Windows 11 still not winning the OS popularity contest(theregister.com)
theregister.com
Windows 11 still not winning the OS popularity contest
https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/05/windows_11_adoption_november_statcounter/
83 comments
>clean up at least 50% of the legacy shite hiding behind it
...but that legacy shite is where me and the rest of the IT folks can actually find the options that have been removed from the 'improved' interface!
...but that legacy shite is where me and the rest of the IT folks can actually find the options that have been removed from the 'improved' interface!
>I lived through the glory days of Windows 2000 and it was consistent and dependable back then. Every step forward since has been two steps backwards.
I can't tell you how often I've repeated this.
Windows UI/UX was at it's pinnacle for Win2k. I miss it.
I can't tell you how often I've repeated this.
Windows UI/UX was at it's pinnacle for Win2k. I miss it.
Same era but the predecessor to Metro. Encarta 1999/2000. High contrast, and overall extremely easy navigability.
That's a lot of things they still need to change - what are the good things about it? I use windows 10 at home and it's fine, but it feels like it's slowly becoming 11 without asking me. There's an ad on my lock screen now.
It's really fast so you can fuck the crapware off in record time.
That point is in jest but it really annoys the hell out of me that the excellent work the core windows guys have been doing is being compromised by the veneer of diarrhea over the top.
That point is in jest but it really annoys the hell out of me that the excellent work the core windows guys have been doing is being compromised by the veneer of diarrhea over the top.
> All they have to do is
Well, you basically list major problems we have with Windows in general. 11 is not that different from 10 in that respect. So it's hard to say "the direction it's going in is the correct one" - I understand why they are pushing this stuff down our throats, but they are not winning users. Whoever can switches away.
Well, you basically list major problems we have with Windows in general. 11 is not that different from 10 in that respect. So it's hard to say "the direction it's going in is the correct one" - I understand why they are pushing this stuff down our throats, but they are not winning users. Whoever can switches away.
whoosh
lol. yes. Specifically, the whole cloud sign in SUCKS
Disclaimer, MS employee here, but I've got to say that the cloud sign-in is one of my favorite features.
The amount of time I spend worrying about and preparing for a hard drive failure has significantly gone down.
I'm able to have one device at home, and another at work, and they stay reasonably in-sync with one another.
I'm able to check things from my phone (even if I can't be productive on the phone, at least having access to progress made on my home machine is important).
I see others commenting here about how hard it is to create a local-only account on Windows 11, and I don't want to dismiss such criticism, but I'm personally never going back to a local-only account on my devices.
The amount of time I spend worrying about and preparing for a hard drive failure has significantly gone down.
I'm able to have one device at home, and another at work, and they stay reasonably in-sync with one another.
I'm able to check things from my phone (even if I can't be productive on the phone, at least having access to progress made on my home machine is important).
I see others commenting here about how hard it is to create a local-only account on Windows 11, and I don't want to dismiss such criticism, but I'm personally never going back to a local-only account on my devices.
Good for you. Most people don't want Microsoft to own their data. You get that? User's data belong to them, if you are set to share all your personal data with Microsoft , then it should be an opt-in process (maybe they can entice you with Bing points or some sort of rewards?). It should be offline by default. As customer are already paying for the operating system. You can also use many syncing solutions from Google drive to dropbox, and many others. Regarding the "amount of time I spend worrying about hard drive failure" , never have I had a hard drive that just dies, is possible , but extremely unlikely, I make a backup of my important stuffs to other hard drives or the cloud. Cloud sign-on is just another way to track users and violates their basic privacy rights.
I’ve had more critical OneDrive failures in the last two years than hard disk failures in the last 30 years. I’ve experienced actual data loss on OneDrive three times since 2020.
It’s not a backup and it’s a shitty safety net for trivial cases. Fortunately I had beem backing up OneDrive up using Beyond Compare to an external disk and doing a binary comparison so I could find the cocked up files and recover them.
It’s funny the only time I’ve had to do a restore is because Microsoft’s cloud fucked up.
It’s not a backup and it’s a shitty safety net for trivial cases. Fortunately I had beem backing up OneDrive up using Beyond Compare to an external disk and doing a binary comparison so I could find the cocked up files and recover them.
It’s funny the only time I’ve had to do a restore is because Microsoft’s cloud fucked up.
Well, I'm glad you trust your employer to be a good steward of your personal data. I certainly don't trust them...
Even aside from the "MS owning your data" point other people are surely taking issue with - people are syncing their personal and work devices?
I do not want that at all!
I do not want that at all!
> people are syncing their personal and work devices
No, that's not what was said and I'm not sure how you interpreted that. I have a work device at home and in-office. My work devices use different user accounts from my personal devices.
No, that's not what was said and I'm not sure how you interpreted that. I have a work device at home and in-office. My work devices use different user accounts from my personal devices.
I think you missed the "mandatory".
It's like religion. You have one. Good for you. Don't shove it down other people's throats.
Edit: I just realized this could read rather harsh. I didn't refer to you explaining your preferences, but "shoving it down our throats" is seemingly the current attitude of MS as a whole.
It's like religion. You have one. Good for you. Don't shove it down other people's throats.
Edit: I just realized this could read rather harsh. I didn't refer to you explaining your preferences, but "shoving it down our throats" is seemingly the current attitude of MS as a whole.
I use it too, but seriously why is it so obfuscated to create a local account? Microsoft is clearly making it very hard.
The real issue here is that W11 doesn't solve a problem or fix a need. Instead what it does do is makes unnecessary UI changes.
File explorer right-click menu change: check Advertisements for MS store/MS services in working areas of the UI: check
Harder to create/use a 'local-only' account on non-enterprise versions of the OS: check
Not that long ago, the `safe` option for businesses was to wait until ServicePack 2 for an OS was released before we installed it. MS would have better W11 adoption if they had just called it Windows10 SP2.
I used W11 (because it came pre-installed on a laptop I bought) for 2 weeks. The right-click menu changes were infuriating. The 'Start' menu is still an abomination. I had more popups advertising MS services and pushing a MS Account then I ever saw on the popup-hell of the 90-00's internet.
IMHO It would take using 'Start10' (is the new version called Start11?) to de-crapify W11 before I would want to use it, and since the upgrade is primarily cosmetic; then what's the point of upgrading?
File explorer right-click menu change: check Advertisements for MS store/MS services in working areas of the UI: check
Harder to create/use a 'local-only' account on non-enterprise versions of the OS: check
Not that long ago, the `safe` option for businesses was to wait until ServicePack 2 for an OS was released before we installed it. MS would have better W11 adoption if they had just called it Windows10 SP2.
I used W11 (because it came pre-installed on a laptop I bought) for 2 weeks. The right-click menu changes were infuriating. The 'Start' menu is still an abomination. I had more popups advertising MS services and pushing a MS Account then I ever saw on the popup-hell of the 90-00's internet.
IMHO It would take using 'Start10' (is the new version called Start11?) to de-crapify W11 before I would want to use it, and since the upgrade is primarily cosmetic; then what's the point of upgrading?
> The real issue here is that W11 doesn't solve a problem or fix a need
Having a scheduler that actually works with 12th generation and 13th generation P+E cores coming out of Intel is a pretty important problem methinks. Especially if you're a user who wants to take advantage of the E-core's efficiency to increase battery lives on your laptop.
> Instead what it does do is makes unnecessary UI changes.
I do wonder why the Microsoft / Windows folk keep reinventing their UI. Literally reinventing it. We're on WinUI 3 now, from like Silverlight -> Windows 8 Metro -> Windows 10 UWP -> WinUI3 (I'm not sure where WinUI1 or 2 stand, but its probably somewhere in that Win10 UWP era).
I get that Microsoft's business strategy keeps changing. But it has to be annoying for Windows developers to try to keep up with all that.
Having a scheduler that actually works with 12th generation and 13th generation P+E cores coming out of Intel is a pretty important problem methinks. Especially if you're a user who wants to take advantage of the E-core's efficiency to increase battery lives on your laptop.
> Instead what it does do is makes unnecessary UI changes.
I do wonder why the Microsoft / Windows folk keep reinventing their UI. Literally reinventing it. We're on WinUI 3 now, from like Silverlight -> Windows 8 Metro -> Windows 10 UWP -> WinUI3 (I'm not sure where WinUI1 or 2 stand, but its probably somewhere in that Win10 UWP era).
