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by PostThisTooFast 1741 days ago
How is it a "great modern OS?" Internally?

Because its UI and user experience are a shitshow. Settings are scattered everywhere. Windows have no toolbars, title bars, or borders to distinguish them from the one they're overlapping. Menu bars are missing. There are access-prohibited shadows of user directories all over the place in Explorer. The color-scheme editor is simply gone. It's still full of peek-a-boo and Easter-egg UI, with controls disguised as text or simply invisible unless you accidentally roll over them.

And my favorite: Microsoft has disabled remote desktop access except in its "pro" version. Gee, Microsoft: Your contention is that a PROFESSIONAL is the most likely customer to need someone else to log in and help him remotely? Retarded.

When my parents have an issue that I could log in and solve, guess what? I can't. And no, Microsoft, I'm not "upgrading" them to a "pro" version of your broken shit. I'm going to buy them a Mac, and that's the end of Windows in any of my family's homes. And this is coming from a former Windows enthusiast / professional developer / Mac scorner.

You don't realize how unusable Windows has become until you try to set someone up on it. Its E-mail program is absymal, defective in design and function. Outlook isn't included anymore. If you do make the mistake of installing another glorified spam conduit, Office 365, you'll be treated to defects that literally render it unusable to some people: I increased the system-wide font size for my parents, but Outlook didn't honor it. E-mail subjects in the In box remained microscopic and illegible.

And of course there's the endless goddamned harangue to log in with your Microsoft account. A huge portion of the population is laden with an ever-growing pile of accounts and passwords. An account to log into your computer. Another for E-mail. Another for Apple products. Another for your cable provider. ENOUGH. They have no idea which one I'm asking for when I need to get their password to help them with something.

It's easy for the Hacker News demographic to forget that PEOPLE DO NOT UNDERSTAND THIS MESS. And so they are writing down their IDs and passwords on Post-Its and putting them on their computers. They are using the same password on every site that demands that they use an E-mail address as a user ID, because they think that this is required.

Then the users feel dumb and blame themselves for problems, which pisses me off even more. They're being TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF BY MICROSOFT and others, rendering their computers essentially unusable and their security at risk. It's disgraceful.

4 comments

Windows have no toolbars, title bars, or borders to distinguish them from the one they're overlapping.

...and let's not forget removing color from the active window's titlebar, so it was eye-searingly white like all the others, then reluctantly adding it back as an optional setting in an "update" later.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/how-to-resto...

When stuff like that seems to happen almost regularly, I really wonder who's running the show at MS. Destroying two decades of UI refinement takes active (and IMHO almost malicious) effort, not mere ignorance.

Bleach white minimalism is the thing I lament the most about 21st century design. And, when designers reluctantly put color and contrast back in, they tend to just give you light grays.
I'm looking forward to the return of baroque UX. It's been a few hundred years, but what the hay.
Well, regarding the color thing, I figured it was a taste thing, and mine might be outdated or something.

But I particularly like it when I open a new window, it appears on top of the old ones, it looks like it's accepting input (the cursor blinks) but when I type, nothing happens. I have to actually click inside it for it to actually gain actual focus.

I'm thinking in particular of new Edge windows.

I use a custom active window title bar color but frustratingly Google Chrome is about the only application I notice that doesn't respect it.
They won't change until they have competition.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/solve-pc-problem...

Nice things are that it doesn't disable the ability of the remote end to see what's happening and that it requires active input from both ends to make the connection so the machine isn't open to a fully remote takeover.

>And my favorite: Microsoft has disabled remote desktop access except in its "pro" version. Gee, Microsoft: Your contention is that a PROFESSIONAL is the most likely customer to need someone else to log in and help him remotely? Retarded.

Before calling someone the hard R word maybe first know about what you're talking about.

https://superuser.com/a/1302011

https://rktechstudio.com/enable-disable-remote-assistance/

You can use "Quick Assist" app on non-Pro to support other's PC, rather than remote desktop. It can connect to PC under NAT. RDP don't support NAT traversal by default so not suitable for support use case. Even WinXP supports "Remote Assistance" (I don't remember how it work). Did you tried RDP to PC in other house past? Please don't expose RDP port in the wild.

For user id claim, it's not only due to MS but all services. MS and others improving situation by supporting FIDO and password manager.