On Saturday, I pointed out how Microsoft force-restarting Windows 10 computers to install unwanted web apps was the latest proof you don’t own your own Windows PC. Today, the company says it was at least partly a mistake — and will be pausing the “migration” that brought web apps to your Start Menu this way.
Originally, Microsoft tells The Verge, the idea was that any website you pinned to the Start Menu would launch in Microsoft Edge. If your website of choice had a PWA web app version, the Edge browser could automatically launch that as well. But — in what Microsoft seems to be calling a bug, though we’re trying to get clarity as to which part was the bug — the change also made it look like existing web shortcuts to its own Microsoft Office products had installed a web app on your PC as well.
Ah, the “it’s a bug” defense. Not very imaginative.
This is the kind of nonsense you have to put up with when you choose to use a closed source operating system or device that you merely license or borrow, not own. The slippery slope people have been talking and warning about for decades when it comes to closed source software has made it so that not only do we seem to accept this behaviour, people even defend it.
Windows as an operating system is in this weird place right now where its guts are, by all accounts, in very good shape, while the user interface is messy and Metro applications are a failure, leading to an often startling user experience that switches from old Win32-looking applications to modern flat applications every other application, and many settings are hidden in old Win32 dialogs instead of being available in fancy modern ones.
On top of all that, Microsoft has added tremendous amounts of telemetry, ads, and even forced installation and reinstallation of applications through updates. They built up massive positive mindshare with Windows 7, lost some of it with Windows 8, and then regained some of it with Windows 10 – only to just lose it all over again with nonsense like this.
At this point, I have no idea where Microsoft wants to take Windows. It feels like the pace of development is minimal from a user’s point of view, while at the same time still being somehow fast enough that things regularly break. Why would anyone willingly use a platform like this? What redeeming qualities does it have over the competition?
The redeeming features of Microsoft Windows are:
1) It’s one of only two operating systems with a decent app ecosystem
and
2) It’s significantly cheaper than a Mac (and Macs have their own potential pitfalls with the ongoing iPhone-ization of OS X and all…)
Yeah… yeah… I know, Desktop Linux has “90% of the apps a user would ever need”. First of all, this is highly dubious, since software like Microsoft Office and Photoshop are not officially supported and lots people spend a ton of time there. But even if it was true, that 10% of apps Desktop Linux doesn’t offer is *different* for every user. And no, Wine is not a solution, the people behind it can’t make it work consistently.
If you don’t care about apps, get a Chromebook. That way, you get something with guaranteed battery life (unlike Desktop Linux) and guaranteed good DPI scaling (unlike Desktop Linux). But too few people go that way.
So, to answer your question: Why would anyone willingly use a platform like Windows? -> Desktop apps.
This is something even Microsoft fails to understand, pushing useless “Metro” and “UWP” apps and then acting surprised when users fail to give a crap.
Also, keep in mind that Windows is quickly becoming the device you open once a month for that one special task you can’t do on your phone or tablet, so, reliance on Windows actually increases as the Desktop and Laptop lose screen time to phones and tablets.
To boot, Microsoft user base is growing older. My younger cousins, nephews, nieces are all “phone-first” users, and virtually the only use case they have for windows is games, if they had not switched to Playstation or Xbox. If they need office, they often use chromebooks.
And the existing user base of windows, which is, as I said, growing older on average, does not ask for these changes. At 42, I already feel that I am no longer as good as learning new interfaces, compared to when I was 22. I don’t want to learn a new interface, a new style of apps, a new way to do things. I didn’t ask for the ribbon. I didn’t ask for metro. I didn’t ask for the stupid control panel replacement. But they were pushed into my throat, causing undue burdens in my already busy work day.
I just want to use win7 + office 2007 (without the ribbon). Don’t antagonize me any further Microsoft.
I feel the same way. It was said at the time that people are always just complaining and in time they would look fondly at metra/ribbon/etc but I find this not to be the case and I find it less usable. The themes aren’t as capable as in former versions of windows and the flat borderless windows are so bad that I find it to be a usability issue. Seriously go open up two or more command prompts, type in “dir” in each and at times it’s difficult to see exactly where one window starts and the other ends. Other times it’s buttons that don’t pop out. It’s gotten more difficult to find/use scrollbars. These are new problems and It’s disappointing that these kinds of usability problems were created intentionally in order to make an artistic statement. To make things worse many apps themselves have joined in on the flat minimalism.
