3 Reasons Windows 8.1 is better
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Oh, I think I know what you're asking for now. Try this:
7+ Taskbar Tweaker
7+ Taskbar Tweaker allows you to configure various aspects of the Windows taskbar.Most of the configuration options it provides can't be tweaked using the taskbar properties or the registry.The
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Yes, I know.
But the point is this should be OS functionality and not need third-party software to get around.
That's all I'm trying to say.
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It should, but Microsoft has historically let useful third party apps fill the space while they focus on other aspects of the operating system that they deem to be a higher priority. I don't even necessarily disagree with their decision not to spend development effort in this area as it's a very small percentage of people who find this feature useful, and said application has existed since at least win xp (there was a different version for that, but it was still taskbar tweaker)
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indeed I cannot reorder them among themselves
But Windows itself will randomly reorder them when it runs out of memory, the application stops responding, and the window borders temporarily revert to "Classic" style.
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The Apple app store on the other hand... doesn't nag you to death about updating
Please tell me what Apple app store you are using that doesn't nag you about updates. Mine puts up update alerts every day that cover everything else whenever anything you have installed is updated.
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You know you can turn the alerts off, right? (I have pretty much all notifications turned off)
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My sister has a macbook pro that I've never seen her use for anything other than facebooking.
Every time I see it, it has the "your OS is really out of date, you should update it" notification in the corner, and when I tell her to do something about it she clicks on it and then immediately cancels the update.
She won't let me anywhere near her facebook machine.
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I have a client who was absolutely convinced that Apple was better in all situations, because he liked his iPhone. I tried to talk him out of it, not because I hate Apple, but because most everything they do is dependent on Windows and would require workarounds. No dice, he was convinced. So he bought a MacBook Air 11", even though he is pushing 50 and the fucking screen is tiny. When you see him working, he is always leaning forward and squinting his eyes. The primary applications he uses it for is MS Office and RDPing to his old desktop to do the rest of his work. Fucking fuck fuck, this fucking idiotic software will not let me enter a line return, so consider this string of rant to be considered a line break, let's try manually entering it.
TRWTF though is that he bought the 11" Air because it was "light and easy to carry" and it never leaves his desk and spends most of the time running an RDP session to the desktop that we were going to replace. How the fuck can you mangle basic browser and OS functionality so badly that I cannot enter a fucking line break
I fucking hate Dicksource. What is so hard about just letting the Enter key do its job?
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This post is deleted!
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Metro solved a bunch of technical issues and annoyances traditional Windows has been having since basically forever, such as:
- kludge-less true DPI independent applications (just using bigger fonts does not count);
- custom installers, all different, all equally pointless, all trying to trick you into the Yahoo toolbar for the one billionth time with increasing desperation;
- custom updaters, all different, all nagging, all running all the fucking time, all neglecting to take their fucking toolbars with them;
- application sandboxing so that a bunny game can't update itself into a rogue trojan horse silently;
- limiting application privileges to make sure that the bunny game isn't a trojan horse to begin with, and of course you're running it as root because you disabled UAC because every fucking cool kid runs everything as root anyway amirite? What could possibly go wrong?
Those are all very real problems that do make like on Windows miserable, no matter how much used to them one may be. What's the fucking point of a wizard you mash on "Next" all the way through? "LOOK AT ME I AM AN INSTAL— PLEASE TAKE A MOMENT TO READ FROM OUR LAWYE— CAN I LITTER ALL OVER YOUR COMP— ARE YOU REALLY SU— JUST A SECOND OKA—"
Also, everything rolls its own stinking updater. Some things update silently while running, some put a fucking window in the tray when there's an update, some put it there always, most show off their Windows XP support by throwing balloons at you; some just point you to the website for more ad dollars, some make you re-run the installer, some give you an update wizard, some update before launching, some update things on shutdown; everything does whatever the fuck it pleases and the fact there's programs that try to keep the bullshit at bay like Soluto is telling and even then it can only do so much.