I get that Microsoft's business strategy keeps changing. But it has to be annoying for Windows developers to try to keep up with all that.
How come they don't update the scheduler in Windows 10 to support Intel's processors? Also, from what I have read the biggest changes are UI based and some new features like DirectStorage which don't seem like they would require an entirely new operating system. Is there some backwards compatibility issue with the new features? And is there a complete changelist from Microsoft?
A lot of people aren't aware of this but Win10 is in maintenance mode and has been for quite some time. Not only do they not backport new features but they also don't always backport important bug fixes either (except for security obviously).
Win11 is probably an opt-in upgrade due to the UI changes. The idea of Win10 being the last version ever was nice, but if all upgrades happen automatically you can't make any serious UI changes because people hate stuff just suddenly changing on them when they don't expect it. Note that Apple never made any move as bold as removing versions, and they were able to continue making UI changes as a consequence in each version. People moan, the people who don't like it don't upgrade, and eventually have to pick between support or upgrading but they're never forced so the blowback is minimal.
The idea of Win10 being the last version seems to have come from web apps which aren't visibly versioned. But the same problem crops up there, hence why big UI changes on sites like Gmail, Reddit etc have to fork the frontend codebase - sometimes for years.
Win11 is probably an opt-in upgrade due to the UI changes. The idea of Win10 being the last version ever was nice, but if all upgrades happen automatically you can't make any serious UI changes because people hate stuff just suddenly changing on them when they don't expect it. Note that Apple never made any move as bold as removing versions, and they were able to continue making UI changes as a consequence in each version. People moan, the people who don't like it don't upgrade, and eventually have to pick between support or upgrading but they're never forced so the blowback is minimal.
The idea of Win10 being the last version seems to have come from web apps which aren't visibly versioned. But the same problem crops up there, hence why big UI changes on sites like Gmail, Reddit etc have to fork the frontend codebase - sometimes for years.
Oh my and if they would finally fix that darn printing spooler which hangs exactly in the same way since Windows 3.1 with undeletable jobs and can't find a printer to save its life when you hop wireless networks...
Except the people running the show seem to not have any clue about what Forms, WPF and MFC are capable of doing, while trying to sell WinUI 3.0, and not having an answer for those stuck in UWP for XBox and HoloLens.
They have burned lots of good will from WinRT advocates with all those rewrites, I doubt most of us care, other than those with a sunken cost in WinRT.
They have burned lots of good will from WinRT advocates with all those rewrites, I doubt most of us care, other than those with a sunken cost in WinRT.
Its largely what happened to windows CE/etc too. They could have had a much larger part of the phone pie, but they literally would throw everything away every year or so and start over.
Which is such an odd behavior from a company who's main product didn't win because it was the best, or most ubiquitous, but because they maintained a religious amount of backwards compatibility for 15+ years while steadily improving the product.
Which is such an odd behavior from a company who's main product didn't win because it was the best, or most ubiquitous, but because they maintained a religious amount of backwards compatibility for 15+ years while steadily improving the product.
That problem was noticed way back in 2004:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
"There are two opposing forces inside Microsoft, which I will refer to, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as The Raymond Chen Camp and The MSDN Magazine Camp .... The Raymond Chen Camp believes in making things easy for developers by making it easy to write once and run anywhere (well, on any Windows box). The MSDN Magazine Camp believes in making things easy for developers by giving them really powerful chunks of code which they can leverage, if they are willing to pay the price of incredibly complicated deployment and installation headaches, not to mention the huge learning curve. The Raymond Chen camp is all about consolidation. Please, don’t make things any worse, let’s just keep making what we already have still work. The MSDN Magazine Camp needs to keep churning out new gigantic pieces of technology that nobody can keep up with ... Inside Microsoft, the MSDN Magazine Camp has won the battle."
This telling of the situation is rather unfair on both sides, of course.
The actual reason behind what happened is straightforward - Microsoft had to abandon Win32 because it was a terrible API even by the standards of its time that had no hope of keeping up with competitors, but their intended replacement (.NET) was too big of a leap and didn't manage to fully take over. They were trying to compete with Java and mostly managed that, but it was too far above the metal to replace Win32 in every context. In particular the Windows team rejected it as a way to build and ship Windows itself, leading to severely dysfunctional internal politics and dramas.
Plus their whole strategy for the web was "try to kill it by making IE dominant and then defunding it, whilst pushing people back to the Windows API". They didn't try very hard to understand why devs were flocking to HTML despite its massive disadvantages compared to Win32. In fairness nor did Apple or Sun or anyone else, really.
So: Win32 was dying, and was designed in such a way that incremental progress wasn't going to fix anything. The API itself was just too badly flawed. But they ceded the battle of ideas to Java and then couldn't find a way to incrementally port existing Win32 apps, because C# was too different to C++, and the various .NET C++ dialects just weren't a compelling story for games, the MS Office team, the Adobe suite etc.
Roll forward a decade or so and we have a needle scratch moment - the Windows team finally decide that they need a proper replacement for Win32 that can actually be incrementally adopted. WinRT is their answer. It's sort of COM but evolved and with databases of metadata that allow the auto generation of high quality language bindings (including a standard C++ binding), along with a pile of new APIs, which can also be incrementally adopted inside Win32 apps. It's actually, dare I say it, not that bad. At least in terms of overall design. Unfortunately by the time they finally get this strategy right the world has long since forgotten about Windows programming, with experts in it confined mostly to the video games industry, the Chrome team, and random old farts like me who occasionally still need to write a Windows app for whatever reason. Currently for me that's about making distributing apps easy - Conveyor [1] uses a small custom app that mixes Win32 and WinRT in the same program, a small EXE that drives the download/install. And it uses the WinRT packaging scheme (MSIX) which is Linux-like and has a whole bunch of advantages over other installation mechanisms.
Unfortunately for Microsoft whilst WinRT does get the foundations right, the implementations of the new APIs at the UI level (WinUI) aren't really being used by anyone outside the Windows team themselves, and it's a whole new UI toolkit written from scratch, not based on an evolved Win32 codebase. So a lot of little details are wrong. Try triple-clicking to select text in the Settings app for an example.
I guess the core question is how things could have been different. The WinRT strategy could have worked or at least resulted in slower decline, if it had been started around the Win 2000 era and if .NET had been a properly integrated feature of Windows. In other words if they'd retained strong technical leadership over the platform as a whole. They'd still have lost out to the web and Linux though, because even now their platform doesn't really grok why web apps or Linux are popular.
[1] https://conveyor.hydraulic.dev/
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
"There are two opposing forces inside Microsoft, which I will refer to, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as The Raymond Chen Camp and The MSDN Magazine Camp .... The Raymond Chen Camp believes in making things easy for developers by making it easy to write once and run anywhere (well, on any Windows box). The MSDN Magazine Camp believes in making things easy for developers by giving them really powerful chunks of code which they can leverage, if they are willing to pay the price of incredibly complicated deployment and installation headaches, not to mention the huge learning curve. The Raymond Chen camp is all about consolidation. Please, don’t make things any worse, let’s just keep making what we already have still work. The MSDN Magazine Camp needs to keep churning out new gigantic pieces of technology that nobody can keep up with ... Inside Microsoft, the MSDN Magazine Camp has won the battle."
This telling of the situation is rather unfair on both sides, of course.
The actual reason behind what happened is straightforward - Microsoft had to abandon Win32 because it was a terrible API even by the standards of its time that had no hope of keeping up with competitors, but their intended replacement (.NET) was too big of a leap and didn't manage to fully take over. They were trying to compete with Java and mostly managed that, but it was too far above the metal to replace Win32 in every context. In particular the Windows team rejected it as a way to build and ship Windows itself, leading to severely dysfunctional internal politics and dramas.
Plus their whole strategy for the web was "try to kill it by making IE dominant and then defunding it, whilst pushing people back to the Windows API". They didn't try very hard to understand why devs were flocking to HTML despite its massive disadvantages compared to Win32. In fairness nor did Apple or Sun or anyone else, really.
So: Win32 was dying, and was designed in such a way that incremental progress wasn't going to fix anything. The API itself was just too badly flawed. But they ceded the battle of ideas to Java and then couldn't find a way to incrementally port existing Win32 apps, because C# was too different to C++, and the various .NET C++ dialects just weren't a compelling story for games, the MS Office team, the Adobe suite etc.
