Windows 11 is really the worst iteration, my partner did not want the telemetry and other windows 11 crap, so she, from her own free will, researched linuxes and chose Fedora Kinoite as her operating system, because she liked the idea that she could not accidentally break it.
After a year or so, she is a happy camper, steam works, web works, all is good. Though once we start with the art software, that might be a bit tricky.
Only issue that it had was when after an os update the extra hdd mount points lost their execute flags for some reason, so unfortunately not a 100% technical free experience.
> Though once we start with the art software, that might be a bit tricky.
Something that took me way too long to figure out is that you can have Steam run arbitrary Windows software in a Steam-managed -er- Protonprefix. [0] Perhaps this might remove some of the hassle of handling Art Software if Wine doesn't quite work for you?
To do this, you can use the menu option to "Add a Non-Steam Game to My Library", browse for any old .EXE, and Steam will handle setting up Proton for you. You can also change the .EXE that that Steam entry points to after all that shit gets set up... so I _assume_ that you could first point to the .EXE for the Art Software's installer, let it run through the install process, and then change what the Steam entry points to to the .EXE for the Art Software.
[0] ...it's like a WINEPREFIX, but with Proton... get it???
If you don't know the name already check out Krita https://krita.org for art software
Depending on interests other solid sw is Inkscape and Blender. But that gets increasingly intricate to use. I also wonder how the Adobe AI clones will do after their first one shot publicity.
> Though once we start with the art software, that might be a bit tricky.
This might be super helpful for her: https://getartcraft.com/apps. Works extremely well as a CC etc. replacemenmt.
Also https://capycanvas.art/ - a lovely native Linux replacement for Procreate, which I've been looking for ever since my 2018 iPad Pro stopped receiving updates.
I'm all for artcraft effort to succeed and wish them all the best. But you're overselling this as "Works extremely well as a CC etc. replacemenmt." - it's alpha level software. It's got lots of issues and is not polished yet. Give it some time.
In the meantime, Krita and a few online apps have been around and very successful.
The incredible thing is that Windows 10 was already near perfect. It would make sense to increase performance and security, but they changed the UI without improving an iota of user productivity, including removing key features of the product. Almost ever change in the past few years made Windows worse. Windows leadership should be fired and replaced by people who are actually Windows users, not MacOS users.
That's why a lot of us still works on Windows 10. I'm always laughing hearing that on Win 11 even Task Manager breaks not showing process list, randomly. Clipboard on RDP breaks every few connections and requires killing process or restart.
The funniest is when next person calls me and asks if he really needs creating Micro$hit account to just use PC for local stuff.
I hope someone at big corp will be so bored one day that he'll just start releasing Win 10 updates after reverse engineering the mechanisms and we will get Win 10 support again.
The rule still alive and stands strong - every second Windows is just a crap. ME, Vista, 8 and now 11.
If they’d just taken Windows 10 and applied the Windows 11 theme (Fluent) that would’ve made for an OS that I wouldn’t have minded leaving on my gaming PC. That didn’t happen, and so now it’s now running Linux.
> Windows leadership should be fired and replaced by people who are actually Windows users, not MacOS users.
As a longtime Mac user, Windows leadership decisions don’t make any sense to me either. I have precisely zero interest in making 11 my primary OS… XP, 7, or 10 wouldn’t have been ideal but if I had no choice but to work with Windows those would be greatly preferable to 11.
> If they’d just taken Windows 10 and applied the Windows 11 theme
That is what they did. They took windows 10 added the theme and taskbar/start from the triple failed 10x added arbitrary cpu cutoff and released as 11.
as an avid gamer, win11 is the one that pushed me to use linux only (edit: along with the fact that proton and wine make games playable on linux!!!). i would have LIKED to keep using windows but the way they treat their customers is unforgivable. when i go to a restaurant i give them 2 chances at annoying me before i go elsewhere, i gave the windows team what feels like a hundred chances. dont care what they do now, theyre history.
edit again: do they even need pc business, they make all their profits from server stuff now, they may as well wrap up the pc os division ;)
> As a longtime Mac user, Windows leadership decisions don’t make any sense to me either.
To be sure, as another Mac user, they make sense in that they want Apple's revenue and reputation. The problem is they categorically refuse to invest in their engineering staff to even remotely the degree Apple does, which is reflected in the "quality" of the products on offer.
Everyone wants to be Apple, and they're all convinced despite ongoing proof to the contrary, that they can do it for pennies on the dollar. It's genuinely kind of pathetic how desperate they are to be Apple.
The biggest improvement in Windows 11 is increased locking of small users into Microsoft ecosystem and Microsoft cloud services.
This is not a improvement for the users, it's a improvement for Microsoft shareholders, because many users may decide to pay for additional Microsoft services (additional revenue after paying for the operating system) and it allows Microsoft to monetize customer data (Microsoft learned this business strategy from Google).
"
Home and Pro (since version 22H2) edition installation requires internet connection and Microsoft account login (only if for personal use on Pro) is mandatory unless manually bypassed to create a local user. However, Microsoft has since blocked one of the last remaining easy bypass methods that allowed local account creation during initial setup, complicating the bypass process further. All other editions are excluded from this requirement.
"
Don't forget having to shove all the "recommendation" and "suggestion" systems into it, too, so they could add random sponsored apps to your Start menu primed and ready to install as soon as you clicked on them at the same time they push more notifications at you to use more OneDrive.
I've recently switched from windows to Mac and it was so refreshing using a system that does not purposely work against the user. I don't agree with many design decisions in Mac (wtf is up with tabbing into apps I've closed, or not being able to tab through instances of an app without a separate shortcut?!) but at least they're not shoving telemetry and ads down your throat.
You must be using a different macos than me, or have not attempted to connect a mouse (Scroll Reverser), an external display (BetterDisplay), wanted to have sane power management (Amphetamine), want to reach all application windows with only the keyboard, wanted to close modal popups with only the keyboard, etc...
About telemetry, and ads: It is also present in MacOS, but less invasive indeed. And about not showing something down my throat: the other day my iphone just told me in declarative, with a single accept button: now your system will be updated to ios27 (download of updates was enabled, with manual confirmation).
Also having to unlock every app after every brew update in the applications as they "have been downloaded from the internet"... it is not something i'd call refreshing and not working against me.
> it was so refreshing using a system that does not purposely work against the user.
I don't share this optimism, Apple has not been a hardware-first/computers company in a very long time and nowadays makes more bucks profiling your consumption habits to sell you "content" on their ever more "content-consumption" oriented devices.
Edit: just to add to that the same ads (for cloud storage and premium services) that people in the Microsoft world get pissy about very much exists on that side of the fence. It's a race to the bottom, Apple isn't there to lead by example.
(many) apps keep running without windows — all you closed was the last open window. cmd-~ switches between windows within a running app. this has been the case since the classic Mac days, & while it seems to drive those who come from Windows bonkers, long-term Mac users (at least all I've known) appreciate this small aspect of macOS as it makes a clear distinction between apps & windows. newer apps (some from Apple) which break this model are still maddening to use.
That's fine, but I do not want to tab into an app whose last windows I have purposely closed. I closed it so I have a cleaner slate of apps to work with. If chrome is closed, it should not show up until I open it again. Not just windows but also linux make much more sense in that regard.
It's annoying because the x button on the windows is now a completely useless widget to me, and I have to close apps via cmd+q instead. It's even more annoying that I can't actually close Finder, even though I'm using a different filebrowser.
1. do this on a non-us layout
2. do this with Firefox / Chrome and its in-private window. Those are not reachable with neither shortcut for me.
Mac is the most culturally colonialist minded thing in my experience, its i18n support is terrible for smaller languages.
The "windows bonkers" model is strangely copied by most third party windowsin systems, as it makes sense, with having the recency based tab order, and being a global list. For us who work with more than a single software and often have to work between two different software, maybe an editor and a terminal... it is usually pretty handy.
I really liked Win2KPro. My son has a copy of Windows Neptune he fires up now and then.
But I also had lots of fun when Code Red and Nimda came around - full perm file navigation on computers everywhere. Any Win2k box knocking on my firewall was telling me it was wide open for use.
I remember building a lc for a client, installing 2k then SP2. Clicking around installing our software thinking “this could be my main machine. This would be good”
Because designers must design, programmers must program and managers must manage to ear a paycheck you have to change things even when they don't need changing. When you put this into a context of a greedy corporation that is completely self serving, i.e using the platform to serve their needs instead of those of the user it's inevitable that the product will turn into shit from the user perspective.
I've been Windows 10 user for many years, but just few days ago I bought new laptop and went with Windows 11.
Honestly it's the same for me. Taskbar is a bit weird and start menu is a bit weird, but I was able to turn off unwanted features, so it's not bad right now.
I'm mostly Linux user and my Windows usage is more about gaming, but I did some programming with it as well.
> The incredible thing is that Windows 10 was already near perfect.
This is a ridiculous statement given how many people complained about it at the time!
There seems to be a common cognitive bias where things in the past are considered good and things in the present bad. So a few years from now, a bunch of people would say "Windows 12 is so bad, the incredible thing is that Windows 11 was already near perfect", completely forgetting the sentiment at the time.
Windows 8 hasn't been vindicated by time yet, Windows releases have been more of a pendulum where every other major release is widely adopted (not necessarily beloved) after a misbegotten major release.
>. Almost ever change in the past few years made Windows worse.
I feel like this is the point. Microsoft don't want to support a consumer desktop OS anymore, and are pushing people to other devices, where their profitable cloud services are also available.
MS wants you to pay for authentication, office, cloud services etc without having to do consumer support or anything like that. I reckon they see Apple as the perfect partner for this, someone with a desktop experience compatible with their cloud experience.
Cortana is literaly the reason I am on Linux now for 9 years.
Had to reinstall Windows and could not disable Cortana or even skip some weired voice output during initial setup. Immediately removed Windows again and installed Ubuntu.
About 25 years ago (maybe a bit more) I remember a friend, a top tier developer at Microsoft (this was in the period where the underbelly of windows 7 was being designed) explaining to me that Microsoft knew its users better than they knew themselves and that the key was to train them properly. While there's some sense to such an attitude when introducing tweaks to technology, some variant of the attitude underlies most of Microsoft's missteps since then.
If that's important to you, there's an option to allow using a local account during setup by dropping to command line and setting a flag. Pretty straightforward if that's your only deal breaker.
I just recently installed Windows 11 on a computer and this is the steps that I followed
2) It opens a command prompt and you type OOBE\BYPASSNRO
When you hit enter it reboots and allows local mode.
Microsoft should not have hidden this away like they have and it should be an option for everyone installing Windows, and I recognize this isn't a solution for the non-technical user.. but for you specifically if it's something you're comfortable doing, it's an option to allow you to avoid having to use a Microsoft account when installing Windows.
I know that a lot of tech folks consider it a non issue because it is 'easy' to fix if you know the bypass and your way around the more inner workings, but broadly this isn't really an answer to the problem.
If we always just say 'Oh, well, if you do XYZ then you can manage to do A despite B' then we're eroding our control and agency. Slowly the bypasses will phase out, as they have slowly been in this case, and then we're really in a poor state.
I had a tech support client who came to be because they valued their privacy and didn't want an account but who had no idea how to make that happen. They didn't even really know what to be looking for.
I'm by no means suggesting it's normal or that I think it's okay Microsoft removed the native ability.
You're right that I probably made an assumption that someone posting on hacker News would have the technical ability to hit a keyboard combination and type a command on a command line and hit enter, which is essentially what's required currently to utilize the local account ( https://rtech.support/guides/bypass-11/ )
My reply was intended as more of a direct message to OP, as opposed to general advice I think every end user should know and follow. I should have been more clear.
Not only that, if someone has a tech knowledgable person set up their Windows 11 computer without online accounts MS updates will cause it to spam the tech-ignorant person owning that computer with misleading pop-ups saying they need to press this button to do $x thing. Which then secretly sets up online accounts which automatically and silently enables drive encryption. Which causes it to go to a bluescreen saying to go to some shady looking URL at aka.ms and type in a long code that appears on your blue screen only broken computer. It's basically ransomware. This is not some theory, I had this happen to a sewing machine laptop I set up for my mother.
