UX was constantly trying to remove the start menu, I remember hearing that it was Bill Gates who was adamant that it stay in. I had a good laugh at Win8 when they finally got their chance to remove it and totally messed it up.

Now the Win11 UI is so slow that it feels like every click must be hitting telemetry first. When I right click I see the normal context menu briefly before the simplified context menu. Sometimes it’s so slow enough that buttons will move right before I click on them.

I now have a stutter in games making them unplayable. Having to boot into Linux for games is not something expected to happen so soon. I still use Windows for legacy reasons but few things would make me happier than deleting my windows partition for good.

This reminds me of an experience with Windows 10 a few years ago.

I tried to start cmd.exe and nothing happened. Tried a bunch of times more. Still nothing...

I was connected to a WiFi network that allowed ping to the entire Internet but not TCP connections. Then I switched to a WiFi network that allowed TCP connections to the Internet and 20+ cmd.exe instances started all at once.

I thought: "Wait, that can't be true", but it was reproducible.

This makes me wonder if launching programs takes longer on a slow internet connection.

I do not know if this still happens as I have only used Windows 10 on a handful of occasions since then.

That's a fascinating dynamic. We can't make our product better, because that would suggest that it isn't already good enough.

Drop down menus are so much quicker to scan

Another commenter mentioned OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org/) but i'd also like to suggest LibreOffice (https://www.libreoffice.org/) as a capable and reasonably compatible alternative to MS Office, which retain the old look of dropdown menus.

If you don't have the need to support very particular features of Office, then it might just be suitable to retain your preferred way of navigating the UI of an office suite app - on my personal computers i have just LibreOffice (with which i finished my bachelor's and master's thesis), whereas on my work computer i have both LibreOffice and Word, for those few exceptions when the latter is necessary.

That said, i can understand why many would also find the ribbon UI to be easy to navigate, should they get used to it. That's why some Office clones, like WPS Office (https://www.wps.com/office/linux/) and FreeOffice (https://www.freeoffice.com/en/) seem to copy it with varying degrees of success. That said, personally i like the open source nature of LibreOffice too and the file format itself not being proprietary.

In case anyone would like to try it out, it's under:

  View > User Interface > (pick one of the Tabbed options, there are quite a few)

Still i wonder how much it effects my productivity decline in Office since i still search sometimes for functionality. In anyway it made me hate office and made Switch to open Office wherever i can. However I attribute it to having kicked of my quest for a plaintext workflow because beeing f*ked over by feature bloat and Designer circle jerking once to many times.

Simplicity is king. Maybe its just the age that makes me realize that there are just to many layers of complexity.

I feel for the young learners that get thrown into this world and dont even understand the concept of a file system tree anymore. It has been abstracted away. it's not in the cloud! It's in the app with 3 klicks reachable or doesn't exist.

There are around 6 Documents folders/libraries/whatever in File Explorer, going to a combination of my work OneDrive, my personal OneDrive and my local user folder. There's one weird Documents that goes to the Documents in both OneDrives. There's a My Documents that give an error. I've a work Sharepoint folder that was also named Documents. I tried renaming them, which didn't work, and has just left me even more confused how to find things. If I go to the command line and do "dir C:\Users\<me>\Documents" which of this do I find? And how do I get to the others? And which ones get backed up where?

It's a complete mess. I sympathise now with the people who keep every file on the desktop.

Every time I go back to Linux, I feel a wave of relief: I see my files in a single dir tree under /home, searching works predictably.

How did Microsoft get to this?

Avoid the "My Computer" paradigm.

    C: System
    D: Data (business data and main work area for product design data)
    F: Library (stuff you rarely touch, PDF's, books, references, "knowledgebase", etc.)
    G: Backup (external)
    S: Swap and Scratch Files (this is actually a RAM-based 128 GB drive for speed)
    Z: Development (mostly for web development, VM storage, etc.)

The other thing this facilitates is backup. You can backup and restore each of the logical/functional units separately, as full drives.

This also makes upgrading the system or the entire computer far simpler. The separation between OS and data makes it so.

Way back when, before the registry was a thing, you could upgrade your OS without having to reinstall the applications. While I understand the advantages of common DLL's and the centralized management of common settings and code, I do miss the ability to not only separate data from the OS, but also applications. I don't think that is ever coming back.

Isn't it better to just have the RAM as RAM than to have the same RAM used to provide swap space on a RAM disk?

One of the primary motivations for using a RAM disk was to not beat-up SSD's with the kind of access swap space gets.

The advantage of a hardware RAM-based drive is that it is extremely fast. When these machines were built, this was the fastest way to get data on and off a swap drive.

Today SSD's are super fast. On some machines we now have a separate dedicated 250 GB SSD for swap. If it craps out, you throw it away and pop in a new one. No worries about comingling valuable data with swap space.

I still have my muscle memory tuned to creating and using only:

  C:\Games
  C:\Music
  C:\Movies
  C:\Pictures
  C:\Torrents
  C:\Workspace

  C:\Users\ChuckNorris89\Pictures\ or whatever.

Or maybe this just shows how old I am.

  %CSIDL_MYPICTURES%
  %USERPROFILE%\Pictures

You can also add your own environment variables.

  setx pix "%SYSTEMROOT%\Pictures"

Distros and package managers putting binaries in completely different spots. Is it /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin? Who knows!

If anyone is curious:

Historically /bin and /sbin contained the binaries that were necessary to bring up the system (especially to mount the /usr partition, which was "best practice" to have separately from the root and /boot partitions). Nowadays most distros just symlink them to /usr/(s)bin

/usr/sbin is for utilites that only root should use, whereas /usr/bin is for regular applications managed by your system (i.e.: your distro's default package manager).

