> Office products are bastardized with copilot buttons everywhere.
They put copilot in notepad. NOTEPAD.
They put copilot in notepad. NOTEPAD.
It's basically a fancy textbox.
Microsoft's own people can't use the toolkits they write, as evidenced by the React component in the start menu(!)
That is how you end up with web garbage in what was supposed to be native code, or .NET.
I think this is also a reason why WinUI efforts went down the drain.
I'm sure Microsoft would be perfectly fine ditching Windows as long as they could keep pushing Teams, Azure AD and Office 365 to companies.
It's crazy how no one actually competently working towards a shared goal is invested in the desktop OS game any more.
Linux people still have some fire left in them, but lack organization and shared vision to deliver a high quality product in a timely manner. macOS is the best contender, but other than pushing weird mobile-driven UX design and locking down the OS, the macOS of today hasn't changed that much from the OS X of 20 years ago.
So in other words, Linux on the desktop will be a Linux I will hate. The closest thing to Linux for the mainstream we have is ChromeOS and I'm sure we all hate it. I sure do because I want nothing to do with Google services.
In other words, be careful what you ask for.
AI. Customers want AI, users want AI, peers want AI. If anyone says otherwise, they’re a Luddite and possibly a dangerous political radical.
Even .NET and C++ tooling getting spoiled with AI no matter what, see latest set of DevBlog announcements.
The problem isn't hiring people that only know macOS/Linux, we always argue about how bad HR hiring processes are in our field.
The problem is apparently the lack of management motivation to bring those peoples up to speed, and is confortable pushing for Web widgets instead.
They can hire pretty much anyone. They choose to not hire people with Win32 experience. They choose to implement hiring process which results in hire other kind of people.
That may be, but there is PLENTY of people with the expertise to develop WinUI apps -- IMO, the glaring problem would be that Microsoft can't get their head straight on which UI to support in the first place!
WinUI, only Microsoft employees on the Windows team, and fools that aren't aware of all the WinRT tooling reboots since Windows 8 was introduced, buying into WinUI marketing of how great it is.
As one of the fools that thought WinRT was a great idea, what .NET 1.0 should have been, I doubt there are many of those left.
WPF wasn't brought back into active status at BUILD 2024 by accident.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40843252
Then check the feedback on the latest community call,
https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/discussions/1...
Yeah, there's been complaints about some Apple's old polish and consistency being lost, but it's usually very nitpicky stuff, nothing compared to the complaints about Win11.
I thought most work is outsourced now.
That was the lure.
But the real Notepad has been decommissioned and there is some bloated one now.
The two applications i miss on my linux boxes are notepad++ (though Kate is a good substitute) and GitExtensions
Looking at the features there does not seem to be anything special, but a lot of people seem to love it so there is clearly something special about it.
Having so much there in just a couple clicks is very nice!
A.k.a. donor.
Foobar2k, Paint.NET, Notepad++, IrfanView, WizTree, Ditto, TotalCommander, NAPS2 etc.
Linux has many options for any of those, but I always had a feeling that those options have less polish, or are less stable, or their UI is an afterthought etc. On Windows you have basically a single option for each application that most people go for, so documentation and online help is plentiful.
Without those, especially last one my productivity at my corporate work would be half at most. Editing a file in an archive within another archive directly, doing quick file comparisons of 2 files, syncing different dirs, fulltext recursive search... all with much better UI than Unix console counterparts (which I use too). And much more.
Simply the best tools on the whole market for me in given category, period.
There is something magical about those specialized, no nonsense tools using WINAPI, not chasing cross-platform, and maintained for decades, some of them since 90s. Snappiness, intuitiveness, stability, discoverability etc.
Less stable? MPD supported damn state supported popular science radio streaming channels in Spain like nothing...
Also vidir, entr and jimtcl/awk scripts p0wn your setup any time... I can just remote-mount FS's anywhere and use any local tools as if they where there. I can just spawn builds on directory changes and spawn an editor with a REPL in miliseconds. GUI? Everything it's composable. I can use a mega-complete GUI for MPD that makes Foobar2k blush. I can output audio to an streaming socket (or to plain Icecast) from MPD and plug any audio FX' and whatnot with MPD plugins.
