I don't get it. Functional UI changes should be different from visual fluff, yet Windows seems to the only OS where the two aren't separated.

Of course there are limits. iirc Windows 7 RTM had an obviously 3.1 derived file picker make it into the add fonts dialog until it was replaced in SP1 if my memory has the timing right. Despite using win32 widgets which had the correct theming, that didn't look native at all

The newer stuff sits on top of DirectX.

The latest UI framework (XAML/WinUI) sits on top of a better rendering architecture (compositor) that itself wraps DirectX tech.

(TL;DR: the Windows UI mess looks to me like an organizational problem, not a technological problem. From the outside it looks like as the old guard is leaving, the new people coming in discard all the old code and instead prefer to start completely new projects, which of course is destined to fail, because the new people are repeating the same errors which had been identified and fixed decades ago).

So much code is required to do things we now take for granted that the resulting patterns became new frameworks.

Win32 is old and unviable because Microsoft hasn't bothered making comprehensive upgrades for it and never laid out a gap-free plan for how to move off it. They could have upgraded it more smoothly but never did.

WinUI/UWP still uses CreateWindowEx and good old WndProc for event loop message handling at the top level on Windows 10.

It gives you all the building blocks to implement it yourself.

Remember that Win32 is not UI framework but OS API which allow you to build yourself one (wxWidgets, QT, SWT).

You state that as fact, but I believe the poor UI situation is holding windows back from gaining market share. It’s not just the way things look, but uniformly communicate a single experience. Microsoft used to be very integrated and had an entire ecosystem that was uniform. Letting this go has really hurt the brand IMHO, and creates a very low bar for third parties.

It's not so much that microsoft let things go as it was taken from them. When computers became networked we needed ways of easily distributing applications across that network in secure, reliable and always up to date ways. Windows never had a good solution to that (not even today), because every install was fraught with peril, and every app had to roll its own update mechanism. Meanwhile the web was sandboxed and up to date by definition, dramatically lowering the barrier to entry for networked software. Anything that could move to the web did move to the web, which opened the door for chromebooks, which in turn fragmented the OS market, which made it uneconomical for companies to invest in a windows native codebase. Microsoft could have stopped this had they leaned hard into the concept of an app store and sandboxing around 2000, and hadn't stumbled so badly when it came to extending windows to mobile.

I'm pretty sure that modernizing the entire windows UI doesn't change a thing for windows market share. But the reason to do it is not because it makes economic sense, it is because they should have pride in the products they make, and want them to be well-made.

I'm having a hard time believing that. While some Mac users who are used to a more integrated user experience might be deterred, I'm not sure that the os's ui esthetics really affect windows adoption. My feeling is that most people who use Windows do so because they're either (a) told to use it or (b) they choose to use it because it's the shortest path to doing what they want to do.

I'm sure Microsoft know this and understand the tradeoffs very well

I tried to go all Linux many times, gave up, I just wanted something that works.

Microsoft understands keeping their customers. That is why backwards compatibility is king with Ms.

Windows is not growing in adoption. It is under attack by Google (Android killed Windows on phones and Chromebooks are eating away the education market), Apple, and on the server, Linux.

For the cost of the average computer running MacOS, one could buy a TV, a console, a desktop Windows computer, and a laptop. Or whatever it may be. ($1500 on an iMac could be $400 console, $500 TV, $500 computer. Or whatever your break down is. For the lower middle class and working class, trying to 'gear up' their family and make their kids happy and be happy with their home, this is real math they have to do).

While it is true that for those who are wealthy or who can justify the cost, the experience is very nice and justifiable, the cold hard facts of living in the western world is that most people would need to spend irresponsibly to use MacOS regularly.

It is what it is but it's no surprise that the cheapest mass market OS has 90% market share, and anyone who thinks that "UX" is the reason instead of cost doesn't understand the industry fundamentally.

A $900 MacBook Air would probably have lasted far longer and needed less time troubleshooting than a $500 computer made with subpar components. The amortized costs are far lower with Apple products (or other products using higher quality components) compared to buying the cheapest devices made with the lowest quality components, so there is no point in comparing the two.