Ah, but you might be able to kludge that in existence already without abandoning Windows as we know it (those who tried Atom on Windows know about Chocolatey), but actually getting people on board seems impossible; Microsoft's very own .msi has been a thing since 1999, but 15 years and 8 days later still half the programs roll with custom shit and 99% show you the bullshit wizard anyway; it also does nothing to solve the update problem.
Then there's high DPI. This has nominally been a thing in Windows since 95 but literally no one gives a fuck about that setting and timid attempts to make it work fail horribly even in FOSS software like VLC that's made to run on any operating system with any font and font size ever and just has to build its interface the right way. Literally the only solution here would've been a fresh start, without the baggage of programs who still think it's 1996 and no one is going to buy your program if it looks alike anything else on your system (even Linux is getting their shit together here).
It's not just feel-good wishy washy UX bullshit. There's years on years of annoying bullshit that Windows users have gotten used to but just don't exist on other platforms; the convenience of something like
apt-getis just mind-blowing.And it seems like they're here to stay, and honestly it's a disgrace — with the biggest of them all being Windows 9's return to the bloated, inconsistent, kludgy as hell menu/array/searchbox/treeview of programs/files/whatever-the-fuck now-with-live-tiles start menu.
Hooray for progress. Rant over.
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She won't let me anywhere near her face
book machine.
FTFY.
Filed Under: Thx2Necros for reviving this topic
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That doesn't match the original due to the space between book and machine.
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There's years on years of annoying bullshit that Windows users have gotten used to but just don't exist on other platforms; the convenience of something like apt-get is just mind-blowing.
I spent close to a year begrudgingly stuck with Ubuntu on a laptop I used every day and am going to wholeheartedly call bullshit on that. apt-get is great IF you happen to know the exact name of what you want (case sensitive no less) and IF it exists in the preloaded repositories and IF everything goes perfectly during installation (because god help you if you try to find any useful error info in the wall of text the install process will spew forth) and IF the program's author has prepared a download for the specific version of the specific OS you're using.
In practice, installing anything interesting or specialized seemed to invariably require c&ping a laundry list of terminal commands and spending the next several hours praying that nothing went wrong as I rebuilt the entire application from scratch, since the precompiled binaries for the proper OS version either didn't work or didn't exist, because the "LTS" in 12.04LTS apparently doesn't apply to programmers.
Meanwhile in Windows Land, the procedure is just: Google the program's website -> Download the .exe or installer -> Carefully dodge the toolbars and browser hijackers built into the installer -> PROFIT
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It's not just feel-good wishy washy UX bullshit. There's years on years of annoying bullshit that Windows users have gotten used to but just don't exist on other platforms; the convenience of something like apt-get is just mind-blowing.
True, but the downside is that no two Linux distros handle package management quite the same, even if they use the same package manager. While this is in some ways a good thing - as I've often said, while every OS sucks, the advantage of Linux is that you have multiple options for just how it sucks, and can choose the least painful option for your needs - it does mean that if you use one that doesn't use either apt-get or RPM, you often have to either wait on the distribution to update itself, or else fall back on the basic tarball installation (e.g., Oracle's official Java distribution, which because of their ridiculous insistence on you directly accepting their license on the website itself makes it impossible to integrate with, say, Portage, unless they choose to support it themselves). Worse still, there is a small but significant number of non-OSS packages (e.g., the otherwise excellent Beersmith) which work with only a single package manager, period, and if you aren't running (in this case) apt-get, you're SOL.
Also, every package manager has it's weaknesses and blind spots. Most have different problems with conflicts, and often get themselves into difficult to resolve blind corners where the only solution is to remove several pieces of software, install the update, then reinstall everything you removed and hope you got it all right. . Then there's the trade-off between binary distribution, which installs quickly but may lead poor performance, and source distribution, which gives optimized program performance at the cost of re-compiiling the code on every update (which for large packages like [Open|Libre]Office may take hours), and often does an awkward job with binary-only distribution formats (e.g., the nVidia video drivers).
