Microsoft isn’t talking about its big Windows plans at Build 2021 this week, and that’s because the company is preparing to detail what’s next for its PC operating system separately. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella teased this announcement during his Build keynote this morning, revealing he has been testing “the next generation of Windows” in recent months.
Windows is in a bit of a rut. As far as its core frameworks and lower levels go, it’s an incredibly solid, fast, extensible, and yes, secure operating system that can chug along just fine. The user experience, however, is a garbled, confusing mess consisting of bits and pieces dating back to Windows 3.11 (if you look hard enough). Almost every part of the operating system has multiple sides to it with different user experiences, looks, and feels, and if you come from a modern Linux distribution, the update experience, installing and managing applications, changing settings, and so on, are just downright laughably bad.
The user-facing part of Windows doesn’t just need an overhaul – it’s had countless overhauls over the years, all leaving various bits and pieces around that you still encounter today – but a complete redesign. I think the lower-levels and core frameworks are more than fine, but everything on top of that needs a clean start.
Microsoft has promised countless of these “next generations” of Windows, and aside from the move from Win9x to Windows NT, they’ve all been thin, patchy veneers atop all the thin, patchy veneers that came before. After so many empty promises, it’s just hard to take them seriously. Mark my words: this “next generation of Windows” is nothing but a few nips and tucks to the current, existing UI to make it slightly less of an inconsistent mess.
Nothing more.
I don’t understand why everyone waxes lyrical about the fact that some of the management utils of Windows are stuck at a Windows 2000 look-and-feel (with icons to match). It’s still much better than what you get on Desktop Linux, which is a terminal and some conf files that you have to edit by hand.
What is annoying about Windows is that instead of Microsoft iterating on top of .NET and win32 (and yes, there is stuff to iterate on, for example adding permissions and making them mandatory for new signed exes, ability to install stuff without elevated priviledges in a manner similar to Android, better SDKs, and adding touch support), they instead went ahead with the Metro UI which no user I ‘ve met likes, and all kinds of “foreign” new runtimes which no big application vendor uses.
I mean, what are the chances of Adobe rewriting their main apps to Metro’s runtimes just for the privilege of having to pay a 30% cut to the Microsoft Store and with no user-facing benefit? None.
Even Microsoft’s own Office team hasn’t made the move in full, with the win32 version of Office being the “real” version of Office. Nice confidence in Metro there from Microsoft’s own divisions. Imagine if it was the Windows 95 era and the DOS version of Word was the real one you wanted to get. Of course, that didn’t happen, because win32 offered immense usability benefits, so making the switch was worth it.
I think they lost track of reality when MacOS X came out with Aqua. I’m glad they finally added hardware compositing (at the cost of a frame of latency I believe), but the XP theme, then vista, 7, and 10 UX have all been huge fails from a purely theoretical usability point. Add on top of that the Ribbon UI which is pretty poor too. I’d give them a pass if at the very least everything was consistent, but as you point out it’s all over the place. Microsoft, for better and for worse, does tie its own hands behind its back by demanding the level of backward compatibility they have so generously bestowed upon the world. Mac apps just stop working every few years and the community appears to be fine with it. I personally think its a travesty. Classic to OSX, sure, thats something I think we can agree can be cut. But PPC to Intel, then 32 bit to 64bit, then various API iterations, things just stop working inexplicably. Microsoft has been generous to create compatibility layers, though the UX on those can be rough (they sugar coat the settings like hidpi but to a degree where it doesn’t make sense to novice users, power users, or even developers).
Since Office 95, seems like the office team obtained carte blanche with new non-standard UI in office 97 (which was later largely but not completely adopted by the IE and shell teams), office 2k with a slight divergence, then total change in xp (which seemed on track with whistler or whatever but that got scrapped because of aqua for the crazy luna UI based on windowblinds), then 2003, 2007, etc. Total divergence from the platform UX, which I believe is totally unacceptable. Since they went Office 365, it feels like the office team just dissolved; there are very minor feature changes every year and certainly nothing I’ve ever found useful.
Nah, the Vista and 7 themes were awesome. Basically an iteration on what was already there, but better.
kurkosdr,
Personally I always set it back to the win2k theme. It could be done in windows 8 prereleases too but they stripped it out at the last moment. Given how many were complaining about how bad the metro UI was for desktop computing, it was ironic to double down on the decision to permanently remove legacy themes. I’m pretty sure those legacy themes and interactions would have been preferred by the majority of microsoft users.
They wanted to put their Metro start screen in front of as many eyes as possible, in order to give their Store traffic and not lose the mobile market (which they did, because most people just kept using the apps they always did).
Aero and the classic themes took the boot for not being “modern” (aka flat) enough.
They backed off the Metro start screen, but they had to come up with a new design so they don’t look like fools completely.