Roll forward a decade or so and we have a needle scratch moment - the Windows team finally decide that they need a proper replacement for Win32 that can actually be incrementally adopted. WinRT is their answer. It's sort of COM but evolved and with databases of metadata that allow the auto generation of high quality language bindings (including a standard C++ binding), along with a pile of new APIs, which can also be incrementally adopted inside Win32 apps. It's actually, dare I say it, not that bad. At least in terms of overall design. Unfortunately by the time they finally get this strategy right the world has long since forgotten about Windows programming, with experts in it confined mostly to the video games industry, the Chrome team, and random old farts like me who occasionally still need to write a Windows app for whatever reason. Currently for me that's about making distributing apps easy - Conveyor [1] uses a small custom app that mixes Win32 and WinRT in the same program, a small EXE that drives the download/install. And it uses the WinRT packaging scheme (MSIX) which is Linux-like and has a whole bunch of advantages over other installation mechanisms.
Unfortunately for Microsoft whilst WinRT does get the foundations right, the implementations of the new APIs at the UI level (WinUI) aren't really being used by anyone outside the Windows team themselves, and it's a whole new UI toolkit written from scratch, not based on an evolved Win32 codebase. So a lot of little details are wrong. Try triple-clicking to select text in the Settings app for an example.
I guess the core question is how things could have been different. The WinRT strategy could have worked or at least resulted in slower decline, if it had been started around the Win 2000 era and if .NET had been a properly integrated feature of Windows. In other words if they'd retained strong technical leadership over the platform as a whole. They'd still have lost out to the web and Linux though, because even now their platform doesn't really grok why web apps or Linux are popular.
[1] https://conveyor.hydraulic.dev/
There are all good points, and I tend to agree. But I don't think win32 as such is/was a problem. As you rightfully point out IE (HTML+JS) ran just fine on top of that environment, as did Java (visual J++ anyone?) and most of the other alternative layout/programming/etc environments. So while MFC (which was a terrible wrapper) was trash, that wasn't true of many of the other win32 based wrappers. Like for example visual basic/VBA which they killed to drive adoption of .net, another layer on top. So they killed three hugely popular win32 alternatives (VB6+, Visual J++, and IE) all within just a few years.
So I don't think win32 was a problem, in fact to this day it still has one of the best I/O, threading, event blocking, interface that exists as a core OS API. And as a GUI toolkit, its a bit low level, but that's fine too because it was flexible enough to allow things to be layered on top, or even with the Direct* APIs bypassed completely (direct2d anyone?). The GUI toolkits problems were mostly things it inherited from win16 (single event collector, lack of implicit threading support, etc). But while those are listed as problems, what most people fail to mentally merge, is that those same problems exist in the most "modern" environment people are programming in regularly too (aka DOM based javascript, which is basically single threaded, while not looking like it). Just about the entire win32 GUI programming problems can be summarized with a rule known for 30+ years. Don't block the WM_ event handler by doing "work" in it.
So I don't think win32 was a problem, in fact to this day it still has one of the best I/O, threading, event blocking, interface that exists as a core OS API. And as a GUI toolkit, its a bit low level, but that's fine too because it was flexible enough to allow things to be layered on top, or even with the Direct* APIs bypassed completely (direct2d anyone?). The GUI toolkits problems were mostly things it inherited from win16 (single event collector, lack of implicit threading support, etc). But while those are listed as problems, what most people fail to mentally merge, is that those same problems exist in the most "modern" environment people are programming in regularly too (aka DOM based javascript, which is basically single threaded, while not looking like it). Just about the entire win32 GUI programming problems can be summarized with a rule known for 30+ years. Don't block the WM_ event handler by doing "work" in it.
From my point of view, there were two big problems with WinRT when Microsoft started pushing it, and for a long time afterward: the biggest part of the API, the XAML UI framework, couldn't be adopted in an unsandboxed Win32 app until 2019, and there was no way to use that UI framework on Windows 7 (e.g. through an OS update or a backported redistributable runtime). So as a third-party developer looking at this in the mid-2010s (before I went to Microsoft), I could develop an app that ran on Windows 7, an app that used the native framework of Windows 8+, or both, but the same app couldn't do both. I chose to keep targeting Windows 7, and not use the newer UI framework.
In hindsight, I think Microsoft should have done the following, going back to the mid 90s:
As soon as Java comes out and you see that some developers actually like AWT layouts, develop a C++ wrapper over Win32 that mimics that ability to lay out a UI in code. That would have muted my disgust at Win32 and MFC when I got Visual C++ 6 as a teenager. Not a new OS API, mind you; all of this has to be done in a way that works downlevel, back to Windows 95 and NT4. (I was using NT4 at my first job until I lost that job in early 2002.)
When the industry discovers the pain of registering COM components and ActiveX controls for VB6 apps, come out with a new registration-free flavor of COM (edit: or maybe go straight to registration-free WinRT) that lets application developers just drop the DLL and OCX files in the same folder as the app. Again, not an OS feature, just new interfaces and conventions to be used by applications, components, and VB itself.
Implement something like Chrome's installer and updater, so mere mortal application developers can have fast installation and smooth automatic updates. Something baked into the OS like MSIX is better, of course, but every advance has to work on the machines of users running old versions of Windows, or the rest of the industry will just ignore it.
Every advance in UI technology and fashion should be done in a way that can be incrementally adopted in Win32 apps, as the parent discussed. Direct2D did this right; it's just a shame that the internal UI frameworks Microsoft built on top of Win32 and Direct2D were only internal.
When developing a new high-level language like C# as an alternative to VB, go with ahead-of-time compilation, so mere mortal developers can ship self-contained, fast-starting applications that work on their users' older Windows machines. But also keep real VB alive; the jump from VB6 to VB.NET only further fractured the platform for third-party developers.
Edit to add: Also don't lure Anders Hejlsberg away from Delphi. Perhaps Microsoft didn't fully appreciate the value of a third-party development environment, free of Microsoft's internal politics, that was enabling ISVs to kick ass with self-contained applications that exclusively targeted Windows. One of the most successful Windows-first apps of the 2000s, Skype, was developed in the early 2000s with Delphi.
I think with these moves, Windows would have stayed dominant in desktop apps, possibly even preventing the rise of web apps.
As soon as Java comes out and you see that some developers actually like AWT layouts, develop a C++ wrapper over Win32 that mimics that ability to lay out a UI in code. That would have muted my disgust at Win32 and MFC when I got Visual C++ 6 as a teenager. Not a new OS API, mind you; all of this has to be done in a way that works downlevel, back to Windows 95 and NT4. (I was using NT4 at my first job until I lost that job in early 2002.)
When the industry discovers the pain of registering COM components and ActiveX controls for VB6 apps, come out with a new registration-free flavor of COM (edit: or maybe go straight to registration-free WinRT) that lets application developers just drop the DLL and OCX files in the same folder as the app. Again, not an OS feature, just new interfaces and conventions to be used by applications, components, and VB itself.
Implement something like Chrome's installer and updater, so mere mortal application developers can have fast installation and smooth automatic updates. Something baked into the OS like MSIX is better, of course, but every advance has to work on the machines of users running old versions of Windows, or the rest of the industry will just ignore it.
Every advance in UI technology and fashion should be done in a way that can be incrementally adopted in Win32 apps, as the parent discussed. Direct2D did this right; it's just a shame that the internal UI frameworks Microsoft built on top of Win32 and Direct2D were only internal.
When developing a new high-level language like C# as an alternative to VB, go with ahead-of-time compilation, so mere mortal developers can ship self-contained, fast-starting applications that work on their users' older Windows machines. But also keep real VB alive; the jump from VB6 to VB.NET only further fractured the platform for third-party developers.
Edit to add: Also don't lure Anders Hejlsberg away from Delphi. Perhaps Microsoft didn't fully appreciate the value of a third-party development environment, free of Microsoft's internal politics, that was enabling ISVs to kick ass with self-contained applications that exclusively targeted Windows. One of the most successful Windows-first apps of the 2000s, Skype, was developed in the early 2000s with Delphi.
I think with these moves, Windows would have stayed dominant in desktop apps, possibly even preventing the rise of web apps.
Officially, as answered by Anders on an interview, he was lured by former Borland colleagues, and he declined multiple times, until he saw there was time to move on from Borland.
https://behindthetech.libsynpro.com/001-anders-hejlsberg-a-c...
https://behindthetech.libsynpro.com/001-anders-hejlsberg-a-c...