And yes, I later learned that aka.ms is a real Microsoft URL. But when it was first described to me it sounded exactly like ransomware and had exactly that effect.
I would appreciate a link to the details about 'setting a flag.' The last version of that I used earlier this year stopped working in recent months, and I believe I saw tech news stories to the effect that Microsoft had intentionally closed that path.
For now I just use a customer-supplied email address which I used to setup a Microsoft account, setup Windows and use that account, immediately create a local-only 'admin' account with full rights, delete the online associated account, and start creating user account(s) from there.
I had recently had to install windows for the first time in years, did some chatting with mr gpt and poking around on reddit until I arrived at: https://massgrave.dev. They guide you on how to download windows LTSC from the "official" Microsoft links. So much less crap shoved down the system, it's kind of nice.
There are also community projects like NTLite ( https://ntlite.com/ ) and Windows ISO Debloater ( https://github.com/itsNileshHere/Windows-ISO-Debloater ) for the more technically advanced that want full control to prevent the bloat from even making it to your machine during installation at all (instead of having to clean it up after the fact)
If someone is already setting up Windows manually themselves, I believe they're already at some level of technical ability.. but as I pointed out in another comment, my reply was specifically to OP who I made an assumption had some technical ability given that they're here on hacker News. Maybe that assumption is wrong and I recognize that.
That said, the process is:
1) while installing Windows press shift f10
2) a command prompt will open and you type OOBE\BYPASSNRO
When you hit enter the computer will reboot and allow local mode.
I fully recognize that this is a hidden option that most people don't know about, but if you do, it seems pretty straightforward to me for someone that's already at a level where they're comfortable manually installing Windows, but I recognize I have an blind spot due to my own technical abilities.
i couldnt get that to work the last time i tried but i ended up using rufus to burn the ISO which gives you options to turn off the microsoft account. it even disables the tpm2.0 check so you can install it on older hardware if you want to
Installed Windows 11 on a VM over the weekend for running a specific program. The lengthy multi-reboot updates are just like I remember from Vista. Except now they show advertisements.
Grateful 2008 was Year of the Linux Desktop for me.
Sometimes I do wonder why it's hard to see that you shouldn't invest in AI, let Sam Altman hoover up all compute hardware and then make a surprise pikachu when hardware sales of your user base decline. Same for Google: "what, if I stop people from going to websites because I let a bot summarise what they're looking for, I get less money from website visits?"
At this rate (I know I keep beating that drum), I think we cannot have AI: it is too self-defeating from a business pov.
Just a clarification, Google's search revenue actually went up in their latest quarterly reporting. It just didn't go up as far as analysts were predicting.
My sister gave me his win 11 laptop to fix. 1 Tb SSD was full. Half of it was windows.old folder after 26h2 update.
Windows has 5 different ways to delete that folder and none works. They are all badly documented. It spends 1 hour reading the file list before starting to delete... On a 4 tb/second nvme drive. Then spend a day "deleting" the folder, but doesn't deletes anything.
Finally, booted an Linux rescue distro from USB and deleted the folder.
Then had to clean the winsxs folder, which was full of useless files after an update.
That's the universal way to clean up roll back installs and other Windows update related.
If that's not working for you, there's probably a much larger issue at play on her machine and would be much better off backing up her data, wiping all the partitions and installing fresh. You'll likely reclaim more than 700 GB.
The only time I've seen situations like what you're describing is when these are machines that have been in use for years and have major Windows versions on top of major Windows version stacked on top of each other, not just incremental updates.
You don't have the option? Or when going into system mode as part of temporary cleanup it doesn't show older Windows update as an option to clean or it fails when it tries?
Way too little way too late Microsoft. After 30 years I will never choose Windows again. Got on Windows with 3.1 and off the train with 11. It's not me--it's you.
As maligned as it was... I think Vista was actually servicable if all the extra visual effects and UAC stuff was turned off. It ended up looking more like a plainly styled XP desktop and ran moderately well on laptops just for a win32 C development machine (emacs, gcc/msvc cl.exe). I had this setup for windows builds, with a Linux desktop as my main machine.
At least back then more of the original engineering talent that Microsoft had was still around, and you would even run into them on irc from time to time. 20 years on, I suspect a lot of the foundational personalities that drove engineering decisions have since retired or been made redundant, and that reflects the weird UI fracturing and endless regressions. I doubt they can recover at this point.
I have some Lenovo 'temporary UI removal tool' (don't remember its name exactly, do not care that much to look for it from this Mac) that comes back with each update. The tool, as my AI agent explains, regularly (24h) wakes the computer from hibernation (yes, I took care of being that available, I need that, despite as a MS SE says: they know me better than I, so they removed that possibility only coming back by tweaks) to check if the post-installation temporary UI something is still there, and removes if it is there. But keeps running - it is a service or what -, still waking after removal, every 24h, including weekends. Checking if the already removed UI thingy that it removed is still there. They then have some service restoring service too watching if the UI removal service was stopped/disabled/removed, restoring that. One need to kill/unset both through command line to have some remedy. Which both come back at each Windows update. Yes, it is Lenovo. But yes, it is Windows delivering this way sometimes just few days apart with frequent 'updates'.
It took me longer than 3 days to set Linux up for my (multi-specialty) needs, but I can see absolutely no reason anyone would ever want to go back to Windows at this point. You know what else lets me customize my menus? KDE.
My last few years of Windows were more frustrating than Linux has ever been. Everything locked down and a never ending string of crashes and issues that are impossible to properly diagnose or repair. At least on Linux, when there's an issue, it's clear what it is and where to report it.
(Disclaimer: I have an AMD GPU and I don't play competitive multiplayer games. All other games have just worked so far.)
I mean yes, but an update on my Linux box just installed a new kernel, uninstalled the old video card driver, and didn't install a new video card driver.
I have taken to asking claude "is it safe for me to reboot now?" before restarting after updates. So far 3 times in a row it has come back with "no, your system won't startup".
Edit: I also just woke my desktop up from sleep and the alt-tab service failed to resume. Just... wut.
Unfortunately this is still the reality of many Linux distros. On every update something breaks.
Just as an exMple I'm on arch myself and after last update if I use X11 screen saver with lock some service crashes and the computer cannot be unlocked.
Maybe next update will have a fix but then something else will be broken instead.
Linux (as in the kernel+user space of your choice) is a perpetual alpha. Has been for 30 years and will always be.
Whenever GTK/Gnome becomes reasonable stable it's time for a rewrite!
I am not sure you know what you are talking about. What is the "alt-tab service" you are speaking about. There is no systemd service with that name in any linux distro I have used.
Also if you are able to know that the new video card driver hasn't been installed, you also know that you can solve this by doing it yourself. In that case why wouldn't you do it?
Ultimately if all those things are too hard for you there are a number of immutable "image" based distros where packages/drivers aren't managed individually during updates and where you can always boot to the previous version. Maybe that is what you need.
Both AMD and Intel have open source graphics drivers which are upstreamed into the Linux kernel, so that situation would be impossible with an AMD or Intel graphics card. Any driver issues are a pain that nvidia decided to inflict on you.
I installed it on a laptop for a friend after not having used it since the mid 2000’s. What a piece of flaming dogshit that whole platform is. How is this the output of a multi billion dollar company?
Well then you look at a random webpage from CNN and I guess they’re all competing for how trashy they can make their products.
There can’t be any pride left at all in that place.
And yet you still hear "Linux is only free if your time is worthless."
It's untrue in comparison to Windows, and MacOS (at least for software dev, when I last used it 1.5 years ago).
Linux easily has the lowest maintenance burden if you pick a boring distros. It can be a huge pit of wasted time, _if you actually want to fall into that pit._
IMO that is still kind of true. Windows 11 LTSC gives a totally bloat free experience, the only downside is you can only reasonably get it through grey market cdkey sites.
Linux, sometimes works without faff. But in my experience it's at best 50:50 if you get that, or constant crashes, hangs, broken peripherals, etc. (Of course any time you mention this the luck 50% pipe up with "it works for me".)
Linux day 1: whole day looking up which distro is usable.
Day 2: install Linux distro, total process is like 4 hours because at every step you double check that you won't lose your Windows data because it's your first time installing Linux. Realize that your distro doesn't support modern displays and never will. Call it a day because you're mentally exhausted.
Day 3: install a distro that does support modern displays. The process is only 3 hours because you're already familiar with it. Spend the rest of the day looking up which Linux programs are good replacements for Windows ones. Hint: all of them have bugs that affect your particular use cases - KDE shits itself when it sees a folder with 20k images, DaVinci Resolve has lots of issues with audio drivers and video codecs and gives zero error messages, no native Linux audio player supports all exotic music formats in my library so I need to run foobar2000 which obviously crashes when it sees WMA lossless and then UI fails to scale properly, lots of random shit like Wine installation causing system update to fail.
Day 4: connect $DEVICE. Look up drivers.
Day 44: $DEVICE works.
Day 104: $DEVICE works AND survives system update.
In my case that were keyboard (support for extra keys) and steering wheel.
Day 204: invite friends for video games. Spend the entire evening trying to fix controllers because they're fucked - if I first connect Steam Controller and then run Steam, then Steam shits itself. I need to specifically do it the other way around. Also, Xbox One controller drivers have an incompatibility with X360 controllers so I couldn't simply connect the old dongle and play like that.
Debian+xfce or even lxqt are about as plug and play as you can get with UX straight out of 2002 in the best way. Hell it probably even runs on 2002 hardware.
Ok my guy have fun grinding that axe. I don't care pick any distro and it's gonna be more stable and less user hostile than Windows. Meanwhile tell me how Windows 11 is actually great and we are all using it wrong. All we need is the right magic strain of regedits and post install cleanup scripts. Brb let me send those steps to my grandma for her PC so it stops uploading all her files to the cloud every 5 minutes.
> Linux day 1: whole day looking up which distro is usable.
>
> Day 2: install Linux distro, total process is like 4 hours because at every step you double check that you won't lose your Windows data because it's your first time installing Linux. Realize that your distro doesn't support modern displays and never will. Call it a day because you're mentally exhausted.
Hmmm day 2 should be: making a backup of my windows data, that way I can do the f... I want during installation.
> Day 3: install a distro that does support modern displays.
Apart from LTS/enterprise versions, all distros are running the same kernel generations. They all have the same hardware support really.
The rest of your text soup doesn't mean anything. Like this: "random shit like Wine installation causing system update to fail.", this really sounds like hallucinations and inventions.
The part about $DEVICE and drivers is like looking at a kid trying to connect a Nintendo SNES controller to a PS5 and complaining it doesn't work to well.
While I'm sure that would help, I still wouldn't use Windows even if it was completely free and distributed as easily as Linux. Windows has some serious problems with dark patterns like ads in the start menu and telemetry everywhere. The software is slow and bloated. The lack of a package manager makes each application run their own updater (though they did at least put the drivers inside windows update which was a step in the right direction).
Trying to understand the original Windows 11 context menu diagram as someone who hasn't used Windows 11 is surprisingly difficult. By contrast, Gnome 51's context menu (or earlier versions as far back as I remember) for a file/folder are unambiguous and easy to understand.
At the top of the Windows 11 context menu are some small icons without text for high usage actions which I assume are:
2. duplicate-in-place-with-number-appended-to-duplicate-filename or select-for-copying (copy), perhaps Gnome's "Copy to..."
3. something to do with the clipboard--maybe copy contents to clipboard
4. something to do with text entry--maybe rename the file/folder, perhaps Gnome's "Rename..."
5. share via social media applications or cloud file sharing applications, or move the file/folder locally perhaps Gnome's "Move to..."
6. move to recycle bin (delete)
Menu options with text are unambiguous for "Open", "Open with", "Compress to ZIP file", "Properties", although Gnome will state "Open with {name_of_default_app}" to make it clear exactly how a file will be opened without having to guess.
I guess "Copy as path" might just copy the full filesystem path to the clipboard. I can't remember the last time I wanted to do that.
I guess "Always keep on this device" prevents the file/folder being backed up to some cloud storage provider. I'd rather open up an application dedicated to cloud storage backups and be able to review current backup options there all in one place for all types of data/files.
