Back when I reviewed Windows 11 for Neowin in 2021, I awarded it a score of 6.5/10, while saying that “simplification of UI isn’t a terrible idea but having it there in a half-baked manner doesn’t really make for an enticing user experience”. Although that was my opinion based on the launch version of the OS, unfortunately, it still hasn’t changed more than six months later.
Microsoft seems intent on adding new features as we have seen in recent Insider releases, while ignoring all the UI inconsistencies and lack of basic functionalities in the existing release.
The goal with Windows 11 was to make the UI more consistent, but as I predicted, it just seems Microsoft added yet another graphical layer atop the vast list of layers going back all the way to Windows 3.x in some places. Coming from the lovely visual and behavioural consistency of a Gtk+ desktop, seeing Windows 11 makes my brain hurt.
Lovely and GTK+ is something i have never heard anyone say before. Was that facetious?
Well done, your comment made me registering just to reply: How is GTK not consistent? I use a mix of XFCE Desktop and Gnome applications with my preferred theme and have Desktop which I perceive both as beautiful and productive and consistent as well. Even my Java Swing Applications (e.g. JEDIT) blend in quite nicely.
Compared to that, Windows is a bad joke and that was the editor’s point.
There are people, who like USING GTK/Gnome. I prefer still prefer it over QT/KDE (despite granting them a lot of credit too.)
my comment does not mention consistency. but humor you gtk2, qt and fltk apps looks out of place in every gtk3 based desktop i have tried.
Agreed on QT/FLTK applications and this is my main reason to avoid them.
GTK2/GTK3 however integrate quite nicely, with the exception of the GTK3 Client side decorations (which I am not very fond of).
I do use XFCE with GTK3 and GTK2 applications and the excellent JUNO theme and I am actually quite happy with it.
“It’s perfectly consistent if you ignore everything available that isn’t!” is not a very convincing argument.
I am not sure what apps use FLTK. It seems like a strange dig at GTK that some other toolkit looks out of place with it. I would make the same comment for QT. Not sure what this has to do with whether or not GTK is “lovely” or not.
GTK2 seems a more appropriate compliant as one of the criticisms of GTK has been that theming is incompatible across major versions. That said, are people still using GTK2 apps? The only one I can think of off the top of my head is GIMP although the 2.99 versions ( which I use ) are GTK3. Even MATE ( GNOME 2 ) is GTK 3 these days.
What GTK2 apps are looking out of place on people’s desktops?
Exactly, I’m using Debian (ppc64) XFCE, the UI, plus every application and tool installed look absolutely perfect, uniformed. I’m even using a custom theme and icon set, “IndigoMagic”, found over at https://www.xfce-look.org. It’s an amazing SGI theme that I thought would look great on my most recent SGI Fuel Power 9 conversion.
The desktop I am looking at right now is XFCE with several GNOME apps open along with Firefox. So everything I am looking at is GTK ( not really consciously ). Everything looks very much like it belongs together ( so consistent I guess ). Even more importantly, it looks great. I was using macOS earlier and it was more of visual mess. I have a Windows 11 laptop as well and, as others have said, Windows is really the most haphazard these days.
I have never said “lovely and GTK+” before either I do not think because it is not something I talk about. The fact that I am not complaining about it is perhaps the best sort of compliment for a UX though. In many ways, the best UX is the one that you do enjoy without thinking much about it.
The Microsoft of today reminds me of the GM of the 70s and 80s: It makes you wonder where all the money they are making is going, because they are not going into the product, that’s for sure.
I mean, you are goddamn Microsoft, can’t you make sure your OS has a consistent UI everywhere? Or at least the most commonly-used parts? At this point, Microsoft is a compatibility provider, much like Unisys or DEC’s VAX division of old. The reason people buy Windows is because they want win32/win64 compatibility (regardless of form factor: tablet, laptop, or desktop) or because they want support for certain high-end graphics cards on laptops and desktops. i mean, even in laptops and desktops, you can get a ChromeOS or a MacOs device now, so Microsoft doesn’t even have that monopoly anymore. And Valve hasn’t even entered that market yet (the Steam Deck is getting scalped due to high demand btw). Did I say Microsoft is a compatibility provider now?
