What I, and probably non-power users want out of windows is for it to be faster and use less power. I'd honestly be happy to go back to a Win95 interface with the latest kernel.

Microsoft needs to fire the idiots that keep messing around with the UX. It's not broke, stop trying to fix it.

UX folks don't get paid to leave things alone.

But, noooooo, the company decides developers must perpetually change the software and designers need to perpetually change the UI, and therefore you must continue to pay for it, regardless of whether you want any of those changes.

If I were in charge of Windows product strategy I think I would create competing subdivisions that replicate the model of Linux distributions but on the NT kernel. Sworn to binary compatibility but inspired to try different monetization schemes.

Meanwhile my mind has taken a deeper dive into the rabbit hole fantasy of competing Windows distribution divisions. I'd expect it to seem like a total failure : the surface. E.g. with Steam users refusing to get lured into the "gamer Windows" (something with an X in the name), the "crippled version that is entirely ad-funded" (10, basically) drawing too much hate for the entire brand while still not being crippled enough to push people to paid options and the one you can get with the Office subscription being a little too incompatible for employee lockout reasons with the plethora of in-house essentials required to run at customers. But Microsoft could still come out stronger, having a well defined place for bad ideas to go to die. And who knows, one of the niche distributions might be essentially sysinternals with a kernel and a package manager.

For corporate and government, it was not free. And these are where the money is.

I once worked for a corp that didn't have subscription. The rationale was, that is was not important who was running which version at their computer, and the subscription was thus a cost on top of OEM license that didn't bring any value. Since the computers were refreshed every 4-5 years anyway, they always had a supported Windows version.

Problem is, most software doesn't exist in a vacuum; it is part of an ecosystem. Security updates that you might pay for are not enough, because the ecosystem is constantly changing around the program you bought.

I'm author of HashBackup. It uses remote object storage services so if there are incompatible changes made on the storage side, the software has to adapt. What if IP4 is no longer supported? Adapt. A library like Boto2 gets rewritten and the old version loses support. Adapt. Google Sites decides to force you to migrate to a new version that looks like shit. This just happened to me, and it's so bad I'm having to do a whole new documentation site.

Just keeping software working has become a big challenge because of ecosystem changes.

Stop changing things just to change them. But if you're actually changing for a good reason, consider the downstream effects of your changes.

I can take a bash script from 20, maybe 30 years ago, and know that it will still do what it's supposed to do, and all the standard commands it calls, like sed, awk, and grep will also do what they are supposed to do. Bits don't rot by themselves. Careless developers in the ecosystem make changes and don't consider backward compatibility, and we euphemistically call it "bit rot."

That's a bit unfair. The iPhone 13 just came out and one of the memes and jokes going around is that it looks the same as the previous phone and users are just buying the same thing again. Even tech people I know are joking about it.

So the UI people are always going to be busy because even people in the industry equate looks to changes. If the looks don't change they will all be scratching their heads confused why this is Windows 11 when it looks identical to 10.

There are even companies outside software business, that pay contractors per tickets, basically a budget is assigned and the contractor does as much tickets as they are capable of for the given budget.

Now the quality of the code is not for the faint of heart.

apple podcasts is a fine example, among others, of this conundrum. on every iteration an "improvement" makes the app less usable. on the last iteration they decided that i should now "follow" shows and not "subscribe" to them. what's worse is that some screens had the old and the new names resulting in extreme confusion. on that same iteration, someone decided that the way i was deleting episodes wasn't cool enough. so they replaced a working feature with a half-working one!

please leave the podcasts app alone.

I’ve been using Podcruncher since 2010. Manual downloads, no hiding episodes, custom playlists. All in a straightforward interface. It is amazing that Apple with its resources can’t deliver anything comparable.

Iteration on designs is of course permitted, but there’s more pressure on “get it right” rather than “dirty MVP”. Once launched, changes can’t go to prod-lest they lose their bonus-and emphasis is more on more in-depth and longer-term user research and refining the design.

This way design teams are still doing valuable work, and there’s no crunch to both design something and then get it out ASAP. The next time front-end teams come back to work on any kind of UI refresh everything is already sorted and ready to go.

The absolute worst is the macOS Music app, which doesn’t seem to allow basic things such as dragging from search results to playlists.

"Modern" UX does involve a lot of dumb antipatterns and things that break usability, but I don't think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater here.

Hence not all in the dark side.

I call it the "BIG BATAN" ideology, as everything needs to be a clean oversized button without any extra options or functionality. Stupid mobile OS features creeping into desktop for no good reason.

I swear if MS eventually removes the don't group fallback I'm finally ditching Win for KDE and never coming back.

  > I swear if MS eventually removes the don't group fallback
  > I'm finally ditching Win for KDE and never coming back.

I have been using KDE on-and-off since 2001 before switching fully in 2005, and in all that time KDE has had a single disruptive UI switch, going from KDE 3 to KDE 4. The upgrade to KDE 5 went all but unnoticed.