And most people only need 1 computer, if that. I would actually bet most people can do everything they need to with iOS and an iPad would suffice. And other than the smaller screen size, I can see people make do with an iPhone even, especially if all you are doing is consuming.

I've never seen a more-true statement on this site. Years ago, my wife was using a $500 Acer laptop, which was a cheap plastic POS, which broke after a couple of years. I bit the bullet, and bought a pre-owned Air for $900. She is still using it, 11 years later. I used to have to fix something on her Windows computer every other week. Now I hardly ever have to help her with anything.

A year later, I bought another $900, used Air for my daughter. She is still using that, 10 years later. I bought a new MBP, and gave my son my 7-year-old version. I expect him to get many more years out of it.

People who have never owned a MacBook expect that they "wear out" like a $500 laptop, but they just don't. They cost much less over the long run. It's like hiking boots. You can buy cheap ones every year, or bite the bullet, and pay 3 times more, and have a pair that lasts for 10 years.

Even fully up to date there is always another zero day, so for individuals doing nothing of particular importance the best bet is good up to date backups of the important files and when your software tools are working well to help you get whatever it is you do done, don’t change them, and don’t update them, because odds are there will be some regression, some feature removed, a change to a subscription model, some functionality now depends on the Internet, or some level of telemetry/spying.

Software has become hostile to users. Everything is nearly malware now. Easily snap shotted and sandboxed VMs are just about the only way to maintain some level of consistency over a 5-10 year span where you are depending on the software to just keep doing what it is doing.

If it's the Mid-2009 model (the next older model), it can still run El Capitan and therefore the newest Chrome.

I have good experience with Asus laptops, though, I still have an EeePC from 2008, and it's still working fine. Slow as a snail, of course, but still working. ThinkPads, too, although they can be a bit pricey.

There's the software side, of course, macOS is much more pleasant to use than Windows. But I found after using a Mac Mini for about three years that I actually prefer GNU/Linux on my desktop.

I'm reminding some tone-deaf wealthy users that COST is the #1 factor behind OS usage, and the rest is basically irrelevant window dressing except to the upper class.

Is what it is, but you'll struggle to find a more privledged and clueless group of commenters than here. Part of the charm, I suppose.

This actually helps makes new devices more affordable as the cost is amortized over a longer and more useful lifespan, while the secondary market serves others very well.

Interesting. I figured the people here are completely ignoring maybe half of all users, but you seem to be ignoring about 85%!

So given your example which already excludes most people on the planet, I was replying to the fact that Apple hardware usually has a lower total-cost-of-ownership given the longevity and resale value. Of course not everyone sees it this way, nor can they afford the upfront price, but it is what it is. Anyway, the company certainly didn't get to a $2T market cap from a lack of demand.

In Windows’s case the “worse” competitor is ChromeOS and Chromebook, and Microsoft’s basically thrown in the towel when it comes to native apps, so with time everyone who doesn’t need pro Photoshop or AutoCAD could just use a Chromebook.

Note that you can run Word for Android on Chromebooks full-screen already.

I haven’t used android games on chrome os but things like candy crush should work just fine in chrome os by now?

Assuming you have a really low latency to a Google datacentre, the Stadia experience is not particularly compelling enough to ditch running the game on bare metal.

All of the above is moot though if you are not within a few ms latency of a Google datacentre though... which for most of the world is absolutely the case.

Instead they were focusing on Xbox and let their PC ecosystem rot. Now Nvidia, Valve, Epic and other middleware vendors consumed this market. They tried with GFWL, but it was a dumpster fire.

They now try again with Game Pass for PC, but again they just want to push Xbox ecosystem instead of Windows gaming as whole.

And one day Google will release desktop Fuchsia.

I use Linux because it’s a way to run a good Unix-like OS on non-Apple hardware.

The overwhelming majority of people who use Windows (or macOS) is because their computer came with it. As long as it mostly works, people don’t care about which OS they are using.