Funny thing is Microsoft wants to court iPad and Android tablet users with this UI.
Microsoft is spending a lot of their money on amazing technology and experiences to be fair. Azure is kicking butt. Their development tools are second to none in my opinion. It is hard to argue that there is a better office suite. They are absolutely killing it in gaming.
You are not wrong about Windows though. And they do produce a lot of crap ( I am looking at you Teams ). This may say more about their priorities than anything though. After many years as the Golden Goose, I do not believe that the Microsoft executive team seems Windows as the essential center of the Microsoft universe anymore. Even the priorities for the Windows kernel itself are probably starting to be dominated by gaming. Surface is as much iPad Pro as it is desktop. Azure is more about Linux at this point.
I wouldn’t mind Microsoft leaving Windows 7 as-is and keeping it in maintenance mode. But nooo, they want to compete with the cool kids (iPad), so they have to redesign the UI to something different, but only some of it. If they want to redesign the UI, why not redesign all of it? As with 70s and 80s GM, it makes you wonder where all the money they are making is going. And how granted they take customers that buy their stuff.
By the way, Windows 8.1 with Classic Shell Start menu shows you can have both the classic Windows UI and the finger-friendly Metro stuff (whatever portion of it is done), so it’s not an either-or proposition. Microsoft is simply destroying the Windows UI they spend years refining up to Windows 7 purely out of ideology (“flat UIs with ugly icons be good”). This is what you get when you have a CEO with Apple Envy and a product development team made by kids who’d rather design smartphone apps than OSes. I mean, I understand why a smartphone app like Uber or whatever will be constantly redesigned to match the current design fan. But when it comes to OSes, if you can’t commit to redesign the whole UI, don’t bother, because you ‘ll end up with a half-done mess. Also, when designing OSes, you can’t throw away the old before having the new ready. And if you have two types of screen and two UIs that serve each, you’d better keep both UIs anyway. Plain common sense, which is apparently non-existent in Redmond nowadays.
I’d love to see MS open-source Win7 and inject money into the ReactOS foundation.
It’ll never happen, but one can dream.
I don’t know. I’m not sure if they make that much money anymore with Windows.
I have this odd feeling that Microsoft is becoming a IBM: a company that exist to provide services to other companies.
Is this a bad joke?
Certainly not. Its a sentiment shared by quite a few people out there. I myself always start quietly crying when I am forced to work on client’s windows systems.
Given how bad Windows has become, no, it isn’t.
It’s a nice twist of irony, given that 15 years ago, Windows users used to complain a lot about the “inconsistency” of GUI on Linux.
And the sad part is: it is not that Linux really evolved in that regard (it got worse, actually, thanks to garbage like adwaita, that makes GNOME applications alien on anything else, and that FreeDesktop that once championed integration between desktop environments looks more and more neglected by the day). It is Windows that degenerated sharply.
in all fairness, we Windows folk complain about the messed-up UI of Windows more than we ever did about the UI of Desktop Linux. Funny thing is that, with the UI of Windows being so messed up, Microsoft cemented Windows’ reputation as “that thing you buy if you want win32/win64 compatibility or support for certain hi-end graphics cards”. Otherwise, get a ChromeOS or Mac device. Somehow, I doubt this was their goal when they started destroying the Ui of Windows 7.
>Coming from the lovely visual and behavioural consistency of a Gtk+ desktop, seeing Windows 11 makes my brain hurt.
So how come GTK/Gnome still doesn’t have thumbnails in the filepicker, unlike KDE, macOS and Windows?
I do not see, how missing out your personally beloved feature (justified or not) makes Gnome/GTK not “visual and behavioural consistent”. There is no problem, to prefer Gnome/GTK vs. KDE vs. MacOS vs. NextStep vs. NCurses — but arguing in favor of Windows “consistency” does not help to make one look intelligent.