The "Free up space" option I'm less clear on--will a local application pop up and suggest what I can delete within the folder, will a cloud storage provider application pop up and suggest the file not be synchronised with the local device and only be kept in cloud storage, etc.
The bottom option "Show more options" is not expandable so I assume there are so many other options an entire new window is needed to display them all. Maybe it'll give me useful but rarely used options from a list of hundreds available, such as "count how many words are in this file" for text files...?
"Always keep on this device" / "Free up space" only make sense when you understand the "Desktop" and "Document" is now backed by cloud -- the file you have on your local computer is just a cache.
The former meant it have higher priority in caching, the latter is just evicting from cache immediately.
I use "copy as path" all the time. It's good for if you have scripts and want a program in a different folder to launch them (e.g AutoHotKey, Task Scheduler).
TBH while the menu has glaring issues (half of it is basically an ad for cloud storage), your complaints boil down to "I don't like it because I'm not familiar with it" which is not valid critique, and especially shouldn't be coming from a Linux user if you want Windows users to switch - they don't like Linux because they're not familiar with it.
My complaints are generic to human-computer interfaces. Providing small icons in close proximity is poor design per [1]. Providing icons without text is also poor design, as summarised at [2]. We can argue more about how detailed labels should be--as I would equally complain about Gnome's context labels too. For example, "Open with..." is more useful as a menu with maximum 5-10 other applications to choose from. For example, will "Compress..." replace/remove my original file if I click on this action, or just create a compressed archive alongside the original?
Halfway through writing a response I've realized that Americans have a completely different approach to icons compared to the rest of the world. In the US most traffic signs have text information on them, while in most other countries most signs are icon-only. Text is usually reserved for exceptional situations that cannot easily be represented with an icon. So we're going to be talking past each other because you'll insist that a "yield" sign absolutely needs the "yield" word, while I'll insist that it should not.
What if traffic signs had text for many years and then suddenly a bunch were replaced by new ones with only a new icon and no visible explanation of what the icon means?
I think the analogy to traffic signs is flawed even further. Traffic signs icons are also standardized, have been for many years, and are taught in required safety classes. Not even close to the situation with mystery UIs in computer programs.
> What if traffic signs had text for many years and then suddenly a bunch were replaced by new ones with only a new icon and no visible explanation of what the icon means?
That's... exactly how meaningful icons are born. First you put icon with text, and once everyone understands the meaning of the icon, you remove the text, because it's not necessary anymore.
Do you think that US drivers would be left completely clueless when seeing the "yield" sign without the text, or would they recognize the icon?
> Not even close to the situation with mystery UIs in computer programs.
Android UI offers three buttons at the bottom of the screen. There's never been any text there. Yet somehow, most people have no issues using them. How come? Follow-up question: if you wanted to put text there, whete exactly would you do that, and what would it say? In real life, what about public toilets? Many places don't have a text "toilet", they just have a symbol of two stick figures, one wearing a skirt, yet we're all fine. Emergency exit? Sometimes it's without text, just a green light with a white stickman running through a door. Red X is also widely recognized as "closed" or "don't enter".
Finally, please tell me what you see in top-right corner of a window in your computer. If you see spelled out words "minimize", "maximize", "close" then yeah. Otherwise I'd like to ask you what makes these three buttons so special that they don't need text.
Payment terminals have green-yellow-red buttons at the bottom. No text, just icons and colors.
Point is, "icon without text" is an idea that exists in the wild and works.
Why would I as a Linux user want windows users to switch? I don't. If many of them do, Linux will become more like windows to appease them, and also because there's more money in the masses.
As long as Linux is fundamentally open, I don't see how Windows users switching over and popular distros becoming more like Windows is a negative thing, as the power users will still be there and have the ability to tune their systems however they like along with the benefit of more funding and software support. I think the ecosystem is too diverse and open-ended to have a tragedy of the commons.
Firefox already auto-selects the location bar when it gets focus, and refuses to even give the option not to do that. This is the sort of unwelcome behavior that can be forced on a community when a larger, less technical community merges with it. Overall, I do support Linux becoming the majority OS, but there will be some negative consequences.
Linux is the "normie" open source system, while hobbyists who want to have things done their way use things like Haiku. Gatekeeping Linux is like gatekeeping Toyota Corolla.
>your complaints boil down to "I don't like it because I'm not familiar with it" which is not valid critique
dhx cited Fitts's law, and you answered with "you're just not used to it" and a pompous, hand-waving non sequitur about traffic signs you pulled out of your reactive ass.
Fitts's law doesn't give a shit what you're used to. The time to hit a target goes up with its distance and down with its size. A row of tiny unlabeled icons crammed together is slow and easy to miss on the thousandth click, not just the first. Getting used to them teaches you what they mean. It doesn't make them any bigger.
Paul Fitts published it in 1954. Card, English and Burr used it at Xerox PARC in 1978 to show why the mouse beat the joystick and the cursor keys. It's the first thing anyone who designs pointing interfaces should know. If you've never heard of it, you have no business telling anyone what counts as valid critique of a menu. Neither do the people at Microsoft who shipped that row of icons, whether they never heard of it or heard of it and ignored it.
As for traffic signs: they're standardized by international treaty, you have to pass a test on them before you're allowed to drive, and the European stop sign still says STOP. Show me the treaty and the driving test for the Windows 11 context menu icons.
Familiarity is something a design has to earn, not something users owe it. Pie menus are self-revealing: they lead, follow, and get out of the way:
1) A novice clicks, sees the labels, and the menu leads them to the item.
2) An intermediate starts moving before reading, and the menu follows, highlighting the slice to confirm the direction.
3) An expert flicks in the direction without waiting, and the menu gets out of the way and never even draws. It's the same motion every time, so using it is learning it through rehearsal.
Every item is the same short distance from the click, and every target is a whole wedge out to the edge of the screen.
Jack Callahan, Mark Weiser, Ben Shneiderman and I measured it at Maryland in 1988: pie menus were significantly faster than linear menus with fewer errors, even for novices.
An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus, CHI'88:
I've been building them ever since, in shipping open source and commercial products and reusable components: an X10 window manager (the one we ran that experiment on), NeWS, SimCity in both NeWS/HyperLook and X11/Tcl/Tk, ScriptX, The Sims, ActiveX, a personalizable Palm TV guide and universal remote you could stroke with one finger instead of using the pen, and numerous implementations in JavaScript for web browsers.
The earliest known pie menus were in PIXIE, at Cambridge in 1969, by Neil Wiseman, Heinz Lemke and John Hiles: radial buttons that traveled with the light pen's tracking cross on a PDP-7. Its 1972 program runs again in the browser, so you can try them yourself.
Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective, covering all of these:
And by your own admission, half the Windows 11 menu is an ad for cloud storage. Get as familiar with that as you like. It'll still be there on every click.
Instead of pulling reactionary bullshit out of your ass and calling it user interface design, you should base your beliefs on empirical science and actual measurements in the real world, not irrelevant metaphors. Like the way the midterm elections just resoundingly proved beyond a doubt, once and for all, that Trump really is a stupid idiot.
I use Linux, MacOS and Windows and I am generally happier with Linux and Windows for navigating around but if there are annoyances that still haven't been fixed after 20 years on Windows, they are:
1) Paying for a licence and still being treated like a marketing target
2) Windows update is ridiculously slow end-to-end and takes a whole morning once per month to update our platform machines (even though we are 80% Linux)
3) Search is really, really, really bad. I mean honestly, search for a program and it might take 10 seconds to load a result if it loads anything at all. Partial matches? Nope. This has never worked on any of my windows 7-11 machines and has never been fixed.
4) The whole "reinstall Windows" attitude at Microsoft Support if they cannot work out why something isn't working
5) The half-arsed attempts to harmoize the UI which just leads to weirdisms like network in 3 different places, remote desktop still in a windows 32 bit dialog, and the fact that things got renamed and moved with every major release for what can only be assumed to be a shit reason breaking muscle memory for 1000s of people.
6) Not having the Virt IO drivers included in the base windows installer.
Meh. It's been 3 years and *gestures broadly* so much else of the Windows 11 UX still leaves much to be desired: making the context-menu slightly-less-awful isn't going to bring me back to the fold when so many other aspects of Win11 are not just unappealing, but actually off-putting.
(I maintain that Windows 11's bad UX is a consequence of MS having to make a single UI for everyone, which means it'll be too dumbed-down, simplified, or inflexible for power-users (XP, Win8, Win11); or too complicated and intimidating for everyone else (Win7, Win10), or just bad for everyone (Vista)).
If Microsoft wants me to willingly buy into Windows 12, then I want the option to keep the Windows 10 UI (File Explorer, Taskbar, Start Menu, and Window Management) - I know it can be done in theory[1], I just want proper support.
It only too them 6 years. But still lacks the ability to set it to your desired width. Its coming sometime in the next 6 years (unless windows 12 come first, then you lose the ability to set the taskbar to the side and have ot restart the cycle).
I have to use sharepoint on ms edge for work. Today I had to search something up an on my 27" monitor, I had 7 fixed rows of non-content on the top (including the tab bar and the locator bar) and 3 fixed rows at the bottom: last one being the windows taskbar that I still cant move as 26H2 hasn't been deployed.
The actual search results were a scrollable list with 5 rows visible of the content I was searching for.
I wonder what skills must one posses to rise to places that give one the authority to make such decisions? Are there incentives that drive these or are these borne of Kafkaesque bureaucracies? Does no one object to such monstrosities? Are the ones responsible so bereft of empathy and/or common sense? I know this is meandering and pointless but I wonder and struggle to understand the thought processes. This apathy, sure it presents itself in something so mundane but it permeates everything. i guess its the human condition.
Ah, this could be a great study in organization design! Conway's law suggests that the software architecture resembles the organization. So there might not be any designers making such decisions. Probably lots of organizations can't use each others' toolbars but are expected to add their own toolbar?
The late 90s. Office for dos is not what we know now. Office 98 was basically the same as what we have today, the improvements since then have been only incremental. And often worse like the ribbon. Visual studio came from this time too, they were really on a roll then.
Microsoft just stops investing in innovation once they take over a market. You saw it with IE, with office, with windows even.
There was never an MS Office for DOS. The first version was for the Mac.
There was a Word for DOS, but Word for Windows was a port of Word for Mac. Excel started on the Mac (their DOS spreadsheet was called Multiplan). PowerPoint started out as a Mac product funded by Apple, which Microsoft acquired.
None of this can be described as "knocked out by Microsoft in a year".
That's the one that made me ditch Win11 for Mint, a top panel + Plank Reloaded.
My entire UI workflow is top right orientated (menus, windows size/close buttons, docks) for muscle memory, so the Win10 stopped security updates forced me to switch.
Ironically a week later they extended security support for Win10.
One done, four thousand three hundred twenty-one to go. Plus minus couple of hundreds.
I have a dozen or so myself, probably two dozens, that I meet daily. Yes, daily. Using Windows feels like trying to run in muddy water with Lego bricks in the bottom here and there. It wasn't like this much earlier. Not even when the blue screen of death was commonplace.
> Users will get a “customize menu” button that controls what commands appear when they right-click their mouse
Good, though doesn't seem to be include the ability to control icons, name and accelerator keys, so still a long way to reach the user ergonomic heaven...
I wonder if MacOS is also going down the drain - obviously not as fast as Windows - but I believe it doesn't feel as smooth - it feels always more bloated with every updates and I find myself having to install more and more custom little tools for everything:
- Cleaning my drive from unwanted files → One app
- Organizing files based on type → another app
- A good voice-to-text → another app
- A better launcher → another app
- An incredible terminal → another app
I mean is this the way it's supposed to be? Wasn't the whole point - unwrap the macbook, load up Mac OS and LFG?
Please tell of of this better launcher? Spotlight is so bad these days. I used to be able to pull up the calculator with cmd+space..ca[enter] but lately it grabs some other completely ridiculous thing like some random file that throws an error instead. Yeah Apple that’s what I wanted, I wanted to open the Caltable.inf file, or worse if parallels is open it picks the windows calculator first before the macOS calculator? Wtf!