My Computer paradigm is long gone. They call it "This Computer" or just "Computer" now. There is no "My".

It still baffles me though how the Windows designers assumed it would be a great idea to bless me with a predefined "3D Objects" folder (right under "This PC"), which comes at the top of the list due to alphabetical ordering, and can't be removed. I wonder what percentage of users actually need this.

The UI in regards to navigating files in Windows is indeed a mess. A personal gripe that i have with it, that's even worse than some of what you named is the file open/save dialog - there's not just one (that would let you write the file path in the bar and thus allow you to copy paths from Explorer to it), but many different ones for different programs! This essentially makes it so that using some software like GIMP and navigating around the filesystem with it is needlessly annoying!

Add on small annoyances like Windows search by default trying to look into the contents of many files, thus making search needlessly slow and also things like it not supporting mounting remote directories over SFTP (which should get at least a bit of attention) instead of always having to use SMB or whatever, and you have a somewhat problematic daily experience.

Of course, there are also things that it does better than some other systems/configurations, like having the whole recycle bin concept, with ctrl+Z allowing you to undo file deletions, file moves or even renaming files, which makes dealing with user error on your part more easy! Just checked on Linux Mint - the recycle bin works as you'd expect, but there is no ctrl+z to restore the last deleted file automatically.

> Every time I go back to Linux, I feel a wave of relief: I see my files in a single dir tree under /home, searching works predictably.

About this, i'm also somewhat torn. The filesystem structure on most Linux distros also just feels weird, although it's for historical compatibility reasons (not quite as bad as Windows having two oddly named Program Files directories, but still). I doubt that we couldn't structure things in a more reasonable manner, than having all of the following for just executables, for example:

  /bin/
  /sbin/
  /usr/bin/
  /usr/local/bin/
  /usr/local/sbin/

Throw in /opt and /usr/share and whatnot and it's a recipe for different bits of software out there using different configurations because of differing opinions about what would be suitable for their use cases. The same mess actually extends to what's in the /home directory - sure, in most cases you can back it up and restore it, but once again every piece of software will have its own opinions about how to structure its data, be it in a visible/hidden config file, a visible/hidden folder for the application itself, or something else.

Of course, Windows also has a similar mess going on with Program Data and AppData folders, as well as Documents and whatnot, so Linux isn't the only problematic system here.

In short, i think that all have their advantages and shortcomings, here's hoping that things improve in the following decade!

At least three, if you inclde "Roaming\Appdata" (or is it "Appdata\Roaming"?), which is also a program files directory nowadays.

As for Linux, yeah... Either stick with the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, or -- if it's time to revolutionise the directory structure -- maybe something like what GoboLinux (et al?) are doing.

- / is on tmpfs

- the OS is mounted on /gnu

- system data is mounted on /var (and /etc is populated from /var/etc)

- user data is mounted on /usr

This way, I can avoid the plethora of separate tmpfs filesystems on most distro's (at least /dev, /run, /tmp, /dev/shm).

But I'm not running any desktop systems on Guix right now, just service containers. I'm would expect there to be plenty of Linux desktop software that can't handle /usr being for user data.

Note that even in the older-style file dialogs, that don't have that new (relatively speaking) breadcrumbs-style file path display at the top (like in Windows Explorer), you can still paste a path into the file name input box and it'll navigate to that folder. Relative paths also work. The only drawback is that the file name will then be reset to whatever it was when the dialog was initially opened, but other than that it works nicely.

> but many different ones for different programs! This essentially makes it so that using some software like GIMP and navigating around the filesystem with it is needlessly annoying!

The problem is a) backwards compatibility – programs can customise the file open/save dialogs to quite some extent, so they need to explicitly opt into using the new dialogs. Plus software that wanted to support older Windows versions (pre-Vista, so these days it's probably not that relevant any more, but during the Vista/7-era it definitively mattered) then needs to have code to handle both kinds of file dialogs. b) as far as I can tell, some cross platform frameworks use completely self-written file dialogs, which 1) usually mimic the older (Windows XP and older) style of Windows' dialogs and b) usually don't manage to copy all the features of Windows' native file dialogs, and instead often get some things subtly (or less subtly) wrong.

My personal gripe with the breadcrumbs file path navigation is that the breadcrumbs dropdowns don't support keyboard navigation like the main explorer window (or the file list in the file open/save dialogs) does, so when you have a folder with lots of subfolders and want to use the breadcrumbs to change the path, you then need to do lots of scrolling instead of simply being able to press a key.

Linking to my previous rant on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28994133

I do think the categorization takes a little getting used to but once you do it’s fairly trivial.

It’s also important to recognize the horizontal categorizations within each ribbon, something that can easily be missed until you know about it.

I thought the ribbon was great, but obviously you had to get used to it.

Occasionally I have to use windows and the abandonment of regular drop down menus and introduction of ribbons is really disorienting in my view. MS changes too much core UI. I like that Apple is more conservative and keep stuff that works. Keeping the menu bar but adding a search bar to it was a much better solution in my opinion. It allows us to use a well established UI paradigm while also making it easier to find well hidden entries.

Hunting through stuff in the ribbon is not easy.

I think anything that changes nothing is more willing to have faithful users but changes can be good if done in a utilitarian way considering different types of users.

How is this an indication of UI/UX (where UX is how things should work, but not implementing it) failures? It sounds like this one is purely on the development org for writing someone that has poor performance and/or not prioritising improving it.

To make this obvious, let me use an analogy. If a vegan restaurant found a very successful steakhouse and decided to copy their decor of say game animal heads and rifles on the wall, it would probably decrease their sales regardless of how faithfully they match the aesthetics.

