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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

I always use the Windows key instead of pressing the start menu button, so I didn't really care. I always thought it made more sense as a Tablet / Touch OS, and for people without a touch screen, Windows 8 was just terrible. It had good intentions, poorly executed.

Apple did not even bother with touch screen laptops on the other hand.

My favorite goof of Windows 8 was the most googled question: "how do I turn it off?"

It required stupid mouse witchcraft and incantations to shut off if you weren't in a touch screen.

Windows 8 was Microsoft thinking everyone was going to use touch screens for EVERYTHING and ruining the non-touch screen experience for most.

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I think around that time was when Ubuntu switched from Gnome to Unity as well. What a mess that was. Seemed like all the UI teams had lost their minds at once.

Indeed, this is the dirty secret and shame of our industry that doesn't get acknowledged enough. We are so prone to group-think and follow-the-thought-leaders that as my parents would have said, "would you follow them off a cliff?" the answer as an industry is a clear "yes." We rarely seem to learn from the lessons of the past either.

Gnome 3 was also doing a major restructure, which forced MATE to be built. I liked some things about Gnome 3's original release, but I was insanely annoyed because a lot of it went away, I'm not sure if it was just distro specific or packages changed drastically, I don't even know how to describe the feature, but for example Gnome 3 had apps that could show / hide on the edges of your screen, so if you were logged in to MSN (or even XMPP) you could chat with someone, then it would 'hide' it was really cool how that was implemented, I was upset to never see it again on any other OS, it felt like a nice way to keep a chat window available but still out of the way.

It has felt quite good to be a KDE long-timer watching all this unfold.

I’m sorry, but the release of Plasma, around the same time IIRC, was not without controversy.

But, come on, a WHOLE OTHER LEVEL of "controversy."

Plasma criticism was pointed and deliberate and grownup. Windows 8, less so.

KDE 4.0 - which introduced plasma - was released in 2006, and it was awful and wasn't supposed to be generally available (blame the distros and/or poor version naming). By version 4.5 (2010), KDE had stabilized. By the time Gnome 3 and Windows 8 were released in 2011/2012 respectively, KDE plasma was pleasant to use and rock-solid

It felt great to watch Gnome stumble after all the shit-talking, some schadenfreude was in order. I didn't care much for Windows 8; Vista was a the bigger mess of a release.

I missed KDE 3.5 for many many years, as KDE 4 was terrible by comparison, and went to MATE due to the awful GNOME 3. KDE 3.5 was so so usable and Konqueror handled everything well.

I love KDE since KDE 3.5 but after KDE 4 its been weirdly unstable. Even now, I use KDE daily on Endeavour (Arch) and it will randomly kill the taskbar etc and restart itself, which is cool that it can self-clean but why does it fail like that randomly? I hate it because other DEs feel unstable or like the UX is worse. KDE has the exact UX I like, but I do hate the one thing browsers / KDE does where my clipboard is hijacked if I highlight text, not sure if I mistakenly made it like that or what but it drives me up a wall, sometimes I want to highlight text to paste over.

Bad compilation options, and/or bad driver/firmware interactions.

I'm using it on CachyOS with on old intels(Kaby Lake Core i5-7500t/Core i7-7700t) with old intel integrated graphics(HD630), and it never did that. Since early Plasma6/late Plasma5 times. Cant recall exactly anymore, for about 2 years now. In fact, since Plasma6 it reminded me of the good old KDE3 days, again. Except for the memory usage maybe. OTOH the systems have much more memory since the times of KDE3, so shrug?

If everything else fails, there is still https://www.trinitydesktop.org btw.

KDE lost some corporate support when SUSE changed their default to GNOME in about 2005(?). I think it sees some use in the automotive world but aside from that it's all volunteer work.

People don't like when I say this, but it's just another piece of evidence that mobile phones ruined everything.

IIRC the true story behind that dark period is that Microsoft was making vague murmurings about suing everyone for cloning Windows XP, so everyone felt they had to run away from that.

The problem was that it was a bunch of people who had no good ideas and no insight trying to come up with new paradigms for interaction, and they were all bad. What the Linuxen desktops were doing was even worse than Win8, and the ones on that journey were all determined for some reason to deprecate the old WinXP clone UIs at the same time. Gnome really moved into a position of harassing and mocking its old users (basically regulation redhat behavior.)

I have to admit, I really, really liked Unity. The HUD feature (which let you 'search' in menus for any command) was really useful to me.

Still around, still works, and still in active development on mobile -- that version is in Debian now.

I also use the Windows key, but even then the WHOLE screen animating and changing to a different solid color was super jarring and tiring IMO. I much prefer a small popup like they have now

There's also the issue of distance for a mouse cursor to travel to select something. I think the general issue is imposing one interface for every mode of input instead of options, so either select an appropriate interface depending on how the start menu was invoked (even if it's just scaling it down to a confined space) or letting people select the default however it's invoked. Yes that's going to be more work, but when we're talking about the largest corporations on the planet I struggle to believe they can't afford it.

The Windows 8 start menu is no different from Launchpad on macOS throwing up a grid of icons that takes over the screen. Except macOS doesn't have the benefit of live tiles to excuse it.

> The Windows 8 start menu is no different from Launchpad on macOS

Launchpad appeared for the first time in Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" in July 2011.

Windows 8.0 launched August 2012.

Personally I think both are inspired by the full-screen launchers of iOS and Android, and not by one another.

Yeah I never used or liked Launchpad. On macOS I only ever used Spotlight (and Raycast for the past few years).