I’ve been using Raycast[0] to replace spotlight. Spotlight index kept randomly losing my /Applications dir, and like 90% of what I use spotlight for is Cmd + space > type in the name of the app I want to switch to/open. So it was a constant annoyance.
They have some AI stuff that they try to push on you during the install, but it can all be disabled so day to day it doesn’t bother you.
I had to install an app just to get smooth scrolling to work with my mouse. On a Mac! Apple practically invented smooth scrolling! It's like no one gives a shit about user experience anymore.
It's a drag that products like Windows are stuck forever the way they are. Or, rather, that they're stuck the way they are but then command such market share that nothing new ever comes and sees the light of day. Windows is doomed to keep generating billions for Microsoft until one day it doesn't, which I guess is what they're going for.
It also seems silly to tie the decline of Windows to UI discontent. Windows is in decline because it's increasingly irrelevant in the post-PC, post-USA world, and sucks in general.
I'd rather a setting to go back to the old right-click menu by default. It's possible to do with a registry edit, but not from a user-friendly setting.
Watch what they do, not what they say. My right-click menu still takes 2000ms to open, the Weather app idles at over 700MB ram, teams randomly heats up my CPU and causes my laptop to sound like a jet engine until i close it, opening start menu still causes the PC to lag. Do not give them any credit for posting Copilot-generated press posts, before you see the changes yourself.
Try an OS that's designed for people rather than for tracking, and you'll be amazed at how fast an OS can be.
Actually, it is a substantially worse gaming box too once you've used SteamOS/Bazzite. All it's good for right now is windows-only legacy software and anti-cheat implementations for the time being.
And somewhat excel because excel is badly implemented on mac
honestly Linux has gotten pretty good even for gaming, I set up a Linux (Fedora) on my primary gaming rig as a lark and figured I would go back to windows but I have not really had the need to and some games actually even run better on Linux it seems.
I don’t know what could drive PC sales in this age.
Old machines from the last 10 years are still capable of all normal daily tasks, even development tasks. This has the 95% covered through existing or cheap second hand machines.
The only new use-case is local AI, which for most people is simply out of price range right now with the current GPU and RAM prices. There’s some people who’ll want this, but they are a minority. Not enough to drive sales at scale.
So whatever remains as a segment is business - which in these cost-aware times are mostly doing like the other 95% and only buy new machines if needed to cover new hires.
i recently dusted off an old desktop that i hadnt used in a really long time. the GPU was a 1070 from 2016 i think and it wasnt even that high end when i bought it but it works surprisingly well. although im only using a 4b qwen model and only asking it very basic questions but its still better than nothing and it means i only need to switch a cloud model when i need to do something more complex. that GPU is going for 100-150 these days as well and im sure there are better options that are still cheap enough
- then download vmware workstation pro (you ll need to create a free account to get the download link on their website)
- install vmware workstation pro
- turn internet off
- plug your pendrive in with the rufus w11 x64 iso on it (mind ya, this pen drive ll first need full formatting before burning a w11 image to it)
- press f2 to reach bios in vmware settings and make it boot from pendrive
- turn internet off on your machine (DO NOT keep it on)
- install w11 (keep a 100gb for vmware)
- without updates it ll load real fast and you wont need an MS account (rufus takes care of it)
- while it installs, download revo uninstaller pro on a separate machine https://onefiles.net/9d170d01078634b5 (latest version 5.4.x) and put it inside a second pendrive / portable hdd
- once w11 loads, it ll ask you to enter a password, keep existing password blank and enter literally anything for a new password
- voila you are done with w11 setup inside vmware
- now connect the 2nd pendrive with revo and install it (need to clean uninstall many tools, hence we need this one)
- now go to search bar and type check for updates and update everything on w11 inside vmware
- next stop get unigetui from ms app store or from here https://devolutions.net/unigetui/ (it is a package manager responsible for installing just about everything else with auto updation of all packages)
- the open unigetui and search for the following packages vlc, winrar, winhance
- winhance is the fully customizable debloater you ll need to turn off all telemetry (we ll debloat after installing all the other requirements)
- next go to ms app store and install python or open powershell and type python
- the open unigetui and search for the following packages vlc, winrar, winhance
- winhance is the fully customizable debloater you ll need to turn off all telemetry (we ll debloat after installing all the other requirements)
- next go to ms app store and install python or open powershell and type python
- mind you this installs a python version manager that lets you install and uninstall multiple python versions
- after this python version manager is setup, install a specific version of python like
```
py install 3.13
```
- next we need a node.js version manager, use fnm for it
- install ghidra , ghidra-mcp (mind you open ghidra-mcp first because it only works with specific versions of ghidra and java) this is the reason we installed a java version manager
- run winhance, check recommended settings under optimize and every other tab and restart the vm a few times for full debloat with 0 telemetry services
- congrats you have a full blown agentic environment at this point (if I missed anything i ll come back and update)
Are you fucking kidding me? crypto bros were angels compared to these spawns of Satan ai bros. at least during crypto craze only GPUs were on short supply and nobody except gamers were affected. RAM and storage prices affect every single consumer electronic device thus everyone.
I recently got my hands on a windows machine - I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t actually excited to use windows after a 15 year hiatus
What a heaping pile of you know what. You need Microsoft accounts to download basic apps from the App Store
You get nagged and nagged to enter a windows account
Having grown up with it, it’s an incredibly odd feeling using it. Modern ui…modern ui…modern ui…and then BAM a weird screen directly ported from windows 98 (or 2k, you get the point)
An OS that was always incredibly intuitive to me all of a sudden just felt like a disorganized mess. Want to see your Ethernet adapters? Good luck, you’ll open 10 other settings menus/search results before finally getting to the options you need. Advanced sound settings? Same
My headset wasn’t working, after clicking through a bunch of options at some point I loaded a wizard with very specific questions that I’d never seen before and wouldn’t how how to get back to, it randomly worked
Still a bunch of bloatware, still can’t be on for more than a day without having to reboot, everything I remembered that was bad with made worse by bad ux
These days they even tried to remove the option of installing windows with an internet connection, aka ms account
"The timing is notable, as the announcement comes alongside Microsoft’s quarterly financial report, which showed a continued decline in the business of selling Windows licenses for new PCs."
Several factors come together. For me, Spy-Recall was the dealbreaker. I can not use an operating system that constantly reports to the USA what I am doing. But the increase in RAM prices also means that I fail to see why I should overpay now due to greedy US AI corporations. These corporations all us folks money here. It is like a racket. This is not a "free market" either, since it is so heavily skewed in favour of corporations. The whole idea about capitalism, which the USA once claimed to worship before selling out to the TechBros, has been that free market competition leads to lower prices. Right now we see collusion, a mafia - why the TechBros aren't in jail already beats me. Too much financial kickbacks into the judicial system.
After using Windows since I was a pre-teen I finally switched to Omarchy. Its incredible having claude (or other agent) to manage all the random linux config. Its not just good enough its better than Windows in every way. (OK I dont game)
Windows 11 is really the worst iteration, my partner did not want the telemetry and other windows 11 crap, so she, from her own free will, researched linuxes and chose Fedora Kinoite as her operating system, because she liked the idea that she could not accidentally break it.
After a year or so, she is a happy camper, steam works, web works, all is good. Though once we start with the art software, that might be a bit tricky.
Only issue that it had was when after an os update the extra hdd mount points lost their execute flags for some reason, so unfortunately not a 100% technical free experience.
> Though once we start with the art software, that might be a bit tricky.
Something that took me way too long to figure out is that you can have Steam run arbitrary Windows software in a Steam-managed -er- Protonprefix. [0] Perhaps this might remove some of the hassle of handling Art Software if Wine doesn't quite work for you?
To do this, you can use the menu option to "Add a Non-Steam Game to My Library", browse for any old .EXE, and Steam will handle setting up Proton for you. You can also change the .EXE that that Steam entry points to after all that shit gets set up... so I _assume_ that you could first point to the .EXE for the Art Software's installer, let it run through the install process, and then change what the Steam entry points to to the .EXE for the Art Software.
[0] ...it's like a WINEPREFIX, but with Proton... get it???
If you don't know the name already check out Krita https://krita.org for art software
Depending on interests other solid sw is Inkscape and Blender. But that gets increasingly intricate to use. I also wonder how the Adobe AI clones will do after their first one shot publicity.
You can argue it's the best iteration. It annoys people so much they wre eager to look for another option.
> Though once we start with the art software, that might be a bit tricky.
This might be super helpful for her: https://getartcraft.com/apps. Works extremely well as a CC etc. replacemenmt.
Also https://capycanvas.art/ - a lovely native Linux replacement for Procreate, which I've been looking for ever since my 2018 iPad Pro stopped receiving updates.
I'm all for artcraft effort to succeed and wish them all the best. But you're overselling this as "Works extremely well as a CC etc. replacemenmt." - it's alpha level software. It's got lots of issues and is not polished yet. Give it some time.
In the meantime, Krita and a few online apps have been around and very successful.
Why not Bazzite?
The incredible thing is that Windows 10 was already near perfect. It would make sense to increase performance and security, but they changed the UI without improving an iota of user productivity, including removing key features of the product. Almost ever change in the past few years made Windows worse. Windows leadership should be fired and replaced by people who are actually Windows users, not MacOS users.
That's why a lot of us still works on Windows 10. I'm always laughing hearing that on Win 11 even Task Manager breaks not showing process list, randomly. Clipboard on RDP breaks every few connections and requires killing process or restart. The funniest is when next person calls me and asks if he really needs creating Micro$hit account to just use PC for local stuff.
I hope someone at big corp will be so bored one day that he'll just start releasing Win 10 updates after reverse engineering the mechanisms and we will get Win 10 support again.
The rule still alive and stands strong - every second Windows is just a crap. ME, Vista, 8 and now 11.
If they’d just taken Windows 10 and applied the Windows 11 theme (Fluent) that would’ve made for an OS that I wouldn’t have minded leaving on my gaming PC. That didn’t happen, and so now it’s now running Linux.
> Windows leadership should be fired and replaced by people who are actually Windows users, not MacOS users.
As a longtime Mac user, Windows leadership decisions don’t make any sense to me either. I have precisely zero interest in making 11 my primary OS… XP, 7, or 10 wouldn’t have been ideal but if I had no choice but to work with Windows those would be greatly preferable to 11.
> If they’d just taken Windows 10 and applied the Windows 11 theme
That is what they did. They took windows 10 added the theme and taskbar/start from the triple failed 10x added arbitrary cpu cutoff and released as 11.
as an avid gamer, win11 is the one that pushed me to use linux only (edit: along with the fact that proton and wine make games playable on linux!!!). i would have LIKED to keep using windows but the way they treat their customers is unforgivable. when i go to a restaurant i give them 2 chances at annoying me before i go elsewhere, i gave the windows team what feels like a hundred chances. dont care what they do now, theyre history.
edit again: do they even need pc business, they make all their profits from server stuff now, they may as well wrap up the pc os division ;)
re last para.
loss leader funda in action, prolly.
or, sort of: those who live together, stick together.
aka if you buy window pcs, you're likely to buy windows servers and vice versa.
> As a longtime Mac user, Windows leadership decisions don’t make any sense to me either.
To be sure, as another Mac user, they make sense in that they want Apple's revenue and reputation. The problem is they categorically refuse to invest in their engineering staff to even remotely the degree Apple does, which is reflected in the "quality" of the products on offer.
Everyone wants to be Apple, and they're all convinced despite ongoing proof to the contrary, that they can do it for pennies on the dollar. It's genuinely kind of pathetic how desperate they are to be Apple.
> Everyone wants to be Apple
Can they instead aim to be what Apple was? Being what Apple is or going where Apple is heading is rather gross.
The biggest improvement in Windows 11 is increased locking of small users into Microsoft ecosystem and Microsoft cloud services.
This is not a improvement for the users, it's a improvement for Microsoft shareholders, because many users may decide to pay for additional Microsoft services (additional revenue after paying for the operating system) and it allows Microsoft to monetize customer data (Microsoft learned this business strategy from Google).
