was pretty much downhill after leopard :(

Last year I went through every version of macOS from 10.1 to the current release and used each for a couple of weeks. The thing that surprised me the most is just how consistent the user interface has been. Anybody familiar with 10.1 would have no problem using Monterey.

You should write a blog post about this. I'd definitely read it.

And more importantly, when Apple changes some design guidelines, provided you’re using the Cocoa API (which you likely are, if you’re developing for macOS natively), your application will look consistent with the rest of the OS.

Yes, Apple doesn’t care about backwards compatability, so you might have to update your application so that it runs on the latest macOS version, but there’s no way around it.

You either have a gazillion competing frontend APIs to maintain compatability with shit that was written for Windows 3.1, or you don’t care about any of that and end up with almost entirely consistent visual styles across the entire OS.

Sadly we've lost that, as more and more apps everywhere are now developed in Electron or other "cross OS" systems. Even Java apps would try a bit harder to match the OS than these "let's create a new UI paradigm for everything" apps that won't even let you open a second window.

This is the most embarrassing thing I've ever read. That thread goes on to extoll the virtues of dogfooding, and its absolutely true.

I personally believe the reason that chrome/edge/firefox and apps in general have become so resource hungry is because all the devs have been given beefy machines to allow them to compile on-device and this has lead to the devs basically ignoring the app's resource budget. The ultimate "it works on my machine" shrug. imo windows OS and browser devs should be given i3s w/4gb of ram, let them optimize their code for that experience.

> windows OS and browser devs should be given i3s w/4gb of ram

And slow HDDs. The gains of going from an HDD to an SSD have been squandered. The time it takes my computer to boot to a usable desktop feels the same as the bad old days with spinning HDDs.

I remember when SSDs where new and YouTubers were making videos of booting into Win7 with Office, etc. open in seconds. WTF happened?

You know the saying "work expands to fill the time available for its completion"? There's a similar thing at play here with regards to resource usage.

I still boot in seconds with Windows 10 and NVMe disks.

Wait a few years until it's undoed.

Windows with i5 or less plus HDD with about a year of use (which leads to bloat) is painfully slow.

Yup, I got a relatively new AIO from work for free, set it up as an all purpose media machine in the kitchen, but no one ever used it bec it was so slow, after about a yr of aggravation I decided to check the specs, had an HDD, I replaced it with a cheap sata SSD, now it purrs.

My fairly high-end system with NVMe drives is absurdly slow at booting to my minimal Arch Linux installation's (tty) login screen. And I'm not some anti-systemd evangelist, but it certainly doesn't seem to be helping matters. Once the kernel starts being loaded, it shouldn't take more than a couple more seconds to get to login.

> no side taskbar

This is literally the first thing I do on a fresh install. What the hell were they thinking

> start menu further ruined

but whyyyyyyyyyyyy

I honestly never had a problem with Microsoft Windows over its UI decisions until Windows 8.

Windows up to and including Windows 7 were actually ok, because you could put the start menu on the side, switch to classic UI, turn off the graphical embellishments that your shit laptop didn't like, and so on.

Windows 8 became very tabletified, but with options to switch to classic UI, and Windows 10 is the same but arguably a bit more bizarre.

Neither UI was really consistent or knew what it wanted to be, and worst of all, the user can't decide what it should be.

But whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

Errata:

    Windows 8 became very
    tabletified, but 
    with options...

should read:

    Windows 8 became very
    tabletified, but 
    without options...

Dammit, I was just going to reply to your GP comment and ask how one switches on the classic UI! :-(

It seems to frequently be true that Microsoft releases a horrifying nightmare OS, polishes is up and removes hated features, and then releases a new version. It's been a bit of a pattern.

Windows 8 -> Windows 10

Windows Vista -> Windows 7

and even before that:

Windows Me -> Windows 2000 -> Windows XP was a pretty solid chain that shows it over three releases (personally I think XP was buggier, I don't know what the idea was there other than to make some more money?).

> Windows Me -> Windows 2000

This isn’t a transition which existed.

Windows ME didn’t get replaced by 2000, they were both released around the same time.

In terms of OS evolution, there were two separate branches, Windows NT and Windows 95.

On the 95 branch: 95 > 98 > ME > Discontinued

On the NT branch: NT 3.5 > NT 4 > 2000 > XP > Vista > 7 > 8 > 10 > 11

Non-business users were originally only ever on the 95 branch, then when it was discontinued they were transitioned to Windows XP, but the neutered home edition, which has been the model since.

Fair, I switched from 98 to 2000 to XP because Me had such an incredibly bad experience.

From a technology stack side I realize you are right, but I did not experience the UI of Windows ME as a successor to 98 and instead experienced it as a proto-win2k. I'm talking about the UI evolution more than the kernel, which I realize is more subjective.

I do think there is a "paid forced beta -> better after overton window shift" pattern from for instance Vista to 7 and 8 to 10. Those were extremely obviously intended to be the same UI, the first with an extremely questionable UI and the second with a stabilized UI.