I can push the whole graphical environment down and I could keep playing my music and control the whole music daemon from my phone. Add songs, add radio stream, play/skip, volume up and down... from my damn bathroom.
And OFC I can still code under VTY's and even read PDF's/CBZ's/EPUB's and even watch videos play any game or emulator which uses SDL (a ton of source ports, emulators like mednafen, Doom/Quake ports, Scummvm, DOSBox, PCSXR, PPSPPP)...
That without touching a mouse or switching between GUI's. No RSI, no headaches, no remote GUI tools to mount any crap requiring thousands of click and hurting your wrists and forearms. Everything it's under a directory and managed as it if were part of my hard disk filesystem.
I can edit directory listings with my text editor with the vidir tool, they will show up as a text file. You delete a range of lines, these files are gone. I can search and rename files at crazy speeds and, well, I can spawn any tool with find and iomenu and have a quick search for a file. File managers? Forget it, you keep typing and the fuzzy-finding tool with match the file in milseconds and open the registered tool for that extensions. And this is done with tools that could probably run in the 80's and early 90's. Go figure, I'm computing as if it was in 2040 but with 'prehistoric' tools.
Ah, don't forget that most CLI and TUI tools are scriptable... so you can just forget of even using a computer, 90% of the tasks can complete themselves via cron, the time scheduler under Unix.
I say with confidence that you will never be able to do file operations as quickly in a terminal as you could in a good GUI, like the Explorer from Windows 2000.
It used to be instant, which is something you really notice the difference with when it changes.
I also noticed a lot of the time windows just ignores me double clicking on things in file explorer, leaving me to sit there wondering if I have to do it again.
All the computers with Windows 11 that are available to me are fairly similar so I don't know if it's just these particular software/hardware setups. But it seems absurd that a device capable of billions of operations per second even on a single core somehow takes hundreds of milliseconds to display a few menu items.
This is disgusting! Who even comes up with ideas like that?
It was a proper WYSIWYG editor working with rich text, effectively a poor man's Word.
Microsoft should have turned it into a markdown editor, instead of killing it.
Now if you want to complain about something then vscode takes 12 seconds to load
I expect MS will get there long before Meta does given they don't have the encryption issue to contend with.
Every time I see a new CoPilot button, or a toast nagging me because I've not clicked any of them and they think I really should want to, a phrase crosses my mind…
“Thank you the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation”
I pasted this into Google to see what you were referencing, and was met with this full-screen, front page, all-important "AI Overview" (that of course takes precedence over actual search results)
> You're very welcome! If you have any questions about the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's products, their marketing strategies, or need assistance with anything else, feel free to ask.
Full circle.
A popup is a larger object, often a full window, that covers large parts of other elements or sometimes the entire screen. They are sometimes modal.
A toast is a smaller element, appearing (often by sliding into view upwards, hence the cutesy name) in or above a specific notification area of the application or the overall OS. These are much smaller, seldom modal and often convey useful notifications or warnings, unlike popups (especially modal ones) that are often either useless or actively, deliberately, in the way.
While it is correct to call then both popups if you wish, "toasts" are generally considered a specific subset.
It is like a carpet raid. Bomb everything with Copilot agent…
It is funny but it is not.
There are no licensing issues, no fees to pay, no support to pay. It really is free, even in a commercial environment.
With that said, I think I've also had NotePad++ made available by IT at all employers and clients that had me use Windows even when the desktop setup was otherwise quite restricted. It's a rather established tool after all and probably considered a safe and reputable bet even by somewhat conservative IT leadership.
Thanks Microsoft for making everything worse
I feel sorry for the younger generations, they’ll never know what it was like to use computers that weren’t actively trying to shaft you all the time
Aaaand... thats about it, even Total commander's built in text editor is more powerful.
CotEditor on Mac is the closest to Notepad I’ve felt in years. Gotta wonder what the end game at Microsoft is.