" Home and Pro (since version 22H2) edition installation requires internet connection and Microsoft account login (only if for personal use on Pro) is mandatory unless manually bypassed to create a local user. However, Microsoft has since blocked one of the last remaining easy bypass methods that allowed local account creation during initial setup, complicating the bypass process further. All other editions are excluded from this requirement. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_11#Setup
Don't forget having to shove all the "recommendation" and "suggestion" systems into it, too, so they could add random sponsored apps to your Start menu primed and ready to install as soon as you clicked on them at the same time they push more notifications at you to use more OneDrive.
I've recently switched from windows to Mac and it was so refreshing using a system that does not purposely work against the user. I don't agree with many design decisions in Mac (wtf is up with tabbing into apps I've closed, or not being able to tab through instances of an app without a separate shortcut?!) but at least they're not shoving telemetry and ads down your throat.
You must be using a different macos than me, or have not attempted to connect a mouse (Scroll Reverser), an external display (BetterDisplay), wanted to have sane power management (Amphetamine), want to reach all application windows with only the keyboard, wanted to close modal popups with only the keyboard, etc...
About telemetry, and ads: It is also present in MacOS, but less invasive indeed. And about not showing something down my throat: the other day my iphone just told me in declarative, with a single accept button: now your system will be updated to ios27 (download of updates was enabled, with manual confirmation).
Also having to unlock every app after every brew update in the applications as they "have been downloaded from the internet"... it is not something i'd call refreshing and not working against me.
> it was so refreshing using a system that does not purposely work against the user.
I don't share this optimism, Apple has not been a hardware-first/computers company in a very long time and nowadays makes more bucks profiling your consumption habits to sell you "content" on their ever more "content-consumption" oriented devices.
Edit: just to add to that the same ads (for cloud storage and premium services) that people in the Microsoft world get pissy about very much exists on that side of the fence. It's a race to the bottom, Apple isn't there to lead by example.
(many) apps keep running without windows — all you closed was the last open window. cmd-~ switches between windows within a running app. this has been the case since the classic Mac days, & while it seems to drive those who come from Windows bonkers, long-term Mac users (at least all I've known) appreciate this small aspect of macOS as it makes a clear distinction between apps & windows. newer apps (some from Apple) which break this model are still maddening to use.
> many) apps keep running without windows
That's fine, but I do not want to tab into an app whose last windows I have purposely closed. I closed it so I have a cleaner slate of apps to work with. If chrome is closed, it should not show up until I open it again. Not just windows but also linux make much more sense in that regard.
It's annoying because the x button on the windows is now a completely useless widget to me, and I have to close apps via cmd+q instead. It's even more annoying that I can't actually close Finder, even though I'm using a different filebrowser.
1. do this on a non-us layout 2. do this with Firefox / Chrome and its in-private window. Those are not reachable with neither shortcut for me.
Mac is the most culturally colonialist minded thing in my experience, its i18n support is terrible for smaller languages.
The "windows bonkers" model is strangely copied by most third party windowsin systems, as it makes sense, with having the recency based tab order, and being a global list. For us who work with more than a single software and often have to work between two different software, maybe an editor and a terminal... it is usually pretty handy.
Win2KPro was the peak. Windows 7 wasn't terrible, and you could select the Windows 2000 UI. It's been downhill since then.
I really liked Win2KPro. My son has a copy of Windows Neptune he fires up now and then.
But I also had lots of fun when Code Red and Nimda came around - full perm file navigation on computers everywhere. Any Win2k box knocking on my firewall was telling me it was wide open for use.
I remember building a lc for a client, installing 2k then SP2. Clicking around installing our software thinking “this could be my main machine. This would be good”
Then it got a virus.
30 minutes after I finished installing windows.
Because designers must design, programmers must program and managers must manage to ear a paycheck you have to change things even when they don't need changing. When you put this into a context of a greedy corporation that is completely self serving, i.e using the platform to serve their needs instead of those of the user it's inevitable that the product will turn into shit from the user perspective.
I've been Windows 10 user for many years, but just few days ago I bought new laptop and went with Windows 11.
Honestly it's the same for me. Taskbar is a bit weird and start menu is a bit weird, but I was able to turn off unwanted features, so it's not bad right now.
I'm mostly Linux user and my Windows usage is more about gaming, but I did some programming with it as well.
> Almost ever change in the past few years made Windows worse.
No, it's just made it worse for you. You aren't the customer though. Enterprises are customers, you're just a lowly user.
Hopefully one day someone at Microsoft will remember that customers are actually made out of users.
How has it been made better for Enterprises?
> The incredible thing is that Windows 10 was already near perfect.
This is a ridiculous statement given how many people complained about it at the time!
There seems to be a common cognitive bias where things in the past are considered good and things in the present bad. So a few years from now, a bunch of people would say "Windows 12 is so bad, the incredible thing is that Windows 11 was already near perfect", completely forgetting the sentiment at the time.
Windows 8 hasn't been vindicated by time yet, Windows releases have been more of a pendulum where every other major release is widely adopted (not necessarily beloved) after a misbegotten major release.
I keep hearing this since Windows 98.
I'm sure you meant Windows NT 4. It's all kind of down hill after that, with worthwhile stopping points at Windows 2000 and Windows 7.
>. Almost ever change in the past few years made Windows worse.
I feel like this is the point. Microsoft don't want to support a consumer desktop OS anymore, and are pushing people to other devices, where their profitable cloud services are also available.
MS wants you to pay for authentication, office, cloud services etc without having to do consumer support or anything like that. I reckon they see Apple as the perfect partner for this, someone with a desktop experience compatible with their cloud experience.
Every other windows is always terrible
Pff… remember Cortana?
Windows 7 was the perfect OS for me.
Cortana is literaly the reason I am on Linux now for 9 years.
Had to reinstall Windows and could not disable Cortana or even skip some weired voice output during initial setup. Immediately removed Windows again and installed Ubuntu.
Yes. And Tay.
It was hilarious how the update to finally remove cortana came out a month after they announced copilot
About 25 years ago (maybe a bit more) I remember a friend, a top tier developer at Microsoft (this was in the period where the underbelly of windows 7 was being designed) explaining to me that Microsoft knew its users better than they knew themselves and that the key was to train them properly. While there's some sense to such an attitude when introducing tweaks to technology, some variant of the attitude underlies most of Microsoft's missteps since then.
> the key was to train them properly
How very Apple of them.
Apple users train each other.
As long as they still require online account to install, nope, not for me. That's stupid requirement.
If that's important to you, there's an option to allow using a local account during setup by dropping to command line and setting a flag. Pretty straightforward if that's your only deal breaker.
I just recently installed Windows 11 on a computer and this is the steps that I followed
https://rtech.support/guides/bypass-11/
It's two steps:
1) During Windows setup you push Shift-F10
2) It opens a command prompt and you type OOBE\BYPASSNRO
When you hit enter it reboots and allows local mode.
Microsoft should not have hidden this away like they have and it should be an option for everyone installing Windows, and I recognize this isn't a solution for the non-technical user.. but for you specifically if it's something you're comfortable doing, it's an option to allow you to avoid having to use a Microsoft account when installing Windows.
I know that a lot of tech folks consider it a non issue because it is 'easy' to fix if you know the bypass and your way around the more inner workings, but broadly this isn't really an answer to the problem.
If we always just say 'Oh, well, if you do XYZ then you can manage to do A despite B' then we're eroding our control and agency. Slowly the bypasses will phase out, as they have slowly been in this case, and then we're really in a poor state.
I had a tech support client who came to be because they valued their privacy and didn't want an account but who had no idea how to make that happen. They didn't even really know what to be looking for.
I'm by no means suggesting it's normal or that I think it's okay Microsoft removed the native ability.
You're right that I probably made an assumption that someone posting on hacker News would have the technical ability to hit a keyboard combination and type a command on a command line and hit enter, which is essentially what's required currently to utilize the local account ( https://rtech.support/guides/bypass-11/ )
My reply was intended as more of a direct message to OP, as opposed to general advice I think every end user should know and follow. I should have been more clear.
Not only that, if someone has a tech knowledgable person set up their Windows 11 computer without online accounts MS updates will cause it to spam the tech-ignorant person owning that computer with misleading pop-ups saying they need to press this button to do $x thing. Which then secretly sets up online accounts which automatically and silently enables drive encryption. Which causes it to go to a bluescreen saying to go to some shady looking URL at aka.ms and type in a long code that appears on your blue screen only broken computer. It's basically ransomware. This is not some theory, I had this happen to a sewing machine laptop I set up for my mother.
And yes, I later learned that aka.ms is a real Microsoft URL. But when it was first described to me it sounded exactly like ransomware and had exactly that effect.
I would appreciate a link to the details about 'setting a flag.' The last version of that I used earlier this year stopped working in recent months, and I believe I saw tech news stories to the effect that Microsoft had intentionally closed that path.
For now I just use a customer-supplied email address which I used to setup a Microsoft account, setup Windows and use that account, immediately create a local-only 'admin' account with full rights, delete the online associated account, and start creating user account(s) from there.
I had recently had to install windows for the first time in years, did some chatting with mr gpt and poking around on reddit until I arrived at: https://massgrave.dev. They guide you on how to download windows LTSC from the "official" Microsoft links. So much less crap shoved down the system, it's kind of nice.
Great point. It is the ONLY way I would use Windows on my computers. I just use the media builder from Microsoft directly:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11
There are also community projects like NTLite ( https://ntlite.com/ ) and Windows ISO Debloater ( https://github.com/itsNileshHere/Windows-ISO-Debloater ) for the more technically advanced that want full control to prevent the bloat from even making it to your machine during installation at all (instead of having to clean it up after the fact)
I just recently had to install Windows 11 fresh on a computer and this is what I used
https://rtech.support/guides/bypass-11/
I have a Microsoft account, but I prefer to use a local account to avoid a lot of the "value add" that comes from using the Microsoft account.
It's not about technical, it's about their view and mindset.
That doesn't sound like something that counts as an easy option.
If someone is already setting up Windows manually themselves, I believe they're already at some level of technical ability.. but as I pointed out in another comment, my reply was specifically to OP who I made an assumption had some technical ability given that they're here on hacker News. Maybe that assumption is wrong and I recognize that.
That said, the process is:
1) while installing Windows press shift f10
2) a command prompt will open and you type OOBE\BYPASSNRO
When you hit enter the computer will reboot and allow local mode.
I fully recognize that this is a hidden option that most people don't know about, but if you do, it seems pretty straightforward to me for someone that's already at a level where they're comfortable manually installing Windows, but I recognize I have an blind spot due to my own technical abilities.
I hope you enjoy not being able to use the Ctrl-Alt-Delete menu to reset your password, because bypassing OOBE breaks that functionality.
Could you back this up? I did lots of unattended install without having to fill OOBE, and the Ctrl+Alt+Del menu always worked.
I'd recommend creating a sysprep answer file (with LLM's its pretty easy, also rufus can do it) instead of the trick mentioned above.
I've used this tool with great success for both W10/11 to do unattended installs instead of asking an LLM: https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/
i couldnt get that to work the last time i tried but i ended up using rufus to burn the ISO which gives you options to turn off the microsoft account. it even disables the tpm2.0 check so you can install it on older hardware if you want to
This method does not work in current home installer. And they also closed other loopholes.
Just ignore the sign saying "Beware of the leopard".
Windows 11 Pro does not require online account to install.
Installed Windows 11 on a VM over the weekend for running a specific program. The lengthy multi-reboot updates are just like I remember from Vista. Except now they show advertisements. Grateful 2008 was Year of the Linux Desktop for me.
Sometimes I do wonder why it's hard to see that you shouldn't invest in AI, let Sam Altman hoover up all compute hardware and then make a surprise pikachu when hardware sales of your user base decline. Same for Google: "what, if I stop people from going to websites because I let a bot summarise what they're looking for, I get less money from website visits?"
At this rate (I know I keep beating that drum), I think we cannot have AI: it is too self-defeating from a business pov.
It's not like Google had a choice. Asking AI is superior to browsing links in 90% of use cases, and they would have been disrupted otherwise.
