Microsoft took a while to figure out that the A: assignment is pointless as the era of Floppy drives is now over. This has been fixed in Windows 11 Build 22000 (stable). Starting with Windows 11, Device Manager no longer defaults to A: i.e it doesn’t ask you for a floppy disk for drivers (icon has also been replaced).
Device Manager can now automatically detect the OS drive, so you can easily locate the driver package if you extracted the downloaded zip file to a folder on the system drive.
Everything about this user experience is terrible, but at least the ditching of A: makes it slightly less terrible. I can’t believe we’re at Windows 11 in 2022, and this UI is still identical to what was first shipped in Windows 95.
Give them a little credit, it’s identical to what was in Windows 2000, which shipped in 1999, four whole years after Windows 95!!!
In Windows 19 they’ll change to / as a path separator.
Just checked on Windows 10, defaulted to the my documents folder. Seems like baseless bashing of Windows for no real reason, but I don’t have time to go back and check old and un-updated versions. Maybe if your computer has a floppy drive, it’s making a reasonable assumption that the whole computer is old enough for drivers to be found there.
“UI is still identical to what was first shipped in Windows 95.”
And yet the only real equivalent to it in the Linux world is Suse’s Yast hardware management. Over 20 years because “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
dark2,
There are a lot of things that I disliked about windows, but I can’t remember the “A:” drive being an obstacle in any recent versions of windows either. Maybe I just don’t remember because I normally use installers instead.
When I used Suse many years ago, I felt that Yast was by far superior to the system management tools in every other linux distro I tried. Alas I ended up going with debian based distros because I felt the software repos where more comprehensive.
It’s too bad this kind of fragmentation exists because I kind of feel that ideally the software distribution should not be so tightly coupled to the OS. I prefer the conventions set forth by gobo linux, but the masses are generally set in their ways. Good ideas can go unnoticed for projects with such limited support and lacking critical mass.
Yast is the only reason why I continue to use openSUSE on my workstation. For me, it is nice to have one single entry point to configure my base system. I always expected that a few other distro’s would eventually move over to it, but boy was I mistaken.
“Maybe I just don’t remember because I normally use installers instead.”
Indeed, it’s been exceedingly rare to come across a driver without an installer for over a decade, making this a clickbait/windows bashing article for people that haven’t actually used Windows in a long time. The only reason to even attempt such a manual install is for troubleshooting, and that will probably end in diagnosing a hardware failure.
Couldn’t agree more.
By the same logic of criticizing Windows for still using older versions’ established elements:
We’re still using steering wheels. They were introduced in the 19th century. Can you believe it?
We’re still using needles to inject medicine. How boomer is that…
Some people are still using dead tree books, even though kindle et al. has been offering that horrible experience for what, 20 years now?
Meaningful change gets adopted. Do you still have any ball-type mouses around? No. Because the replacement offered solid improvement. Changing device manager for the sake of change aint that.
cevvalkoala,
I’d say the same about control panel and titlebars, scrollbars, menus, etc. These were designed to provide a consistent experience but microsoft (and others) couldn’t just stick with what worked. I hate that they make things harder to find with GUI inconsistencies, cramming crap into the title bar instead of hierarchical menus, Hiding paths to make titles less meaningful and ambiguous. Smaller hitboxes for GUI elements. Visual styles that don’t indicate what’s clickable. This is the curse of windows evolution.
I am always amused by Linux people blaming Windows for having utilities with UIs unchanged since WIndows 2000, considering Linux doesn’t even have these utilities.. What Linux people don’t realise is that Windows is all about allowing the user to do everything from the UI (and being very understated about it at the same time).
The right-click menu of Device Manager is a good example. It offers an online driver update utility (which Desktop Linux doesn’t have), an easy-to-use driver installation utility (which Desktop Linux also doesn’t have, you have to manually find your driver and install with dpkg) and a way to handpick a driver for your device (on Desktop Linux you have to mess with special files to do that). Plus the enable/disable device feature, the “uninstall driver” feature, and tons of hardware info and diagnostic features. Simply put, you can manage every single of your device right from the “properties” window without ever running a single command.
Services.msc is another good example, where you can edit and manage your services without ever having to edit a single text file (yes, I know Desktop Linux has tools pretending to be service management utilities, but they are a thin veneer over a text editor).
This is why most Desktop Linux DEs can’t nail the UI experience Windows offers. The coders behind it implement a desktop and a settings screen, declare that it has “90% of the functionality”, and then leave it there, not realising they have barely scratched the surface. To be honest, the hipsters under Satya Nadella fell into the same trap, thinking they can replace the Control Panel with a settings screen made of all-new-code™ (7 years after the initial release of Windows 10, they are still trying).
