In the lovely bubble that I live in, the “power users” haven’t been using Windows for quite some time now.
To Microsoft’s credit, they’ve made it incredibly easy for me, a .NET developer, to not have to use Windows any more. So I am, admittedly, grateful for that.
An old programming joke compared c# (ie .net) to a laser cannon strapped to a donkey, that oddly enough doesn't work as well without the donkey. Does this still ring true to you seeing as you are using the laser cannon sans donkey
> The donkey still is important for legacy runtimes, which probably have many decades of lifespan left.
Yep you're quite right, and actually the fast-moving, high-churn transition to .NET Core has been tough on devs still working with (now) "legacy" .NET Framework apps - which as you say, will have many years of lifespan remaining if they still fit the purpose for which they were built.
I don't envy those devs (and I do still have some legacy Framework stuff that I provide support for - but not for too much longer thankfully).
It is a little frustrating seeing how quickly so many libraries, even first-party Microsoft ones, have ditched support for dotnet 4.8.
There's an entire universe of enterprise stuff that hasn't caught up, or relies on features that have been dropped from future dotnet Core/5/6+ support.
We still have plenty of COBOL developers maintaining and upgrading legacy applications. Framework, and all the apps running on it, are officially legacy now. Legacy development has entirely different challenges and limitations to modern development.
2) 30k sloc heavily v&v'd code? Why? The cost and effort would be insane, and, to MS' credit, the current .NET ecosystem is great.
3) First class citizen. Rider (and the other jetbrains stuff) is as good as any other I've used
In my eyes, as someone who has been exclusively a Linux user since 1998, I now include C# in serious consideration for greenfield projects as well as legacy.
It also has quite a big standard library while not being 10 years behind everything like Java is.
It also has quite good performance (speaking in a web development context) compared to other popular choices like Ruby and Python.
I've personally only switched away from using C# in my free time because I was already writing C# during my day job, and that doesn't feel good (or look good on a CV).
All the simplifications that they mentioned seem reasonable to me.
Wouldn't Power Users be regular users of things like keyboard shortcuts, AutoHotKey scripts, etc...?
For example, 99% of my time is spent in seven or eight applications and use the Win-# key to jump between them. Win-1 is file explorer, Win-2 is web browser, Win-3 is email, etc...
For lesser used things I hit the Win key and start typing the name of the thing I want and then hit enter as soon as it's highlighted. The organization or size of the Start menu is not important.
The only feature I use that I would lose is small task bar icons, but that isn't exactly a showstopper for me.
If the list is what Windows' most loyal users are complaining about, Microsoft must be doing a good job. If anything, I think these changes will affect more casual users who spend a lot of time inside the start menu.
The loss of the small task bar icons will be annoying to me. I always fight to minimize UI real estate in my workspace, typically selecting the most compact / small offering that is still workable. I strongly prefer my task bar to remain visible but take up minimal space. I've become "used" to this problem though as UIs have all gone more and more finger friendly (read: big) over time. Definitely a good thing for the right use case, but please don't take away my option to get your application to be as non-instrusive as possible.
And worse, the apparent inability to move the taskbar to the right hand side of the screen. This takes up less of the valuable vertical space, but shortens the taskbar so small icons are even more important.
Given the long list of stuff they are changing, there’s a high probability that everyone will come out with at least one annoyance. For me it is the impossibility of showing all the icons in the notification area: it’s a small thing, but I can’t stand having them collapsed.
I guess my point is that most users spend very little time actively using Windows. When my computer is on, close to 100% of my time is spent in the browser or Visual Studio or email or some other program that requires Windows. I spend very little time in Settings, the Start menu, the device manager, etc.. I would guess File Explorer is my most used part of Windows.
So how do you use Windows? Isn't it essentially a foundation for the applications you want to run? Is the percentage of time you spend doing OS level things significant?
LTT did a video review and there was a very simplified right click context menu that you could click "more options" and it returned to the Windows 10 style menu. That will be extremely painful to use if that is not customizable.
Hopefully the people that have picked up Classic Shell are able to keep up with the changes when this settles out and unbreak the bad UI decisions that will be forced on us.
They also have modules that alter explorer as well (though I don't find them terribly useful). As an "old fogey" in the computer world Classic Shell is one of the first things I install on any Windows machine I set up for myself.
Microsoft is trapped by its own success. It is used all over the place and these old uses are hamstringing its ability to innovate because the new OS may not meet the needs of all of its previous use cases.
This has been Microsoft's predicament since probably 2000.
I'm not sure there's any need to "innovate" on the UI in this case. It's a stable, mature product refined for >30 years to suit the desktop use case and billions of people are familiar with it and its metaphors. There's plenty of room for innovation on new features, but why mess with what works UI wise? Seems like change for change's sake.
I agree, especially if you compare it to Apple's approach of small, steady, iterative tweaks to the UI.
You can still keep the OS looking fresh and up-to-date without completely reengineering the UI with every OS generation.
Especially as this "complete reengineering" was so so so much worse each time, with additional "new" layers of (incomplete) UI being added on top of legacy UI that would inexplicably still be there. Simply the worst of all worlds.
I'm a big fan of the old Windows 2000 era UI (which partly, amazingly, still exists today), but I have no desire for it to stay around if they can just come up with something fully cohesive and all-encompassing to *fully* replace it with.
Much Ado about nothing. Hit windows key, type a few characters, smash the ENTER key. I never even look at the start menu.
Don't encourage them by starting debates over "features." The start menu should damn near read my mind and get out of the way after serving my needs without requiring that I squint at the screen.
