Beautiful.
It’s crazy to see this and realize how much current Windows is unusable. I haven’t used Windows in ~10 years and every time I see the current interface I can’t believe someone is able to use it without losing their mind.
It’s crazy to see this and realize how much current Windows is unusable. I haven’t used Windows in ~10 years and every time I see the current interface I can’t believe someone is able to use it without losing their mind.
Me, I used Windows for years until ~2008. In 2008 I started using both Mac and Windows. In 2010 I started using Linux, Mac, and Windows. I never really found one better than another. Each one had their strengths, none of them had huge UI issue for me at least.
For example, one plus I find on Windows vs MacOS is I use Chrome with multiple profiles. Windows is able to display an icon per profile in the dock. Mac is not (not idea if this is a limitation of MacOS or Chrome on MacOS)
Another plus I find on Windows is zip support is better. On Mac, to use a zip you double click it and the OS uncompresses the zip. On Windows you double click it and Windows Explorer just looks inside the zip like it's a folder. You can directly copy and paste, or drag and drop, files out of the zip into other folders or apps, no need to first unzip it.
I'm not saying Windows is better, just different. Windows 11 cleaned some things up. Explorer is streamlined compared to 10 for example.
Plenty of things I like on Mac, like Terminal with bash or zsh vs Powershell on Windows (though I can run WSL but for actual windows stuff I usually stick to powershell). Airplay I use often to stream to my TV.
https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
It also brings other Windows 10 UI paradigm's back in.
Most people have been using the taskbar that way for nearly 15 years, only a minority of people would have switched away from the default.
Some things are a dream come true in terms of utility. Others feel really archaic compared to FOSS desktops.
I have a strong feeling that this is Chrome's limitation. The builtin Activity Monitor on macOS can even plot a realtime graph of CPU usage in the dock icon, and various other apps (including third party) are able to alter their own icon as well, so this doesn't look like a private API. Having two separate instances of an app in the dock is achievable with minimal hackery (I managed to do this a couple of times by accident, just by poking at and exploring the system).
Of course nothing helps if the app doesn't want to go the extra mile to integrate with the platform, which is how we keep ending up with the lowest common denominators for everything.
Admittedly I know WPF needs good graphics hardware which I'm sure Citrix is not providing.
I know we need to scale for different screens but the reality is it's slower then ever on faster hardware.
UWP/WinUI/Metro uses XAML and Microsoft was very committed to that for a while. UWP didn't really pan out, but that was for reasons other than XAML and WinUI IMO.