The context matters. Also the fact that both imaginary businesses are in the same industry of serving food isn't enough of a similarity. It's quite specific.

And even if the contexts match, the pursuit just makes them seen as a knockoff; a laggard, an imitation.

The goal isn't to meet the competition, it's either to beat it or be somewhere else.

Intentionally making yourself a 2nd rate Apple isn't a positioning strategy; they could simply introduce a discount line and knock you out in a single blow. It's phenomenally stupid

The center of window management in macOS I'd say is easy access to Mission Control (prev. Exposé). All Macs come with either a huge, multi-touch trackpad or a Magic Mouse with gestures to trigger it. I sometimes use my Macbook with a "normal" mouse— I've mapped all extra buttons to trigger Mission Control commands otherwise I wouldn't be able to effectively navigate my way around.

Moreover, full-screen windows are automatically made their own desktop, so one switches between these windows using desktop switching. I actually am just now remembering that the Dock supports window switching with a ctrl-click: I completely forgot since I only use it for rudimentary app switching and for windows it's all Mission Control and desktops.

This, is context at the OS-level and hardware levels, but of course there's also the user base and what they're used to after years of using their computers.

Copying some individual elements is just really dumb. For example, Gnome 3 copied the mac menu bar. Except menus don't actually go there (windows still have their own menu bar), negating the very meaning of having an unified menu bar.

The result is that my desktop now has a ugly-ass, useless, wasteful black bar on top. Why.

I have to agree with the OP, it's the triumph of form over function.

I use Windows Blinds on my Win10 system to make it look like Win98, which is close enough to 2K.

And for extra lulz, my screensaver is the Windows 95 loading screen.

macOS isn’t perfect but Apple hasn’t mangled core features like the task bar and start menu for something that is superficially prettier but lacks a bunch of actually useful features that used to exist.

but if majority of your lead designers never in their lives used the taskbar they are surprised when replacing it with a dock causes outcry

That, likely, highly depends on your industry. Designers doing mobile application design, as well as web design from my limited experience tend to steer towards Macs. Even within my college the entire graphics design department was Macs. Of course if you are working on a Windows based product you'd in theory expect the designers to use or be familiar enough with Windows but you may be surprised.

I'd be curious to know if there are regional (country) differences in this.

It’s tragic that because of elitism Microsoft does not hire those designers and instead hires designers who don’t care about their product.

When you have over a billion users worldwide there's an expectation that you don't treat your product like a startup's art project. I haven't met a single person who wasn't completely confused by Windows 8's UI or who liked the changes. I've seen lifelong Windows users spend 10+ minutes desperately looking for the shutdown button.

There's "inspiration" by different products but in the end you need to know your own product in order to improve it.

If you want innovation, how about performance, accessibility, compatibility,...

And I'm not an indestructible 20-year-old either :)

All laptops have a very special feature called external monitor support. And for some laptops, you can even buy docks.

Boom!

I know, it's amazing.

Arrogance is not doing any or ongoing competitive analysis.

If someone is selling something that's out of reach, financially, for most people, then making a cheaper and worse product available can still be good. Doesn't mean you prefer it.

I'm guessing Microsoft don't want to think of themselves as "the poor man's OS" however. And, they're not, it costs something like £120.

This discussing thread is getting lost in the weeds.

We were talking about people <<designing>> Windows.

For sure they should be using it, <<day-to-day>>. They should feel the same pain as their users are feeling and they should want to improve it.

Anything else is a travesty and that's how you end up with enterprise software (designed for the CEO, used by the peons), or Android apps (designed for iOS by people with iPhones, used by peons on Android).

The hardest part I think is working and sharing work 2 different systems at the same time. Not that the technical solutions do not exists, but muscle memory will always make that one system end up feeling unbearable and it might not because it is worse but by resistance to change.

In the case of UI/UX, I don't want this.

I use Windows because it's not MacOS. I absolutely hate MacOS. Microsoft UI/UX designers using MacOS as inspiration is a critical bug, not a feature, as far as I'm concerned.

I want my taskbar to show labels. I want multiple windows of the same app to be a separate item on the taskbar so that switching between multiple windows of the same app is a single click. I want each window to have its own menu bar, rather than a single menu bar at the top. I want a taskbar on each monitor, each showing only the items on that monitor.

Windows 10 has all these as an option. If Win11 is imitating MacOS, all those go away.

"Whereas MacOS is free, it's included with the machine and Apple doesn't charge for it separately"?

But how much of the price you pay for that machine is because of the OS, that's an unknown. Maybe the actual development costs, distributed per device, are available somewhere deep in the bowels of Apple accounting, but that doesn't tell us how much of the (inflated) price you pay for the box is due to the OS. Microsoft's dev costs for Windows probably aren't £120 a copy either (especially considering what a tiny minority of users actually pays exactly that, as an explicit item separate from the hardware).

So I reckon Windows still actually is "the poor man's OS": You probably pay more than that for MacOS, only it's baked into the cost of the hardware so you don't know how much, exactly, it is you're paying.

Ask gamers that paid $3000 for the graphics card alone, I recon their opinion will differ

MacOS sure ain't the poor man's OS.

Windows always had a price, even if that price was included by the OEM in the price of the device.

Let me repeat that:

   only Macs, of course

* IS just an upgrade. Those Macs all came with an OS originally, didn' they?

* ISN'T actually "free": You have to buy a Mac first. They cost money -- quite a lot of it, compared to most other PCs, I've heard.

I've dealt with this at a few companies and it's really crazy. I've seen them tank products more than once because they ignore everyone and are given unquestionable power.