I like Windows because it's more compatible than other OSes with any hardware that I can throw at it. It's also more stable than any other OS. My Macs have been broken multiple times throughout their life by simply upgrading to the next version of macOS, but Windows has always just kept on trucking along year after year. Another reason I love Windows is that it's got a high degree of flexibility. While Apple hides APIs and does everything they can to prevent you from doing things that they don't approve of, Microsoft does the exact opposite and publishes APIs to help you get it done. Mostly though, I just love the Windows UI and the Windows way of doing things. I find it to be very simple and obvious. The things I don't like are largely unseen, like the forced telemetry and updates.

I use my Mac when I need to build or test something for iOS or macOS. Outside of that, I just can't stand the way they do anything. I find the UI and the UX of macOS to be absolutely hideous. The fact that you have to install third party stuff just to get basic features like "decent window management" is simply beyond the pale to me.

For work, I started using a Linux desktop a few years ago because Windows was annoyingly slow when doing anything with npm/yarn/node_modules or Docker and I was doing more and more work with NodeJS and less with .NET/SQL Server/etc. So, I installed Manjaro with XFCE and that's when I found out that XFCE does a minimalist Windows style desktop better than Microsoft does. They have all the Windows features that I want, like Window snapping and none of the Windows features that I don't want. They even have a feature that I usually installed 7+ taskbar tweaker to get: They let you middle-click taskbar items to close the window (also you can drag/drop them), similar to how Chrome treats browser tabs. I've had Manjaro installed on multiple systems (desktops and laptops) for years now and I haven't seen any of the issues that people complain about here, like having to fiddle with their system to get it to work. Everything just worked for me since day one.

Now I just use Windows for entertainment - I've got a NUC style PC at every TV and I have one gaming PC.

That Microsoft created new APIs, runtimes, and frameworks not for technical reasons but in order to lock customers in or disadvantage competitors. That's a big reason why Windows is an unmanageable mess of inconsistent interfaces and DLLs--they were short-term tactics, not well considered approaches.

No, you.

> they didn't help businesses, they locked them into inferior technology that cost more and undermined productivity.

In order to lock people in to something you have to have something of value to offer... so, your argument defeats itself.

> That's a big reason why Windows is an unmanageable mess of inconsistent interfaces and DLLs...blah blah blah

Pfffft. Yeah it's so unmanageable that every single IT department on earth is running Windows all day every day. Even my personal PCs are running perfectly without so much as a hiccup. What a mess!

That’s one case of “it came with the computer”.

But Microsoft was really clever at giving all the functionality companies want for their corporate issue computers. In the mid-2000’s very few companies offered Macs as desktops because of that. I only have a work MacBook because it can authenticate against AD and has all the management automation required by my employer. That’s also why a Linux laptop wasn’t an option.

No, that's the reason why it comes with the computer in the first place. You don't think that PC manufacturers just decided for everybody do you?

Microsoft won for a one reason - they have products that solve problems better than anything else.

UI consistency just isn't that important to most people.

See: electron applications.

Big companies just love to jack around with Windows, and do things like prevent users from changing their desktop backgrounds (in the name of "security," of course), and Microsoft has always bent over backwards to give them the ability to do any stupid thing some corporate IT drone can think of, so they continue to be loved my companies around the globe.

There's a _fundamental_ difference in the way that Microsoft and Apple have approached making an operating system. One treats it like a layer of software in an entire stack that someone else owns and controls, and the other makes PERSONAL devices. And it shows.

And, of course, the Microsoft-slobbering trade press can't imagine a scenario where they don't try to prove that YOU should be running Windows because the numbers -- inflated by the Fortune 1000 -- says it's what "everyone" is running. Meanwhile, more than half the people I know now run NOT-Windows for their personal computing.

Let's break out the corporate purchases from sales data, and then let's talk about actual, personal market share, and whether better UI/UX would help Microsoft in a heads-up battle against macOS or ChromeOS.