"Implement something like Chrome's installer and updater"
MSIX does implement the same UX and comes with every Windows 10+ install, the runtime can be installed to older Windows too. So they did do this in the end. Conveyor produces them and it now also implements a web-like update UX (for macOS too) where the app checks for an update on every launch and will update/relaunch itself synchronously with no user intervention. Delta updates make it fast - on a decent internet connection like those we have here in Switzerland it's practically as fast to update to a new version and start a desktop app as loading a web app! I gotta say it feels great, quite different to the old desktop app feel. Especially neat is the way Windows can share files and even file blocks between unrelated apps, which means if you install an e.g. Electron or JVM app and then another one, Windows won't download the files twice, it'll hard-link them into place. So they can even share the underlying memory when the two apps are running, reducing memory usage! And if they're slightly different it'll only download the changed blocks.
Why didn't MS do it 20 years ago? When Google's updater engine was new it was very controversial. We've all forgotten about it now, but the idea that apps would upgrade themselves silently, in the background, if you weren't even running the app at all, and you'd not even be notified, well this made a lot of programmer control-at-any-cost types extremely angry. Google did it anyway because Larry Page had an unusually extreme focus on simplicity and wanted a web-like experience, so pushed it through despite opposition. Now it's accepted as the right way to do things. Page doesn't get enough credit IMO for his product management insight and sheer force of will.
The web would probably still have risen, but maybe a lot slower. Even a hypothetical much improved Win32 wasn't ever going to be a good way to represent documents, and on the web a lot of "apps" are closer to interactive documents than apps, or evolve out of documents. Microsoft didn't and still doesn't have anything in the platform that recognizes this.
The goal of Conveyor is to make it as easy to distribute desktop apps as it is for web apps (or much easier if you need things like hardware access or offline support, of course). The long term idea is that if it's easy to do stuff outside the browser, it'll become possible to explore alternative architectures that are maybe more appropriate than HTML.
One idea I keep coming back to is file associations. The web doesn't have any such concept because it doesn't recognize that apps can exist independently from documents. Imagine there's a simple way to form a little graph, such that a piece of data can point to another node using edge labels like "view", "edit", "transform-to:text/json" or whatever. These are like the verbs that file explorers allow apps to associate with files. And then the target node can itself be a file like a script with an association like "execute". By following the links you build up the entire software stack needed to work with the target file, you can sandbox that stack and execute it, and users can override the associations for any kind of node to replace the default functionality with something else. This would make the original XML vision of separating data and presentation actually happen because you can define a custom Markdown+JSON format that holds the content for your blog, associate it with a separate program that renders that to <whatever>, associate that in turn with something that renders your <whatever> format to pixels and so on.
I think that sort of addition would have been a possible way that Microsoft/Apple/Linux could have combatted the competitive threat of the web. But nobody was thinking about it.
MSIX does implement the same UX and comes with every Windows 10+ install, the runtime can be installed to older Windows too. So they did do this in the end. Conveyor produces them and it now also implements a web-like update UX (for macOS too) where the app checks for an update on every launch and will update/relaunch itself synchronously with no user intervention. Delta updates make it fast - on a decent internet connection like those we have here in Switzerland it's practically as fast to update to a new version and start a desktop app as loading a web app! I gotta say it feels great, quite different to the old desktop app feel. Especially neat is the way Windows can share files and even file blocks between unrelated apps, which means if you install an e.g. Electron or JVM app and then another one, Windows won't download the files twice, it'll hard-link them into place. So they can even share the underlying memory when the two apps are running, reducing memory usage! And if they're slightly different it'll only download the changed blocks.
Why didn't MS do it 20 years ago? When Google's updater engine was new it was very controversial. We've all forgotten about it now, but the idea that apps would upgrade themselves silently, in the background, if you weren't even running the app at all, and you'd not even be notified, well this made a lot of programmer control-at-any-cost types extremely angry. Google did it anyway because Larry Page had an unusually extreme focus on simplicity and wanted a web-like experience, so pushed it through despite opposition. Now it's accepted as the right way to do things. Page doesn't get enough credit IMO for his product management insight and sheer force of will.
The web would probably still have risen, but maybe a lot slower. Even a hypothetical much improved Win32 wasn't ever going to be a good way to represent documents, and on the web a lot of "apps" are closer to interactive documents than apps, or evolve out of documents. Microsoft didn't and still doesn't have anything in the platform that recognizes this.
The goal of Conveyor is to make it as easy to distribute desktop apps as it is for web apps (or much easier if you need things like hardware access or offline support, of course). The long term idea is that if it's easy to do stuff outside the browser, it'll become possible to explore alternative architectures that are maybe more appropriate than HTML.
One idea I keep coming back to is file associations. The web doesn't have any such concept because it doesn't recognize that apps can exist independently from documents. Imagine there's a simple way to form a little graph, such that a piece of data can point to another node using edge labels like "view", "edit", "transform-to:text/json" or whatever. These are like the verbs that file explorers allow apps to associate with files. And then the target node can itself be a file like a script with an association like "execute". By following the links you build up the entire software stack needed to work with the target file, you can sandbox that stack and execute it, and users can override the associations for any kind of node to replace the default functionality with something else. This would make the original XML vision of separating data and presentation actually happen because you can define a custom Markdown+JSON format that holds the content for your blog, associate it with a separate program that renders that to <whatever>, associate that in turn with something that renders your <whatever> format to pixels and so on.
I think that sort of addition would have been a possible way that Microsoft/Apple/Linux could have combatted the competitive threat of the web. But nobody was thinking about it.
> the runtime can be installed to older Windows too.
Can a Windows app packaged with Conveyor actually be installed and updated on an ordinary Windows 7 machine, without the user having to do anything extra? I suppose we don't have to worry about Windows 7 for much longer, but that time isn't yet here.
Can a Windows app packaged with Conveyor actually be installed and updated on an ordinary Windows 7 machine, without the user having to do anything extra? I suppose we don't have to worry about Windows 7 for much longer, but that time isn't yet here.
Yep. You can install "MSIX Core" on Windows 7 or 8.1. The project is open source, even:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/msix-core/msi...
That said, Conveyor itself isn't tested on anything less than Windows 10 and won't automatically install MSIX Core. Windows 7 isn't supported anymore and Chrome is about to phase out its support for it too. So far we just don't see any demand for a better UX on Windows 7, so the user would have to apply that themselves. Or, just download and use the zip version, of course.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/msix-core/msi...
That said, Conveyor itself isn't tested on anything less than Windows 10 and won't automatically install MSIX Core. Windows 7 isn't supported anymore and Chrome is about to phase out its support for it too. So far we just don't see any demand for a better UX on Windows 7, so the user would have to apply that themselves. Or, just download and use the zip version, of course.
Yep, that pretty much sums up the state of GUI civil wars at Microsoft.
How many people sunk costs into Windows RT? I thought that disappeared as quickly as it came. And I seem to recall the store always being pretty empty, even by today's Microsoft Store standards.
(I might be outing myself for missing something fundamental - but can you really blame me for losing track of MS's platform reboots?)
(I might be outing myself for missing something fundamental - but can you really blame me for losing track of MS's platform reboots?)
Some are MVPs with common appearances on community calls trying to sell how successfully they ported from UWP into WinUI 3.0, while downplaying existing issues, after a couple of years after Project Reunion.
Mid 2020 I was asked to port an app away from Silverlight before it hit EOL in Oct 2021. I wrote the original app in WinForms in 2003. Having experienced Win32, MFC, ATL, WinForms, WPF, WinRT and looked into WinUI I decided to pass on it.
ANY other UI technology is probably a better long term bet than anything Microsoft come out with.
ANY other UI technology is probably a better long term bet than anything Microsoft come out with.
For me what did it was the way they managed (or actually really didn't) the transition from .NET Native and C++/CX to their replacements, both with much lesser tooling, requiring manually dealing with code generation, merging files, no designer, while their GitHub issues keep increasing exponentially.
> I do wonder why the Microsoft / Windows folk keep reinventing their UI.
There's a trend in the general tech zeitgeist where people think anything older than a couple years is decaying old cruft and needs to be redone. Whether that's UI/UX, programming languages, architectures, etc.