Excel specifically used to be my favorite spreadsheet program by a wide margin with openoffice calc being a distant second. Excel was just indispensable for me. But after microsoft pushed the new version I found it got worse and I actually preferred open/libre-office; consequently libreoffice has become my daily driver. honestly I still prefer excel as it was, but since that’s long gone it’s libreoffice for me. Sometimes forcing unwanted changes actually pushes users away to alternatives with a more traditional UX. I gotta say a KDE desktop is ironically more familiar to windows 7 than windows 10 is.
Ubuntu kind of did the same thing as microsoft with unity…I know they’re pushing change for change’s sake, but I’m not sure it’s a good thing to do given that it distances itself from traditional WIMP environments that were intentionally optimized for usability 🙁
Try ubitmenu ( https://www.ubit.ch/software/ubitmenu-languages/ ) which gives the old office menus back, and effectively allows you to ignore the ribbon mess.
hdjhfds,
Thank you for the suggestion, maybe I should have looked at it years ago. I don’t actually have a local copy anymore. The only version I use anymore is office 360 through a corporate account.
Usability-wise, all major OSs and even major desktop environments on Linux has gonna downhill since the last decade. They are designed to look good on screenshots, not to be good to use.
I’m a full time Linux user, for a long long time, and I long for the KDE 3.x days. I’m still on KDE (now called “Plasma Desktop” for… reasons) because at least they allow me to get rid of this hideous “all flat” stuff for a actual theme designed to be used on a production machine instead to be showcased on a static image at r/Unixporn on reddit.
But I find this trend of increasingly reduced customization capability (reaching none in some cases) all across the board in nearly all major ecosystems terrifying.
Now I’m not a regular office user, but I did need to make some diagrams pretty regularly… ahh, while ago. And I know exactly how you feel because I liked Visio better before Microsoft bought it. It used to for example have better snap by default.
Still amazed a working feature is just broken by default.
@ hdjhfds
This tends to change as they get older, they migrate towards the desktop as their needs become more complex.
Windows is like democracy in what concerns desktop and laptop OSes, it has flaws, but the alternatives are even worse.
Apple platforms, the ones I use are all on the job, owned by the employer, no way I am paying that much money for underpowered machines. My Thinkpad graphics workstation laptop offers so much more for the same money.
Chromebooks, outside US school system, or US in general, they aren’t to be found or hardly, have higher prices than similar speched Windows laptops with a lucky 3 years updates and then it is time to give papa Google more money and contribute to digital waste.
Linux based laptops, while improved, still the same deal with what gets supported even with customised distributions from some OEMs, and the whole fragmentation means that they are probably the only community that jumps of joy with Electron apps.
Regarding Metro, apparently Office is a failure, given that it uses React Native for Windows for some of its newer capabilities, which is built on top of UWP APIs.
Besides the huge number of proprietary applications (including vpn/banking/state software) which is either unsupported or badly working on Linux, I still find that Windows has the best support for multiple screens / connecting to devices such as video projectors.
The apps I use most (Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC, TotalCommander, PHPStorm, Putty) do work on Linux, but they do as well on Windows.
Many graphical apps in linux suck: they are buggy, crashy, miss features, or have plain bad interfaces (eg. forgetting to turn cursor into hourglass when a long operation is ongoing, having problems with small screen resolutions, etc…).
The rate of change of the “GUI” part of linux is way higher than windows (even taking into account the ribbon/metro/controlpanel messes) and there are way too many differences across the different linux desktops for me to be bothered to learn the fine details of them all (is wayland working in kde today?).
For dev work, Virtualbox caters to all my needs – I find it preferrable to run a shell environment in a VM from a host with a rock solid GUI rather than the opposite.
In short: plain old death by a thousand cuts. It is true that the situation is much better than it used to be regarding most of the above, but the benefits of switching over from Windows (loosing telemetry, having more control) still seem to be outweighed by the losses…
> I still find that Windows has the best support for multiple screens
Given how poor windows is at it I worry about other OS’s support!
