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0 pointscm310y ago0 comments

Exactly. Windows 8 and 10 include substantial improvements to the underpinnings that would be worth the switch from Windows 7 if Microsoft didn't basically kill the UI. This stupid desire to change stuff for a new version, as done with cars, does nobody good.

- 3D widgets serve a purpose and make it much easier to see what's a widget and what's not

- Windows XP theme engine was great and it got killed in Windows 7

- Windows XP and Windows 2000 UI was to the point and didn't waste screen real estate like 7, 8, 10 do as well as current OS X and GNOME or KDE. First we complained open source desktops had no designers, now we should curse the day we wished for designers to get involved.

- all Windows tools and subsystems got much better and featureful and there's new filesystems and subsystems, but you cannot take the core and slap on a different desktop environment like you can with Unixes. Back in the day you could use a different Windows Shell, but I don't know if that's still possible.

I have this suspicion that Cutler has a private build of Windows on his machine which still has Classic UI, but the product managers would never allow that to get published, or else they would be wrong to have killed it off in the first place. This constant desire to change the UI is unbelievable and hard to explain. Imagine if new knives would follow the same mantra. Many things work best the way they are with no need to change, and if change is wanted, something like Windows XP's theme engine is more than sufficient.

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oldsj10y ago· 2 in thread

Having switched to windows 10 after using OSX and Linux primarily for the past 10 years or so, I have to say its been fine for me. The UI is simple: hit the windows key and type the name of the program you want to launch. Switch virtual desktops with ctrl+win left/right. Snap windows to the left or right with win+left/right. And now, its actually usable for dev with the subsystem for linux feature.

Oh and by the way games just work, chrome just works, spotify just works, intellij just works and all of this can be installed from the cli with chocolatey.

cm3OP10y ago

Yeah, like I said, many things have been improved, but they come with as many regressions in the UI which are mostly done to chase wrong goals (tablet unification) or misguided design (go back to Windows 1 flat UI). In some ways Microsoft's Core Server variant might be a better Windows for development as was Windows Server 2003 back in the day, but I doubt it'd be fully functional on the desktop. These are just a few things that will hold back Microsoft compared to Linux and BSD, when you want to do more than just Visual Studio and Steam Games.

pjmlp10y ago

Holding back in what sense?

Personally, after a decade of dual booting between Windows and GNU/Linux, I have focused again in just Windows with GNU/Linux on VMs.

At work, I seldom see anyone using anything else other than Windows on the desktop, except for a few Macs that are shared across the company for the occasional iOS project.

At customer sites there is always a mixture of UNIX and Windows deployments on their server farms.

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