Any software shop that fancies itself as a cool, move-fast-and-break-things environment for hip young Silicon Valley-types needs to always be following the latest trends lest the stubborn organization and its red tape turn us into the next BlackBerry.
I blame Google. After having enough products of theirs that I used and liked ripped away from me and replaced with something worse, and having to adapt to a new Android UI with every annual OS update (their favorite place to rearrange is the quick settings/notification shade - I don't know if a year went by where they didn't redesign it), I finally swore off using any new services they come out with, de-Googling where I can, and bought myself an iPhone. I won't say Apple is perfect for not doing stupid UI redesigns, but at least the texting app looks pretty much identical to what Steve Jobs demoed in 2007.
There's a trend in the general tech zeitgeist where people think anything older than a couple years is decaying old cruft and needs to be redone. Whether that's UI/UX, programming languages, architectures, etc.
Any software shop that fancies itself as a cool, move-fast-and-break-things environment for hip young Silicon Valley-types needs to always be following the latest trends lest the stubborn organization and its red tape turn us into the next BlackBerry.
I blame Google. After having enough products of theirs that I used and liked ripped away from me and replaced with something worse, and having to adapt to a new Android UI with every annual OS update (their favorite place to rearrange is the quick settings/notification shade - I don't know if a year went by where they didn't redesign it), I finally swore off using any new services they come out with, de-Googling where I can, and bought myself an iPhone. I won't say Apple is perfect for not doing stupid UI redesigns, but at least the texting app looks pretty much identical to what Steve Jobs demoed in 2007.
> Especially if you're a user who wants to take advantage of the E-core's efficiency to increase battery lives on your laptop.
It is my understanding that "e cores" in AL/PL are all about space, not power. Did I read the graphs wrong?
It is my understanding that "e cores" in AL/PL are all about space, not power. Did I read the graphs wrong?
These changes are a pain but i have mostly achieved a copy of my Windows 10 setup which is much needed to stay productive!
Getting the old right-click menu back is done through a registry setting.
Reverting the taskbar back to Win10/2000 style for things like ungrouping of task bar items, items in multiple rows, items with titles and a quick launch area i use this: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
Getting the old right-click menu back is done through a registry setting.
Reverting the taskbar back to Win10/2000 style for things like ungrouping of task bar items, items in multiple rows, items with titles and a quick launch area i use this: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
> The real issue here is that W11 doesn't solve a problem or fix a need.
How so? You could ask Richard Stallman whether he has any idea about why....
How so? You could ask Richard Stallman whether he has any idea about why....
>The real issue here is that W11 doesn't solve a problem or fix a need.
That's not true. I'll try to exemplify some problems and improvements Windows 11 solved over 10:
The only annoying and unforgivable thing to me is that they're forcibly grouping all opened apps into taskbar icons without labels, a-la GNOME/MacOS. Just let me have my mess of apps with labels spreading across the entire taskbar Microsoft, I'm more productive that way, as my peripheral vision keeps track of which app is where even on a messy crowded taskbar. Don't try to think you know what's best for me and dumb things down for me just for the sake of superficial aesthetics. I paid for the entire taskbar, and damn-it, I wanna use it!
Hope this helps.
That's not true. I'll try to exemplify some problems and improvements Windows 11 solved over 10:
- App windows return to their place on their respective monitors between laptop dock-undock switches. On Windows 10, all windows get dumped to whichever monitor powers on first when you dock back the laptop. Though I haven't used Win 10 in a year so they could have pushed this fix there as well in the meantime.
- WSL with WSLg comes enabled out of the box, making pulling stuff off github and running it in a native linux environment much quicker and easier out of the box, without all those hacky steps Windows 10 needed to get WSL.
- Window tiling is massively enhanced with more tiling options, without the need for PowerToys like you do on Windows 10.
- Screen capture and recording with OCR is now more polished and seamless out of the box.
- Dark mode is way better than on Windows 10 with many more components of the UI capable of turning dark. On Windows 10 it was completely half assed with many UI elements staying white and blinding you. It's still not perfect though (right click on a file, show more options, click on properties and get blinded), but still overall much better than Win 10 as yes, it set the bar that low.
- The quick toggle menu next to the clock is much more useful than on Win10, very similar to the one on the latest Gnome, with the most useful features available like switching power modes, switching Bluetooth/audio devices or toggling Night Light.
- I can change speaker volume just by hovering the mouse cursor over the speaker icon next to the clock and flicking the mouse scroll wheel, just like in Gnome and KDE. Really love this one.
- Start menu search is better and smarter than on Windows 10. I just hit the start/meta key and type the first 3 or so letters of an app and it nails it. It also indexes the latest files you accessed so you can type the first few letters of a file and it will bring it up.
- The settings menu/app is now far more feature complete and lets you easily find and change a setting without having to dig out the old control panel like you might need on Windows 10. The control panel is still there hidden away, but I really never had to open it by now in almost a year.
- Multi-finger trackpad gestures for workspace and window switching is better and more seamless
- Win11 brings enhanced security features like core isolation
- HDR support out of the box is far better, if you have one such monitor
- Basic out of the box apps like screenshotting annotation I previously mentioned, image viewer/editor, video player/editor, are now fully featured and actually useful, meaning I can actually start using the OS after installation and get to work, without first going to download Chrome and then going to download third party PDF readers, video players and image viewers, etc. as was the typical post-installation ritual that plagued every previous Windows release to make it actually usable. It's finally a more cohesive and productive experience out of the box. I still download Notepad++ though, that's irreplaceable.
The only annoying and unforgivable thing to me is that they're forcibly grouping all opened apps into taskbar icons without labels, a-la GNOME/MacOS. Just let me have my mess of apps with labels spreading across the entire taskbar Microsoft, I'm more productive that way, as my peripheral vision keeps track of which app is where even on a messy crowded taskbar. Don't try to think you know what's best for me and dumb things down for me just for the sake of superficial aesthetics. I paid for the entire taskbar, and damn-it, I wanna use it!
Hope this helps.
While nice, most of those read like a bug fix release, and not a new version of the OS.
I think they got the idea right with Windows 10 being the "last" version and really just shouldn't have moved to Windows 11. It is still my belief that they only did that because Apple dropped the Mac OS X thing.
So the question because whether or not we view Windows 11 and a true new release or just a bunch of point releases rolled up and a version bump for marketing reasons.
I think they got the idea right with Windows 10 being the "last" version and really just shouldn't have moved to Windows 11. It is still my belief that they only did that because Apple dropped the Mac OS X thing.
So the question because whether or not we view Windows 11 and a true new release or just a bunch of point releases rolled up and a version bump for marketing reasons.
>While nice, most of those read like a bug fix release, and not a new version of the OS.
That's irrelevant. GP said that Windows 11 brings no fixes over Win 10 when that's just not true in any way. People keep moving the goalposts to try to support their false argument.
That's irrelevant. GP said that Windows 11 brings no fixes over Win 10 when that's just not true in any way. People keep moving the goalposts to try to support their false argument.
It's silly that these improvements are locked behind an OS update that requires fairly new hardware (cause of the TPM requirement)
These should have just been in a service pack for Windows 10
These should have just been in a service pack for Windows 10
That's not true, I installed Win 11 on a 7 year old laptop (soon to be 8) without TPM, for my parents, and it worked just fine.
If you do a USB install, the TPM requirement is a soft requirement that doesn't need to be fulfilled for Win 11 to install and work.
Try it.
If you do a USB install, the TPM requirement is a soft requirement that doesn't need to be fulfilled for Win 11 to install and work.
Try it.
You don't even need to do a USB installation. I installed in place by tweeking a single registry entry. During installation I was given a warning that my hardware is unsupported and I was allowed to proceed.
Fully 1/2 of these are fixes for things they have broken in the past 20 years... The dark mode support might actually be at the level of windows 3.1 now.
You're moving the goalposts. He claimed Win 11 brings no fixes over Win 10, and I proved him wrong, not what features Microsoft removed over the years and brough back with Win 11. And what's wrong with them bringing back older features? You're making it sound like that's a bad thing.
The point was that Win 11 is far more polished and feature compete than Windows 10, yet people somehow gloss over this and pretend that Win 10 is somehow better (it's not, it's really janky and backwards in comparison, just look at the settings menu and dark mode implementation). Win 11 really fixes many of Windows 10's shortcomings and jank.