Windows 7 was absolute perfection and then it went downhill after that (lightening fast, typing a character or two presented exactly what I needed every time). They have even broken this core feature several times in Windows 10 by cramming in complexity.
Been using windows 11 for a bit for a while on the dev channel. Seems fine. Only thing that annoyed me was the context menu. I think fairly recently they added the "more options" which expands it to have everything that was there before which is slightly annoying but still fine. Overall I think 10 felt kind of amateurish and perhaps even a bit gaudy and I think 11 looks better. I prefer the new start menu as well.
They shouldn't be trying to push "apps". I want heavyweight programs and software not cheesy-sounding "apps". Not to mention being gently prodded at every turn to Microsofts own uninspiring ecosystem like i'm stupid.
Windows vista had cute options to make the UI look more like older versions of windows. I thought it looked hideous, but i still wonder why MS don't consider it for Windows 11, to let you "change" it to Windows 7 or Xp.
I'm very glad that Microsoft believes that none of my computers are "good" enough for Windows 11. I'm going to ride Win10 as long as I can, then it's probably off to BSD or Haiku.
This is so irritating. It's like nobody does actual work on computers anymore so UI changes which break muscle/visual memory (and consequently "flow") focus group well.
This is too bad. Apple taking the "appliance" path with their computers makes me wish Microsoft would lean into power user features and customization options to play to the strengths and appeal of Windows. I don't think trying to be a worse version of MacOS is a good strategy.
Windows is sort of the default computer choice for a lot of normal, non-technical people, so I can understand that Microsoft wants to simplify things for them by taking some inspiration from MacOS.
The problem is that Windows is also used by many businesses, network admins, and tech enthusiasts too.
These users are in conflict.
What Microsoft should be doing in my opinion is using its Windows Home and Windows Professional packages to divide the complexity. Windows Home users can have the simplified experience, and Windows Pro users can have the full power. Wouldn't that make everybody happy?
> Windows is sort of the default computer choice for a lot of normal, non-technical people, so I can understand that Microsoft wants to simplify things for them by taking some inspiration from MacOS.
If this is their motivation they have no clue. What messes the most with normal users is changing familiar functions and metaphors. The cost of adapting to changing UI for normal users is much higher than sticking to an older, even less-optimal, one. Sometimes this even causes a loss of function for that user as they give up on trying to relearn e.g. how to make text bold for nth time.
>Windows is sort of the default computer choice for a lot of normal, non-technical people, so I can understand that Microsoft wants to simplify things for them by taking some inspiration from MacOS.
That's a really good point and I agree with your solution. I doubt Microsoft would want to do the work involved in creating essentially two versions of Windows, though.
They did it before, and then unified it. The Win95 line had a distinct core compared to the NT line. It was unified under XP. XP had multiple editions (home, professional, a couple others). I no longer recall the major differences, but I think the big one was that professional supported corporate provisioning while Home did not (which meant if you were a nerd like me and had a home LDAP server Home couldn't use the login information from it, IIRC).
However, I don't recall the user interfaces being fundamentally different between those versions. And that's what they'd need now if they wanted a smartphonified desktop OS for the "average home user" (whatever that means) and the now over 25-year old interface for professionals.
The plan was to have the same exact OS on desktops and phones. Around the time Windows RT came out (which was a result of their Windows-on-ARM stuff), that's when they finally stopped using WinCE on their phone hardware and moved to the NT kernel.
Of course that's all moot now since they've given up on phones.
That's good to know, OK, same OS, but keeping the same interface?
> Of course that's all moot now since they've given up on phones.
What I rather had in mind was not the interface, but some other things which are "normal" to have on phones: forced updates, impossible to aquire root rights with factory OS, pre-installed shit apps, ads (like on factory-fresh Xiomi, out of the box). So when I saw "ads" and I know the updates are forced, that's where I meant PCs are becoming more like smartphones.
That smartphones are unlikely to become more like PCs is an issue of hardware.
More than something out of a mobile OS, it quite looks to me like some launcher I've seen on Linux (I don't remember which one was, I've been using Plasma for too long).
When the first iPhone was announced people did complain about its lack of features (no apps? no keyboard? no stylus? no handwriting recognition?). It was a step backward in many ways for those used to Blackberry and Palm devices. However, it was the opening up of the smartphone (though was the first version really a smartphone?) market to a broader audience. It wasn't a regression of an existing Apple product (they had no product equivalent to it yet, unless you go back in time to the non-phone Newton).
Windows 11 is a continuation of an existing product and meant to replace it. Regressions (real or imagined) will get lamentations because, well, they're regressions.
Honestly Microsoft really needs to stop listening to this vocal minority.
- This group is why Windows had a trash terminal that didn't even have a right click menu until recently.
- This group is why Windows Explorer is identical to how it was almost 2 decades ago, with the same terrible search and still things like choking when it encounters a folder of MP3s and still unable to handle folders with 1000+ items without choking and loading in new sets every few pages of scroll.
- This group is why resizing windows still has glitching and tearing.
- This group is why most of the admin and system tools are still designed for 800zx600 screens and why device manager flickers and completely redraws just to add 1 item to the tree display.
Stop listening to this group, Apple and Linux have been able to forge ahead and build modern powerful interfaces that actually utilize the hardware properly because they've been able to ignore the screams every time something that is 20 years old changed.
I agree...explorer absolutely sucks for what it is. Then I swing over to my other desk and encounter Finder...no wonder Microsoft hasn't bothered to fix explorer...no competition.
To Microsoft’s credit, they’ve made it incredibly easy for me, a .NET developer, to not have to use Windows any more. So I am, admittedly, grateful for that.