It's absurd. They have as much capacity to be wrong as anybody else

When the iPhone became successful, before that it was all utility, then fashion took priority when the iPhone out sold literally everything.

Pretend everything else about the iPhone happened; The charisma and leadership of Steve Jobs, the brilliant marketing, the countless number of talented software engineers, but instead the device basically looks like a blackberry.

Physical keyboard, plastic case, More or less a knock off aesthetically.

We're deep in counterfactual territory but I think it can be argued that this imagined iphone with a very conventional aesthetic would have done effectively just as well. It still connects to iTunes and hooks up to your Mac, having all the same technical features and functionality.

The point is people see something successful, then they assign one of the attributes as the driver of the success and there seems to be very little reflection of the two core questions: (1) is it true? (2) is it generalizable to other companies?

And let's say it is. Are you really going to make something that's more iPhoney than an iPhone? More macosy then macos?

So even conceding those two points, which I think are utterly contestable, It still doesn't make any sense. Maybe that's why it's never worked. Maybe. Who knows?

> Pretend everything else about the iPhone happened; The charisma and leadership of Steve Jobs, the brilliant marketing, the countless number of talented software engineers, but instead the device basically looks like a blackberry.

> Physical keyboard, plastic case, More or less a knock off aesthetically.

> We're deep in counterfactual territory but I think it can be argued that this imagined iphone with a very conventional aesthetic would have done effectively just as well.

Yeah, but AFAICS that doesn't really contradict the hypothesis. Sure, I might agree with your counterfactual and also conclude that it wasn't really the design -- and, side note, I think what was originally meant here was the narrower sense of the ever-dumbed-down GUI, not physical characteristics like keyboard or not -- that led to the iPhone's breakout success... But just because you and I think so, CEOs didn't (necessarily) agree.

If they thought it was the cheery skeumorphic (and later stylised, then rounded-corner, then sharp-edge-rectangular, then rounded-corner again... yadda yadda) graphical design that led to the market success, then they started listening only to graphical designers, and that is what has elevated graphical designers to "gods" over actual developers.

And that's not just a counter-hypothesis to yours, but my theory; it's how I think it actually happened.

Heck even supposedly technically minded people will say things like "Apple invented the mouse" or they had "the first mp3 player" or "the first smartphone".

There's a circus about them that permits them to stomp out history before their first performance and mark it as irrelevant.

Musk is also a master of this craft. Founder of Tesla? You'd be surprised. Founder of PayPal? Go look that up.

These people could have been excellent actors if their businesses had failed

And how do you think they would do that?

Apple sometimes uses a bit of hyperbole to describe itself (https://512pixels.net/2014/01/apple-boilerplate/), but I don’t think Apple ever claimed "Apple invented the mouse" or they had "the first mp3 player" or "the first smartphone".

I also have never met anybody who made such claims, only people saying there are people who make such claims.

It also would be weird for them to do so. Their marketing differentiates their products from the competition, and has been doing that for years.

The competition sells MP3 players, the iPod was a _music_player_ or just the iPod (look at https://youtube.com/watch?v=kN0SVBCJqLs, and count how often Steve says music before he says mp3. [1]); the iPhone an iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device (https://youtube.com/watch?v=x7qPAY9JqE4), the iPad just the iPad.

[1] There’s a claim in hat video that Apple invented FireWire. I think that is mostly correct. They were the driving force there.

Particularly so since in the Keynotes where SJ introduced e.g. the iPod he shows the state of the competition and has a good critique before introducing his 'lame' replacement.

Like this.

It lets you have video and web browsing, and what actually lets apps be useful.

Before the iPhone, the UX was basically fixed and couldn't be iterated on, and the screen space was ~240p or 144 tops

iPhone was ways ahead in usability compared to everything else back then.

For all the faults of Apple, they needed to define how smartphones look like and act. Mobile OSes were horrible pain to use. People tolerated that because there was nothing else out there.

It's not about buttons or even copy-paste as weird as that sounds for a techie.

But zooming on a map with your fingers was a game changer. Zooming an imagine with your fingers. Using your fingers to scroll a list, naturally. And lists are probably the most common UI element except for buttons, labels and images. They're for sure the most common complex element.

It wasn't a "few features" (techie speak), it was a "new way of working" (usually marketing speak, but here it was actually true).

W11 is a few missing features for an existing way of working.

The iPhone had a few missing features for a fundamentally new way of working that was much superior to existing smartphones.

Your complaint was like the handlebars on the new bike being hard to push (which I can workaround by pushing harder, up to a point) while the old bike had square wheels and a chassis meant only for square wheels (which I could not work around).

pinch to zoom doesn't interfere in any way with easy app installation or easy files transfer, they can coexist (and they do, on android), sync simply doesn't work when you want to quickly drop that one specific file and keep moving, sync doesn't work when one device has much bigger storage than the other, sync doesn't work when you want to easily remove files from one device

"paradigm shift" to golden cage is not a good thing, apple intended to take all responsibility from users but at a cost of being unable to do anything efficiently

The original iPhone didn't have an app store, apps were supposed to be web apps.

If you're going to rewrite history, at least do it well.

I get it, you're a techie, just like me. I use Android, I don't like iOS.

But to deny that for the average person the iPhone was the first usable smartphone is just silly at this point.

Navigating a 2D space with my fingers, just dragging around or pinching to zoom, is also much, much faster and more convenient faster than than doing the same with arrow keys (again, either physical or on-display ones).

And navigating through the OS and apps, either through lists and 2D spaces (websites, images, maps, videos, etc.) is a lot more common than copying files around on phones. 100:1, probably. Again, some techie/advanced functionality was lost at the start, but the time and frustration savings from those basic yet intuitive features heavily outweighed their loss.