The point was that Win 11 is far more polished and feature compete than Windows 10, yet people somehow gloss over this and pretend that Win 10 is somehow better (it's not, it's really janky and backwards in comparison, just look at the settings menu and dark mode implementation). Win 11 really fixes many of Windows 10's shortcomings and jank.
The point is with the half dozen things they fixed, they broke another hundred things. From the broken in a different way control panel, to the lack of functional grouping in the start menu, it just keeps going. Its the same thing they did with win10, and why its not running on any of my personal hardware either.
> From the broken in a different way control panel
Broken how? Are you talking about the settings menu or the control panel? You can do everything from the settings menu now, why would you try digging up the control panel? Unless maybe you're a sys-admin maybe trying to do some corporate stuff.
>the lack of functional grouping in the start menu
Thee start menu grouping works fine for me. Have you actually used the latest release of Win 11, or are you commenting based on stuff you read on the internet?
>they broke another hundred things
Can you please name the 100 broken things? You named just two things which either aren't broken but more like you either haven't used or don't like how they are. But that's not the definition of broken.
Broken how? Are you talking about the settings menu or the control panel? You can do everything from the settings menu now, why would you try digging up the control panel? Unless maybe you're a sys-admin maybe trying to do some corporate stuff.
>the lack of functional grouping in the start menu
Thee start menu grouping works fine for me. Have you actually used the latest release of Win 11, or are you commenting based on stuff you read on the internet?
>they broke another hundred things
Can you please name the 100 broken things? You named just two things which either aren't broken but more like you either haven't used or don't like how they are. But that's not the definition of broken.
I have a win11 tablet, and a couple work test machines. None of them can group icons by functional usage, or if they do, its not obvious. If they have added it since I tried to do it some months ago, and simply didn't provide any visual hinting that it was possible in a newer version when I upgraded it. Then that itself is a failure. Just because I rant about how I don't allow it on personal devices doesn't mean I don't lay hands on it, on a regular basis.
The first couple hits when i google it, remain links to 3rd party software enabling the function.
Edit: Still not sure how to do it, went down the first half dozen links, which were to things like this: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/forum/all/how-do...
and no answers. If it takes me half an hour to figure out how to do something that every single version of windows since windows 2.0 could do, then... fail.
another edit: and to reply to some of the things you added after the fact. Type control panel into the search button on win11 pro/etc and notice all the stuff that remains there because it doesn't have similar functionality in the new control panel. Pretty frequently I find myself in that control panel because what I want to change can't be changed from the new control panel.
The first couple hits when i google it, remain links to 3rd party software enabling the function.
Edit: Still not sure how to do it, went down the first half dozen links, which were to things like this: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/forum/all/how-do...
and no answers. If it takes me half an hour to figure out how to do something that every single version of windows since windows 2.0 could do, then... fail.
another edit: and to reply to some of the things you added after the fact. Type control panel into the search button on win11 pro/etc and notice all the stuff that remains there because it doesn't have similar functionality in the new control panel. Pretty frequently I find myself in that control panel because what I want to change can't be changed from the new control panel.
>None of them can group icons by functional usage,
I really have no idea what this means as that's never my workflow, but it could be a valid complaint. I just hit the start/meta key, type the 2-3 letters of my desired app/file, then hit enter.
>Type control panel into the search button on win11 pro/etc and notice all the stuff that remains there because it doesn't have similar functionality in the new control panel.
Like what? I consider myself a relative power user and haven't needed to touch the old control panel at all, at least for cases that cover 99% of windows use-cases, as for power user uses cases that aren't covered by the new settings menu, I usually go directly to the registry editor. Just because you find control panel results in the start menu search, doesn't mean you can't do those things in the new settings menu.
>Pretty frequently I find myself in that control panel because what I want to change can't be changed from the new control panel.
For example, what things?
I really have no idea what this means as that's never my workflow, but it could be a valid complaint. I just hit the start/meta key, type the 2-3 letters of my desired app/file, then hit enter.
>Type control panel into the search button on win11 pro/etc and notice all the stuff that remains there because it doesn't have similar functionality in the new control panel.
Like what? I consider myself a relative power user and haven't needed to touch the old control panel at all, at least for cases that cover 99% of windows use-cases, as for power user uses cases that aren't covered by the new settings menu, I usually go directly to the registry editor. Just because you find control panel results in the start menu search, doesn't mean you can't do those things in the new settings menu.
>Pretty frequently I find myself in that control panel because what I want to change can't be changed from the new control panel.
For example, what things?
>None of them can group icons by functional usage,
>> I really have no idea what this means as that's never my workflow, but it could be a valid complaint. I just hit the start/meta key, type the 2-3 letters of my desired app/file, then hit enter.
Right, its fine for you, and I'm happy for you because your workflow doesn't involve having a machine with 100's of applications installed that you can't remember the name of because you use them once every couple years. For example I have a cdripping application installed its categorized under "media->rippers". If I type "ripper" into my application search box (this is win7) my cdripping app doesn't show up, if I type CD in, it doesn't either. Because its called "audiograbber" and its quite nice, and quite old too, because its from a time when people ripped CD's by the car load. It still works fantastically, and once in a while I click the "used cd" option in amazon and buy one for $2 because they are cheaper than the .mp3s. And for some reason I can't ever remember its name (rather I mentally think of a couple of its competitors).
Listing everything alphabetically or showing a giant pile of icons doesn't work for me. Which is funny because I can drive a unix machine from the command line all day, but even then I still reach for the KDE start menu sometimes.
And I'm sure your happy with the task bar too, which I find helplessly useless because I've been putting my windows task bar across the left hand side of my screen with textual descriptions for 25+ years. That allows all the terminal windows/etc to stack up and have their machine/menu descriptions visible on the left 1" or so of my screen when I hit the windows key or mouse over there. I don't have to mouse around or alt tab for days to go through the 100's of firefox and putty windows I accumulate over the space of a couple weeks.
Similarly I think MS devs should have mouse free weeks where they are forced to navigate the OS using only the keyboard, since that is the primary input device of a _desktop_ os. If I want a tablet OS I will get a android/ios tablet instead of a 1/2 functional windows one. At least on those I can categorize my games separate from my CAD/EE apps, and my media production tool set.
That same desktop has what works out to ~7K x 5K worth of screen real estate, and don't get me started how broken windows is now with that kind of space.
So, while I think integrating tablet and desktop UI's is a reasonably good idea, what has happened is that MS no longer has a desktop OS. Its a bad version of 2010 era iOS. The UI isn't scalable or usable for heavyweight desktop use, its largely a toy, not ideal for large scale server deployments, not a good tablet OS, and now its not a good desktop OS either. For all the shit windows 8 got, the idea of having a "desktop->tablet" switch wasn't all that bad compared with what we have now.
None of the constant MS churn was a problem, when the old options were buried under some menu item, or in a registry hack, or sitting on the disk somewhere (progman anyone?, that thing shipped for what 15 years after it was deprecated, and still probably runs on 32-bit windows). The problems started when MS decided they were going to wholesale rip things out without regard for how people were using the OS, and then fail to provide a replacement.
>> I really have no idea what this means as that's never my workflow, but it could be a valid complaint. I just hit the start/meta key, type the 2-3 letters of my desired app/file, then hit enter.
Right, its fine for you, and I'm happy for you because your workflow doesn't involve having a machine with 100's of applications installed that you can't remember the name of because you use them once every couple years. For example I have a cdripping application installed its categorized under "media->rippers". If I type "ripper" into my application search box (this is win7) my cdripping app doesn't show up, if I type CD in, it doesn't either. Because its called "audiograbber" and its quite nice, and quite old too, because its from a time when people ripped CD's by the car load. It still works fantastically, and once in a while I click the "used cd" option in amazon and buy one for $2 because they are cheaper than the .mp3s. And for some reason I can't ever remember its name (rather I mentally think of a couple of its competitors).
Listing everything alphabetically or showing a giant pile of icons doesn't work for me. Which is funny because I can drive a unix machine from the command line all day, but even then I still reach for the KDE start menu sometimes.
And I'm sure your happy with the task bar too, which I find helplessly useless because I've been putting my windows task bar across the left hand side of my screen with textual descriptions for 25+ years. That allows all the terminal windows/etc to stack up and have their machine/menu descriptions visible on the left 1" or so of my screen when I hit the windows key or mouse over there. I don't have to mouse around or alt tab for days to go through the 100's of firefox and putty windows I accumulate over the space of a couple weeks.
