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by ploxiln 4068 days ago
Microsoft is following the popular trends. The "other major desktop OS", Mac OS X, is similarly bad. What used to be the default desktop for most linux distros, Gnome, is also going this way.

Lots of people love it. They say "computers shouldn't bother me with details, they should just work". They say "if I should be doing something, like backing up or managing settings, the computer should do it automatically". Even technical people say this, and I think it's a fair and realistic way to portray their opinion.

The only place you can hide from this trend is one of the full-manual linux distros (or bsd). I've used them for many years, I've worked on linux kernel drivers, I do dev-ops stuff, so of course I would hate this "make it easier" trend. But I feel that I am qualified to say that trying so hard to make things easy and automatic, while also keeping up with absurdly fast changes in GUI fashion, makes things less reliable and less fixable (and thus damn frustrating).

Things are more and more "designed", more and more "streamlined" and "optimized for user experience", and people seem to get the impression that the results are good, but in practice common people still don't really know how to even use the interface. I can figure out pretty quickly what you can click and what you can scroll, but the common user can't! and I don't prefer these slick new information-starved whitespace-fat interfaces. I guess they're just for demos, and their own designers.