I used windows because GAMES! However let’s moan about the multiple monitor support…
a. Machine wake up procedure. Everything moves to second minotor then to first then wake screen. After dismiss the wake screen everything stays on first monitor. Maybe a third paty app could help. I don’t have that much open win+shirt plus right does the job for the maximised windows but can’t for the non maximised as it rescaled to the realative minitor size which I do not want.
b. Yes I realise a lot of my pain (it’s not that bad!) comes from having one 4k monitor and one 1080. It does not make it acceptable though. Some apps / dialog only ever check the info of the first monitor. For instance pale moon’s first dialog (say save as yes or no) ) is scalled bloody massive (4k scaling while on 1080 monitor) though the app and the actual second dialog (the actual save filename one) is fine.
Ahh that’s enough moaning now! But I could go on!
Multi-monitor support in Ubuntu has issues such as applications appearing in different windows than the one you launched them from, and annoying issues such as Geany sometimes opening the find dialog on the other screen. Another issue I personally have is that, if you have two identical monitors (with the same name) connected via a dock, and you disable one of the monitors off, when you come back the monitor had just.. disappeared, aka Ubuntu now thinks you only have one monitor. The only way to fix this is to rm the monitors.xml file and log out. Combined with the inability of BlueJeans and Hangouts to share only one monitor under Desktop Linux (which forced me to turn one monitor off when screensharing), it drove me nuts.
I know people at work who rejoiced when they got promoted to senior, not because of the pay rise but because they could finally ask IT Support to give them a Macbook (and requisite dongle).
BTW the wake-up issue of Windows is due to Windows thinking you have unplugged your second screen and is trying to move Windows to the remaining screen. It depends on the order your monitors wake up and such. You can make Windows ignore screen sleep signals using the TMM entry or the SIMULATED entry in registry
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5jlk82/how_to_prevent_windows_from_rearranging_when/
For the 2160p vs 1080p problem, good luck. Apple tried to introduce resolution independence in their own desktop OS, and they gave up and ended up rendering everything at a lower resolution for high-DPI monitors and then doubling the lines (via billinear). It’s so app-dependent behavior the OS vendor can do nothing. If the screens have similar dimensions, I would set them both to 1080p.
Cheers for that, however niether key seems to help me. TMM does not exists and the SIMUATED_LONGNUMBER is set to 1080 not what they say, not sure 4k would help!
Does seem to mention that displayport cables might be the issue! Pretty sure they both are on this setup with the previous 2 1080s that worked only 1 was on displayport.
Ahh well can live with it.
I also assme that final fantasy 11 (yes, old I know) is poping up at above 1080 when it is set to 1080 is the 125% scaling. But again I have not looked into it too much!
I clearly need another 4k monitor! I meen it might help 😉
“This is the kind of nonsense you have to put up with when you choose to use a closed source operating system or device that you merely license or borrow, not own.”
Yawn. Let’s be clear, this has nothing to do with being closed source. It has little to do with “licensing” or ownership (in that sense). This is about using a packaged product, and where you have “product owners” determining what is and isn’t part of the package.
There will always be rough edges / imperfections with every operating system. MacOS isn’t without flaws. Neither is Linux (I’ve had far more issues with updates on Linux over the years where packages need to be recompiled and can’t without being patched first than I’ve ever had problems with Windows). Overall, Windows gives me what I want in being able to build hardware to my specification, and have access to the software that I want/need to use.
Valid point there. Ubuntu has made some questionable choices regarding the user interface (such as the silly “global” menu bar that isn’t global and the window controls on the other side) and even some questionable choices regarding privacy, and despite that, it’s still the major Desktop Linux distribution. Because Ubuntu now has its own app ecosystem if Ubuntu-exclusive proprietary apps (tiny as it may be, it’s still an advantage) and OEM support now. And more mindshare than any other distribution. It has become, in a sense, a mini-Microsoft within Desktop Linux.
> At this point, I have no idea where Microsoft wants to take Windows. It feels like the pace of development is minimal from a user’s point of view, while at the same time still being somehow fast enough that things regularly break. Why would anyone willingly use a platform like this? What redeeming qualities does it have over the competition?