Similarly I think MS devs should have mouse free weeks where they are forced to navigate the OS using only the keyboard, since that is the primary input device of a _desktop_ os. If I want a tablet OS I will get a android/ios tablet instead of a 1/2 functional windows one. At least on those I can categorize my games separate from my CAD/EE apps, and my media production tool set.
That same desktop has what works out to ~7K x 5K worth of screen real estate, and don't get me started how broken windows is now with that kind of space.
So, while I think integrating tablet and desktop UI's is a reasonably good idea, what has happened is that MS no longer has a desktop OS. Its a bad version of 2010 era iOS. The UI isn't scalable or usable for heavyweight desktop use, its largely a toy, not ideal for large scale server deployments, not a good tablet OS, and now its not a good desktop OS either. For all the shit windows 8 got, the idea of having a "desktop->tablet" switch wasn't all that bad compared with what we have now.
None of the constant MS churn was a problem, when the old options were buried under some menu item, or in a registry hack, or sitting on the disk somewhere (progman anyone?, that thing shipped for what 15 years after it was deprecated, and still probably runs on 32-bit windows). The problems started when MS decided they were going to wholesale rip things out without regard for how people were using the OS, and then fail to provide a replacement.
The only one I thought I'd use (I have Windows 11 on my laptop) was
> I can change speaker volume just by hovering the mouse cursor over the speaker icon next to the clock and using the mouse wheel, just like in Gnome or KDE. Really love this one.
Except Windows 10 (on my desktop) has this one already!
(I do like WSL - which is on Windows 10, but haven't tried WSLg yet.)
On my laptop, I can forgive the horrible limitations of the task bar, the regressions of the start menu, the gross clickbait news widget (I want the weather widget but I'm not sure if it's worth the trade off. Much prefer the Windows 10 weather live tile and app.) I just turn on my laptop, fire up games, and try to ignore the rest of the mess that is Windows 11. I only put it on there to validate my suspicions that I would not want to use 11 over 10, and that is exactly what happened.
Edge is on Windows 10; I'm not sure why you list that as a feature of Windows 11.
> I can change speaker volume just by hovering the mouse cursor over the speaker icon next to the clock and using the mouse wheel, just like in Gnome or KDE. Really love this one.
Except Windows 10 (on my desktop) has this one already!
(I do like WSL - which is on Windows 10, but haven't tried WSLg yet.)
On my laptop, I can forgive the horrible limitations of the task bar, the regressions of the start menu, the gross clickbait news widget (I want the weather widget but I'm not sure if it's worth the trade off. Much prefer the Windows 10 weather live tile and app.) I just turn on my laptop, fire up games, and try to ignore the rest of the mess that is Windows 11. I only put it on there to validate my suspicions that I would not want to use 11 over 10, and that is exactly what happened.
Edge is on Windows 10; I'm not sure why you list that as a feature of Windows 11.
I switch from work desk (2 monitors) to home desk (2 monitors, different ones) to laptop monitor only and I always get the windows on the right monitors.
The only thing that does not work is that the numbering of minoris at home and office changes (they are swapped) so I get the winding on the wrong ones.
But I never have them all gather on one monitor when there are more available.
The only thing that does not work is that the numbering of minoris at home and office changes (they are swapped) so I get the winding on the wrong ones.
But I never have them all gather on one monitor when there are more available.
You have listed a lot of great features that I had mostly forgotten about or didn't know. Thank-you.
I'd be hard pressed to describe anything as needing a new Major version number upgrade. i stand by my original comment as calling it: Win10SP2
I'd be hard pressed to describe anything as needing a new Major version number upgrade. i stand by my original comment as calling it: Win10SP2
It is basically what Windows 10X team got assigned to do after it got discontinued.
Work laptop got upgraded to it, on my private one I am keeping Windows 10.
Work laptop got upgraded to it, on my private one I am keeping Windows 10.
We have a Thinkpad running W11. It's my son's and I didn't really think much about the OS until he started having issues (with things like the Windows Hello security system that automatically logs you in through webcam face recognition...supposedly).
It used to be that Windows had it's own quirks, but the UI and functional interfaces were generally roughly equatable with what you'd get on a popular Linux distro, or OSX. Now, though, while you can still get under the hood easily, Microsoft has messed with the UI/UX so much that it feels more like trying to use an XBOX for productivity than a desktop computer OS.
If it wasn't for the fact that you can generally assume reverse compatibility and drivers for literally everything from MSFT, I think they'd have lost huge marketshare with this release. It's a Vista for a new generation.
It used to be that Windows had it's own quirks, but the UI and functional interfaces were generally roughly equatable with what you'd get on a popular Linux distro, or OSX. Now, though, while you can still get under the hood easily, Microsoft has messed with the UI/UX so much that it feels more like trying to use an XBOX for productivity than a desktop computer OS.
If it wasn't for the fact that you can generally assume reverse compatibility and drivers for literally everything from MSFT, I think they'd have lost huge marketshare with this release. It's a Vista for a new generation.
I feel like the odd one out on windows 11. I actually quite like it, and the UI changes it brings. I also approve of how well they've integrated wsl2. It's been making many aspects of developing for both windows and linux much less painful.
I don't like how much content it grabs from the internet on things like the menu bar and the start menu...but that's about my only gripe with it.
I say this as someone that grew up using linux and gnome 1.4, 2.0, 3.0, having gone through various other desktop environments andwindow managers like enlightenment, kde, openbox, fluxbox, xmonad, etc. and abbreviating microsoft to "m$". I don't like microsoft as a corporation, and I'm no fanboy. but it seems nicer to use than what I've seen in the linux world. I definitely like it more than macOS.
Sometimes windows can still feel cluttery, but I'm very happy with how they allow easily snapping windows to current positions/sizes.
I generally am only using firefox, clion/goland/emacs (in wsl2), and various games though. So maybe I'm just getting a limited experience. I also use it on a very beefy machine (12 core amd ryzen 9 3900xt, 128gb ram, 2x2tb nvme, gtx 3060). It could be on more average hardware that it's a terrible experience.
I don't like how much content it grabs from the internet on things like the menu bar and the start menu...but that's about my only gripe with it.
I say this as someone that grew up using linux and gnome 1.4, 2.0, 3.0, having gone through various other desktop environments andwindow managers like enlightenment, kde, openbox, fluxbox, xmonad, etc. and abbreviating microsoft to "m$". I don't like microsoft as a corporation, and I'm no fanboy. but it seems nicer to use than what I've seen in the linux world. I definitely like it more than macOS.
Sometimes windows can still feel cluttery, but I'm very happy with how they allow easily snapping windows to current positions/sizes.
I generally am only using firefox, clion/goland/emacs (in wsl2), and various games though. So maybe I'm just getting a limited experience. I also use it on a very beefy machine (12 core amd ryzen 9 3900xt, 128gb ram, 2x2tb nvme, gtx 3060). It could be on more average hardware that it's a terrible experience.
As far as I can tell the main 'feature' of Windows 11 is a stronger move towards everything-is-a-service (and particularly a service you have to pay for on an ongoing basis). Why else the push to be logged into microsoft and onedrive? Office365 being online only software-as-a-service was just the start. The goal is clear, and its clear its primarily a step backwards for the user.
Who would have thought that an operating system with crazy minimum system requirements and no meaningful improvements for the average user wouldn't be a popular choice.
The official minimum requirements are just bizarre, because they're only enforced at installation. Windows 11 runs just fine on Skylake processors.
Yes, older CPUs don't have certain security features. That's unfortunate, but it's not like running Windows 10 is more secure for them. Just turn those features off when they're not supported.
Yes, older CPUs don't have certain security features. That's unfortunate, but it's not like running Windows 10 is more secure for them. Just turn those features off when they're not supported.
Will anyone at MS learn a lesson from this and stop taking their OS development in directions the user doesn't want it to go? Or is that just crazy talk?
They know most users don't have a choice and will upgrade when their current OS goes EOL or they buy a new computer. If it were for me I would have kept the Windows 7 shell and upgraded the operating system under the hood. Why change someone's workflow with a worse version of what you previously had. Like the awful search in Windows 10 that looks stuff up in Bing before searching the hard drive. Who thought that was a good idea? IT WORKED JUST FINE IN WINDOWS 7.
Yah, I'm done with windows on personal hardware. I was late to 7, and refused to run 10, rather switching to KDE on a number of machines.
