There actually is a concrete reference for the Windows 95 era research. Microsoft published detailed results from their usability work in the mid-90s, including task based testing with real users, error analysis, and iterative design changes.

Article title: The Windows® 95 User Interface: A Case Study in Usability Engineering (1996)

Link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/238386.238611

I've heard that MS took a different path (than previously) for the Windows 8 Metro design and wonder if a big source of the initial UI issues was a result of shoehorning the new design into the existing Windows UI.

I use Linux for home and both Windows 11 and Tahoe for work. I personally find Windows 11 actively hostile while Tahoe is mostly just whatever. I'd much rather be using Tahoe.

The complaints about Apple are from decades of excellent design and about a pixel being off or other small items that people with well trained eyes spot. The problems with Windows are forcing you to run Onedrive and then deleting your files

I have been using Tahoe since it came out, and I really don't understand all the hate on it. Some of the aesthetics are a little off, but not burdensome. The only thing I really don't like is the large, rounded corners on windows.

Tahoe UI sucks and is a dumpster fire but for the most parts it's still just normal MacOS. Windows 11 on the other hand actively hinders my productivity.

You said that as if Linux desktop weren't a thing.

...and you're mostly right.

Completely incomparable! It is not a bigger disaster. John Grubber is being an aesthetic stickler -— “comically sad icons”, “indiscriminate transparency” leading to things that are ugly, hard to grab-to-resize rounded window corners, icons in menus “ruining Mac’s signature menu system.”

If you think that adding icons all over the place to menu items RUINS it, I think you’re either in a MacOS “purist stickler” category (which John Gruber is in), or you’re hyping things up for clicks. Because no sane person would call this ruining the menu system.

And new icons “comically sad”? Someone call the whambulance. I saw the new icons, and they are fine. Sure, they are different. But I am not laughing and/or crying about them, and I bet most people don’t find them comically sad either.

> It’s not yet the year of Linux on desktop, I don’t think - but we get closer every year.

It is if you want it to be. For me it was 1996 - been doing great on Linux since then.

> It’s not yet the year of Linux on desktop, I don’t think - but we get closer every year.

For me it is. I was already considering going back to Linux for a while, and MacOS Tahoe pushed me over the fence. Got a Thinkpad with Linux as a replacement for my MacBook some months ago and don’t regret it yet.

Yeah, the regressions in Mac OS are particularly ill-timed and infuriating because there is no real competition now. I consider Windows unusable. It's not even worth talking about anymore; and I was a big Windows fan (and developer) into the 2000s. Now I don't have a single instance of Windows running in my house.

If Apple's slide continues, computing will recede back to its hobbyist/academic roots, I guess.

> I just wish that steam on linux has full support for most games that are it supports in windows then i'll make the switch

That day is today (assuming you don't play games with kernel anti-cheat).

Steam on Linux is great. I'm playing Deadlock and Arc Raiders on my 3070 Ti without issue, highly recommend it if you're not playing FaceIts or Valorant.

Improvements? Windows has suffered an ever-accelerating slide into the toilet, starting with Vista.

It was all downhill from 3.11

Windows 95 has some legitimate problem but one thing that was nice is that Microsoft (and Apple) were doing Skeuomorph, so training users to use it was a joy. It was designed to be easy to learn. Today they don't really care how users are trained, and just assume they'll figure it out.

PS - Yes, Skeuomoric concepts age out, like Floppy Disk-Save Icons, but the concept still has merit. It can help "ground" the experience.

I have. Blame the drivers, not the OS. Vista wasn't great for the same reasons. Sure, Windows 11 mostly doesn't have driver problems, but that doesn't mean the OS is great. It's largely irrelevant to the point being made.

I remember those days. Thankfully Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 had a Windows 95/98-style desktop but used the rock-solid NT kernel. Unfortunately they were not marketed to home users.

I feel similarly about the classic Mac OS: excellent interface and UI guidelines hampered by its cooperative multitasking and its lack of protected memory.

Windows XP and Mac OS X were major blessings, bringing the NT kernel and Mach/BSD underpinnings, respectively, to home computing users.

I have. Also windows 98, Me (I loved it), NT 4.0, 2000, 2003 (as a workstation), XP, 7, (loved 7; skipped Vista, skipped 8), windows 10 is my last one.

I really really liked windows 95. It rarely crashed on me even though I used and abused it extensively. It lived running smoothly, tolerated tinkering and uni files shenanigans.

The i loved 7. To me it was a pinnacle. All comfort, no crap. Win 10 was less convenient (even if safer), and it was a constant struggle with the subversive, hostile vendor.

Windows 95 is closer to the ideal, I agree with GP, although to me the closest is Windows 7 tbh.

I was doing tech support through the Windows 95/98/ME period and it was hell. Everything either crashed the OS or required a restart if you touched it.

When Windows 2000 rolled around and I saw how stable it was, I went out and bought it to put on my gaming PC. Another friend from work laughed at me and told me how terrible "Windows NT" was for running games until he saw how smooth Starcraft ran on it.

Yeah, Windows 95/98/ME were terrible.

Nonsense. And 98 was even better.

This was back when you'd hook up a new printer or other device to a Windows computer, and it would detect it and prompt you for a driver disk. During that same era (and well past it, into the 2000s) if you plugged something into a Mac... nothing would happen. You had to go hunt down a driver for it and initiate the installation process yourself.

How times have changed.

It was unstable but it was nice to use. It introduced a lot of UI elements that are now taken for granted. I remember starting to build a window manager that replicated the win95 look.

Non-technical users aren't fans of random UI changes either. On the contrary, they hate having to re-learn shit every whatever-the-fuck years.

No,lots of people hate it. The biggest haters I know in real life are non technical users.

However, they will continue to use it so MS does not need to worry about them.