Pretty much, XP “Oliva” (or “Silver”) theme was smart and unobtrusive, yet knowing what was what was evident. Windows 7 was as close.
But nothing compare to Win95/2000 classic theme, while “ugly”, everything is clear and self explanatory.
QNX Photon theme is also great in that regard : http://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/6.5.0/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.qnx.doc.neutrino_sys_arch%2Fphoton.html
For me the difference between Apple and Microsoft is that there are hundreds of things I hate about Macs and thousands to tens of thousands I hate about Windows.
I have Apple apps that I’ve been using –forever– and Windows apps that stopped working and had to be replaced from Windows 9x to 2000 to XP to 7 to 8.1 to X. It just depends on which apps you use. If you use the ones that I use, you will find a trail of apps that you used that you can’t anymore and keep having to find another solution. They are both the same in that regards.
As for Apple leaving different CPUs behind? One of MSs biggest faults is that they try to support all CPUs or almost all and they failed to make it rock solid on any of them. At least Macs are solid enough to keep running without reboots 99% of the time between major security and OS updates. The same isn’t true for Windows anywhere past 18 days for me. And yes, I’ve kept a spreadsheet on my Mac for all the times that I’ve had to reboot Windows for work (I wouldn’t use that **** for personal if they paid me $500,000 a year to use it. There are things in life that are worth more than money and one of those is time. You can NEVER get time back and Windows sucks more time from my life than anything else.
There is something really screwed up about a world where things that are broken makes it more easy to make money than things that work. Which is why we have become a throw away world.
“It’s still much better than what you get on Desktop Linux, which is a terminal and some conf files that you have to edit by hand.”
You can say the same about Windows and editing the Windows registry.
You have not tried a modern desktop like Ubuntu.
I do every day at the work laptop. Here is the verdict: In order to switch the HDMI dynamic range from “Narrow” (RGB 16-235) to “Full” (RGB 0-255)”, so I don’t get washed-out picture (yes I tested with Lagom LCD), I have to use obscure xrandr commands and put them in startup scripts! On Windows it’s a control panel option. But people will complain about the GUI being inconsistent and whatnot.
Also, preventing random chat apps from autostarting? Command-line commands again.
O don’t mind, since our centos EC2 instances don’t have a GUI, but the fact Desktop Linux has major UI gaps and requires you to drop back to the command line is a major fail.
kurkosdr,
I’m under the impression these modes are already autoselected using EDID info, can you clarify what you are doing and why you need to override the defaults? I’ve never needed to override the defaults and I’m curious what scenario breaks it.
I don’t know what you are talking about, maybe you can clarify. To be honest though autostart apps have been a much bigger problem on windows in my experience. In fact I’m often called to provide windows tech support disabling & removing unwanted auto start crap. These are often legitimate programs, but it can be very annoying when software autostarts without asking. Granted this would be annoying on linux as well, but in my experience this kind of behavior is far more prevalent with windows.
EDID doesn’t always get it right. You have PC monitors with HDMI inputs assuming everything they are fed is “full” range (IIyama), however Linux defaults on “narrow” range for HDMI (for better compatibility with TVs). Linux also defaults to “narrow” range on Displayport and DVI (at least on Intel), which is plain wrong (most DisplayPort and DVI monitors want “full”).
Windows gets this perfect for me (so far), but anyway, dynamic range is a finicky thing, this is why all GPU vendors also provide a control panel module where you can adjust the dynamic range. For example, I like to set my TV to “full” and then set the output to “full” also.
BTW I had the apps for Slack and Microsoft Teams autostart on my Ubuntu. You can’t disable it via the GUI.
A personal favourite of mine is that if you want to create a shortcut on the dock (for apps downloaded outside the repository, say Telegram or Sublime), you have to manually create a .desktop file and put it in .local/share. That’s an “1.0” feature which is embarrassingly missing from Gnome and the Unity of old (haven’t used KDE, enlighten me if you have).
kurkosdr,
For what it’s worth, your expected behavior is what I experience on my linux systems out of the box, but this is using nvidia hardware and drivers. HMDI output defaults to full range from the get-go and it’s also easily changed using the desktop widget.
This article suggests that the color range detects if resolution & refresh rate match a television profile.
https://pcmonitors.info/articles/correcting-hdmi-colour-on-nvidia-and-amd-gpus/
Obviously your using different drivers though, which may work differently. You could still try the suggestions of using PC specific resolutions or pixel formats to test.
Yeah I remember having a hell of a time disabling ms-teams autostart on windows. msconfig is usually your friend to disable unwanted startup applications, but microsoft was using some kind of back door to launch it, quite frustrating.
On linux your distro probably has a gui tool to manage startup applications.
Turns out Ubuntu DOES have something to manage startup applications now. Who knew!