PS: I just returned to the UK from Greece, and I just discovered Ubuntu doesn’t have a UI to change the timezone, you have to manually ln some files to change your timezone.
Couldn’t agree more. And windows have had these features for decades in such a consistent way I haven’t needed to “relearn” every release. It’s consistent and incredibly well documented. An old boss once described “good ux” as “steps can be described to a noob over the phone”. Stuck with me as a truism that Linux never quite grasped.
I don’t think the companies that have true control over Linux development (aka the ones footing the R&D bill, aka RedHat and IBM) care about the desktop. They care about the CLI and configurability via Ansible, and for the desktop it’s up to the GNOME kids to maybe develop a thin veneer over the CLI utilities or the text files.
RedHat and IBM don’t care about support for non-generic PC hardware either.
Canonical did allocate some budget toward desktop development, which was squandered so Mark Shuttleworth can copy OS X’s global menu bar and pretend to be Steve Jobs. Oh, and Mir, so Mark Shuttleworth can pretend to be releasing his own smartphone like Jobs did.
Adurbe,
I am also not a big fan of new UIs replacing classic ones that worked just as well. However I would argue that microsoft is as guilty as anyone. Windows 8 made things very inconsistent. They decided to move everything around and pushing much less mature metro UIs when the classic UI was much better. Now at least it’s becoming more mature in windows 10, but I still prefer windows classic. Windows XP also changed things like control panel, explorer, etc sometimes needing more navigation involved to get what you wanted. But at least in that case you could still revert to classic modes. I hated the way Microsoft kept mucking around with the icon tray, which was a big problem for phone support.
Anyways I think you can make the case that microsoft hasn’t learned the lesson with windows either. Unwanted changes are probably the biggest reason home/enterprise users despise certain windows releases.
> Windows is all about allowing the user to do everything from the UI
And you never have to manually modify some obscure value in the Windows registry…
Its so simple, when it fail, you have just to reinstall (I agree, recent Windows versions are far more stable).
I never had to edit any obscure values in the registry. And if such need arises, the Windows community will make a tool to make it happen and it will be featured in most guides (unlike the usual CLI instructions featured on most Linux guides), because that’s how Windows trains Windows users to think.
Also, even the registry is more graphical than editing random conf files. There are no misplaced newlines or commas like there are on text files.
And yes, I know, CLI and text files are great for servers etc… but this is the desktop.
kurkosdr,
“Never”?? Consider yourself lucky 🙂 I’ve needed a lot of fixes in the form of registry keys. Maybe edge cases, but still not unusual.
They both have their pros and cons. Neither is particularly well organized IMHO. At least linux config files can be documented and are relatively easy to script. Honestly I’d rather see configuration take place in a powerful structured database. When I was developing on windows I did not particularly like working with the registry. Regedit is “simple”, but less face it, it isn’t very powerful and lacks documentation.
Ironically short of resorting to writing code, it was often easier to work with the text reg files using standard text tools and then importing that rather than mucking around with regedit.
Linux has always been developer-centric. Certainly the CLI is important for customization but most users don’t have to do that and I think it’s realistic for users with basic needs to get by with libreoffice, steam, firefox, etc. without ever touching a command prompt or config file.
Different people have different tastes, it’s not a big deal because people can choose what they use.
The stability is from stopping 3rd parties from making their own kernel patches when they transitioned to 64 bit. It was the antivirus and sometimes 3rd party drm screwing your system stability.
Why even have the intermediate window? Just jump into the open dialog box.
I can’t believe we’re in 2022 and every crap fix Microsoft churns out is reported in the news.
In KDE, you get several fixes like that on a weekly basis: https://pointieststick.com/category/this-week-in-kde/
No, I’m not saying that should be a weekly news entry here; KDE has a much smaller user base.
Just to give an idea how little such a change to an obscure dialog really is.
It’s bigger news because a lot of those open source projects will update things like the icon pack every 6 months simply to look more modern and give some new programmers experience.
In a way it’s a form of serfdom. A king or queen stubs their toe or changes a tiny detail on a coat and it’s the talk of the town. You save a life or heroically get the harvest in and it’s none news.
I think you all have really high expectations from the indie company Microsoft Corp. Perhaps we can start a Gofundme so that Microsoft will be able to hire for a few months people that have had experience with UI design and implementation…
jonnyvice,
Maybe they can get a google summer of code intern.
🙂