If you don't agree with this, I guess you either haven't tried pre-iPhone smartphones or you just have a very unorthodox opinion and I'm not very keen to continue this conversation.

It's more like switching from using a spook to move soup to your bowl to eating a sandwich instead

It took until last year to get an apps list and not have to have everything pinned to my start screen.

Don't even get me started on the Blackberry devices of the era. Missed the keyboard still though.

HTC, Sony, Moto, RIM - there's a reason these companies barely exist in the same form anymore. Samsung were the first to consistently catch-up to Apple - largely because they're official strategy at that point was 'copy Apple'

Let me describe you what the phones scene was looking like just before iphone was released. They were fine for making phone calls, sending texts/e-mails (in blackberry case), and taking an occasional photo if you had a high end Nokia. That's it. The phones had very long lists of features nobody actually used. Yes they had rudimenatry browers, but why browse if the pages look nothing like the real ones and it was extremely expensive outside of being connected to wifi.

When iphone was released it was very obvious that it was on a completely different level to what we had until then. Yes, one could argue that it was missing some minor functionalities like SMS character counter which was very standard. But the first time you see it, when you saw that the screen can be smooth scrolled, that you use fingers completely naturally to do any kind of actions (vs styluses which were crap), when you see that everything is presented clearly and nicely, that the screen is nice and bright, and GUI easy to use, it seemed like the device came from the future. In many ways it was like a pocket computer.

I got the second batch of first iphone (the one which could be unlocked by some means so I could use it in my country) and showed it to my friends at college who all had high-end phones. You should have seen their faces. They had no idea what they were looking at. And no, they never watched Jobs's presentation or anything. Most of them didn't even know who he was, or were exposed to any kind of Apple marketing. Actually it was the reverse, Nokia and similar were established brands. The phone was judged on its own and it was almost magical to us.

And I still didn't come to the best thing about it.

It brought internet to your pocket. Not only the browser would render the pages like they've looked on your computer, but it was very usable which was unseen before. Have you actually tried to browse internet on a Nokia phone at that time? It was complete shit. That pinch to zoom/in out was actually revolutionary as well.

The second part of the revolution was people actually wanted to use the phone to browse the internet, so Apple and users both put pressure on the ISPs to lower the prices of cellular data. And believe it or not, they did. They lowered the prices so much to make it from one of the most expensive resources in the world to the cheapest. That alone is groundbreaking.

The third part, even though it happened some very short years after that, was that it enabled programs which were actually usable paving way to the whole mobile app ecosystem which we have now. How many people were writing software for a living on a mobile device before iphone? How many do you think are doing it now? The iphone kickstarted the whole industry.

And all of this was actually made possible by excellent software and hardware design (not fashion, they are usually diametrically opposite!). Nothing of this would happen if it wasn't for that design. If iphone was just another N95, nothing would have happened whatever people thought of Apple marketing. Nothing would have happened if the browser was difficult to use, the UI lagging, or needed a stylus to use. It all had to come together for it work. And they've managed to pull it off spectacularly. It makes it very easy to argue that the most important Jobs' legacy is the iPhone.

"Because many users are appraising apple's looks, by cloning apple we'll also get praised by our users right?" "Then we can get Apple users to use windows too!"

I'm still dismayed that in Windows 10 you still basically have 2 separate UI/UX experiences to configure the damn OS.

Luckily that was a VM in my Linux box (the luck is that I use Linux, not Windows.) The Linux equivalent would be either cron or systemd, which are configured with text files that I can type full screen if I care. Microsoft made a ton of work building those graphical UIs and in some case the result is worse than not doing it and using text files. Note that GUIs are not magical. To do what I was up to I still had to look for documentation and eventually had to type some XML in a text area. That is to start a task after another one completed.

What's dismaying is that in that four decades it's now just regression. I admittedly have used MacOS for a couple of decades -- simple and it works well enough, but always run Windows as a secondary OS and Linux "as needed".

Windows has gotten so ersatz and bizarro that it's just strange to me when I do use it every few days.

Windows 2000 / Windows 98 had it down. It wasn't fancy, logical, and it worked. It's been a confusing mess since Windows 7.

But you're right, they completely screwed up the control panel. If not for that then it would've been the new pinnacle (let us never discuss Vista).

Is there such a thing as design continuity? or granular design change?

They are the ones providing the money that pays for their employment.

"Expert" User Design is design that is recognised as such and accepted by Users.

If Users reject these designs then they can't claim to be "experts".

And design team that thinks they can make changes and new features just by sketching in their notebook is mistaken and ineffective.

You can't have every user inputting on each change so the design team needs to be the voice of the user. They are talking to users anyways.

And Fischer-Price was also functional, you just got extra colors.

In addition, the "classic" desktop of XP time wasn't flat grey. It was a warmer color, with a bit of beige. Wikipedia says image says #d4d0c8. Which was a lot nicer on the eyes all day long. How far backward we've come. Forced into narrow choices by folks who never heard of "Chesterton's fence."

Can't recall whether XP, Vista, and 7 also allowed you to change colours directly -- if it was only the "Fisher-Price", "Glass", and, uh, "Glass 2?" that were locked-in in the standard UI setting -- or if you needed to switch to "Windows Classic", the 95--W2K-style UI, to change even the colours. Can't recall, because I of course switched to Classic first thing I did on any of those.

That all went away with Windows 8, of course, and AFAIK didn't come back on 10 either. Actually, they'd started to sabotage it a little earlier: About halfway into the lifecycle of W7, you couldn't change the window border width in the dialogue any more; you needed to hack that value in the Registry (and re-hack it after any change via the dialogue box). And towards the very end, even that hack didn't do anything any more.