I'd actually like a modern pen-enabled PC, but they seem to be getting worse at software (and batteries!) over time. And when I'm at a desk with a keyboard, mouse, and large monitor, nothing else from MS beats the classic 2K/XP (7's okay too) UI.

[0] - https://rammichael.com/7-taskbar-tweaker

Taskbar can no longer be moved.

That single "improvement" will keep me away for as long as possible. It's the first thing I change when setting up a new Windows environment, and have done it for over a decade. I'm enough not alone that I've seen in mentioned in multiple articles.

MS makes all kinds of noise about "reworking the UI from the ground up for true usability" or some such. Yet I have no idea what could possibly be the benefit to removing such functionality. MS says they listen, but obviously not.

Unless a developer has a massive and utterly revolutionary improvement in the way we interact with the machine, and it yields 10X productivity improvements (or even 3X) for 90% of the user base - fkn leave it alone!!

Marginal improvements are the worst - the time spent relearning, or fumbling while using a different machine is never recovered, and it just makes people annoyed at you. Even if the improvements are "free" the price is too high.

...are we talking about the same Apple and Google? Big Sur? Material You?

Sure, maybe it’s not “every” release, but only because they have a faster release cadence than Windows.

And this is the key. UI refreshes are fine as long as they don’t add unnecessary friction to the user experience.

Apple’s refreshes are also generally complete, cohesive and coherent. Yes they have the odd inconsistency here and there but largely the design system feels fully thought out at a high level. (I would perhaps put built-in apps like Podcasts and Music to one side here as I have far less charitable opinions around some of those UI updates - I’m mainly talking about the core OS experience).

I’m an experienced user of macOS and Windows and I cannot remember the last time I upgraded a macOS version and couldn’t just immediately carry on with my work without any major reorientation needed. Likewise with iOS. And Apple is iterating on their UI at a much faster pace than Microsoft.

And yet I have Windows VMs and Servers that I’ve used for years now and I still cannot fathom where they have moved setting X because it’s literally all over the place. Their UI updates are mostly incoherent, incomplete and just plain baffling.

The hash they’ve made of settings is just incredible. I have no idea how normal users navigate that crap. Even if you can stay in the top-level “dumbed down” layer of the settings UI it’s completely unintuitive in many places.

I’ve not seen an improvement to the start menu that has benefited my usability in any way since Windows 2000. I’m constantly confused with the various different start menus across servers running different Windows versions. Contrast that to the dock in macOS which has basically been the same simple and usable design paradigm for over 20 years with gentle refinement over that time. The only consistent thing Microsoft seem to keep doing to the start menu is they make more space for ads. FFS.

I’m not even going to get into the aggressive, seemingly-can’t-be-stopped forced updates…

I’m bullish on Microsoft’s .NET developer ecosystem and mainly positive about their Cloud strategy - the company has made some impressive changes over the last decade, but my god, Windows is a total car crash at the moment.

There are a couple of Google IO sessions where the presenter goes through how to custom write Android views to match Material.

Then a couple of years of comunity complaints they released a Material custom theme for Android that still doesn't implement 1:1 their UI/UX specification.

When this framework was finally catching up with Material documentation, they release Material You.

"It's easy. Just add a cog icon for settings!"

Then, there's the whole free/ad supported model wherein you need an MS account, etc. I don't want to be integrated into your cloud metaverse. I don't want OneNote. I don't want Teams. I don't want to go through a whole phony tablet-like experience to get to the stuff I need.

I just want to use my machine as the productivity/dev tool I purchased.

I think they fundamentally no longer understand what the product is or should be.

On the contrary, I think they know what the product is quite well: it's you. All the ads they're shoving into everything are evidence that even if you're paying for it, you are still the product being sold.

But, in terms of delivery, form-factor, packaging, etc., they have no idea how to pull it off with any coherence.

I've always assumed the "let's profile and sell the data" was a either a bubble waiting to pop in the face of something GDPR-alike, or a tail-wag-the-dog scenario where they're gradually killing $100-per-sale products for 30-cents-per-user-per-month of new revenue. Would be fascinating for both consumers and investors to see what dollar figures they're using.

fire the idiots that keep messing around with the UX

Don’t push on them too hard, maybe they are bound by some evil contract. Legend has it, one guy sold his soul to make the new PATH= editing dialog after 666 weeks (~13 years) of negotiations.

But that one in Win 10 at least seems like an improvement

There could have been better ways to keep it modern, but just leaving everything alone because “it works” isn’t really an option. First comes Unicode, then 4K/High-dpi scaling, then touch support and so on.

Once high DPI screens arrived, UIs that scaled poorly literally don’t work.

This is done by marking the application DPI aware using the settings found in the manifest file.

The manifest file is then embedded into the resource section of the application, which then lets the OS know the application will be handling it's own DPI.