Someday, if by some miracle I finish the Thelema language and get to work on the OS part of the project, I mean to have a package manager as part of the core user system, using 'slim' binaries (partial compilation into a serialized AST and support data) as a compromise between binary and source distribution. I envision a fairly complex but hopefully less easily confused system for handling library conflicts, which would allow for multiple versions of non-critical libraries to co-exist as needed. It would also be less dependent on repositories, as the code sharing would be over a quasi-Xanalogical peer-to-peer application-layer network. Because code would be shared in a partially-compiled state, and executables cached but not permanently saved, the compiler would be hopefully be able to optimize on a per-system basis, or even per-execution basis a la the Synthesis kernel . Of course, this is all dreaming at this point, but none of it is anything that hasn't been tried before - it just never was combined before.
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[quote=dookdook]
IF you happen to know the exact name of what you want (case sensitive no less)
[/quote]Last time I tried apt-get (on some Debian pi version) I just I wanted to install something and just typed in what I thought it was called. Apt-get actually corrected it for me and installed what I needed without any problems. I remember being pretty impressed at that time. Then again, it might have been a lucky fluke :P
Filed under: pretty sure self correcting software can be terrible in production environment
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(a list of annoyances MS fixed)
All fair points. Now if only MS didn't:
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Limit the new software paradigm to the mobile-friendly touchy timewaster crap. There's just no way you can make a real productivity app or utility using this touch-oriented huge-ass UI controls and crippled libraries. Even Microsoft's own Office stayed with "classic desktop" WPF.
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Limit the software sources to Microsoft's own app store and NOTHING else. Excuse me if I don't feel like paying money to be locked inside Microsoft's gilded cage, with a 10000 fake VLC app makers.
Now if they went the apt-get route and added support for desktop apps, with their app store being the default but not the only choice, that would be a different story.
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Next time you're stuck with Ubuntu, try and install aptitude. It's a "graphical" interface to apt with built-in search and bulk package management. There's a few keybinds to learn like
+adds a package and-removes it, but there's not much else to it. It also lets you solve conflicts interactively.If you want software that's not packaged, that's also not a problem: typically something will have made a .deb for it, which you can download and install with a double click or a
dpkg -iincantation. Do that andapt-getwill do its best not to break your software as it upgrades everything else. That doesn't solve the update problem, so Ubuntu came up with PPAs: personal mini-repositories third party sources maintain. If you trust them you can add them to your system, at which point the software within will be available just like all other programs.
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I spent close to a year begrudgingly stuck with Ubuntu on a laptop I used every day and am going to wholeheartedly call bullshit on that. apt-get is great IF you happen to know the exact name of what you want (case sensitive no less) and IF it exists in the preloaded repositories and IF everything goes perfectly during installation (because god help you if you try to find any useful error info in the wall of text the install process will spew forth) and IF the program's author has prepared a download for the specific version of the specific OS you're using.
In practice, installing anything interesting or specialized seemed to invariably require c&ping a laundry list of terminal commands and spending the next several hours praying that nothing went wrong as I rebuilt the entire application from scratch, since the precompiled binaries for the proper OS version either didn't work or didn't exist, because the "LTS" in 12.04LTS apparently doesn't apply to programmers.
When apt-get works, it fucking WORKS. You type the command and 10 seconds later, your program is ready. NOTHING beats the convenience of that.
But yeah, if it gets stuck or doesn't have what you need, you fall 100 floors down into the swamp of tarball install. There's rarely a Windows-like middle ground, where you download an installer app and let it set everything up (although it's possible - eg. Netbeans).
I especially like the chain reaction when you want the latest version of package A, but to compile it, it requires the latest versions of packages B, C and D, none of which are available in apt-get. At this point, just using the old version is easier than jumping down THAT rabbit hole.
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All fair points. Now if only MS didn't:
[ul]
[li] Limit the new software paradigm to the mobile-friendly touchy timewaster crap. There's just no way you can make a real productivity app or utility using this touch-oriented huge-ass UI controls and crippled libraries. Even Microsoft's own Office stayed with "classic desktop" WPF.[/li]
[/ul]Yes. Unfortunately this is another case of Microsoft's many hands not doing what the others do. When they announced that Metro tablets would come with Office -- the desktop version of Office -- and by the way that was the only desktop program tablets could run, they cemented in the general public the idea that Metro is not for serious programs.