But still, Intel drivers don’t have anything to set dynamic range via GUI. And there is the whole need to create .desktop files for applications downloaded outside the repository (such as telegram and sublime). so, the desktop experience still is underwhelming, These are basic stuff to have.
“welcome every creator who is looking for the most innovative, new, open platform to build and distribute and monetize applications.”
Going open source?
In the past years “next generation of Windows”, versions after Windows 7, was always more or less about the next attempt to make “application store”. Success, for Microsoft, being to monetize it. In my eyes developing Windows in the past decade was not much about anything else. And as they never made it, at least until now, we can say Windows itself was more or less stagnating and was as such neglected.
It’s tough to impress us now, no matter what changes are offered.
Unrelated I know, but I’m hanging out for the next gen OS that delivers it’s desktop to me via AR on my own workspace/desktop. No more monitor, no more mouse, just me with a pen / pointer of some sort and a wireless keyboard maybe some earbuds. When you can make any surface your worksurface and project CAD, Math or code there, you are on a winner!
People want customization ability. No wait, they want a uniform look. No wait, they want freedom. No wait, the freedom is too free. People like square corners. No wait, they like rounded corners. People like a 3D look. No wait, they like a flat look.
The “next generation of Windows” is always doomed to be a successful failure.
friedchicken,
There’s a sharp divide between those who want to use windows as a reliable workhorse, and others who like the desktop to be artistic and always changing.
IMHO they managed the balance fairly well up until metro when the arts designers were put in charge and they disregarded decades of UI design experience & optimization to make a desktop in the modern flat art style while removing long time visual context cues. To this day I still struggle to identify where windows start and end because borders are poorly defined. New themes may be “fun” and all, but it’s hard to comprehend why a company would authorize such a chaotic transition for long term users. The sales were poor. and with windows 10 they made upgrades free and even used deception to recapture market share. If I were a windows project manager, I’d try listening more to customer needs.
I think microsoft was focusing heavily on the allure of imposing fees on everyone else’s software like apple was doing with IOS. It would have been easy money if only microsoft could pull it off. Except that neither customers nor developers actually want windows to become a walled garden like IOS.
It’s interesting Alfman.
I think this imbalance between design and performance was worst with Vista / Win 8, improved a bit with Win 8.1 and performance was fully restored or even greatly improved on some hardware with Win 10.
As far as I can tell, Win 10 fixes all the performance issues I had with Vista, Win 8 and Win 8.1, and I find that improvement is consistent across many generations of hardware not just the latest and greatest.
So I really do not get those rallying against Win 10 on a performance basis, I even find myself questioning if the negative feedback they offer is genuine!
This performance issue is of course a separate issue to backwards compatibility of discrete hardware, many correlate the two issues, but even discrete hardware compatibility has greatly improved in Win 10 over recent times.
What you believe to be Windows 10 resolving any perceived performance issues is undoubtedly the hardware you are running today compared to yesteryear. If I was wrong, Windows 10 would *massively* outperform Windows 7, but it only incrementally does so on much better hardware.
Microsoft has hired some of the smartest people on the planet as evidenced by WSL, Azure, Office, and Visual Studio, but it’s plainly clear they have hired some of the most untalented people Earth has ever produced as evidenced by the total failure in vision of Windows workflow, experience and UI since circa-2012.
It’s over 9000 +1 !!!
I think the heart of the problem is that Windows is sort of at a crossroads and the two things MS wants it to be are, to an extent, mutually exclusive.
On the one hand, they want an IOS, “it just works” experience that tries to achieve simplicity by drastically limiting what’s allowable: you want software? It comes from the Windows Store. You want to change a setting? It’s either in Settings, or it’s not something you can change. Your application must use a very specific set of widgets and looks to be “content-centric.” Etc.
On the other hand, they’re fully aware that even if most users aren’t power users, a lot Windows’ appeal has been from the fact that it provided a reasonably attractive environment to businesses, power users (including sysadmins) and developers – backwards compatibility at a truly staggering level, decent devtools, and a lot of functionality that had grown up organically. Sure, settings may sometimes require some sleuthing to find, but they’re there if you want to tinker with them.
Historically, it felt like Microsoft’s attempts to change things tended to involve bolting new stuff on (incurring long term costs), but leaving the stuff below it relatively intact. (Don’t like Luna? There’s a toggle to go back to classic. Don’t like the new users.cpl? The old one’s still there if you know how to use RunDLL32, etc.) Now they’re trying to move away from some of that, but rather than simplifying things it makes the inequalities in the system seem way more obvious. It’s funny, because they’ve managed this before when they deprecated Win9x and (to a degree) Win16. As two off-hand examples:
1. Settings – I don’t think any reasonable person has an issue on paper with their stated goal to have all the system settings live inside Settings, (Remember that “Godmode” control panel trick that let you view all control panel pages as an index?) instead of spread out across Control Panel applets, context clicks from notification icons, etc. Yet, when they migrate things to Settings, they usually decide to cut or limit the features offered to better fit into the simplicity that the Metro design language wants to emphasize, and in so doing they tend to piss everybody off: power users are ticked that they can’t do things anymore, but the options left behind are usually still enough to confuse non-technical users, or else in their quest to simplify they removed a feature that had appeal beyond power users. (Examples: Screensaver/wallpaper configuration, and printer configuration. Plenty of otherwise computer illiterate people routinely access these, and the Metro versions of them are IMO terrible.)
