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Comment by mdmglr | Hacker News Reader

It seems like every few weeks I see posts on HN criticizing Windows about privacy and it’s inconsistent UI. It’s getting a little old.

It’s trivial to use Group Policy Editor to disable windows “spyware” as HNers like to call it.

As far as the “inconsistent” UI goes, it’s funny to me how no one talks about Linux and it’s inconsistencies which are much more significant.

Windows is an OS a tool to get things done. My customers could care less about any of these things. Articles like these are interesting but pedantic.

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> no one talks about Linux and it’s inconsistencies which are much more significant.

Except that with Linux you actually get to choose the desktop you want to use, and it's very possible to customize it yourself if you don't like the baked-in design.

Yes I agree. It’s good to get to choose your display server, DE, WM, and whatever else.

I’m just conveying the complaint of an inconsistent UI is stupid. Considering these are tools that enable getting real work done. Icons reused from the 90s isn’t getting in anyone’s way to get work done same with Gtk themes don’t apply consistently across apps.

This is an argument I hear a lot in places like HN by power users but almost never by anyone else anywhere else. Put technical people aside for one moment, how is a novice supposed to “choose the desktop” they use? How are they supposed to “customise the baked-in design”?

I believe that the average user at home or at work values consistency, intuitiveness and attractiveness far more than the potential for customisation. They need the user interface to be clear and explicit, they need patterns that are repeatable and easy to remember and they need to not hate looking at it. They need to feel confident enough that they can either guess how it works or to reuse some knowledge they already have learned from elsewhere on the system.

Customisation is so often touted as the be-all-and-end-all solution to outright deficiencies in design — if you don’t like it, just do this and this and this and this — but that totally misses the point because then the underlying problems never get solved. Just look at the significant behavioural differences between apps built in Qt, Gtk, Electron, wxWidgets, …

> It seems like every few weeks I see posts on HN criticizing Windows about privacy and it’s inconsistent UI. It’s getting a little old.

It seems everytime someone points out the obvious flaws in Windows, Windows users seem to attack Linux even though they say "it's not for ordinary users".

I could show you tens of posts that criticize Linux and they are posted way too often but no, we only dislike it when someone attacks Windows™.

> It’s trivial to use Group Policy Editor to disable windows “spyware” as HNers like to call it.

and you don't consider it a spyware? Windows literally does what spywares do, it's not even up for debate anymore. Maybe the definition of spyware has changed in the last 10 years but I don't think Windows is a bad example of what a spyware is.

> As far as the “inconsistent” UI goes, it’s funny to me how no one talks about Linux and it’s inconsistencies which are much more significant.

UI inconsistencies? Really? Like having control panel or settings at the same time or having icons and UIs from the 90s?

Linux is fragmented, we get it. It's an obvious result of the nature of its working.

> Windows is an OS a tool to get things done

Many of us like our computers. We don't see tools as just tools. They represent philosophies, they represent ideas that we conform to in our life. We care because we care, not because we see them as means to an end, we want to enjoy the means to the fullest.

It was not my intent to attack Linux in any way. My point was that these criticisms against the UI are stupid. If the tool gets the job done that’s all that matters.

As an example I’m building a flight simulator. I use Ubuntu to run the steam gauges and of course Windows to run the simulator. At the end of the day I’m flying and practicing instrument flight rules. The last thing on my mind when I’m using these computers is that the control panel is a remnant of Windows 8 or the Javafx app on Linux doesn’t match the UI style of gnome.

I was not criticizing Linux being hard for “ordinary users”. I’m simply pointing out the DE, WM, GUI toolkits are all fragmented and not very opaque to beginners.

I don’t know what the UI tells you about philosophies. What it tells me is that there is a large feature base in windows, worked on by a variety of teams, and there is limited time to ship and certainly more pressing issues to resolve.

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