In my experience, Windows is still the target for most specialized or business software. Most of these things also demand a Windows Server component. Typical suspects are: "Personalmanagement" timesheet software basically (accounting working hours, vacation, bonuses etc. and making sure the right receipts are printed at the end of each month and more, like when somebody leaves the company, is ill or the is "Kurzarbeit" because the union with the employer settled on this). Another suspect is software for insurance and taxes, energy management (which in a stainless steel foundry is an important piece of software and keeps at least a handful of people fully employed), logistics software (usually also with needle printers that are able to still print "Durchschlag" carbon paper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_paper which is fast and handy for the drivers). There is special software for measurement and production with complex machines, ovens, mills, spectrometers, microscopes, x-ray machines etc. Oh and then there is the internally developed application, that keeps running the company and will be replaced sometime during the next 10 years with a different Windows native app if it is ever finished. And there is the MS SQL administration in addition to group policy for all the Windows computers everywhere that also is best done from a Windows computer.

People are used to Windows, older generations in middle and slightly eastern european countries (former east Germany/ DDR included) especially. There just were no Macs in any company besides maybe a top design studio in the capital or regional hub. This is a big factor. In most companies, ordering certain behaviour just doesn't work in practise.

In companies, every purchase is oriented towards "Abschreibung" or the amortisation period that is determined by "Abgabenordnung" if I am not mistaken - basically the tax. To be most efficient on paper, you have to use the device at least for the duration of the period determined by the state tax books, else you will have a bad tax audit etc. Anything that hasn't followed the rule will raise an eyebrow and somebody will have to explain otherwise you will likely pay more in taxes or whatever. I don't understand this stuff at all but I was told it works something like that and therefore you do so much accounting stuff such as inventory of basically everything that costs at least X, every piece of software, where you also get Microsoft and Oracle and other audits from time to time...

If you are not in the business of selling/ writing enterprise or specialized software in some capacity, you don't really have to care. Most things work using a web browser nowadays, even some enterprise software some companies use. Some software is just more performant or can access certain APIs that aren't available in the web browser. Also, it is very hard to support anything for 10+ years in the webbrowser. Stuff just breaks too frequently on the web, even compared to Windows 10.

In the end, people usually buy Windows, because it really is the only platform that actually works for 99,9% of things. You can spend a long time to support the CEO's Mac, because it is the CEO. Of course, most things running a web app or supporting infrastructure can be Linux or UNIX-based without an issue, but the OS on people's desks just is Windows and it will stay like that for a long time. There are few companies that have the resources to support something else on the desktop as well. I bet, these are in the software or hardware development or creative/ design/ art business and not much else.

Education is a very special market, really anything goes there. Simple things tend to win, but what simple is changes school to school. :-) There are schools that it seems don't know what to do with their money and have dedicated IT department, supporting anything Apple, Google, Adobe, AutoDesk and Microsoft is not a problem there. There are schools that cannot even equip one IT classroom and students have to share computers each with a different OS and updates barely work because the internet connection is flaky.

The bar for third parties was always nonexistent. That was precisely the advantage of Windows which permitted the boom of development for it in the 90s–2000s.

Their Office suite may have been internally consistent, but I did a bit of software for Windows 2000 (back when it was the latest version), and I found the UI of Windows (in general) inconsistent, scrollbars would e.g. have subtle difference between applications.

I ended up using Qt for my own work, as I couldn’t figure out what was the official / dominant style to follow.

    I believe the poor UI situation is holding windows back from gaining market share.

I just don't buy that. Everyone I've ever persuaded to buy a Mac or iOS device comes to prefer it to Windows in a couple of weeks, and I stop needing to fix something for them every other month.

Backwards compatibility is not what stops Microsoft from updating the GUIs for their own components. It is not the reason that the components that have been updated failed to carry forward 100% of the features of the components they're replacing, necessitating the ongoing use of the legacy components. It is not the reason reams of GUIs have gone untouched for 20 years. It is not the reason Windows now has at least 4 versions(!) of Performance Monitor, all of which are broken in at least one glaring way. (More on that below.)

The believable reasons for the GUI inconsistencies I've heard are:

1) API churn, because of which the UI teams did not have sufficient time to work on features versus playing catchup.

2) Bad system GUI APIs that are very difficult for even in-house teams to work with.

3) Unwillingness to take ownership of legacy code, with literally noone left at Microsoft willing to touch things like the ODBC connections panel or the Component Services snapin. People prefer to add new things instead of fixing or removing old things because it's "easier".