7 probably did, too, but the dialog was a bit hidden.

It's utterly incomprehensible to me why the went and just ripped all of that functionality out in later versions.

(Also, why Linux desktop environments keep crowing about how many "themes" they have. However many thousands of them people cobble together... Just utterly pales in comparison to letting users set each detail of their systems up exactly as they want; that's in effect infinite "themes"!)

Amusingly Win10 was the first time since 3.1 where using the color returned for GetSysColor(COLOR_WINDOW) would give you a "correct" color for the window background :-P.

What folder is Gears of War 5 installed to on my PC? Who knows, certainly not me. Also a reason why I hate the Windows Store (not that the mac App Store is any better)

Why are they allowed to work on Windows? Even car salesmen are often required to drive the same car as the one they're selling.

A random example: Macs these days use screens with a brightness response Gamma curve of 1.8 and PCs use 2.2. Macs use a color gamut of DisplayP3 by default now, which has different color primaries than the PC sRGB standard.

Why does this matter? Because two shades that are easily distinguishable when physically viewed on a Mac may not be easily distinguishable on PC! Colors wills shift, and even 50% grey is represented differently. The same JPG or PNG file from a design will look different on a PC even if it has an identical monitor as a Mac!

Similarly, font weight, anti-aliasing, and kerning are very different on the two platforms. Any text design done on one has to be adapted for the other. It's not just the default fonts! The same font at the same size will look very visibly different.

Did I mention default fonts? Only Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier are common between the two platforms. All of those are physically different fonts that look different even if transported to the other platform.

Etc, etc, etc...

> Why is Microsoft having problems finding designers that use and know both?

and you totally failed to answer that.

>> I honestly don't get how this is even a problem.

Which can be interpreted not only as "How can this even happen?", but also quite reasonably as "So what's wrong with that?". The parent comment to yours (GP to this) answered the latter.

This is ridiculous.

Imagine taking someone who is so passionate about UX that they made a career out of it, making them use their worst nightmare as their daily driver, and then giving them zero institutional power to fix any of it because of the n-dev years problem.

Windows, while extremely powerful and stable because of the commitment to not breaking things, is basically unfixable UI wise unless “forward” means going backward. There’s too much to rewrite and not enough value gained by it. So every iteration will be piling on even more inconsistencies and shifting around the “easy stuff” because that’s all you can do.

You just have to embrace that Windows is 50 years of UX trends all coexisting.

Imagine taking a role on the Windows Desktop Experience Team while caring so little about how the operating system functions that you don't even bother to use it as your main workstation.

This is the company where the phrase "eating your own dog food" originated, by the way.

1 Those people are paid, as a dev I am paid to use JS and PHP , I am not crying here because poor me I can't use my favorite language Prolog or Lisp so why a designer should cry if he does not work on his preferred shit. They can use Linux or OSX at home.

2 this designers call themselves UX people. This means they don't work with images of GUIs , they should in fact use the product as an user would use. Ex: you are a UX dev for the Word product but you always use Word with a document of 1 page length, then you would never feel the pains your users that have documents of 50+ , 100+ pages feel. As a dev and UX designers you should use the product you create.

3 If you are a designer in the sense you create logos and icons then probably is fine you don't use the product, though if you are a web designer and really love fucking with fonts and fonts color PLEASE borrow a regular laptop from a friend and check your website in it, your cool fonts might look different on a different machine and maybe you also will be reminded that not everyone has high definition laptop screens.

I still do the job though.

If they're building software for Windows??? Duh, WTF else are they supposed to look at? "Hey, my mockups of our Windows-only software look great on my Mac, so what's the problem?" is about the stupidest thing that designer could possibly say.

And if what they're designing is not just software for Windows, but Windows itself, it's ten times worse. Which is what's under discussion here.

> Imagine taking someone who is so passionate about UX that they made a career out of it, making them use their worst nightmare as their daily driver, and then giving them zero institutional power to fix any of it because of the n-dev years problem.

Yeah, that might be a fascinating hypothetical to discuss some other time, but this discussion is about the problem of designers "so passionate about UX" that they insist on making stuff look "good" at the cost of usability and consistency being given all the institutional power to break it despite the n-user-years problems this causes. The exact opposite of what you are imagining.

>> Imagine taking someone who is so passionate about UX that they made a career out of it, making them use their worst nightmare as their daily driver, and then giving them zero institutional power to fix any of it because of the n-dev years problem.

And if the UI they're designing sucks so humongously that these poor "passionate about U"I designer snowflakes can't even deign to use it... Then whose fault is that? Whom can they blame for this, if not -- the designers of the UI they're designing, i.e. themselves?

Assholes, that's what they are. (And what kind of person defends assholes?) Of fucking course it sucks, when the assholes who designed it don't even have to use it, so they'd get to suffer if it sucks. They're getting away with inflicting the suffering only on others, while they themselves avoid it. No wonder they don't give a shit!

This is precisely what "eating your own dogfood" (aka "dogfooding") is all about. Look it up.

Ever saw airplane controls? They are ugly, and UX people have to design them too, to enable pilots to act in emergencies, to highlighr issues before emergency even happens, etc.

You are conflating visual design and UX, which is common.

The former draw pretty pictures and they can fuck off to MacOS, nobody cares.

UX is about structure: where should we put the delete button? How many clicks does it take to access your files?

Going from 10 to 11 is like being a juggler going from juggling oranges to being punched in the face for the entertainment of 10 year old boys.

