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Comment by dominicm | Hacker News Reader

I worked on Haiku this summer as part of Google summer of code, and it just made me wish their attitude towards user experience was more prevalent in mainstream OSs.

It's little things like errors automatically prompting you to open a graphical debugger or processes being grouped by application. There's sensible UX that doesn't expect me to be a wizard to understand what's going on or how to dig deeper.

Obviously it has rough edges (as, well, honestly all operating systems do), but the things that do work work really well.

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> It's little things like errors automatically prompting you to open a graphical debugger or processes being grouped by application.

I think after Windows 7 the processes are grouped per application in Task Manager. We’re all grumpy about the redesigns of things we are familiar with, but little UX improvements happen all the time.

Not the Details tab, though, and the name of the executable is shown there. The tree view in Process Explorer (shipped with Sysinternals) is the best of both worlds.

I wanted to point to FOSS (GPL3) alternative ProcessHacker [1] which I'm using for years, and found out that their github link [2] now redirects to systeminformer [3], looks like repo rebranding, wasn't able to find it mentioned anywhere though.

[1]: https://processhacker.sourceforge.io/

[2]: https://github.com/processhacker/processhacker/

[3]: https://github.com/winsiderss/systeminformer/

Thanks, I knew about Process Hacker but not System Informer. It's all a bit weird: the download page for System Informer only lists Process Hacker binaries, for "legacy operating systems", while there are no binaries yet for "supported operating systems".

I wish they would just put ProcessExplorer there instead...

process explorer is a lot too much for an average Windows user, I would think. it's dead easy to obtain if you want it, though.

> I think after Windows 7 the processes are grouped per application in Task Manager. We’re all grumpy about the redesigns of things we are familiar with, but little UX improvements happen all the time.

You're right; I was mostly thinking about problems with Linux since thats my daily driver. It would have been better to say that Haiku gives developers the same UX affordances for interacting with their system as non-technical users.

When using Linux I'm frustrated by an overall lack of UX, but when using Windows/Mac it's developer specific UX that's ignored.

FWIW, as with the Task Manager thing, the thing about launching the graphical debugger on crashes was added to Windows eons ago. Even Windows 9x had it, contemporaneously with BeOS. If you had a debugger installed, a "Debug" button would appear between "Close" and "Details". Debug assertion failures will pop up a dialog from the C runtime allowing you to break into the debugger there, too.

Huh, TIL. Thanks.

> It's little things like errors automatically prompting you to open a graphical debugger […] sensible UX that doesn't expect me to be a wizard

I think that shows what the target audience is. I think most people wouldn’t know what to do with that prompt, other than immediately discard it.

> I think that shows what the target audience is. I think most people wouldn’t know what to do with that prompt, other than immediately discard it.

That's a fair complaint, and I'm definitely biased since I'm technically oriented. That said, discarding it is totally fine as long as people who want it at least get the option; and if even showing it is too confusing to users, it's a lot better to have a "developer" toggle in settings that enables all this stuff, rather than not having it at all.

Haiku's certainly not crazy accessible right now, but it has some ideas that I think other OSs should take note of.

> It's little things like errors automatically prompting you to open a graphical debugger or processes being grouped by application.

SerenityOS is also doing a lot to perfect their UX. It might become at least as popular as Haiku down the line.

I absolutely love SerenityOS, and it has been moving at an outrageously quick pace.

> attitude towards user experience was more prevalent in mainstream OSs.

> It's little things like errors automatically prompting you to open a graphical debugger

If this is the concept of "mainstream" and sensible "user experience" it sounds like Haiku is a complete bunch of horseshit. (And this feature is easily available in Windows anyway)

developers are users too my dude

BeOS was a niche of a niche but I fell in love with the GUI. It has a Mac OS 8 feel to it.

>processes being grouped by application

Activity Monitor in macOS can do that too.

Both examples are also true in Plasma 5 :-)

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