Actually, let's just stop here for a second. That last point explains the performance monitor views. I mentioned at least 4 copies, written over decades, by different people. Each new team has steadfastly refused to touch (or remove!) the old code, but hasn't replaced the functionality of the old code, so now end-users need 4 different versions to get things done.

These versions are:

1) The performance tab in Task Manager. The only GUI-based view that exposes some metrics such as GPU temperatures. Only shows a small number of fixed metrics.

2) Resource Monitor, which is opened from Task Manager. The only GUI-based view that shows certain per-process metrics, such as the names of files being touched, or per-connection network stats. Has permanent UI issues that will never be fixed, such as not using the system number formatting in some places, making large metrics unreadable as they change faster than users can count the digits. Similarly, the graphs take forever to change their vertical axes, making them useless 90% of the time.

3) The Performance Monitor MMC snapin. Totally legacy, with un-resizable controls that cut off text. Nonetheless, it is absolutely essential because it provides the only live GUI view of 100% of the performance metrics available in the system. It is also the only way to record metrics and view recordings. It is the only GUI for creating metric logging that persists. Etc...

4) The various versions of Server Manager's performance views, which are so useless that I've literally never used it. Nobody can get their job done doing this, we're all still using RDP to connect to servers so that we can simultaneously launch the three tools above. Why RDP? Because 2 of the 3 above do not support remoting.

I could go on and on like this for hours about how bad just this one aspect of Windows is, let alone the hundreds of other GUIs that have been butchered by bad decision making and internal NIH syndrome leaving a trail of half-baked messes behind.

Wait... did I say 4 performance metrics GUIs? I meant 5, because there's also the new Windows Admin Center, which was clearly written by people that have never had to diagnose a performance issue on a server. It's very pretty and utterly useless, which means that: Nobody will use it, and it will be superseded by someone else's half-baked attempt in a few years, 100% guaranteed.

  * Microsoft Mail
  * Windows Messaging
  * Outlook Express
  * Microsoft Outlook
  * Windows Mail
  * Windows Live Mail
  * Mail.app

Windows Live Mail and Windows Mail were essentially newer, Vista-era versions of Outlook Express. It's the same program rebranded. Mail was bundled with Vista, Live Mail was a way to push the Live branding and get the newer program into the hands of those running older versions of the OS (WinXP).

Microsoft Outlook is a different beast with a different lineage, part of MS Office, and can be thought of the "pro" version of the basic mail clients bundled with Windows.

Yes, Microsoft could probably do with some branding discipline but the technology is quite predictable.

I'm not sure what Mail.app is, I always thought that was Apple's. Entourage was IIRC a native 'designed for Apple' PIM that eventually made its way into Office for Mac, eventually they decided to rationalize and have one client -- Outlook.

Hotmail / Outlook.com - Outlook.com, again despite the confused branding, is Hotmail evolved. Over time, Microsoft slowly merged its consumer (Hotmail, Windows Live) UI with its 'pro' UI (Outlook for desktops, Exchange Web) so that these days they are all pretty similar. These days you also have Outlook's mobile apps for Android and iOS and those too have a familiar look and feel.

I don't see any of these as a bad thing. Microsoft's history is linked to the history of personal computing and the ebbs and flows of market forces that shaped the PC biz and continues to shape today's technology. Given all the churn in this space, it's actually kind of awesome how their technology has evolved -- and will continue evolving, e.g. with all the focus on a web version of Office. But yes, their sudden shifts in branding is pretty sucky and they could do a lot better there.

But "none of them 100% work" is pretty harsh. No mail client is right for every use case (except emacs, naturally -- if it doesn't work for you it's because you haven't written enough elisp yet). But these are very widely deployed products and do work for a good segment of their target market.

Mail.app is what I call the new "modern" app shipped with Windows 10. Mostly garbage. Spends most of its time and your CPU to resynchronize your mails.

My experience with these programs is that the predecessor can have feature X but the successor doesn’t but has feature Y, similar what OP described.

I’m always harsh when reviewing software. No need to be gentle about things that doesn’t work well.

I think also I was annoyed over how one email list item was drawn, too big, thus reduces the number I can see at one time. Can’t remember if I found anyway to customize that.