The only redeeming thing I could say about Launchpad is that it did not replace Spotlight (unlike Windows 8 Start Menu which was a replacement to the previous start menu)

Yes. The constant full screen color flashing made Windows 8 not just unpleasant to use, I was unable to use it since I literally got migraines after using it for too long.

Click on a pdf? The whole screen turns bright red for a second before loading. Click on a Word file, same but blue. It was hell to use for people sensitive to flashing lights.

I got special permission at work to stick with Windows 7 longer than the rest of the company for medical reasons.

> Apple did not even bother with touch screen laptops on the other hand.

> Windows 8 was Microsoft thinking everyone was going to use touch screens for EVERYTHING and ruining the non-touch screen experience for most.

Did/Does anyone actually use the touch screen on a laptop? Surfaces still ship with a touchscreen, so I assume they've done their market research.... It just seems like the trackpad/keyboard are the better ways to interface with your laptop, especially when it's already built in and not BT accessories or something. I hate to sound like an Apple fanboy but I'd assume the thought process was something along the lines of "Customers want touch screens on phones and tablets, not laptops"

My laptop fills the role of "Desktop computer on the go" and I want it to emulate that as close as possible, aside from form factor. Maybe I'm in the minority there? Others do use a laptop as a primary 'daily driver' and want the touch screen?

I can't imagine my working life without a touchscreen. Drag to scroll, touch to focus, pinch to zoom, just the usual stuff. I also use business style light laptops, so touch is always there and more usable/precise than the touchpad. People always get confused when they ask me for help on their machines and I reach to the screen for... nothing, usually.

> Drag to scroll, touch to focus, pinch to zoom, just the usual stuff

I feel like trackpads do most of the above better than a touchscreen? Mac trackpads, at any rate (I do recall a lot of PC trackpads and/or drivers being hot garbage)

> People always get confused when they ask me for help on their machines and I reach to the screen

Nooooo, please don't touch my screen! I can't stand fingerprints on my laptop display! Pretty much every gesture you mentioned has a touch pad equivalent that works just as well or better for a desktop OS.

You must get a nice arm workout moving your hands from the keyboard to the screen and back all the time. Sounds super slow though.

You're probably joking but I actually enjoyed switching between using the mouse and the touch screen, it's a cute little distraction.

I don’t want a touchscreen laptop, but I do want a laptop that can convert to a tablet. Not to use as a tablet, but because then I can plug in a proper keyboard and just use the laptop as a monitor. If they sold non-touchscreen convertibles I’d go for that, but realistically that’s an impossible niche.

I don't, but my kids definitely do. I think this is a generational gap largely due to "what you grew up on." A laptop having a touch screen is near the top of the list of very-nice-to-have or even must-have features for my kids

Yes, quite a bit. Not so much as a replacement for trackpad/keyboard/mouse, but mostly to write down notes with a stylus, or do some quick sketches. I don't do that often enough to justify carrying another device like a tablet, but regularly enough to feel limited by the absence of touchscreens.

I do use one that converts to a tablet and has a stylus. But I have to do a lot of serious drawing for a living. I also appreciate coming close to book note taking without having to print stuff.

It really depends on what you do.

See, this use case has actually never occurred to me. Appreciate your 2 cents

I have a Surface Laptop Studio. And while Windows 11 overall kinda sucks, the ability to turn it into a little easel and the responsiveness of the pen are both great. I also like precise scrolling with the touchscreen sometimes.

The part of the hardware I really don't like is that the `Fn` key toggles fn-lock with a tap and then alt + F4 and such don't work. There's enough space to have another row of keys or something, I never want fn-lock off (I use four finger scroll for volume controls), it's infuriating. But pretty much all laptops (and shockingly some desktop keyboards) have similarly dumb behavior.

Yes, and this is a huge habit difference between Mac and Windows laptop users I know. Give a Windows user a Mac and they will habitually try to use scrollbars with their fingers. Mac users just don’t have that habit and they find it strange. The reflective MacBook screens also look awful with the slightest smudge so that enforces the “don’t touch” reflex for them, I think.

With the continuous degradation of Windows past 8.1, I slowly moved away from Surface, Windows and Touch, but even months after I have got a non-touch notebook, I still would touch my screen.

I had a Windows tablet at the time, and actually paid for a Windows 8 upgrade. It was a nice OS on that device!

I would never used the phrase "good intentions" in combination with Windows 8.1.

Say you had a mechanic you brought your car to for an inspection and they would set it on fire in the parking lot because of "evil ghosts" since they heard a squeak that sounded like evil ghosts speaking. Calling what they did "good intentions just poorly executed" isn't really fitting is it?

Microsoft got hit by a case of delusion on a corporate level where seemingly good arguments combine to create the completely wrong conclusions.

simply pressing ALT+F4 didn't do it? (of course you had to click the desktop first)

That still worked yes! But I don't think most people knew about this. You just gave me flashbacks to those days working at the local college, we would do this to restart all the machines in a classroom, we had them all on Deepfreeze so it would purge anything students downloaded / installed. We had other remote ways of doing it, but it was fun doing the shortcut too from time to time.

It did. To some extent it seems like it was a telemetry mistake that some of the easier mouse controls (an actual button for start rather than gesture; a missing obvious power button; not having a simple mouse button to get to the Charms; etc). Windows users opted into Windows telemetry all must have seemed to be keyboard-heavy (probably because only certain types of power users, such as myself, were opting in to telemetry). All of the keyboard shortcuts still worked. Some new keyboard shortcuts were added. Windows 8 was extremely useful from a keyboard shortcut viewpoint. (The Charms made a lot more sense from the keyboard.)

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