From a UI perspective, in the context of a useful work computer, Windows 8 was an absolute failure. Windows 10 I only tolerate because it's gotten most of the bugs worked out and Windows 7 is no longer getting security updates... I fully intend to skip Windows 11 and wait for the next one if I can possibly do so.

It will I'm sure still have a UI mess that makes it even less pleasant than Windows 10, as (in my opinion) Windows 7 was better than Windows 10 and I would have preferred they just keep fine tuning that UI.

I just want my OS to be an OS instead of an experience, and for things to just iterate better rather than see massive overhauls for what they must know is mostly a business OS. It's such a strange approach, I guess they're just worried about going the way of Sun or IBM by not adopting the latest trends. Or maybe they have a business team and a home computer team and the latter is trying to keep up with Apple while the prior is begging them to stop...

Microsoft has a tick tock approach to consumer OS releases, where every other OS is “the good one”.

Windows me - bad

Windows xp - good

Windows vista - bad

Windows 7 - good

Windows 8 - bad

Windows 10 - good

Windows 11 - bad

For a bad release windows 11 is pretty good. This gives me hope that windows 12 will be their best ever.

This is why it would have been smart of them to stick to windows 10 like they planned, but like picking at a scab they just couldn’t let go of the idea of rearranging the deck chairs and rechristening the ship as windows 11.

The "good" releases are good relatively to the crap ones they've succeeded, not on their own. As if they wanted to pay for QA only every other release.

>Microsoft has a tick tock approach to consumer OS releases

Nice idea but it just doesn't fit.

Windows 95/98/Me were all poor.

XP was widely panned when it came out because existing hardware wasn't quite good enough and it was riddled with security issues. Rememebr SP2?

Where did 8.1 go?

Windows 10 is full of the stuff people are complaining about in this thread.

I disagree.

95 good. 98 bad.

2000 good, XP bad (for me), Vista bad, 7 good, 8 bad, 8.1 better but not great, 10 OK, 11 bad.

As always: https://www.badscience.net/wp-content/uploads/complicatedcov...

("I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that." -- Ben Goldacre)

> For a bad release windows 11 is pretty good.

...and for a good release Windows 10 is pretty bad.

Despite all the flak it got at the time, Windows 8.1 (plus StartIsBack to hide metro crap) is still the best Windows released in the last decade.

I really need to dig very deep into my memory; wasn't Windows ME kind of dead on arrival? And MS themselves half acknowledged it by releasing XP within a few months.

No, there was a shift.

The Win9x/ME (please read as DOS based) series of OS was intended for home users.

The NT/2K was intended for business users.

Only as an example most games at the time would not have run on NT/2K, and Win9x/Me was essentially single-user only.

For some reasons with XP the good MS guys decided to force down the throat of pro/business users (that were very, very, very happy about Windows 2000) the bells and whistles and graphics they didn't ask for and force down the throat of home users (that were very, very happy about Windows 98, not so much about ME [0]) the complexities of the NT, user access, permissions, NTFS, and other things that at the time made no sense whatever.

Basically they (the MS guys) unified the two branches into one and the result was (of course) a compromise.

[0] I know it is hard to say this, but ME, beside some quirks that there was no time to fix, was not as bad as it has been depicted, as a matter of fact the "best" bastard retro system you can make today is a Windows 98 with selected components of ME integrated/backported or a ME with some features of 98SE brought back, the failure of ME (not entirely unlike the later Vista one) was greatly induced (IMHO) by two factors, underpowered hardware and issues with drivers, both - if you want - essentially the responsibility of OEM's.

That was a good bit of context, thank you!

I wasn’t aware that XP was meant to be an upgrade for 98/ME (home users) as well as for 2000 (business users). Talk about posing off both set of customers at the same time.

I personally didn’t mind ME and liked XP, but then it was as a student who didn’t do anything serious with computers so it doesn’t count much.

> that were very, very happy about Windows 98, not so much about ME [0]

I disagree somewhat. The 9x family didn't handle multitasking well and had driver issues, frequently leading to lock-ups and BSODs. The architecture didn't handle isolation well, but NT did. Windows NT mostly stayed out of people's way in XP unless they looked for those menus. It was a huge problem for Vista, though.

Well, you have to put it in context, home users at the time could have:

1) free (in the sense of included in the price or their new PC) a somewhat unstable OS with lower requisites (particularly about RAM) where most software somehow ran (including games)

or:

2) a more stable, paid (costing if I recall correctly more than the equivalent of 2-300 US$ of today) OS needing double the RAM (think of 128 vs. 64 MB), definitely slower, where they could not run many games

for some reasons many chose #1, and BSOD's (on the 9x/Me) were so common that it was perceived by many (that had not any occasion to experience the stability of NT and of 2000) as a "normal state of things".

I hate the Windows 11 taskbar and using ExplorerPatcher to revert to Windows 10 style. Thankfully ExplorerPatcher is yet to let me down. If it does happen I will probably switch to Chrome OS Flex.

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