The only redeeming quality is their ecosystem, that mostly exist out of companies that evolved in the 90s and early 00s around Windows. No real innovation in recent years on Windows ecosystem that doesn’t come from MS itself other than games.
And looks like MS is with this fixed idea of closing this ecosystem and make it “managed”, and that means that MS management either forgot what made Windows successful or worse, never knew (thus it is a historical accident).
This kind of reminds me of a song by Milli Vanilli. LOL But in reality, closed source offerings these days leave you , as the paying sheeple, no choice. Either accept your fate, or change your fate with an open source solution. There’s a price you pay for BOTH options.
“Why would anyone willingly use a platform like this? What redeeming qualities does it have over the competition?”
There are only 3 choices to the average user: Windows- Cheap hardware, doesn’t break itself, everything just works out of the box. Mac- Expensive and limited hardware, but it works if you’re willing to sacrifice seeing under the hood and some other things. DESKTOP Linux- Breaks itself, not reliable to end users, and about 50% of help forum posts from new users still get “run command x” or change “config file y.”
Microsoft can get away with these things because the only way they’ll ever have decent competition is if a court breaks them up. Linux users remain in a fantasy that their OS “just works’ because they haven’t had problems or forget when talking to outsiders that they “learned Linux” to feel superior so they don’t mind the problems. There are plenty of Linux guys that eventually had a family or something and stopped using Linux to make more time for real life.
dark2,
It’s important to point out that the average linux user is running linux on a PC that does not officially support linux. People who actually buy from vendors that preinstall & support linux do not experience the same level of difficulties. Seriously, just imagine how many macos users would be reporting issues if a large percentage of them were running macos on arbitrary unsupported computers.
It sounds a bit like a stawman because most linux users I know don’t think it’s perfect. However it doesn’t mean that it isn’t the best tool for some people. I’ve had problems with all the platforms. Everyone has different needs and there’s nothing wrong with that. If you don’t like linux, fine then don’t use it, but it’s not cool to stereotype those of us who do. Many linux users are not living in a fantasy and are actually happy to be using linux. You should just be happy for them.
” You should just be happy for them.”
That’s actually kind of wholesome. 🙂
Then I realized this is osnews, why would anyone go on this site criticizing people for making their own OS choices ? It’s actually kind of weird. This should be the last place where something like that should be going on.
The problem is not being happy for them, and I’m not stereotyping them. I’m calling out problem opinions like Thom’s that desktop Linux is a valid third choice. It’s like a loud minority with notably bad opinions making seem like they’re bigger than they are. If every Youtube video for new users about Linux started with a realistic “this is going to be waste of time for 99% of you, and a really bad experience” then we’d get people working on a realistic 3rd choice. Instead we’re stuck with people who have Opinions like Thom that Linux is ready, year of desktop Linux, etc. and it’s obvious to everyone that these opinions are the Linux and open source community’s biggest problems. They should be called out as unhelpful and misleading as much as political lies are.
dark2,
First of all, I don’t see what you are talking about. If you are complaining about something specific, then provide a link and let’s see it. However I’m still getting the vibe that this is a strawman argument.
Secondly, why do you or anyone else have to make a problem of Thom’s opinion?
Thirdly, Linux absolutely is a valid choice for many users. Is it perfect? No. Does it check the boxes for everyone? No. But this is true of any platform. It’s all a bunch of pros and cons; different people naturally have different expectations and priorities.
Obviously many technical users such as developers like *nix, but even if we ignore this demographic entirely there are still many users who just need a web-enabled platform and guess what? Linux fits the bill.
Good grief man. As usual, you are entitled to whatever opinion you feel about the merits of operating systems. Opinions aren’t facts though, so perhaps tone down the judgement of others over their different subjective operating system preferences.
Not exactly. Even if a court were to break Microsoft up, that in and of itself does not guarantee a competitor. There would have to be enough of a market for a competitor to succeed, and someone with the drive and resources to create it. I suspect that, in the case of a general purpose operating system, this would not be the case. Most computer users don’t care what operating system they have as long as they can use the tools they wish to use. It’s that simple. I still deal with people who don’t know that they’re running Windows. They know the brand of their machine and that’s it.
Almost sounds like the bug is it even tried to do a restart to just ‘install’ some links in the Start Menu.