2. Metro Apps – in my office of 200 or so clients, the ways in which Metro Apps break or are just non-functional are staggering. On my desktop, Calculator simply won’t launch, update, or uninstall – not via Store, not via Powershell, not via prayer. People open tickets constantly metro because apps in the start menu are suddenly not loading their names, but rather their internal IDs (ms-app-Calculator-LONGGUID.etc.andson). Want to execute a Metro app directly from explorer? Not supported. Want to define a program alias for a Metro or Non-Metro app? I’m sorry, that functionality has to be defined by the APPX/MSIX package creator when the package is created, and is not user-configurable.
TL;DR? Win10, while in many ways a great daily driver, is a compromise that satisfies no one in terms of architectural trends.
I have both former and current friends & family at Microsoft and there’s a recurring theme with them all which is far too many great ideas get trashed due to incompetency and/or stupid politics. There’s a lot of internal tribalism that ruins what could-have-been. The sad part about that is Microsoft truly does employ some top-tier talent. If the company could learn to stop squandering what they have, Windows would be in a much better state. I don’t expect it will happen because it requires harsh honesty about what’s poisoning the well and who’s doing it.
Maybe it’s because I’m getting old but Windows, Linux, Mac OS have been going on for so long and all the architectural issues have been discussed into the ground it’s all one big mess now. My brain stalls just thinking about it all. I have half a dozen applications I use and that’s all I care about now. Apart from bug fixing I wouldn’t care if they went into code freeze. They do what they do and they work and I don’t need anything else.
“Verrrry soon”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tgrka088ZFk&t=15m34s
Microsoft is a great distribution company. Their distribution agreements are masterful and tight, like their original code when they wrote languages for a living. The same can’t be said for their OS or software store.
XBox is an exception, It is a decent platform with decent competitors and all products are better for it, including XBox.
“Windows is in a bit of a rut. As far as its core frameworks and lower levels go, it’s an incredibly solid, fast, extensible, and yes, secure operating system that can chug along just fine. The user experience, however, is a garbled, confusing mess consisting of bits and pieces dating back to Windows 3.11 (if you look hard enough). Almost every part of the operating system has multiple sides to it with different user experiences, looks, and feels, and if you come from a modern Linux distribution, the update experience, installing and managing applications, changing settings, and so on, are just downright laughably bad.”
“it’s an incredibly solid, fast, extensible, and yes, secure operating system that can chug along just fine.”
That is, unless you use it and you compare it to TRULY incredibly solid, fast, extensible and secure operating systems. It’s like saying a 1970s MGB or Jaguar was a very fast (when it was working) and secure (when it wasn’t being attached) or solid (when it wasn’t rusted out) or … oh I could go on for DAYS about how those compare VERY solidly to each other. Windows is NONE of the things that you describe and computers as a whole will be much better off the day that Microsoft finally dies.
PS: Yes, I use a Mac. Am I an Apple fan? Not really. There are many ways that Mac OS and iOS and iPadOS and Apple TVOS all really suck big time. But it’s better than Windows but there are at least a dozen operating systems that meet your statements much better than Windows OR Mac.
Any OS that cannot stay running for AT LEAST a year is not rock solid. It is an OS built on sand that is ready to crash at any moment. Which is why I have THREE computers at work and not one. One is a Mac and two are Windows. If I could get rid of Windows I would and I would trade in Mac for a few other OSs but they don’t have all of the —types— of programs that fully work that I need like being able to to import a 3 hour plus video that needs to be edited down to half an hour and is very easy to work with and can be used for multiple types of computing at the switch of a thought.
Try this, if you don’t know what I’m talking about. Try working in Windows for a day without ever having to stop and fix something just to get your initial great idea down in your application of choice without Windows having some stupid thing that stops your entire train of thought and makes you update something and possibly reboot before you can do what you wanted to do in the first place. I run into this all the time.
I’ve been working with MS operating systems since 1983 and I’ve used over 50 different desktop OSs and Windows is definitely in the LOWER half of those 50 when it comes to any part of that statement that you made.
“it’s an incredibly solid, fast, extensible, and yes, secure operating system that can chug along just fine.” Right. And I’m twelve feet tall with an IQ of 300 and can run faster than Mr. Bolt on the track. Let’s live in reality here.
This is OS News not OS News science fiction.