I ended my Office subscription because I didn’t really like the feeling of the applications. It feels like they have put lipstick on a pig. Yes, there is a minimal writing mode in Word, but beneath it is the same old steaming pile that seeps thru.

But I’m somewhat harsh when evaluating software so maybe I’m missing something here.

I do however find it to be the best (on Windows; unsure about on Mac).

I would so much like Microsoft to sell it outside of "Office Pro" as I would like to use it at home too but do not otherwise need "Office Pro" at home.

I am not familiar with Windows APIs but I can see this be the truth if MS made it possible for developers to plug inside this dialogs, like a printer driver would plug soem GUI changes in the panels , changing this would break a lot of devices.

Does logman not working anymore? If not, hasn't it been replaced by PS APIs?

So even there, the unnecessary and counter-productive interface churn continues to the detriment of the users.

I'm always very skeptical of refusal to handle the past because of the promise that the same won't reiterate in the future. What could also happen is that 5 years from now, you or another dev justifies refusal to handle inconsistencies developed "temporarily" and or accidentally in the meantime with exactly the same reasoning.

A more direct and simple observation is that if nobody is working on converging / cleaning up stuff, they don't converge and aren't cleaned up.

As for the amount of backward compat already provided by Windows, it is good but not great anyway. Try to play old games, install/use old VS with a few patches, install/old Matlab, use old devices, etc... Hell even try to continue to use your semi-recent devices across new build of windows, like 20H2 breaking USB-C on my XPS 15 9560 (but now I'm ranting so I'll stop :D )

When I use multiple Explorer Views, most of the time I do it, to interact between them. This is not the case for websites.

So for drag and drop interactions, two windows always beat the drag, hover over the other tab until it catches my intend to switch to this tab, and drop it there workflow.

The same goes for copy and paste. Ctrl+c, alt+tab, ctrl+v. I'm sure there is a corresponding command to cycle through the tabs, but alt+tab is deep muscle memory, that it beats this command always.

It's ctrl+tab. And shift will reverse direction in both. It's nice and related.

And then there's MacOS, where cmd-tab doesn't cycle through windows, but through applications. Cmd-` cycles through windows of the same application. Because apparently, using multiple applications and multiple windows means you're a bad boy and need to be punished.

I guess it's dependent on the number of applications and windows you have going at any given time.

I have been in love with - and 10x more productive using - TotalCommander!

The ability to >98% of the file related tasks from the keyboard is very addictive!!!

So if you wanted an "unlocked" windows RT, couldn't you just have run windows 8?

Win32 was not removed from Windows RT, but your access to it (if your name wasn't "Microsoft"; because that low-level access was reportedly how they got Office on it) was.

And because of Secure Boot, which (unlike x86, for now) is mandated enabled for Windows on ARM systems, you had to wait for an unpatchable security hole in the booting process (which, while it exists, wasn't relevant until past the end of the Surface RT's lifecycle), you couldn't run full Windows 8 or a tablet-first Linux distro.

Windows RT was just Windows 8 with a locked code signing policy, yup. And yes, Office on Windows RT was Win32, as were File Explorer, MMC, ... it's just recompiled Win8 after all.

As for preventing inconsistencies in future, try getting your QA team back.

My probably unpopular opinion is that the registry is the worst feature in Windows. It’s bloat directly impacts the speed of the operating system.

Seems like such a waste for so many advancements in Windows but the registry sticks around like a bad hangover.

Also there is nothing like "bloat". No process needs too loop around or smth like that, so there is literally no way to have a forgotten registry item slowing down your PC.

And last but not least: What are the alternatives? .plist config files like with Apple, scattering around the system?

The critique against the Windows registry stems from the Windows 95 days when the registry could become corrupt and repair or reinstall was necessary. However since then the registry works like a database, it has transaction logs and simultaneous writes are atomic. Registry is also strongly typed, not a bunch of strings. Registry can easily be backed up and restored.

Do you have any evidence of this? I remember in the XP days the German c't computer magazine tested populating the registry with hundreds MBs of garbage and found no performance impact at all.

I do not really think one is better than the other.

I don't see any alternative on where entire OS could be configured other than registry.