Here’s a screenshot of the Windows Vista start menu in English: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Scree...
As you can see, it’s a nicely crafted layout, with the power buttons at the bottom taking up all the available space, and the thin separator lines below "E-mail", below "Games", and above "All Programs" are taking up the entire widths of the boxes they’re in (minus reasonable margins).
Here’s the Polish version: https://ia902303.us.archive.org/24/items/WinVistaSP2AIOPLMay...
The awful translation made both columns of the menu much wider, making the separators look too short, and adding blank space next to the power buttons.
They aren't much wider.
The one English one is a 1373px wide screen shot. The Polish one is 800px wide.
Even if both menus were in exactly the same language, the second one would look wider anyway.
With respect, you're missing the point - the start menu width does not change with screen width, so on a smaller screen the start menu takes up more space.
You're comparing a ~800px-wide screen with a ~1400px wide screen - obviously the narrower screen is going to lose more to the start menu than the wider screen, even when the menu itself is exactly the same pixel size in both screens.
> here’s a smaller screenshot of Vista in English: https://betawiki.net/images/3/35/WindowsVista-6.0.6002.18005...
That's still much, much larger than the polish version you supplied. Why not show images of the polish version and the english version with the same resolution?
TBH, I get very skeptical when doctored evidence is produced in support of an argument. Your argument might have been better received had you produced no evidence at all rather than misleading evidence.
In my initial reading, I looked at the images and assumed you were talking about the reduced real-estate in the rest of the screen due to the expanded menu. Reading more carefully, you were talking about the extra added space on the right margins.
Now that I see what you are talking about, I admit, yes, there is significant extra space on the right margin, but I disagree that it deserves the description of "awful". It's not ideal, but it's not really awful either - readable, understandable and easy on the eyes.
I remember a mac magazine from my youth complaining that Apple was wasting unnecessary space by localising the deleted items folder as "Wastebasket" when the Americans had "Trash" and in both countries "Bin" would be valid and even more compact.
(It is now called "Bin" on my machine, I don't think I even noticed the change — we're no longer stuck with 640x480 displays where every letter counts so the change didn't matter when it happened).
Just for comparison, nowadays a shitton of desktop software doesn't look all too bad with just changing a gettext()-style list of strings, and not even touching the dialog definitions. You may argue that this is because the dialogs nowadays just look equally bad in all languages, but I'd disagree and anyway it definitely is an order of magnitude in "manageability".