Browsing a curated list of the worst SEO generated spam, sure. Anything is better. Wait for SEO advertising to come to AI summary.
It's already here, ask AI for a product recommendation and it will recommend whichever company has the highest Reddit astroturfing budget.
Yeah but there is more competition in that space which might delay/slowdown the inevitable enshitification
Just a clarification, Google's search revenue actually went up in their latest quarterly reporting. It just didn't go up as far as analysts were predicting.
Yes, but the logical ouroboros should be evident:
- make money from ad views
- make people place ads on many websites, so a lot of ads can be shown
- use made money to build AI summary
- AI summary prevents people from visiting many websites
My sister gave me his win 11 laptop to fix. 1 Tb SSD was full. Half of it was windows.old folder after 26h2 update. Windows has 5 different ways to delete that folder and none works. They are all badly documented. It spends 1 hour reading the file list before starting to delete... On a 4 tb/second nvme drive. Then spend a day "deleting" the folder, but doesn't deletes anything.
Finally, booted an Linux rescue distro from USB and deleted the folder.
Then had to clean the winsxs folder, which was full of useless files after an update.
In the end I cleaned 700 gb wasted.
Settings - > Storage -> Temporary Files
That's the universal way to clean up roll back installs and other Windows update related.
If that's not working for you, there's probably a much larger issue at play on her machine and would be much better off backing up her data, wiping all the partitions and installing fresh. You'll likely reclaim more than 700 GB.
The only time I've seen situations like what you're describing is when these are machines that have been in use for years and have major Windows versions on top of major Windows version stacked on top of each other, not just incremental updates.
That doesn't works, and it's a 1 year old laptop that came with 2024 windows 11 that accumulated updates up to 26h2.
You don't have the option? Or when going into system mode as part of temporary cleanup it doesn't show older Windows update as an option to clean or it fails when it tries?
What doesn't work specifically?
> It spends 1 hour reading the file list before starting to delete
Shift delete bypasses the relocation of files to the recycle bin.
Shift delete still iterate files to calculate estimated time before starting the actual deletion
Try this instead:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...
Way too little way too late Microsoft. After 30 years I will never choose Windows again. Got on Windows with 3.1 and off the train with 11. It's not me--it's you.
What took you so long? I got on Windows 3.1 and off with Windows Vista.
As maligned as it was... I think Vista was actually servicable if all the extra visual effects and UAC stuff was turned off. It ended up looking more like a plainly styled XP desktop and ran moderately well on laptops just for a win32 C development machine (emacs, gcc/msvc cl.exe). I had this setup for windows builds, with a Linux desktop as my main machine.
At least back then more of the original engineering talent that Microsoft had was still around, and you would even run into them on irc from time to time. 20 years on, I suspect a lot of the foundational personalities that drove engineering decisions have since retired or been made redundant, and that reflects the weird UI fracturing and endless regressions. I doubt they can recover at this point.
> What took you so long? I got on Windows 3.1 and off with Windows Vista.
I got off on Windows 95.
It was Microsoft Bob that was the last straw, wasn't it.
> What took you so long?
Support for Gaming - not Wine, but hardware support and performance.
Yeah proton is a helluva drug.
Inertia and many years being forced to use it for work.
Linux: Install and use. Windows: Fight 3 days with the installer. Spend 4 weeks tweaking it... And do it all again after any random update.
I have some Lenovo 'temporary UI removal tool' (don't remember its name exactly, do not care that much to look for it from this Mac) that comes back with each update. The tool, as my AI agent explains, regularly (24h) wakes the computer from hibernation (yes, I took care of being that available, I need that, despite as a MS SE says: they know me better than I, so they removed that possibility only coming back by tweaks) to check if the post-installation temporary UI something is still there, and removes if it is there. But keeps running - it is a service or what -, still waking after removal, every 24h, including weekends. Checking if the already removed UI thingy that it removed is still there. They then have some service restoring service too watching if the UI removal service was stopped/disabled/removed, restoring that. One need to kill/unset both through command line to have some remedy. Which both come back at each Windows update. Yes, it is Lenovo. But yes, it is Windows delivering this way sometimes just few days apart with frequent 'updates'.
It took me longer than 3 days to set Linux up for my (multi-specialty) needs, but I can see absolutely no reason anyone would ever want to go back to Windows at this point. You know what else lets me customize my menus? KDE.
My last few years of Windows were more frustrating than Linux has ever been. Everything locked down and a never ending string of crashes and issues that are impossible to properly diagnose or repair. At least on Linux, when there's an issue, it's clear what it is and where to report it.
(Disclaimer: I have an AMD GPU and I don't play competitive multiplayer games. All other games have just worked so far.)
This is a broad generalization, and inconsistent with my experience. Especially notable as Linux refers to a diverse family of operating systems.
youve missed the joke, that the descriptions used to be swapped
Well, I mean, they still are for most of the public.
> Linux: Install and use.
I mean yes, but an update on my Linux box just installed a new kernel, uninstalled the old video card driver, and didn't install a new video card driver.
I have taken to asking claude "is it safe for me to reboot now?" before restarting after updates. So far 3 times in a row it has come back with "no, your system won't startup".
Edit: I also just woke my desktop up from sleep and the alt-tab service failed to resume. Just... wut.
Unfortunately this is still the reality of many Linux distros. On every update something breaks.
Just as an exMple I'm on arch myself and after last update if I use X11 screen saver with lock some service crashes and the computer cannot be unlocked.
Maybe next update will have a fix but then something else will be broken instead.
Linux (as in the kernel+user space of your choice) is a perpetual alpha. Has been for 30 years and will always be.
Whenever GTK/Gnome becomes reasonable stable it's time for a rewrite!
(And I'm a Linux user since red hat 7.2)
I am not sure you know what you are talking about. What is the "alt-tab service" you are speaking about. There is no systemd service with that name in any linux distro I have used.
Also if you are able to know that the new video card driver hasn't been installed, you also know that you can solve this by doing it yourself. In that case why wouldn't you do it?
Ultimately if all those things are too hard for you there are a number of immutable "image" based distros where packages/drivers aren't managed individually during updates and where you can always boot to the previous version. Maybe that is what you need.
Both AMD and Intel have open source graphics drivers which are upstreamed into the Linux kernel, so that situation would be impossible with an AMD or Intel graphics card. Any driver issues are a pain that nvidia decided to inflict on you.
I installed it on a laptop for a friend after not having used it since the mid 2000’s. What a piece of flaming dogshit that whole platform is. How is this the output of a multi billion dollar company?
Well then you look at a random webpage from CNN and I guess they’re all competing for how trashy they can make their products.
There can’t be any pride left at all in that place.
You just made me check the CNN website. It had black font on black background. Run by incompetents.
Looks fine to me?
https://lite.cnn.com/
Sometimes, some articles don't have content, but eh. Works for me.
NPR's site is nice too:
https://text.npr.org/
And yet you still hear "Linux is only free if your time is worthless."
It's untrue in comparison to Windows, and MacOS (at least for software dev, when I last used it 1.5 years ago).
Linux easily has the lowest maintenance burden if you pick a boring distros. It can be a huge pit of wasted time, _if you actually want to fall into that pit._
IMO that is still kind of true. Windows 11 LTSC gives a totally bloat free experience, the only downside is you can only reasonably get it through grey market cdkey sites.
Linux, sometimes works without faff. But in my experience it's at best 50:50 if you get that, or constant crashes, hangs, broken peripherals, etc. (Of course any time you mention this the luck 50% pipe up with "it works for me".)
Linux day 1: whole day looking up which distro is usable.
Day 2: install Linux distro, total process is like 4 hours because at every step you double check that you won't lose your Windows data because it's your first time installing Linux. Realize that your distro doesn't support modern displays and never will. Call it a day because you're mentally exhausted.
Day 3: install a distro that does support modern displays. The process is only 3 hours because you're already familiar with it. Spend the rest of the day looking up which Linux programs are good replacements for Windows ones. Hint: all of them have bugs that affect your particular use cases - KDE shits itself when it sees a folder with 20k images, DaVinci Resolve has lots of issues with audio drivers and video codecs and gives zero error messages, no native Linux audio player supports all exotic music formats in my library so I need to run foobar2000 which obviously crashes when it sees WMA lossless and then UI fails to scale properly, lots of random shit like Wine installation causing system update to fail.
Day 4: connect $DEVICE. Look up drivers.
Day 44: $DEVICE works.
Day 104: $DEVICE works AND survives system update.
In my case that were keyboard (support for extra keys) and steering wheel.
Day 204: invite friends for video games. Spend the entire evening trying to fix controllers because they're fucked - if I first connect Steam Controller and then run Steam, then Steam shits itself. I need to specifically do it the other way around. Also, Xbox One controller drivers have an incompatibility with X360 controllers so I couldn't simply connect the old dongle and play like that.
I particularly liked the presence of windows, .WMA and xbox controllers in this.
Debian+xfce or even lxqt are about as plug and play as you can get with UX straight out of 2002 in the best way. Hell it probably even runs on 2002 hardware.
Linux users who ignore critique and claim "yeah bro but have you tried MY distro" are like potheads "yeah bro but have you tried MY strain".
Ok my guy have fun grinding that axe. I don't care pick any distro and it's gonna be more stable and less user hostile than Windows. Meanwhile tell me how Windows 11 is actually great and we are all using it wrong. All we need is the right magic strain of regedits and post install cleanup scripts. Brb let me send those steps to my grandma for her PC so it stops uploading all her files to the cloud every 5 minutes.
> Linux day 1: whole day looking up which distro is usable. > > Day 2: install Linux distro, total process is like 4 hours because at every step you double check that you won't lose your Windows data because it's your first time installing Linux. Realize that your distro doesn't support modern displays and never will. Call it a day because you're mentally exhausted.
Hmmm day 2 should be: making a backup of my windows data, that way I can do the f... I want during installation.
> Day 3: install a distro that does support modern displays.
Apart from LTS/enterprise versions, all distros are running the same kernel generations. They all have the same hardware support really.
The rest of your text soup doesn't mean anything. Like this: "random shit like Wine installation causing system update to fail.", this really sounds like hallucinations and inventions.
The part about $DEVICE and drivers is like looking at a kid trying to connect a Nintendo SNES controller to a PS5 and complaining it doesn't work to well.
Maybe they haven't realized how convoluted their licensing system is, and as Gabe Newell says, piracy is a service issue.
While I'm sure that would help, I still wouldn't use Windows even if it was completely free and distributed as easily as Linux. Windows has some serious problems with dark patterns like ads in the start menu and telemetry everywhere. The software is slow and bloated. The lack of a package manager makes each application run their own updater (though they did at least put the drivers inside windows update which was a step in the right direction).
Windows does have a package manager nowadays. I install the majority of software with Winget, and Chocolatey and Scoop fill in the gaps.
those aren't package managers rather a catalog of automated installer switches.
It has very little to do with piracy. The whole PC market is suffering [0].
[0]: https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/worldwide-pc-shipments-have...
...who is ironically a former MS employee.
Trying to understand the original Windows 11 context menu diagram as someone who hasn't used Windows 11 is surprisingly difficult. By contrast, Gnome 51's context menu (or earlier versions as far back as I remember) for a file/folder are unambiguous and easy to understand.
At the top of the Windows 11 context menu are some small icons without text for high usage actions which I assume are:
1. select-for-moving (cut), perhaps Gnome's "Move to..."
2. duplicate-in-place-with-number-appended-to-duplicate-filename or select-for-copying (copy), perhaps Gnome's "Copy to..."
3. something to do with the clipboard--maybe copy contents to clipboard
4. something to do with text entry--maybe rename the file/folder, perhaps Gnome's "Rename..."
5. share via social media applications or cloud file sharing applications, or move the file/folder locally perhaps Gnome's "Move to..."
6. move to recycle bin (delete)
Menu options with text are unambiguous for "Open", "Open with", "Compress to ZIP file", "Properties", although Gnome will state "Open with {name_of_default_app}" to make it clear exactly how a file will be opened without having to guess.
I guess "Copy as path" might just copy the full filesystem path to the clipboard. I can't remember the last time I wanted to do that.
