Of all the languages I speak, German is the more chaotic language by far. But most native Germans consider it the best/easiest.
For me the Windows management of Windows is horrible, but I spent like 90% of my time in Linux were I was young, even using things like "screen" that uses the command line and shortcuts to be the most efficient thing I have ever used (while requiring learning the shortcuts before becoming productive).
Today I use Mac like 95% of my time, control Linux machines with it and use Windows when the force of circumstance obliges me the 5%.
My conclusion is that usability is mostly about getting used to how things work and a tiny bit of customisation. There are no significant usability differences between operating systems.
The _only_ thing that I have never gotten used to and that keeps slowing me down is that app switching (Cmd+Tab) in macOS is MRU while switching windows (Cmd+`, Cmd+Shift+`) within apps is circular.
I'm finding it impossible to remember whether I have to go forward or backward to get back to the window I'm looking for within an app.
I consider my native language to be chaotic and hard to learn. Not all things are subjective, some things can be objectively compared.
Meanwhile on KDE I have an easy option to swap caps lock and ctrl, without having to install some weird .exe file off github.
There used to be a 'tile windows' since windows 2.0 or something like that, but it did just that, splatted the windows to take up all the space.
One thing I like about X11 and Windows doesn't do it, is alt-dragging from anywhere in the window, last time I used Windows you couldn't move things around by holding alt and left clicking anywhere, you could only do that from the title bar, which means you can't slide the top of the window off the screen.
The other major thing for me is selection copy, if you highlight text, you can't middle mouse button to paste it, you have to ctrl-c first, which is just more steps.
You can use "move" in the system menu. Once activated, the arrow keys in the keyboard will move the window outside the desktop window, not sure if you can do it using the mouse somehow.
With XFCE though, I'm quite happy with the level of focus stealing, things that seem to be justifiable are at the right level, like authentication prompts.
Out of interest, what are the things that take focus for you? Maybe we're running totally different sets of programs which might give me an impression that isn't warranted.
I've not noticed focus stealing outside of Steam. What is steam made from, it seems very browserish.
This topic is causing some self-reflection and wonder if I am the peculiar one who does different things and just not bumping into it, I mainly work from xterm, screen, mutt, vim and a lot of time in firefox. Perhaps this combination just doesn't start things that request focus, but when in MS Windows I noticed it a lot.
You're right about steam, but now I'm on a path of wondering...
This topic confirms that focus stealing is a thing in XFCE, I have some research to do!
I am baffled as to how that has been allowed to go on so long. It makes Office a trainwreck usability wise.
The two things that trip me up are that you able to move windows to a position that you can't move them away anymore.
And that apparently maximized windows sometimes leave a 10px gap at the top so that you click on the window behind :-/
In case you hadn't come across it yet, there's a third-party piece of software called AltDrag [0] that lets you do it. It's kind of a must have for me whenever I have to use windows. Yes this should just be builtin
Development on Spectacle ceased[1] and it looks like the community may have rallied around an open-source program called Rectangle, which is open source. At least, judging from this single Reddit thread lol:
https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/kazpcn/spectacle_alter...
[1] Although when I search for it now, I see an update from 2023 on softonic? Although the original dev's github repo for it hasn't been updated in years. https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle
(PowerToys doesn’t do this by itself, you have to select every window in place if I’m not mistaken.)
As just one example—the dock is atrocious for a browser-centric workflow. I only ever have 2 "apps" open at a time, but I have 6 Firefox windows and 2 IDE windows, and remembering where I put a specific window (or even that I already have it open!) is a chronic problem. I know about right-click to show all, but the text that pops up is small (it's a context menu, not a first-class navigation element) and that doesn't help with the discoverability problem.
I'm sure that there are other apps to patch the other aspects of the system that irritate me, but if you have to install 4 third party tools to get something close to how good Windows is out of the box then I'd say OP has a good point.
Also you seem to be ignorant of a lot of features of macOS, like cmd-tab, focus an app, cmd-up arrow to show the windows of the app, and so forth. Or swipe down from the trackpad on a Dock icon to show the windows of the app.
Anyway, YMMV as always. Personally I find the window management atrocious not because of the way it was designed, which definitely works for me (and I hate the Windows’ one), but because of the bugs which they insist on never ever fixing…
It's not that I'm ignorant of these, it's that they're clunky for a browser centric workflow. The abstraction of an "app" is just plain wrong for the way that I and many others use computers these days, because one app (the browser) is home to most of the tasks I'm working on and already has its own second-level navigation in the form of tabs. The "app" layer means on Mac there are three levels of navigation to get to what I'm trying to do, which is too many.
What makes Windows (and most Linux DEs) better for the browser-centric world is that windows themselves are first class citizens—I don't have to pass through Firefox to get to GitHub.
This happens every time I unplug my laptop from external monitors, or plug it in to external monitors (even if they’re the exact same model and configuration as other monitors I’ve previously used). It’s aggravating and distracts me from what I’m trying to do.
Whereas I never have any issues on OSX, always find my windows where I expect them to be, and spend a lot less time moving and rearranging them.
The two operating systems do have different approaches to window management and to me it sounds like you simply prefer Windows, whereas I prefer OSX.