MS didn't learn the lesson that apple taught them, about how a desktop interface doesn't work well on small screen devices without keyboard/mouse. Instead what they appear to have learned is that small screen UI's designed for touch should be used on desktop systems with screen real estate measured in 10's of square feet, and where the primary input device is a keyboard followed by a mouse.
And its terrible. People complain because it sucks. Not being able to figure out which window is active because they removed most of the visual active/inactive window hinting, not being able to find more than a couple dozen programs works great for a work computer where your day job involves sitting in one of a small number of applications all day long, but fails miserably for any other use case. Even android/iphone can group program/icons by function these days (and have you seen anyone under 20's phone screen? Those kids have 100's of applications installed).
And yet the past 10 years of MS "advancements" are largely things people either didn't ask for, or are reversions of things that were possible in older versions of the OS. Sure the task manager can now display network utilization, but you can't figure out if the window your typing in is active until you realize that you just typed your SSH key unlock pin, into slack. And don't get me started on the scroll bars, the new control panel UI has the same abominable f*ed up scroll bar situation as most web apps, and it still can only do about 1/2 of what the old win7 control panel could. You have to try and scroll it 1/2 the time before you can be sure there isn't more information below the bottom of the window. Its just one user hostile change after another, and they add up... over and over. until it feels like the entire point is just to screw around with people.
MS didn't learn the lesson that apple taught them, about how a desktop interface doesn't work well on small screen devices without keyboard/mouse. Instead what they appear to have learned is that small screen UI's designed for touch should be used on desktop systems with screen real estate measured in 10's of square feet, and where the primary input device is a keyboard followed by a mouse.
And its terrible. People complain because it sucks. Not being able to figure out which window is active because they removed most of the visual active/inactive window hinting, not being able to find more than a couple dozen programs works great for a work computer where your day job involves sitting in one of a small number of applications all day long, but fails miserably for any other use case. Even android/iphone can group program/icons by function these days (and have you seen anyone under 20's phone screen? Those kids have 100's of applications installed).
And yet the past 10 years of MS "advancements" are largely things people either didn't ask for, or are reversions of things that were possible in older versions of the OS. Sure the task manager can now display network utilization, but you can't figure out if the window your typing in is active until you realize that you just typed your SSH key unlock pin, into slack. And don't get me started on the scroll bars, the new control panel UI has the same abominable f*ed up scroll bar situation as most web apps, and it still can only do about 1/2 of what the old win7 control panel could. You have to try and scroll it 1/2 the time before you can be sure there isn't more information below the bottom of the window. Its just one user hostile change after another, and they add up... over and over. until it feels like the entire point is just to screw around with people.
Looking at https://www.pcbenchmarks.net/os-marketshare.html, Windows 11 seems to be gaining adoption at the expected rate, at least among the enthusiast crowd (who will run such tests). As with all previous versions, people aren't going to be in any rush to upgrade their OS no matter the feature set. It will naturally gain market share when people throw away their devices and buy new ones.
I tried to like it, but between the telemetry, the bugginess, the insane UI changes, and embedded ads all over the place, I went back to Windows 10. Win11 is a mess.
I know some people who still use Windows 7. The reason is simple: they don't want to fix what's not broken. 7 is also the last properly-desktop release, and it also doesn't put itself before the user.
I am still using Debian. Debian 10 "Buster" to be precise. But I think I will upgrade, it will be uneventful and everything I use will work as before.
BTW it is a nice combo with the Guix package manager ontop when one needs recent libraries and stuff for development. Saves a ton of time.
BTW it is a nice combo with the Guix package manager ontop when one needs recent libraries and stuff for development. Saves a ton of time.
I am a life-long Windows user but 11 is just a total blunder.
I am a life-long Windows user and I'm pretty sure there have been more release blunders than successes. The most I have ever expected from a new Windows version is "well it works as well as the last" other than Bluetooth actually working in Windows 10 compared to Windows 7. I'm sure there are tons of improvements under the hood, but I feel like I can't experience them because of how TERRIBLE Microsoft has become at UI/UX.
I recently decided to upgrade from Windows 10. I have a 7th gen Intel cpu and was planning to a hardware upgrade so I said why not let's give Windows 11 a try before abandoning this pc. To my surprise its much better than people make it to be. I did do a registry change for the right click menu, installed startallback but otherwise everything else is substantially improved. What surprised me mostly is that memory management has improved to the point I decided not to proceed with replacing my pc. It's sad Microsoft chose not to support older cpu cause it really shines in regards to performance.
It won't run on perfectly fine hardware which manufactures EOL practically as it leaves the conveyor belt. They'd like the solution to everything be to buy a new one. So when Microsoft left it to manufactures to decide if a machine could run Windows 11, it was a lot of "nope". Yes even the ones with new enough TPM.
When everyone wants 10 bucks from you, 10 bucks isn't cheap. That model scales poorly at the PC price point.
They need to break Windows 10 and remove choice.
When everyone wants 10 bucks from you, 10 bucks isn't cheap. That model scales poorly at the PC price point.
They need to break Windows 10 and remove choice.
Don’t forget the feature regressions!
Also amusing to report that someone installed Windows 11 on an old pentium [0]. Evidently Microsoft used a processor blackist, but nobody thought to go back that far. So yes, arbitrary hardware restrictions.
[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/no-new-pc-needed-windows-11-runs-...
Also amusing to report that someone installed Windows 11 on an old pentium [0]. Evidently Microsoft used a processor blackist, but nobody thought to go back that far. So yes, arbitrary hardware restrictions.
[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/no-new-pc-needed-windows-11-runs-...
Dug up a several weeks old comment of mine to repost this:
Windows 11 was released in Oct 2021. In Oct 2022, its market share was 15%.
Windows 10 was released in Jul 2015. In Jul 2016, its market share was 28%.
So not ALL that much of a difference, definitely not enough to be writing articles like this and expect to be taken as serious journalism.
Windows 11 was released in Oct 2021. In Oct 2022, its market share was 15%.
Windows 10 was released in Jul 2015. In Jul 2016, its market share was 28%.
So not ALL that much of a difference, definitely not enough to be writing articles like this and expect to be taken as serious journalism.
I haven’t touched Windows 11—no big reason to. The fact Windows 10 will never get better is pushing me to give ChromeOS a shot on my next hardware refresh, and ChromeOS + it’s Linux VM support will likely seal the deal as my next OS going forward.
I did Windows Me, Vista and 8 already, I can't put myself through another cycle. MacOS it is!
Same ones I'd pick out as the "bad" releases, as someone using Windows since 3.1. 10's kinda a dud, too, though. If 7 supported newer hardware (or, vice versa, rather) I'd still be on that. 10's got WSL2 and... not much else going for it, and even that's not really a normal-user feature.
Same, and DOS before it. I've always been a Microsoft fan, but I'm a bit tired now. Apple silicon is a killer feature and I'm finding it hard to justify not moving wholesale to it (I'm dual wielding right now).
I love that for you (and me), but note that there are just as many people whining about macOS Ventura's modest changes.
I do feel like MacOS has done a better job of continuity - they change the system preference tool one time, Microsoft has done it like 4 times. Microsoft messed with the Start menu nearly every release, most people would still be fine with how it was way back in XP/2000. The place where MS shined was program and api compatibility and no sudden surprises (usually) - you knew what was coming down the roadmap ahead of time!
all my family is either on android or macOS for their laptop
i haven't seen a windows machine in the wild for a while already
EDIT:
looks like i hurt some Microsoft Windows fanboys, life must be hard https://i.imgur.com/pbSoAUn.png
i haven't seen a windows machine in the wild for a while already
EDIT:
looks like i hurt some Microsoft Windows fanboys, life must be hard https://i.imgur.com/pbSoAUn.png
All they have to do is kill off the mandatory cloud sign in everywhere, the telemetry, the crapware bundled with it, fix the S3 sleep problems, actually do some QA for a change, make the onboarding experience smooth as butter, deal with the buggity hellscape that is Windows Hello, fix all the stupid HiDPI weirdness, clean up at least 50% of the legacy shite hiding behind it and start respecting customers again and they will have a product.
Oh and fucking stick to one UI for a bit.
Edit: honestly I would love to use Windows on a daily basis. I lived through the glory days of Windows 2000 and it was consistent and dependable back then. Every step forward since has been two steps backwards.