But they were really sluggish, which made them useless in my opinion. If I have to wait seconds for my widgets to load or react, I'll just write my notes in notepad++ and look at the clock on the taskbar.
> And copilot everywhere.
You raise a serious point, oft discussed here (about the sorry state of the OS)
I actually think the "whimsical", nostalgia these kind of apps (toys?) point to is actually indicative of a more serious "yearning" for simpler, higher quality, more user-configurable computing. As it was not so long ago ...
There was little to no spyware or malware risk because this was a time when stealing CPU cycles couldn’t make you money, machines couldn’t be used to anonymously generate internet traffic, and exfiltrating captured data was essentially impossible.
As soon as all the computers went online, the frivolity had to stop.
Very insightful. They ceased to be "our" (user's) machines and became "everybody else's" (vendors, criminals, scammers, "debug-by-update" OS-vendors, etc., etc.)
Though you are probably thinking about rainmeter: https://www.rainmeter.net/
Enshitification ensues.
> Instead what I have is ads
laughs in kde
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Dangerous_Creatures
the holdout was gaming, but Steam and Proton work practically flawlessly. one or two other occasional challenges -- a big one was MS Access that was needed for Master's program -- but other than that nothing on Windows that can't ignored / discarded
That was back when Google was a respectable company that in addition to the mandatory EULA had a separate notice that informed very very cleary, something like:
READ THIS CAREFULLY
THIS IS NOT THE NORMAL YADDA YADDA
It had an amazing RSS feed reader widget that would automagically subscribe to feeds from pages on sites I visited and present a relevant selection of links.
It would be nice to have a taskbar calendar with appointments and notifications though. But Microsoft will never make something that is both pluggable and simple here. (Android used to have a mainscrean one, but it stopped being pluggable a long time ago. For some reason Linux people don't write those things.)
So you set a good example. You don’t install frivolous widgets. You tell everybody never to install things that claim they will just make a cute animal appear on their desktop. And even though you know that this bouncy ball widget is safe and fun because you built it from the GitHub repo… you can’t install it because you can’t explain to average user why it’s okay for you to install the fun bouncy ball but they can’t install the kitten that chases a ball of string.
So we can’t have nice things, sorry.
I want clock, calendar, notes, CPU and system stats, pull out or slide out menus with shortcuts, quirky ones like this one.
Instead what I have is ads.
And copilot everywhere.
With touch screen laptops today you can do so much more. My levono also folds 360 and let's me use it as a full touch screen desktop. There is so much potential for productivity hacks and interactive UX ideas if Windows customization and widgets ecosystem was alive and thriving.