They could've given themselves a year and a half porting Office to Metro, and instead Microsoft spent this time contradicting everything single thing they've said in the recent past (cough xbone cough). It's sad, really.
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Yes. Unfortunately this is another case of Microsoft's many hands not doing what the others do. When they announced that Metro tablets would come with Office -- the desktop version of Office -- and by the way that was the only desktop program tablets could run, they cemented in the general public the idea that Metro is not for serious programs.
They could've given themselves a year and a half porting Office to Metro, and instead Microsoft spent this time contradicting everything single thing they've said in the recent past (cough xbone cough). It's sad, really.
There's something to be said for a strong-minded all-powerful authority figure to be in charge of software development. Someone who can shut down all discussion and cut through the comity bullshit. "It's nice you all have opinions, but we are doing it my way, according to my vision, and that's that!" Someone like Steve Jobs or Jeff Atwood.
Filed under: Now to see if people actually read long paragraphs.
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There's something to be said for a strong-minded all-powerful authority figure to be in charge of software development. Someone who can shut down all discussion and cut through the comity bullshit. "It's nice you all have opinions, but we are doing it my way, according to my vision, and that's that!" Someone like Steve Jobs or Jeff Atwood.
You don't have to be a czar to avoid retracting virtually every single major product decision you've tried to do in the past year, without giving it the time to bloom. When they introduced UAC, virtually every geek in the world hated it, and they had reason to at launch. Microsoft didn't back down, however, and the rest of the world dealt with the fact that writing temporary data to C:\Windows\ is no longer something they can do.
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I mean to have a package manager as part of the core user system
Be prepared to have lots of fights with Linux distributors then. The truly hard part of package management is that there are so many different groups involved, notably including the developers of the package manager, the developers of the managed packages, the distributors, the developer-users, and the end-users. With lots of variation at each stage.
Oh, and you've got to allow for asshats too.
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everything single thing they've said in the recent past (cough xbone cough)
Television. Television. Television. Television. Sports. Sports. Television. Television. Watercooler moment. Television.
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Limit the new software paradigm to the mobile-friendly touchy timewaster crap.
What the fuck does that even mean?
Microsoft didn't back down, however, and the rest of the world dealt with the fact that writing temporary data to C:\Windows\ is no longer something they can do.
They were never able to do that. Not if they wanted their software to actually work.
Microsoft just started enforcing their own OS contract more strictly.
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What the fuck does that even mean?
Means developers are sandboxed in terms of API-s and limited in terms of UI they can use in "modern apps". Means the kind of stuff you find in Windows app store is equivalent of what you find in Android and iOS app stores - simple games, web app frontends and what used to be called "multimedia" apps. So if you want serious software or games, you go back to downloading installers for desktop.
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Oh you were talking about Windows Store apps specifically.
Ok yeah I getcha. On the other hand, Windows Store is an app store for phones and tablets, the fact that it also runs on desktop Windows is gravy. So having the same restrictions as other app stores for other phones and tablets, I don't see that as being an issue.
Microsoft getting into the business of delivering third-party apps through some kind of repo would invite crazy anti-monopoly legislation. I imagine that's precisely why they don't do it.
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Please tell me why a business listening to its customers is a bad thing?
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Means the kind of stuff you find in Windows app store is equivalent of what you find in Android and iOS app stores - simple games, web app frontends and what used to be called "multimedia" apps. So if you want serious software or games, you go back to downloading installers for desktop.
There are some more substantial games out there for mobile devices, but the market for quick casual games to play in a few minutes snatched here and there is massive, and not one that the PC can compete in effectively.
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Microsoft getting into the business of delivering third-party apps through some kind of repo would invite crazy anti-monopoly legislation. I imagine that's precisely why they don't do it.