At least in the comment sections on tech/PC gaming YouTube people are frustrated with it there too.

On the other hand YouTube tries to serve me content I want so maybe thats just the algo talking.

I don't have an issue with it and I started with 98. There are somethings I'd change, but I do feel like I read a lot of hyperbole.

Provided I only largely use my PC for gaming.

HN users are the global thought leaders and (hate the term) influencers in technology and what they think has massively outsized impact on the way the tech world works.

> Around 500 million PCs are holding off upgrading to Windows 11, says Dell.

> “We have about 500 million of them capable of running Windows 11 that haven’t been upgraded,” said Dell COO Jeffrey Clarke on a Q3 earnings call earlier this week, referring to the overall PC market, not just Dell’s slice of machines.

And that's ignoring the 500 million that can't upgrade due to TPM requirements or whatever.

https://www.theverge.com/news/831364/dell-windows-11-upgrade...

You definitely should run it after updates.

Personally I don't think I've ever re-run it. I think I've clicked a few buttons as I've seen alerts about new options appearing. But ultimately it's just a bunch of powershell commands to remove packages and set options. So I'd assume it's safe to run regularly.

I wonder what exactly Microsoft did with “New Teams” that was supposedly written in Rust and uses the system browser engine or whatever instead of Electron. On release it seemed better, but now it seems as bloated, slow and annoying as the Electron one. MS Teams seems to have some incurable infection.

If I could, MS Teams would be the second tool I’d eject out (after Outlook and Exchange). But the company I work in is tied to MS 365 and will not give up on Teams and its useless cousin SharePoint.

How? It's only available to companies.

Or don't buy a licence and use it anyway.

Bloat is what you call any feature you're not actively using.

Only difference is on Windows nobody wants those "features".

Try a distro like Fedora. I mostly use Arch, but I’ve found Fedora to be an excellent out of the box experience.

There's a difference between features you don't use and pre-installed Minecraft and ads.

A major culprit is background processes that scan the drive in the background, like CompatTelRunner.exe. Works fine if you're on an SSD, but grinds an HDD to a halt. They also forgot about their own I/O prioritization API from Vista, so it also spammed I/O at Normal instead of Background priority in the early versions. Not to mention the periodic Defender scans, the Malware Removal Tool scan that runs before each major update, etc.

Similarly, Windows Update used to consume ungodly amounts of CPU time because the update system would write a multi-hundred megabyte text log and then spend forever compressing it for upload. Then they remembered their own ETL system and switched to much more efficient binary logs.

Firefox also has problems on HDD, I remember it locking up for minutes at a time doing cache maintenance until I switched permanently to SSDs.

With write-amplification, SSDs are being thrashed even more than HDDs would be, the SSDs just accomplish it quicker :\

Much worse than it was only a year ago.

Well, they are still Linux, and they are confusing for casual, average users.

And PC gaming. Despite the massive amounts of improvement to Linux gaming thanks to Wine & Valve, if you play games that rely on kernel anticheat, you have no choice but Windows.

I'm hoping now that Microsoft seems like they might get serious about kicking people out of the kernel after the cloudstrike incident, kernel level anticheat may go away which will pave the way for Linux to completely take over.

Don't schools typically use Chromebooks these days? My daughter was issued one each year from grade 7 to 12.

Yes. Senior Citizens. Home users. Legacy backup is there, but MS both de-preference it, and use dark pattern labels on boxes to make it hard to stop one drive from nagging you about what MS want you to do.

And, if you did do a network attached install, your actual Document paths now lie UNDER the one drive anchor mount and so you have to un-do things, in order to be cleanly able to delete one drive: If you don't do this, your files can disappear because they are on local disk, under a one drive protected directory which will be wiped.

Oh, and it does registry edits to wire One drive into office, so there's all kinds of sneaky paths which make this visible. And these are >75yo, declining faculties people. It's hugely unfair.

(I volunteer for a local not-for-profit assisting seniors, older people, with their ICT burdens)

They use Office (YYYY) locally. They repudiate 365 on the quite reasonable take that its rental not ownership, but forget if they found the right bundle, the rental would give them decent cloud (this is when onedrive as a backup can be sensible)

Mostly, they are addicted to menu position and one specific thing word does in showing you content, but different for each person.

I am doing the "how do I make libreoffice look like Word" tunings for font and menu, and so far, I think its close enough I could re-visit this with them but getting them to even agree to look at my own MBP is a struggle.

Older people feel they are losing agency, control. I try not to just tell them what to do. It's better if they decide, than if they give up and ask me to decide for them. The organisation I work with emphasises that older people have a right to dignity even when they're wrong.

There is a cohort happy on linux. I just chose not to work with them because I saw the cohort with a mixture of iPad and Windows as more interesting. (I am a BSD and Mac person mostly)

Microsoft gets a lot of flak for their approach to updating the settings up but I think they did that exactly right. There was no way that were going to be able to re-implement every setting available in one go and have it be good. So they took the iterative approach and moved over the most important settings first and each version of Windows 10/11 more and more options are available in settings.

I find myself having to use the old control panel dialogs less and less -- but I'm also happy that they are still there.

Or like how there are two layers of right-click menu in windows explorer - the new simplified menu, and then 'Show more options' for the old menu just in case.

The services control panel just as badly designed as it was 30 years ago.

They never solved that problem in Windows. Every Windows older than a year, even the modern ones, get slower.

You read my mind

I giggle every time I stumble upon a Windows 3.1 file-selector dialog still in Windows 11.

Exactly there's so much stuff you simply cannot configure otherwise. For example disallowing applications to take sole ownership of a mic, in-detail power plans, etc. If they remove the old control panel, your machine basically becomes unconfigurable.

Absolutely not sarcasm. Control Panel is a mess and keeping it is only confusing for most users.