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Comment by psd1 | Hacker News Reader

Windows 7 was genuinely good. It was stable, it just worked, it shipped with Powershell, and I could launch anything with very few keystrokes.

The downsides I will acknowledge are the modal dialogues (which are worse on macos) and the fact that many system tasks require diving into the win32 api, although I've at least always found that to be well documented.

At the time of 7, Linux desktop options were not great

Windows went downhill from 7. Although I still prefer it over macos.

I have high hopes for Asahi, which I'm hoping will save my despicable work macbook

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It's funny that even thinking for a sec, I don't know if there are any things that I'd miss from Windows 10 if I hypothetically were to jump back to Windows 7.

I like drag-to-side-to-go-halfscreen for window management (though less than I like Spectacle on Mac) and search-to-launch. Both of which could probably be provided by add-ons.

I can't think of any other user-facing features I'd miss if the UI otherwise reverted to Win98. Several things, I'd like better in their Win98 versions.

Under the hood, it's nice that it doesn't crash nearly as often, and the driver situation is better. NTFS support is nice (consumer Windowses didn't used to have that) when the alternative is FAT32. Beyond that, not much I care about.

> I like drag-to-side-to-go-halfscreen for window management

Ughhh: good idea, terribly implemented. Last time I used Windows 10, it seemed like every time I tried to drag my window around, Windows would guess that I wanted to also full-screen it, or pin it to one side, or close all other windows, or anything else besides just repositioning it. I feel I need to have a surgeon's precision in order to just drag a window around my desktop now.

This is why Spectacle (loads of similar tools are available) is so good — all that happens via keyboard shortcuts. Does Windows offer the same, plus the ability to turn off the dragging behaviour?

> I like drag-to-side-to-go-halfscreen for window management (though less than I like Spectacle on Mac) and search-to-launch.

Aquasnap can do the snapping, and more. If any of the 'more' bothers you — like "shake for always-on-top" activating too easily, you can adjust or disable that bit. Hmm, I should add that to my current Win10 machine. I did eventually get a license, so it won't complain about having more than one monitor.

Voidtools Everything can be configured as a search-to-launch tool, but I mainly use it for its blindingly fast NTFS searching. Where Windows Search typic'ly excludes large sections of your drives, eats CPU cycles while it 'indexes', and then still either gives you "Please wait…" or simply claims that it can't find anything, VE just works. Even does NTFS drives across the network (though it has to rebuild a local index of the remote media periodic'ly).

> I like drag-to-side-to-go-halfscreen for window management

Couldn't you do this in Windows 7 with WinKey+Left or WinKey+Right? I guess I am kind of keyboard oriented in my usage though, I mostly get frustrated with the edge of screen mouse features because I mostly enable them by accident.

> I like drag-to-side-to-go-halfscreen for window management and search-to-launch.

FWIW, KDE had both of these out of the box long before Windows 10. Sucks when you have to rely on some company that doesn't care about you for your desktop UX.

Multiple desktops is a big one for me.

Windows Terminal?

linux desktop was far far ahead of even current windows back in the days of windows 7. for something called "windows", it certainly had, and still continue to have pretty lousy window management

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