This is what I don't get. Microsoft got into hot water for making IE a part of their OS. Yet Google and Apple are doing the EXACT SAME THING on their mobile platforms, on top of requiring you to PAY THEM to get anything published and censoring you if they don't like you. And they keep getting away with it.
I don't understand. Is it that no one has the balls to go against them? Or is the legislature more corrupt now than it was 10 years ago?
I read somewhere that Microsoft was making a point of not participating in the bribing ("lobying") of US legislature before the anti-monopoly thing. But they've learned their lesson since.
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Or is the legislature more corrupt now than it was 10 years ago?
Corruption of legislatures has (almost) nothing to do with it; anti-monopoly actions are a matter for the executive and judicial branches.
Android does allow customers to add in extra app stores without paying Google or Samsung or anyone else; some resellers may configure some of these additional channels by default, and I have no idea if anyone (e.g., Verizon) could lock down that feature, but Google sure doesn't. Apple would have more problems, except they're now not the majority of the smartphone/tablet sector, and so aren't even close to being able to exert monopoly power (except in collusion with other parties, which is a horse of a different colour). Microsoft's forays into the area don't have enough traction to matter from an anti-trust perspective.
The app store on Windows (Desktop) would be OK, except the apps are vastly restricted. Which wouldn't matter, except they try to present it as the only way to get applications on. It isn't, and in fact a lot of users want apps that aren't distributed that way, so it's a bit of a fail right now. It could evolve into something better in the future, but might not get a chance.
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Smarter question: who are Microsoft's core customers?
Microsoft's core business is not the home user, never has been. The stuff that people keep going to MS for are not things people go to Apple for and vice versa.
Trying to copy Apple is a shift out of MS' core business, which is business. The home user market is largely just a bonus to them.
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Trying to copy Apple is a shift out of MS' core business, which is business. The home user market is largely just a bonus to them.
Whereas Apple are somewhat shifting in the opposite direction due to the influx of people in business using Apple mobile devices. (I don't necessarily approve or disapprove, but I note the phenomenon.)
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Yup, but it's never going to be the same magnitude of lurch as MS is currently trying to engage (somewhat badly) in.
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ScholRLEA said:
I mean to have a package manager as part of the core user systemBe prepared to have lots of fights with Linux distributors then. The truly hard part of package management is that there are so many different groups involved, notably including the developers of the package manager, the developers of the managed packages, the distributors, the developer-users, and the end-users. With lots of variation at each stage.
If ThelemaOS was a Linux distro, you'd probably be right. However, it isn't anything like Linux at all; after all, what would the point of designing a a new Lisp family systems language for the specific purpose of writing a new OS in it, if I then copied the C-oriented approaches in Unix? This is a new system from the ground up, and if it is similar to anything, it would by Genera; it will also have more in common with both Smalltalk-80 and Oberon than it would with Unix, though even then I am looking for novelty rather than familiarity. It won't even have a conventional file system; storage will be entirely hypertextual, a la Xanadu.It will be primarily GUI with some text-command support, but like Oberon (or Emacs editors), instead of having a conventional CLI or Lisp listener, it will be possible to write a small piece of code, select it, and execute it in the TLE. The UI will consist of pieces of code 'pinned' to a location behind a menu, a button or an icon (though icons will be reserved for representing hardware elements such as printers or other devices). There would be no differentiation between 'shell' and 'library'; instead, each user would have a 'grimoire' of tools they can re-order in various manners, which would link to the individual functions, objects and layout templates they would need to construct their preferred layouts and operate on their documents.
Documents, including functions and objects, would be publishable under various contracts (not in the legal sense, but in the sense of automatically controlling who can access it, how, and if their would be any exchange involved), allowing the creator of the content fine control over its use. Content issued under a general-use contract would be available through a peer-to-peer search, and could be added to a document (grimoires and layouts are both documents, just with special privileges) as a bi-visible hyperlink, meaning that the creator will be able to see who is using their content, among other things.
It's more of a long-term experiment (I've been puttering with the design for over ten years, and have 5+ years of implementation to go) than a production system, though I do have my ambitions. It will probably be too out of the ordinary for most people to adjust to, though.