GTK+ used to be consistent. Now it depends on whether the application is a new- or old-style one. For example a tool like geany still uses the old-style toolbar – which I like – but recent versions of evince use the hamburger-menu-in-the-title-bar style which is annoying and woefully inconsistent with the old UI design.
I share your sadness, although to be precise:
1) Its not GTK 3 vs GTK 4, but rather Gnome/libadwaita vs. GTK
2) GTK Applications are still consistent and look nice (exception: Client Side Decorations)
3) Gnome/libadwaita would be consistent — just ugly 🙂
Right now, it is safe to stick with GTK2/GTK3 only and to ban libadwaita (or only use libadwaita, if you prefer that more).
My hope for the future was to have a libadwaita extension/replacement, which uses GTK4 themes again.
If that won’t work or happen, I would migrate to KDE (unless they break everything again)
I feel it is safe to say Microsoft won’t get the basics of Windows 11 right. That is Microsoft won’t unify their user interface. They more or less can’t do that and if it would really happen then a number of severe cons would likely emerge too. As for remark in regards to GTK. This is just a toolkit. Hence you can indeed say that using a GTK or Qt toolkit can lead to unified and consistent user interface. In addition if you run KDE or GNOME with their basic sets of apps installed. The level of consistency is indeed a rather high one. Much better then what Microsoft is doing with Windows. But obviously when you start installing useful FOSS and proprietary apps. Things quickly change and you are basically on par with Windows in this regards. To solve this FOSS world would need to collaborate more. Lets say around the time of Unity 7 you could still achieve a rather high level of consistency using both GTK and Qt apps. After GTK decided they only care for GNOME and tiny set of FOSS applications. Beyond that achieving high level of consistency is not currently possible. In this regard a GTK or Qt based desktop environment is indeed usually better then what Windows is offering. But this all changes when you start using it by installing useful apps.
> But this all changes when you start using it by installing useful apps.
True, but for all platforms equally. For example Skype/WhatsApp have only Electron clients, which will not blend into any OS/Framework and look alien on any platform.
It’s not the fault of the platform though, but rather your own choice to use such applications, trading of “functionality” vs. compliance.
That said, the GTK3 world as well as the KDE world offer quite a rich software repository and except Skype/WhatsApp/Teams and IntelliJ/JEdit at least I have no need for alien software.
IMHO it is mainly the fault of “the platform(s)”. It’s up to them to resolve this issue(s). That is if they want to. Currently i would say they don’t want to and instead they rather chose to do things their own way.
Disclaimer: I’m a Microsoft employee, not in the Windows team.
> For example Skype/WhatsApp have only Electron clients
It’s not just that. I’m always a bit skeptical of people suggesting they have a unified UX on Linux, because it implies they’re not using things like Firefox/Chrome, which are hard to avoid.
My own Linux experience is fairly inconsistent for this reason – my top UI apps are Firefox, LibreOffice, and VLC, which each use a different toolkit. There’s always going to be some killer app that’s in a different toolkit to my preferred one.
The article is (in part) complaining about inconsistencies in built-in apps, which is a fair comment. However, even if the built-in apps were perfectly consistent, the user experience still wouldn’t be, for the same reason. The big difference between Windows and Linux is the binary compatibility requirement means Windows essentially ships with every version of every toolkit for the last 25 years, and different programs will use different ones. I don’t know about others, but I spend very little time using the built-in apps – that’s just not the cause of real world inconsistency.
I’m a happy user of Windows 10, and I see no reason to upgrade. Many of the changes to Windows 11 take away customization options I’ve used since the days of Windows XP (such as having the taskbar on two rows, showing labels, and not collapsing items).
Windows 11 continues to seem like the Windows 8 team designed it out of petty vengeance for their attempt of forcing people onto the Microsoft store not going well. It’s obviously designed for tablets where all of these “UI inconsistencies” wouldn’t really matter. As for legacy menus, they still have the same problem as always: The legacy menus simply pack in thousands of options that they can’t fully replace easily, even after a decade of trying.