I guess "Always keep on this device" prevents the file/folder being backed up to some cloud storage provider. I'd rather open up an application dedicated to cloud storage backups and be able to review current backup options there all in one place for all types of data/files.
The "Free up space" option I'm less clear on--will a local application pop up and suggest what I can delete within the folder, will a cloud storage provider application pop up and suggest the file not be synchronised with the local device and only be kept in cloud storage, etc.
The bottom option "Show more options" is not expandable so I assume there are so many other options an entire new window is needed to display them all. Maybe it'll give me useful but rarely used options from a list of hundreds available, such as "count how many words are in this file" for text files...?
"Always keep on this device" / "Free up space" only make sense when you understand the "Desktop" and "Document" is now backed by cloud -- the file you have on your local computer is just a cache.
The former meant it have higher priority in caching, the latter is just evicting from cache immediately.
I use "copy as path" all the time. It's good for if you have scripts and want a program in a different folder to launch them (e.g AutoHotKey, Task Scheduler).
TBH while the menu has glaring issues (half of it is basically an ad for cloud storage), your complaints boil down to "I don't like it because I'm not familiar with it" which is not valid critique, and especially shouldn't be coming from a Linux user if you want Windows users to switch - they don't like Linux because they're not familiar with it.
My complaints are generic to human-computer interfaces. Providing small icons in close proximity is poor design per [1]. Providing icons without text is also poor design, as summarised at [2]. We can argue more about how detailed labels should be--as I would equally complain about Gnome's context labels too. For example, "Open with..." is more useful as a menu with maximum 5-10 other applications to choose from. For example, will "Compress..." replace/remove my original file if I click on this action, or just create a compressed archive alongside the original?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law
[2] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/icon-usability/
Halfway through writing a response I've realized that Americans have a completely different approach to icons compared to the rest of the world. In the US most traffic signs have text information on them, while in most other countries most signs are icon-only. Text is usually reserved for exceptional situations that cannot easily be represented with an icon. So we're going to be talking past each other because you'll insist that a "yield" sign absolutely needs the "yield" word, while I'll insist that it should not.
What if traffic signs had text for many years and then suddenly a bunch were replaced by new ones with only a new icon and no visible explanation of what the icon means?
I think the analogy to traffic signs is flawed even further. Traffic signs icons are also standardized, have been for many years, and are taught in required safety classes. Not even close to the situation with mystery UIs in computer programs.
> What if traffic signs had text for many years and then suddenly a bunch were replaced by new ones with only a new icon and no visible explanation of what the icon means?
That's... exactly how meaningful icons are born. First you put icon with text, and once everyone understands the meaning of the icon, you remove the text, because it's not necessary anymore.
Do you think that US drivers would be left completely clueless when seeing the "yield" sign without the text, or would they recognize the icon?
> Not even close to the situation with mystery UIs in computer programs.
Android UI offers three buttons at the bottom of the screen. There's never been any text there. Yet somehow, most people have no issues using them. How come? Follow-up question: if you wanted to put text there, whete exactly would you do that, and what would it say? In real life, what about public toilets? Many places don't have a text "toilet", they just have a symbol of two stick figures, one wearing a skirt, yet we're all fine. Emergency exit? Sometimes it's without text, just a green light with a white stickman running through a door. Red X is also widely recognized as "closed" or "don't enter".
Finally, please tell me what you see in top-right corner of a window in your computer. If you see spelled out words "minimize", "maximize", "close" then yeah. Otherwise I'd like to ask you what makes these three buttons so special that they don't need text.
Payment terminals have green-yellow-red buttons at the bottom. No text, just icons and colors.
Point is, "icon without text" is an idea that exists in the wild and works.
Why would I as a Linux user want windows users to switch? I don't. If many of them do, Linux will become more like windows to appease them, and also because there's more money in the masses.
As long as Linux is fundamentally open, I don't see how Windows users switching over and popular distros becoming more like Windows is a negative thing, as the power users will still be there and have the ability to tune their systems however they like along with the benefit of more funding and software support. I think the ecosystem is too diverse and open-ended to have a tragedy of the commons.
Firefox already auto-selects the location bar when it gets focus, and refuses to even give the option not to do that. This is the sort of unwelcome behavior that can be forced on a community when a larger, less technical community merges with it. Overall, I do support Linux becoming the majority OS, but there will be some negative consequences.
Linux is the "normie" open source system, while hobbyists who want to have things done their way use things like Haiku. Gatekeeping Linux is like gatekeeping Toyota Corolla.
>your complaints boil down to "I don't like it because I'm not familiar with it" which is not valid critique
dhx cited Fitts's law, and you answered with "you're just not used to it" and a pompous, hand-waving non sequitur about traffic signs you pulled out of your reactive ass.
Fitts's law doesn't give a shit what you're used to. The time to hit a target goes up with its distance and down with its size. A row of tiny unlabeled icons crammed together is slow and easy to miss on the thousandth click, not just the first. Getting used to them teaches you what they mean. It doesn't make them any bigger.
Paul Fitts published it in 1954. Card, English and Burr used it at Xerox PARC in 1978 to show why the mouse beat the joystick and the cursor keys. It's the first thing anyone who designs pointing interfaces should know. If you've never heard of it, you have no business telling anyone what counts as valid critique of a menu. Neither do the people at Microsoft who shipped that row of icons, whether they never heard of it or heard of it and ignored it.
As for traffic signs: they're standardized by international treaty, you have to pass a test on them before you're allowed to drive, and the European stop sign still says STOP. Show me the treaty and the driving test for the Windows 11 context menu icons.
Familiarity is something a design has to earn, not something users owe it. Pie menus are self-revealing: they lead, follow, and get out of the way:
1) A novice clicks, sees the labels, and the menu leads them to the item.
2) An intermediate starts moving before reading, and the menu follows, highlighting the slice to confirm the direction.
3) An expert flicks in the direction without waiting, and the menu gets out of the way and never even draws. It's the same motion every time, so using it is learning it through rehearsal.
Every item is the same short distance from the click, and every target is a whole wedge out to the edge of the screen.
Jack Callahan, Mark Weiser, Ben Shneiderman and I measured it at Maryland in 1988: pie menus were significantly faster than linear menus with fewer errors, even for novices.
An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus, CHI'88:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie...
I've been building them ever since, in shipping open source and commercial products and reusable components: an X10 window manager (the one we ran that experiment on), NeWS, SimCity in both NeWS/HyperLook and X11/Tcl/Tk, ScriptX, The Sims, ActiveX, a personalizable Palm TV guide and universal remote you could stroke with one finger instead of using the pen, and numerous implementations in JavaScript for web browsers.
The earliest known pie menus were in PIXIE, at Cambridge in 1969, by Neil Wiseman, Heinz Lemke and John Hiles: radial buttons that traveled with the light pen's tracking cross on a PDP-7. Its 1972 program runs again in the browser, so you can try them yourself.
Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective, covering all of these:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1
X10 "uwm" window manager with pie menus, scriptable in Forth (1987):
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/piemenu/uwm/
NeWS pie menus in PostScript:
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/piemenu.ps.txt
Tk pie menus from multiplayer SimCity for X11 (1992):
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/micropol...
ScriptX pie menus (Kaleida Labs):
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/scriptx/piemenu.sx
The Sims pie menus:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-sims-pie-menus-49ca02a74da
ActiveX pie menus:
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/piemenus/ActiveXPieM...
ConnectedTV, the Palm TV guide and remote with finger pies:
http://www.pencomputing.com/palm/Pen44/connectedTV.html
jQuery pie menus:
https://github.com/SimHacker/jquery-pie
PIXIE, running on an emulated PDP-7 and Type 340 display (the mouse is the light pen):
https://hyperties.org/cabinet/applications/pixie-symelec/
PIXIE and FORTH on PDP-7 Cabinet Emulator with Type 340 Vector Graphics Display:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo8kdY-5i6c
Why PIXIE matters: the people, the 1969 film, and how the 1972 listing was brought back to life:
https://hyperties.org/databases/pixie/
Flight of the PIXIE, the 1969 film set to Yuja Wang playing Flight of the Bumblebee:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI
And by your own admission, half the Windows 11 menu is an ad for cloud storage. Get as familiar with that as you like. It'll still be there on every click.
Instead of pulling reactionary bullshit out of your ass and calling it user interface design, you should base your beliefs on empirical science and actual measurements in the real world, not irrelevant metaphors. Like the way the midterm elections just resoundingly proved beyond a doubt, once and for all, that Trump really is a stupid idiot.
I use Linux, MacOS and Windows and I am generally happier with Linux and Windows for navigating around but if there are annoyances that still haven't been fixed after 20 years on Windows, they are:
1) Paying for a licence and still being treated like a marketing target
2) Windows update is ridiculously slow end-to-end and takes a whole morning once per month to update our platform machines (even though we are 80% Linux)
3) Search is really, really, really bad. I mean honestly, search for a program and it might take 10 seconds to load a result if it loads anything at all. Partial matches? Nope. This has never worked on any of my windows 7-11 machines and has never been fixed.
4) The whole "reinstall Windows" attitude at Microsoft Support if they cannot work out why something isn't working
5) The half-arsed attempts to harmoize the UI which just leads to weirdisms like network in 3 different places, remote desktop still in a windows 32 bit dialog, and the fact that things got renamed and moved with every major release for what can only be assumed to be a shit reason breaking muscle memory for 1000s of people.
6) Not having the Virt IO drivers included in the base windows installer.
I think that is enough for now!
Meh. It's been 3 years and *gestures broadly* so much else of the Windows 11 UX still leaves much to be desired: making the context-menu slightly-less-awful isn't going to bring me back to the fold when so many other aspects of Win11 are not just unappealing, but actually off-putting.
(I maintain that Windows 11's bad UX is a consequence of MS having to make a single UI for everyone, which means it'll be too dumbed-down, simplified, or inflexible for power-users (XP, Win8, Win11); or too complicated and intimidating for everyone else (Win7, Win10), or just bad for everyone (Vista)).
If Microsoft wants me to willingly buy into Windows 12, then I want the option to keep the Windows 10 UI (File Explorer, Taskbar, Start Menu, and Window Management) - I know it can be done in theory[1], I just want proper support.
[1] https://lesferch.github.io/OldExplorer/
They also finally allowed moving the taskbar to any edge of the screen.
It only too them 6 years. But still lacks the ability to set it to your desired width. Its coming sometime in the next 6 years (unless windows 12 come first, then you lose the ability to set the taskbar to the side and have ot restart the cycle).
Pretty insane how a company that knocked out office and visual studio in the scope of a year or so now has problems making a task bar moveable.
I have to use sharepoint on ms edge for work. Today I had to search something up an on my 27" monitor, I had 7 fixed rows of non-content on the top (including the tab bar and the locator bar) and 3 fixed rows at the bottom: last one being the windows taskbar that I still cant move as 26H2 hasn't been deployed.
The actual search results were a scrollable list with 5 rows visible of the content I was searching for.
I wonder what skills must one posses to rise to places that give one the authority to make such decisions? Are there incentives that drive these or are these borne of Kafkaesque bureaucracies? Does no one object to such monstrosities? Are the ones responsible so bereft of empathy and/or common sense? I know this is meandering and pointless but I wonder and struggle to understand the thought processes. This apathy, sure it presents itself in something so mundane but it permeates everything. i guess its the human condition.
Ah, this could be a great study in organization design! Conway's law suggests that the software architecture resembles the organization. So there might not be any designers making such decisions. Probably lots of organizations can't use each others' toolbars but are expected to add their own toolbar?
Which year was Office (1988) and Visual Studio (1997) knocked out?
The late 90s. Office for dos is not what we know now. Office 98 was basically the same as what we have today, the improvements since then have been only incremental. And often worse like the ribbon. Visual studio came from this time too, they were really on a roll then.
Microsoft just stops investing in innovation once they take over a market. You saw it with IE, with office, with windows even.
There was never an MS Office for DOS. The first version was for the Mac.
There was a Word for DOS, but Word for Windows was a port of Word for Mac. Excel started on the Mac (their DOS spreadsheet was called Multiplan). PowerPoint started out as a Mac product funded by Apple, which Microsoft acquired.