Huh? You can't even snap windows to screen edges.
Two anecdotes: starting Windows Terminal by clicking an icon in the taskbar (W10) creates a window that's not focused. W11 does away with the alt-space keyboard shortcut to open the window operations menu.
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/d/windows-11-pro/dg7gmgf0d8h...
I've been seeing this sentiment since 2001 at least. No one ever follows through; if they did we would have seen this already in the desktop stats.
You will, whether you consciously realise it or not, switch to playing windows exclusive games the minute all your games run on Linux, hence you will never switch.
There has been an inflection point crossed lately, because of Proton and the Steam Deck. Linux is at 1.95% market share on Steam today. A year ago it was 1.3%.
You may as well say "but the sky is blue", which is also true and just as irrelevant
Well you can see it. Linux is used by 4.25% of all English speaking Steam users. And its trending upward.
It is not a statistic of Linux desktop share, it's a statistic of existing Linux users, not windows migrations.
Yes it is. The Y axis is "Percentage of Steam users". The fact that the Linux percentage is increasing means that the the percentage of Windows users are decreasing. The graph shows a trend of migrating from Windows to Linux.
"% of desktops amongst Steam users" is significantly different from "% of desktops".
(And yes, this excludes ChromeOS and Android)
Those of us who used it on desktop Linux helped drive the handheld, which is really accelerating compatibility. When Windows 10 hits EOL, folks got to go somewhere - and many are not going to toss out their hardware for new.
You can buy Windows 10 Pro OEM licenses for less than 20€ online. I did just that for a familiar three months ago. The installation was validated and associated with the Microsoft account no problem.
Then you can "upgrade" to Windows 11 free of charge, if that's your thing.
Incidentally, I've always thought W2K—taken all round—as the best version of Windows, it's the version with minimal dross and useless stuff and MS hadn't got into spying on users by that stage.
IIRC in about 1989 NT 3.1 was a very solid an reliable system.
The problem was it did no do IP
It was mostly downhill from there.
I got my first Linux machine in about 1992 and lost touch
But keeping windows NT patched, and keeping it running IP reliably were incompatible for a while
Did not stop its wide introduction in my world as IP servers.
It was as if software managers did not know any other systems existed.
Linux was considered "a toy" because it was free, it was much more reliable than NT (as was BSD I hear)
Sun were the other option but I saw no one spending the money
It was buggy, unreliable, insecure NT servers all the way
Still is for some. Squeezing into a Windows instance on Azure, fifteen mouse clicks, three context switches, and you have emulated rsync... Still making money selling terrible software, but now as a service....
Win10's UI on Win11:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/o6ysyb/so_i_repl...
Not sure if this was some Acrobat specific stuff or if it’s still “there” in general.
This is the company that put the entire Windows 95 memory manager into later versions of Windows to keep compatibility, there are tons of old code paths still lying in wait for old software to reuse.
You can't use this stuff as your main UI well, it's no longer tested or optimised for that use case.
- notepad with tabs
- shell UI with tabs, VT-100 support and ability to replace the shell
- Paint.net with AI
- even Windbg has massively improved
I feel applications that do tabs are just like applications that do their own custom quirky File-Open dialog even though my OS provides a standard one.
Screenshot: https://www.reddit.com/r/UsabilityPorn/comments/bqg9tw/fluxb...
Then there's the way they put search into a fixed floating window, which when you search upward sits on top of the search result, obscuring it.
It all just works and then the perfectly good Mail app is forcing my mom to switch to the new Outlook, which is Mail, but messier, with ads. What?
I wish Satya Nadella would pull a Steve and yell at some people for this shit. It’s eroding trust in the company that they maintained for so many decades, that can’t be a good long term game can it?
Just to check, are you suggesting a Steve Ballmer yell or a Steve Jobs yell?
Game made with directx6 20 years ago will render in CPU and just work but be so slow to be unplayable. Then you need to replace the .dll and make it link with an open source library that reimplements dx and converts the calls to the new API, so that it can actually render in hardware.
Yes, solitaire.exe still works. 3d games less so.
I'm full of games like star wars jedi outcast or so that no longer work on windows.
Serious question: Where do you see ads? I’ve used Windows 11 since it came out, and have never experienced a single advertisement.
Bitlocker may state that it's on, but by default, it doesn't encrypt the drive unless you log in to a Microsoft account or manually add a key protector.
This is documented on a Microsoft site somewhere, but it's shit like this that make me wary of the "bypass Microsoft's shit" approach; the bypass methods often lead to behaviour that Microsoft never bothered to test and has side effects they don't bother to warn you about.
I think there are others, but I believe I've figured out how to turn most of it off.
Here’s a genus idea, put an object oriented language in the terminal.
An object oriented language that doesn't have weird-ass pitfalls: https://web.archive.org/web/20240112161109/http://mywiki.woo...
An object oriented language that takes the piping concept and improves it so one can actually form pipelines that make sense and not waste limited resources in just parsing text. However at the same time add more powerful and efficient text parsing tools. So one can actually script on the go with ease.
An object oriented language that is not C which is the language which most stubborn Unix developers usually reach for when their shell is too inefficient or too unwieldy for certain tasks and create even more security holes.