Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

"Windows was designed by a committee. The Mac, by contrast, often feels like it was designed by a single person."

The Mac was apparently designed by a person I can't freakin' stand. I recently spent a year with an OSX laptop, and it was a merciful relief when I was finally able to get the hell out of iLand. My first love is KDE because it bows to my will like nothing else, as a good window-manager/OS should. Win8 is also pretty malleable, even though it's not so good for those lacking the chops to bend it to their will. OSX, by comparison, is a constant freakin' PITA if you don't happen to be the "single person" it was designed by and for.

This might be a bit of a rant but I'm sick of people ragging on Windows for its default settings. Windows is eminently customizable. If you aren't a complete n00b you can bend Windows to suit yourself far more easily than OSX. KDE absolutely spanks them both, but still... I would wholeheartedly recommend OSX or iOS to my grandmother, because she's not so good at customizing things. This blog is aimed at people who probably aren't running their OS on 99% default settings. Customizability matters, and Windows fucking owns OSX in that respect.

My experience has not been the same. Making Windows do reasonable stuff, like not lose focus for dumb reasons, close windows instead of minimizing them when you hit the close button, have virtual desktops at all, have a good fuzzy-search app launcher, and so on, has been a pretty rough experience. Lots of these problems have solutions that technically exist but are so cumbersome to use I'd rather not bother. A real solution called LiteStep allows you to create an environment that is reasonable to use if you put in a lot of effort up front and are okay with your shell crashing every couple days.

Beyond the UI stuff, some MS software is just not meant to be uninstalled. I wanted to test an app without the VC++ 2008 redistributable installed, to see which dlls a user would need. Easy, right? Just go to control panel -> add or remove programs -> click on VC++ 2008 redistributable, and it's gone... except that all of the dlls are still there, in a huge folder with hundreds of other dlls. Which ones are for the VC++ 2008 redistributable? I have no idea. On some platforms I could just rm -rf VC++2008.framework, but not here. I guess MS thinks it would be better for usability if people had to reinstall the OS and wait through hours of updates just to remove some shared libraries.

Dependency Walker. That is what you need to see which DLLs are needed.

Thanks!

"I guess MS thinks it would be better for usability if people had to reinstall the OS and wait through hours of updates just to remove some shared libraries"

I would probably just use a snapshot in a VM in that case. After all, testing "package not installed" is different than "package installed, then removed" unfortunately (which is your point).

Early on, I was big into customization. I even baked my own widgets into VGA.DRV to make my Windows 3 look the way I wanted. My programs used CTL3D.DLL to avoid standard 3.x dialog boxes. Later on, I changed every icon in Windows Explorer to make them look like BeOS. Even on XP, I used Royale and Royale Noir themes instead of the original Luna. Then I moved on to Linux. I downloaded countless themes and icon sets. My Linux machines were unlike any other and were exactly the way I wanted them to be.

Then it ceased to matter. Now I use Gnome shell or Unity. I install software using package managers. The most radical thing I do it to customize the launcher and change stock Ubuntu background to a bluish one. Sometimes I even power up my AIX machine and work from CDE. The way it looks doesn't matter. I spend my days between browser, text editor and terminal. From the desktop, the feature I use the most is task switching followed closely by virtual desktops.

Making the OS look a certain way is doubly risky. It's a waste of time and, if you develop desktop apps, you risk making them consistent with your taste rather than usual conventions your users rely on.

Same here.

There was a time I would spend hours trying every available window managers and see how far I could customize them.

Nowadays I just use what is available by default.

Developers live in Terminal and text editors, and regular people don't care about customization? There's a reason why Linux on the desktop didn't pan out. People don't want choice. They want to be told what to do and get on with their life.

Hence the Gnome desktop's new direction. I actually quite like it (on good hardware with fully functional graphics drivers) but I know that some find the reduction in configuration and removal of options hard.

> They want to be told what to do.

Why degrade people like that? You sound like those hard-core Android fanbois that never misses a chance to tell you they think iPhone users are sheep. :-(

No, they want the software and options to be thought through before released.

Why have 20 options for 100% of the users, when 16 good defaults and 4 options is the better way for 90+% of the users? In OS X, I bet most of those 16 options can be changed using a terminal command.

Unfortunately some of the defaults do not seem to have been thought through and cannot be changed from the terminal. For instance, fat-fingering the button right above backspace will pause your music and make you log back in to keep doing whatever you were doing, and full screening YouTube videos will sometimes trigger a soul-crushungly long transition to the needless removal of all the contents of your other monitors.

Ok, the lack of power button options is silly, as is the location for the said button. But there is a "fix" for it: http://binchewer.org/blog/index.php?id=1

Live patching if not the best thing in the world, but it works.

Thanks for pointing this out.

Not degrading. That's why I own an iPhone. I got more important things to do than change the keyboard on my Android phone. (Yes, I own both)

Having a choice doesn't mean you need to make a choice. There's a thing called default settings that apply to those who want to be told what to do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More...

It appears that that article applies to situations where you need to make a choice.

When you accept the UI defaults, someone has chosen your meal or movie for you - no choice needs to be made.

>> If you aren't a complete n00b

About 6.8bn out of the 7bn people on this planet are complete "n00bs".

If you're going to type 200+ words, could you at least list some specifics?

Seriously. Consider me a Windows customization noob who would love to learn about Windows customization.

Could you list a few customizability examples which you could not do on OSX but are possible on KDE or Windows? I am a life long Windows user, used KDE quite a lot, and OSX for the last year, and I love OSX. I wouldn't claim it's more customizable, but to me it's about the same.

Bind keyboard shortcuts to maximize (vertically, horizontally, or both), minimize, restore size, tile/split, move to adjacent desktop. There's a lot I could learn to deal with on Mac, coming from Linux, but it amazes me that this doesn't seem possible without Applescript.

I use BetterTouchTool to do these things. I'm told there are other tools, but this one works so far.

Better Touch Tool - http://www.boastr.net/

Slate - https://github.com/jigish/slate

Both will do what you want. Also, you can add a 5th modifier key to avoid conflicts: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/a-modern-space-cadet/

There are tools to do it as people allude to but I can't help but feel this is a square peg in a round whole solution.

When I use linux, I use a tiling window manager, when I use OSX, I use tabbed terminals and fullscreen mode and workspaces.

Also, I should note that the Command-~ functionality which doesn't exist on Windows and spotlight is enough to make me prefer the OSX desktop to the Windows one.

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