Have you tried using an app other than photos to view images? How about being forced to manually set every single extensions default opener? Oh, did you expect to be able to right click on the taskbar? Screw you! Have a kick to the groin instead! That's what you get for thinking that this version of windows would operate anything like any other version of windows, you poor, pathetic worthless mineable data source! Now shut up and answer this survey about how much you like Windows 11!

Also, the title bars on MsOffice apps are so cluttered with controls that you can hardly find a safe place to click on them if you want to select that app with your mouse. Why, for example, is the search bar in Outlook up there, instead of some pop-up dialog box? (And the Outlook and Word search tools themselves are a mess, but I digress...)

A similar thing is what happens when you touch a phone when it dims right before sleeping. Some OSes only let the touch restore brightness, while others will do that AND register a tap wherever you touched. Super annoying IMO.

I have focus follows mouse on Linux so it might be an exaggerated problem, but it’s annoying to click a text box and it not actually select the text box.

There is an option in yabai for focus follows mouse, but I had to disable yabai because it’s really awkward and perceptibly slow on macos.

I use 3 monitors for both, and frequently multi task and the extra click on Mac infuriates me.

MS - and especially Windows - has always seemed to me a company that takes smart people and makes them do really stupid things. The product culture seems incredibly broken.

It's never been great. But in the past usable versions like XP and 7 would fall out. 8 set a new baseline for idiocracy and user hostility. I see no evidence things have gotten better since.

I suppose - as per earlier comments here - if the culture is top-down design by people who don't even use the product and are trying to Make a Statement for career reasons, the future isn't encouraging.

The real question is what kind of management allows something so obviously nonsensical to happen.

Yeah, Windows has had that too for a while now. Dunno for sure how long; some five years (or eight? Ten?), I'd guess.

Edit: it seems to depend on the kind of button(?)

> var worksWhenModal: Bool

> A Boolean value that indicates whether the window is able to receive keyboard and mouse events even when some other window is being run modally.

I think there are flags for doing that for non-modal ‘other windows’, too.

I've seen open source projects embrace market driven design methodologies, because they mistakenly think it matters.

There are so many designers and developers who have only worked at startups, and dark patterns have become baked into our development culture.

Mostly this attitude that you need to manipulate the experience of the user, and disregard any feedback from them, because you are the expert, and they don't know what they really want. That's what Steve Jobs said, and he was a success, right? So you should do that also.

That explains a lot. Not having the designers dogfood their work is serious oversight

As an MSFT employee, I have no choice but to use win 11. And suffer from taskbar annoyance and bugs

You should give it a shot!

If everyone there (except the designers) complains, maybe the management might listen?

Not that this is exclusive to Microsoft. Every large company I've worked for has had some variation of that phrase.

How are they allowed to do this? This is awful and goes completely against the "eat your own dog food" philosophy.

Separately, I've noticed that developers in general are too deferent to designers, who then get to run amok with shitty ideas. Your pushback is exactly what is needed.

Designers deserve to be laughed out of the room; developers don't.

___

[1]: Until they get their shit in order, designers can kiss my ass for their pretentious "UX" claptrap. The actual experience is only max-half interface, min-half functionality. Where the latter is provided by lowly coders.

and I want to get rid of all these attention stealing animations, all these readability degrading blurs, pre-neon 10 was great, why break it?

I also have the taskbar on the side of the screen, so there is absolutely no chance of me going to W11. (That and their TPM2.0 insistance for DRM purposes)

Hopefully by the time W10 is EOL there will be a Proton/Linux alternative for gaming, combined with all the malware some games require installed to work.

AFAIK, it's not the DRM that's a problem, it's anti-cheat. Cheat software needs to evade detection of both its install and execution, and anti-cheat has to be able to detect those. I imagine writing API emulation that works with anti-cheat is pretty difficult.

Now I'm curious about how anti-cheat could work in a Linux environment. Cheat software likely doesn't need root to benefit the player, but it will certainly need to run as root to avoid detection from the anti-cheat software which will definitely run as root.

Of course, Linux gamers are probably going to raise an eyebrow about a game component wanting root permissions, but how else are you going to detect cheats?

As someone who's now playing League of Legends from his Linux desktop, even that is going away.

Off topic, but Microsoft can even bypass Steam and use their own (terrible) Microsoft Store and Xbox apps on Windows as they have hard to resist exclusive content. Just like Epic Games did with their store. Platforms, not services!

This is crazy. Essentially you get no product memory and no incentive at designing a good product because the designers won't experience the negative effects of their actions.

If this is by design, tell me what Microsoft management wants Windows to go to.

A saner dynamic would be

Build this please

I built it, use it for a couple of weeks

OK it's shit let's try this other one.

Instead its every crab for themselves and the bucket is overflowing.

Colors -> scroll down to 'Choose your accent color'

   click a nice colour from the 'windows 'colors' tile.

   Scroll down to: 'show accent color on the following surfaces'

     click tickbox 'Title bars and window borders'

This was extremely annoying, thank you for standing up for this.

Images online show that Windows 8 still had colored title bars, so it must have gone white in Windows 10. I do wish we have a way to get back colored title bars, since I find myself confused about what Window is active in a multi-monitor world.

Depends on exactly which window, doesn't it? For example, the main Outlook window on my work Windows 10 PC has a blue title bar, but the pop-up-and-hover appointment reminder's is white. Don't think I ever used Outlook on Win 8, but I could well imagine it was the same.

And so on for a lot of other apps.

I love the example of the Task View to show that they really don't use their own darn things. Since 2018 it has been incredibly buggy. Reproducibly even.

