Comment by delta_p_delta_x | Hacker News Reader

Comment by delta_p_delta_x | Hacker News Reader

delta_p_delta_x

NT is why I like Windows so much and can't stand Unix-likes. It is object-oriented from top to bottom, and I'm glad in the 21st century PowerShell has continued that legacy.

But as someone who's used all versions of Windows since 95, this paragraph strikes me the most:

> What I find disappointing is that, even though NT has all these solid design principles in place… bloat in the UI doesn’t let the design shine through. The sluggishness of the OS even on super-powerful machines is painful to witness and might even lead to the demise of this OS.

I couldn't agree more. Windows 11 is irritatingly macOS-like and for some reason has animations that make it appear slow as molasses. What I really want is a Windows 2000-esque UI with dense, desktop-focused UIs (for an example, look at Visual Studio 2022 which is the last bastion of the late 1990s-early 2000s-style fan-out toolbar design that still persists in Microsoft's products).

I want modern technologies from Windows 10 and 11 like UTF-8, SSD management, ClearType and high-quality typefaces, proper HiDPI scaling (something that took desktop Linux until this year to properly handle, and something that macOS doesn't actually do correctly despite appearing to do so), Windows 11's window management, and a deeper integration of .NET with Windows.

I'd like Microsoft to backport all that to the combined UI of Windows 2000 and Windows 7 (so probably Windows 7 with the 'Classic' theme). I couldn't care less about transparent menu bars. I don't want iOS-style 'switches'. I want clear tabs, radio buttons, checkboxes, and a slate-grey design that is so straightforward that it could be software-rasterised at 4K resolution, 144 frames per second without hiccups. I want the Windows 7-style control panel back.

> Windows 11 is irritatingly macOS-like and for some reason

I bet dollars to donuts that all the designers who come up new Windows designs are using Macs.

The old Windows UI was designed out of painstaking end user testing which was famously responsible for the Start button.

Indeed. And importantly, you could tell exactly which UI elements were which. It's sometimes genuinely difficult to tell if an element is text, a button, or a button disguised as a link on Windows 10/11.

> What I really want is a Windows 2000-esque UI with dense

Engineers like you and I want that. The common end user wants flashy, sleek, stylish (and apparently CandyCrush).

But don't forget that that 2000 UI was flashy, sleek, and stylish with it's fancy pants GDI+ and a mouse pointer with a drop shadow!

> The common end user wants flashy, sleek, stylish (and apparently CandyCrush).

Do they, though? I get the impression that nobody is actually testing with users. It seems more like UI developers want "flashy, sleek, stylish" and that's what's getting jammed down all our throats.

As a UI designer and developer, I would push the blame further along the stack and say that execs and shareholders want “flashy, sleek, stylish”, in the same way everything has to have AI jammed in now, lest the number start going down or not up quite as fast as hoped.

Ah, it's a cycle repeating itself. I remember when Microsoft first released XP it was considered bloated (UI-wise) compared to Windows 2000 and Windows 95/98/ME. Then Vista came and all of a sudden XP was in the limelight for being slim and fast!

Even when Vista came, people told all the time that they consider Windows 2000 to be much less UI-bloated than Windows XP; it was just that of the "UI bloat evils" Windows XP was considered to be the lesser evil than Windows Vista. I really heard nobody saying that XP was slim and fast.

BTW: Windows 7 is another story: at that time PC magazines wrote deep analyses how some performance issues in the user interface code of Windows Vista that made Vista feel "sluggish" were fixed in Windows 7.

I mean yes the default XP UI looks like bloated fisher price UI. But it has a classic mode that makes it look like Win 2000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_visual_styles#Windo...

>It is object-oriented from top to bottom,

On what planet is this a good thing? What does this realistically and practically mean outside of some high level layer that provides syntax sugar for B2B dev's. Lord knows you better not be talking about COM.

I honestly only see these types of comments from people who do NOT do systems programming.

Agreed on you with everything here

That being said if you run something like Win10 LTSC (basically super stripped down win10 with no tracking and crapware) and turn off all window animations / shadows / etc you might be very surprised - it is snappy as hell. With a modern SSD stuff launches instantly and it is a totally different experience.

I run LTSC. You still get the tracking and some crapware sadly.

> The sluggishness of the OS even on super-powerful machines is painful to witness and might even lead to the demise of this OS.

NT has been sluggish since _forever_. It is hardly a bloated GUI problem. On machines were 9x would literally fly NT would fail to boot due to low memory.

Not sure what NT4 systems you were dealing with, but I've dealt with ones thrashing the page file on spinning rust and the GUI is still responsive.

NT4 had a higher base RAM requirement than 9x. Significantly so.

The point being, 3.x/9x and NT using the same GUI, yet NT consistently requiring up to 4 times more RAM. NT itself was ridiculously bloated, not the GUI.

> NT is why I like Windows so much and can't stand Unix-likes. It is object-oriented from top to bottom,

This sounds like you are talking from a design perspective and the rest of your post seems to be from a usability perspective. Is this correct?

> Windows 11 is irritatingly macOS-like

MacOS is such an objectively inferior design paradigm, very frustration to use. It's Apple thinking 'different' for the sake of being different, not because it's good UI.

I only keep a W10 image around because it's still supported and W11 seems like a lot more work to beat into shape. OpenShell at least makes things much better.

I love that NT was actually designed. I don't necessarily like all of the design but I like that people actually thought about it.

> Windows 11 is irritatingly macOS-like and for some reason has animations that make it appear slow

Not sure about Windows but on macOS you can disable most of these animations - look for "Reduce motion" in Accessibility, the same setting is available on iOS/iPadOS. The result seems snappier.

> slate-grey design that is so straightforward that it could be software-rasterised at 4K resolution, 144 frames per second without hiccups

This is not possible (measure software blitting performance and you'll see), and for power reasons you wouldn't want to even if it were.

Win 2000 was the pinnacle. I stuck to it until WinXP was almost out of breath and reluctantly moved to it. Everything afterwards is pretty meh.

Windows 7 was pretty great.

It's never been commonplace but can't you still run alternate shells (the Windows term for the GUI, not the command prompt in UNIX parlance)?

You still can, and it's even exposed specifically for making constrained setups (though not everyone knows to use it)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_for...

The wiki that you posted does not include busybox.

https://frippery.org/busybox/index.html

You didn't understand the parenthetical, busybox has no relation to the Windows shell.

It is a Windows shell. A POSIX Windows shell.

Such as should have been present at the beginning, not the OS/2 affliction.

Unfortunately it is still clear you don't understand my comment nor the linked wikipedia page at all. Windows Shell isn't the same use of the word you are overloading here in this thread and you are out in left field from what everyone else is talking about. Maybe revisit the wikipedia page and read a little more, look at the project descriptions&screencaps, and it will make sense to you.

"shell" in Windows roughly refers to the GUI, not a CLI host like it does in Unix.

Indeed the first thing I do on a new Windows install is load Open Shell.

Busybox has a great shell in the Windows port.

It calls itself "bash" but it is really the Almquist shell with a bit of added bash syntactic sugar. It does not support arrays.

https://frippery.org/busybox/index.html

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