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The point I was trying to make was that if the company is Microsoft and they actually listen to the customer, they are criticised for "bowing to the consumer pressure", if they do what they please every still bitches.
You know what I think sucks ... that after XP they managed to split the SKUs into removing basic stuff you expect in the OS. That the real stinker compared to any slightly iffy UI changes.
I knew what they were trying to do with Metro/Modern UI ... they were too late to the phone/tablet world.
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Corruption of legislatures has (almost) nothing to do with it; anti-monopoly actions are a matter for the executive and judicial branches.
Whatever.
Android does allow customers to add in extra app stores without paying Google or Samsung or anyone else; some resellers may configure some of these additional channels by default, and I have no idea if anyone (e.g., Verizon) could lock down that feature, but Google sure doesn't. Apple would have more problems, except they're now not the majority of the smartphone/tablet sector, and so aren't even close to being able to exert monopoly power (except in collusion with other parties, which is a horse of a different colour). Microsoft's forays into the area don't have enough traction to matter from an anti-trust perspective.
Hmm ok. That makes sense.
The app store on Windows (Desktop) would be OK, except the apps are vastly restricted. Which wouldn't matter, except they try to present it as the only way to get applications on. It isn't, and in fact a lot of users want apps that aren't distributed that way, so it's a bit of a fail right now. It could evolve into something better in the future, but might not get a chance.
Not making it the sole means of delivering apps would be good enough. Why couldn't they just allow different "app sources" to be configured in Windows? Why couldn't they extend the appstore model to desktop apps? Why not just co-opt chocolatey, merge it with nuget and integrate it into the desktop? Why do they have to Microsoft everything up?
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Hmm, your Thelema link is broken.
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Thanks for pointing that out, I've fixed it now. However, I've been reconsidering the low-level part, as I've gone ahead with writing the Assiah assembler; I'm now thinking of writing the low-level parts in Assiah, and having Thelema integrated with the assembler somehow.
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Why not just co-opt chocolatey, merge it with nuget
Chocolatey nugget sounds like an Android version code-name.
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If ThelemaOS was a Linux distro, you'd probably be right.
The forces come because of the mix of different groups doing different things, not because it's Linux. Different groups of people want different stuff, and sometimes they want diametrically opposed things. You cannot make everyone happy all the time.Luckily, it sounds like you're trying to build a modern Lisp Machine and so won't need to worry about having users.
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True, too true.
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Why couldn't they just allow different "app sources" to be configured in Windows?
The answer from Microsoft apologists is monopoly. I've asked why they couldn't at least allow apps to hook into Windows Updates to deliver their updates through a centralized client (a portion of what you get from getting stuff from the Windows Store) and that's the rationalization I got.
It's stupid, but stupid is as stupid does.
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This is what I don't get. Microsoft got into hot water for making IE a part of their OS. Yet
Google andApple are doing the EXACT SAME THING on their mobile platforms, on top of requiring you to PAY THEM to get anything published and censoring you if they don't like you. And they keep getting away with it.FTFY. (Unless you're trying to compare iOS to Chrome OS?)
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Doesn't Android have a browser as part of the OS?
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Yes, but you can choose any other browser you like to be your default, whereas on iOS it's either Safari's way or the highway. I do believe however that in order to truly uninstall and not just "disable" Chrome on phones that do ship with it, you might have to root your phone. That said, the same is true of virtually all crapware on Samsung phones, the top Android make. It's also the make of Android I hate the most.
(Now that you made me write it out, I do see how, if you don't want to get root access on your mobile (or you can't, e.g. because of enterprise policy), Windows and Android are on an even field browser-wise.)
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Yes, but you can choose any other browser you like to be your default
That was true on Windows too.Remember what cartman said:
@cartman82 said:Microsoft got into hot water for making IE a part of their OS. Yet Google and Apple are doing the EXACT SAME THING on their mobile platforms
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You can run Chrome on iOS ... however it uses the Nitro JS engine.