None of this can be described as "knocked out by Microsoft in a year".
That's the one that made me ditch Win11 for Mint, a top panel + Plank Reloaded.
My entire UI workflow is top right orientated (menus, windows size/close buttons, docks) for muscle memory, so the Win10 stopped security updates forced me to switch.
Ironically a week later they extended security support for Win10.
again. For some reason, they forbid it after setting the standard for decades themselves.
One done, four thousand three hundred twenty-one to go. Plus minus couple of hundreds.
I have a dozen or so myself, probably two dozens, that I meet daily. Yes, daily. Using Windows feels like trying to run in muddy water with Lego bricks in the bottom here and there. It wasn't like this much earlier. Not even when the blue screen of death was commonplace.
> Users will get a “customize menu” button that controls what commands appear when they right-click their mouse
Good, though doesn't seem to be include the ability to control icons, name and accelerator keys, so still a long way to reach the user ergonomic heaven...
I wonder if MacOS is also going down the drain - obviously not as fast as Windows - but I believe it doesn't feel as smooth - it feels always more bloated with every updates and I find myself having to install more and more custom little tools for everything:
- Cleaning my drive from unwanted files → One app
- Organizing files based on type → another app
- A good voice-to-text → another app
- A better launcher → another app
- An incredible terminal → another app
I mean is this the way it's supposed to be? Wasn't the whole point - unwrap the macbook, load up Mac OS and LFG?
Please tell of of this better launcher? Spotlight is so bad these days. I used to be able to pull up the calculator with cmd+space..ca[enter] but lately it grabs some other completely ridiculous thing like some random file that throws an error instead. Yeah Apple that’s what I wanted, I wanted to open the Caltable.inf file, or worse if parallels is open it picks the windows calculator first before the macOS calculator? Wtf!
I’ve been using Raycast[0] to replace spotlight. Spotlight index kept randomly losing my /Applications dir, and like 90% of what I use spotlight for is Cmd + space > type in the name of the app I want to switch to/open. So it was a constant annoyance.
They have some AI stuff that they try to push on you during the install, but it can all be disabled so day to day it doesn’t bother you.
0: https://www.raycast.com/
Probably Alfred? It's been a while since I used a Mac, but back then Alfred was one of the reasons to get a Mac.
https://www.alfredapp.com/
Yeah though spotlight was never meant as a program launcher. KDE has a nice thing that is just that.
I had to install an app just to get smooth scrolling to work with my mouse. On a Mac! Apple practically invented smooth scrolling! It's like no one gives a shit about user experience anymore.
yes and the nonstop notification popups for some iCloud nonsense really drive me crazy.
I don't wonder. I used it for years, and there's no doubt it was getting worse.
At this point both Windows and OSX are rent seeking, squeezing as much money as they can out of their users.
Too late too little microslop
I built a new PC because they made me abandon 10 for 11. 11 sucked enough to drive me Linux.
8 sucked enough to drive me to Linux.
(I think it was actually 10, but 8 really started the lean away)
You can shift+right-click to get the old right click context menu.
What do you need to click to edit it?
I assumed people would find shift+right click. It brings up the old right click menu
theres a registry key you can edit too, to use the """legacy"" menu on all right clicks
It's a drag that products like Windows are stuck forever the way they are. Or, rather, that they're stuck the way they are but then command such market share that nothing new ever comes and sees the light of day. Windows is doomed to keep generating billions for Microsoft until one day it doesn't, which I guess is what they're going for.
It also seems silly to tie the decline of Windows to UI discontent. Windows is in decline because it's increasingly irrelevant in the post-PC, post-USA world, and sucks in general.
I'd rather a setting to go back to the old right-click menu by default. It's possible to do with a registry edit, but not from a user-friendly setting.
Can they fix that it runs like trash on 16gb of ram? That’d be cool.
They actually are: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2026/11/03/raisi...
Not that Microsoft isn't a terrible company IMO but they also finally see the need to optimise due to the ram crisis.
Watch what they do, not what they say. My right-click menu still takes 2000ms to open, the Weather app idles at over 700MB ram, teams randomly heats up my CPU and causes my laptop to sound like a jet engine until i close it, opening start menu still causes the PC to lag. Do not give them any credit for posting Copilot-generated press posts, before you see the changes yourself.
Try an OS that's designed for people rather than for tracking, and you'll be amazed at how fast an OS can be.
*They see the need to put optimization to the marketing copy. No need to actually do anything, just say the new release is 42% more efficient
Windows 11 is a major regression.
10 was better, but I’d pay for a modern version of windows 2kpro UI. Bring back msn messsenger.
It’s basically a gaming box, everything else is on a Mac or Linux machine, all on my desk.
Actually, it is a substantially worse gaming box too once you've used SteamOS/Bazzite. All it's good for right now is windows-only legacy software and anti-cheat implementations for the time being.
And somewhat excel because excel is badly implemented on mac
The only "game" I could not run on Cachy Os Linux is 3DMark. Some benchmark run, but not all.
100%.
I'd pay for this, compatible with Windows 11 apps, but basically works like NT4.
Done. This is how easy it is to make money off you people.
honestly Linux has gotten pretty good even for gaming, I set up a Linux (Fedora) on my primary gaming rig as a lark and figured I would go back to windows but I have not really had the need to and some games actually even run better on Linux it seems.
Didn't I recently read on here that MS themselves admit SteamOS has better performance than Windows for gaming?
Windows 11 was just a hastily-developed salesperson-tier excuse to require TPM 2.0 wasn't it?
too little too late
Just rerelease Windows 10 IoT LTSC as standard Windows, there fixed it.
I don’t know what could drive PC sales in this age.
Old machines from the last 10 years are still capable of all normal daily tasks, even development tasks. This has the 95% covered through existing or cheap second hand machines.
The only new use-case is local AI, which for most people is simply out of price range right now with the current GPU and RAM prices. There’s some people who’ll want this, but they are a minority. Not enough to drive sales at scale.
So whatever remains as a segment is business - which in these cost-aware times are mostly doing like the other 95% and only buy new machines if needed to cover new hires.
i recently dusted off an old desktop that i hadnt used in a really long time. the GPU was a 1070 from 2016 i think and it wasnt even that high end when i bought it but it works surprisingly well. although im only using a 4b qwen model and only asking it very basic questions but its still better than nothing and it means i only need to switch a cloud model when i need to do something more complex. that GPU is going for 100-150 these days as well and im sure there are better options that are still cheap enough
the question this doesnt address is whether the world is buying less PCs or is it the windows share of market that’s declining, or both.
The end of windows has been heralded since it exists, but it’s still not going anywhere.
I assume we still won't be able to make the task bar vertical.
- slghtly offtopic but also covers how to run windows 11 super duper optimally
- here is my production grade setup for agentic ai on windows 11
- setup windows 11 with Rufus boot to disable online MS account creation https://rufus.ie/en/
- [download window 11 x64 iso from here ](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11)
- then download vmware workstation pro (you ll need to create a free account to get the download link on their website)
- install vmware workstation pro
- turn internet off
- plug your pendrive in with the rufus w11 x64 iso on it (mind ya, this pen drive ll first need full formatting before burning a w11 image to it)
- press f2 to reach bios in vmware settings and make it boot from pendrive
- turn internet off on your machine (DO NOT keep it on)
- install w11 (keep a 100gb for vmware)
- without updates it ll load real fast and you wont need an MS account (rufus takes care of it)
- while it installs, download revo uninstaller pro on a separate machine https://onefiles.net/9d170d01078634b5 (latest version 5.4.x) and put it inside a second pendrive / portable hdd
- once w11 loads, it ll ask you to enter a password, keep existing password blank and enter literally anything for a new password
- voila you are done with w11 setup inside vmware
- now connect the 2nd pendrive with revo and install it (need to clean uninstall many tools, hence we need this one)
- now go to search bar and type check for updates and update everything on w11 inside vmware
- next stop get unigetui from ms app store or from here https://devolutions.net/unigetui/ (it is a package manager responsible for installing just about everything else with auto updation of all packages)
- the open unigetui and search for the following packages vlc, winrar, winhance
- winhance is the fully customizable debloater you ll need to turn off all telemetry (we ll debloat after installing all the other requirements)
- next go to ms app store and install python or open powershell and type python
- the open unigetui and search for the following packages vlc, winrar, winhance
- winhance is the fully customizable debloater you ll need to turn off all telemetry (we ll debloat after installing all the other requirements)
- next go to ms app store and install python or open powershell and type python
- mind you this installs a python version manager that lets you install and uninstall multiple python versions
- after this python version manager is setup, install a specific version of python like
``` py install 3.13 ``` - next we need a node.js version manager, use fnm for it
https://github.com/Schniz/fnm - once installed, it may need to be added to environment variables manually
- once again choose a specific version of node.js and install it using
``` fnm install 23.12.0 ``` check fnm --help for commands - next we need a java version manager, use jvms for it
https://github.com/ystyle/jvms
- pretty self explanatory
- now install git and again it ll give you some trouble over environment variables, command not recognized etc, fixable with some gpt help
- at this point, we got git, node version manager, java version manager and python version manager and are ready to rumble
- install vscode/ visual studio whatever
- install codex
- install claude
- install opencode (both cli via npx and desktop app) and check their plans out https://opencode.ai/console/go
- install ghidra , ghidra-mcp (mind you open ghidra-mcp first because it only works with specific versions of ghidra and java) this is the reason we installed a java version manager
- check out setup for rea https://github.com/morluto/rea requires npx setup for rea and ghidra both, read documentation
- run winhance, check recommended settings under optimize and every other tab and restart the vm a few times for full debloat with 0 telemetry services
- congrats you have a full blown agentic environment at this point (if I missed anything i ll come back and update)
OpenAI wants all the RAM --- pushing up the price of PCs.
I still prefer this to burning countries worth of electricity for bitcoin bros.
Are you fucking kidding me? crypto bros were angels compared to these spawns of Satan ai bros. at least during crypto craze only GPUs were on short supply and nobody except gamers were affected. RAM and storage prices affect every single consumer electronic device thus everyone.
I recently got my hands on a windows machine - I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t actually excited to use windows after a 15 year hiatus
What a heaping pile of you know what. You need Microsoft accounts to download basic apps from the App Store
You get nagged and nagged to enter a windows account
Having grown up with it, it’s an incredibly odd feeling using it. Modern ui…modern ui…modern ui…and then BAM a weird screen directly ported from windows 98 (or 2k, you get the point)
An OS that was always incredibly intuitive to me all of a sudden just felt like a disorganized mess. Want to see your Ethernet adapters? Good luck, you’ll open 10 other settings menus/search results before finally getting to the options you need. Advanced sound settings? Same
My headset wasn’t working, after clicking through a bunch of options at some point I loaded a wizard with very specific questions that I’d never seen before and wouldn’t how how to get back to, it randomly worked
Still a bunch of bloatware, still can’t be on for more than a day without having to reboot, everything I remembered that was bad with made worse by bad ux
These days they even tried to remove the option of installing windows with an internet connection, aka ms account
Just bad, there are a lot of annoyances to fix
"The timing is notable, as the announcement comes alongside Microsoft’s quarterly financial report, which showed a continued decline in the business of selling Windows licenses for new PCs."
Several factors come together. For me, Spy-Recall was the dealbreaker. I can not use an operating system that constantly reports to the USA what I am doing. But the increase in RAM prices also means that I fail to see why I should overpay now due to greedy US AI corporations. These corporations all us folks money here. It is like a racket. This is not a "free market" either, since it is so heavily skewed in favour of corporations. The whole idea about capitalism, which the USA once claimed to worship before selling out to the TechBros, has been that free market competition leads to lower prices. Right now we see collusion, a mafia - why the TechBros aren't in jail already beats me. Too much financial kickbacks into the judicial system.
Between Microsoft (indirect) contributions to ongoing RAM shortages, and its frankly hostile UI, color me un-fucking-surprised.
After using Windows since I was a pre-teen I finally switched to Omarchy. Its incredible having claude (or other agent) to manage all the random linux config. Its not just good enough its better than Windows in every way. (OK I dont game)