On iOS, the fact that the Home Button brought you back home every time was a selling point, so when you are in the sun, you click once and you know where you are. Then they introduced the 2-click on Home for the Control Center, 3-click, 4-click and now, it’s a cycle, so you never are home. Same for the swipe up to bring the control center, which you always have to do twice because the first scroll up generally brings the local app’s own swipe gesture. Apple became a model of stuffing the maximum of gestures, while Windows went the way of the simplicity. I can’t wait the day when Satya Nadella says “The problem with Apple guys is, they have no taste”…

What happened to the culture of "dogfooding" that supposedly was a big thing at Microsoft, and often pointed as a contributing factor to its success?

Not sure if he cares that his legacy goes down the corporate drain, becoming a failure.

Hmm, somebody noticed.

The idea that designers circa Win7 "ruined" windows UX/UI is just revisionist history. Windows has had pretty terrible UI/UX basically forever, and most Linux folks have known this since the early 90s, where KDE, GNOME, etc. were vastly superior to anything Microsoft was putting out. In fact, most ideas you see in MacOS these days can find their roots in early (and often experimental) Linux interfaces (from multiple desktops, to launchers, to Exposé).

The Windows design team was always terrible, and not to mention lazy[1]. Don't mean to throw shade on your ex-team, and I'm sure there's dozens of brilliant people working there, but the design has been an absolute dumpster fire for decades. And this comes from an almost exclusive Windows power user. (I just recently bought my first ever Mac laptop).

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/grhjuu/til_that_...

I think you need to open your mind a little bit and read: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...

This is debatable but personally, 2009 Windows 7 UX/UI is still better than 2022 versions of GNOME, KDE, XFCE what-have-you in the Linux world. If anything, complete opposite of what you're saying is true. Linux UX/UI is let's just politely put it - OK.

but KDE is slightly better, at least in these aspects I care about, of course it looks disgusting, but you don't need third party tools to disable taskbar grouping and that's a big thing

A bunch of clicks to get to the Control Panel, but once there just a few to get to the GUI configuration dialogue box, and somewhere in that one or two more to enable "Windows Classic" style, and you had the good old W95/NT4/98/2K aesthetics back -- and all the functionality of W7. (And then you could spend a day or two getting colours and fonts and GUI-element sizes juuuust... so, if you wanted to.)

I clearly remember that when Windows introduced auto-snapping/auto-scaling windows, I looked and giggled as yet another KDE feature made its way to one of the "bigger" environments.

It's really well working in these days, but it was not like that until recently. I remember setting up Xorg.conf to get my single monitor working as it should.

Yes, Auto configuring X.org is older than that, but drivers, Multi monitor setup and other related things came later than that.

Even if X had proper support for multiple monitors, drivers were very finicky at the beginning.

While most of the work has vanished for single monitor setups around that time frame, multi-monitor setting wasn't very reliable and deterministic under xrandr came around and drivers added native support for that.

*: randr came around 2003: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/log/randr/randr.c?...

And I definitely touched xorg.conf a bunch of times even a few years later.

Allow me to show you this tiling window manager…

Saying this and also claiming revisionist history, this has got to be satire ?

Early 90s Linux desktop ? From what I can tell KDE/gnome started development in 97.

KDE started in 1996, but I remember running one of the first alphas in 1997 (Alpha 2?) and being relieved that Linux had finally something that somewhat resembled the Windows 95 UI. Before that people were primarily running tvm or fvwm (CDE was still closed-source), which was fine for Unix-heads, but nowhere close to the gold standard that the Windows 95, NT 4, or macOS classic were.

(Ps. fvwm95 was released pretty soon after Windows 95, but only had the look of Windows 95, not really the usability.)

Sorry, but talking about revisionist history. KDE had their first stable release in 1998, years after Windows 95. KDE was inspired by CDE, but almost equally by Windows 95 (see e.g. the launcher in early KDE versions). Before KDE, we were mostly using fvwm, twm, etc., which had extremely bad usability for non-expert users. The GNOME project was started after KDE, because some folks were unhappy that KDE used Qt, which didn't have a free software license at the time.

In fact, most ideas you see in MacOS these days can find their roots in early (and often experimental) Linux interfaces (from multiple desktops, to launchers, to Exposé).

Well, that's saying like "most ideas for the iPhone have their roots in...". Sure, there may have been environments that give some overview of applications. But Exposé set the gold standard for this feature and relied very heavily on GPU-accelerated compositing (Quartz compose). Something Linux desktop environments and Windows only got years later. Quickly after Exposé was added to Panther, you saw folks in the Linxu world trying to copy the feature to KDE and GNOME. See e.g.:

https://store.kde.org/p/1220207

(Also see how clunky and ugly it looked compared to OS X Exposé. Since the icons all have different resolutions, some are sharp, others are very pixely. The design is quite ugly, the Kopete window is cut in half. Etc.)

The Linux development has largely been reactive, even to this day. E.g. once hamburger menus started popping up in Google's design language, GNOME started to copy this idea. Thanks to which GNOME doesn't have application menus anymore (which is absolutely disastrous for desktops.)

most ideas you see in

I think this also expresses an issue with the Linux-approach to the desktop (by and large). In the end it is not about features, ideas, or being there first. It is about forming a consistent and coherent interface. Linux desktops fail here in even basic things that have been solved in other desktops for decades, such as consistent keyboard shortcuts between applications.

I am pretty sure it was the other way around.

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

Also, Exposé was introduced in 2003 before Linux counterparts (and requires a good compositor to do it well). In fact, there was a rush to write KDE/GNOME plugins after Panther was introduced. Sadly, most were pretty janky/bad until Compiz was introduced.

Spotlight (launcher/search) was introduced with Tiger in 2005, also much before Linux desktops started introducing it. Only after that, desktop search (e.g. Beagle) and search-based launchers like GNOME Do started showing up.