So the reason many of those 'legacy apps' don't work with HiDPI is they don't have those required manifest changes in place.

That then means the OS does the DPI scaling on behalf of the application and that results in poor scaling outcomes.

> something assumes Pixels or DIP incorrectly.

These are exactly the types of problems legacy applications run into.

They will contain hard coded assumption in their code and many of those will be 'pixel based' assumptions.

That is how a well behaved 'DPI Aware' application should work.

However, even for those badly written DPI applications that don't listen for those changes, the work around is to first make the required DPI changes and then restart those badly written DPI applications, as they will then pick up those DPI changes on startup.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/d...

Marking the app DPI aware just stops Windows doing any application scaling as it leaves that scaling up to the application.

But the real issue is most legacy apps were written before DPI scaling was an issue so they don't have this built in scaling.

To fix this Windows will do a 'one size fits all' scaling on their behalf.

It is this default Windows scaling that makes these legacy apps look so bad at higher DPI settings.

> Marlett is a TrueType font that has been used in Microsoft Windows since Windows 95. The operating system uses this font to create user interface icons that are used in the menus and windows.

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

The UI that remains unchanged in a few years is perceived as old and obsolete, hence the purely marketing driven need to change it even when it works. And then there are new courses and new support contracts. Governments are a significant part of MS customer base; every time MS changes something, it's new money pouring in. As someone once said, Windows is not an operating system, it's a business platform.

They used the calculator as an example, saying that it saw several improvements but since it always looked the same, people thought nothing had changed. Improvements included things like better arithmetics, so that (10/3-3)*3=1.

https://www.pacifict.com/Story/

For the non-reader:

NPR Radio Piece

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/284/should-i-stay-or-should...

Google Tech Talk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMyg5ohTsVY

People sometimes criticize the Windows calculator for perceived errors in the results even though it is a superficially simple program. What they fail to account for are the edge cases, those quirks of computation that manifest themselves for various reasons (e.g. the precision of floating point, simplifications that appear simple to a person yet are non-trivial to implement in a program). A shipping product is not the same thing as a simple calculator tutorial a novice programmer may follow.

No they haven't. I hate Windows and love my Mac, but being forced into an upgrade from High Sierra to Big Sur sucks... a ton of the features I used all the time got buried behind click-and-hold etc.

There's surely a management book to be written documenting the dysfunctional processes that result in disaster after disaster.

I completely agree.

But look on even HN, if anyone mentions a library they're using you get the inevitable comment about how there's not been a PR in 3 months so the project must be dead. Do a search of HN for the word "Modern" and look how many projects assert themselves as such.

> Nobody wants that!

Apparently, they do. It's just you and I that don't and we aren't enough.

I would be happy to be even on Win3 interface with the latest kernel: themes and colors that worked almost on every f application! bonus: thick BORDERS! look now at the pathetic 1pixel borders they have (and NO F way to change that)

Maybe they need to check their ego at the door and do the job they're paid to do? There's a reason it's called work and not happy-fun-time.

Any rational company would sign-up for that immediately.

This is a general problem with corporate developed commercial software. Nobody ever got promoted by saying, "this is great, let's not change it."

The new UI should 1) actually expose all of the settings and 2) offer a toggle to default to the UI that sits behind everything anyway.

Otherwise, I just don't understand the need to tweak with UI design that roughly 20 years of Windows users have already learned.

My mother also agrees with me on this. She’s been progressively hating Windows more every release too.

... that's a fairly complete list of improvements to Windows since, I dunno, Win2k, that I care about. Most other changes have been neutral, or made it worse.

[EDIT] oh, and two of those three probably would have been at least as good as high-quality add-ons (like the Spectacle example is, on macOS), so as far as really vital stuff goes, making drivers suck a lot less is just about it.

E.g: 11 - bad, 10 - good, 8 - bad, 7 - good, Vista - bad, XP - good, etc, etc.

I co-manage about 150 Windows machines at my org, I'm in no hurry to try Windows 11 ATM.

I'm not sure I would characterize newer UI as more hostile. Some better adjective might be infantilizing, dumbed-down - for the most part; or there's a dichotomy between the UI for dummies part and arcane, not-well-documented, difficult-to-locate parts. This dichotomy was somewhat less pronounced in the past.

That 95 interface is STILL there, buried under 1000 clicks through an unnavagable interface..

Including important features that are not accessible in UI. Like all scheduled tasks run as low priority, no UI to change that.

Windows 2K + cleartype would be perfect.

Actually people seem to focus a lot on UX but in terms of the core features (handling my hardware and managing processes) windows has improved a lot. I also fondly remember win2k but I think it would be absolutely awful to use now.

Also some of the old elements don't work well anymore. Like new menus that appear in certain folders, except you'd never know because the menu bar is hidden by default. Or forms that were never designed to resize.