It’s 2023, and Windows 11 is finally a mature operating system that most people would be happy to use. Sun Valley has finally arrived, and it’s all about a long overdue reinvestment in design under Panos Panay’s leadership. But is it enough? Let’s take a look.
For the purpose of this research, I used Windows 11 build 25267, which as of now is the latest Insider Dev build.
Death, taxes, and new windows theme layers.
2004-08-09 : https://www.osnews.com/story/7968/why-windows-isnt-quite-ready-for-the-desktop/
2008-06-01 : https://www.osnews.com/story/19813/windows-ui-taskforce-your-help-wanted/
2021-06-20 : https://www.osnews.com/story/133581/state-of-the-windows-how-many-layers-of-ui-inconsistencies-are-in-windows-10/
It has been a running gag for two decades now (Windows 2000 had some Windows 95 legacies) so no wonder this will stay a hot topic for much longer.
I wouldn’t mind if they’d still leave the old layers in for those of us who know how to find them, but it seems those are going away slowly but surely.
After every OS upgrade I would always set things back to the way I liked them. So if I didn’t like some change, at least there was something I could do about it. I didn’t like the fisher price UI on XP, but I wasn’t stuck with it. I didn’t like vista UI, but again I wasn’t stuck with it. But windows 8 was probably the worst offender, not just because the UI was disagreeable, but because I had no control over them. UI changes are always going to be subjective, but the very fact that MS decided it would be better to remove the owner’s ability to customize and control windows however they saw fit is itself regressive (regardless of what settings those owners prefer).
Sigh…why should they care about changing things that 99.999% of their customer base will NEVER ever see? Joe and Jane Normal don’t use Remote Desktop, they don’t go below the first layer of control panel (if they ever go there at all) so as long as the top layer is as braindead simple as MSFT can possibly make it? Mission Accomplished.
Hell the few power users and IT guys that use the deeper layers are grumpy old dudes who would probably throw a fit if you changed what they are used to anyway, most IT guys these days that I know are just using Powershell for everything the same way Linux guys use Bash so I bet the metrics on the number of users accessing the deeper layer stuff compared to install base as to be very low single digits.
I’m in the same camp. No one cares, it doesn’t really matter. It would be nice if it were perfect, but not something I would change if there were any bugs in my team’s queue If I were managing a team at MS.
bassbeast,
The problem is they very much are changing things that users can see. Although this is just anecdotal, a lot of people I support do complain about MS chances. For me personally, without 3rd party shells I find window borders on windows 10 unreasonable thin and struggle to see them sometimes. I didn’t have this problem in the past when windows gave users better control. While you are hell bent on turning every OS discussion into a religious turf war, normal people who just want to set things the way they like can and do have legitimate gripes.
Use Winaero Tweaker and set the Aero Lite theme, to which you can set the windows’ border thickness.
https://winaero.com/winaero-tweaker/
I’ve set the settings to :
-> Appearance/Aero Lite : Enable Aero Lite (default)
-> Advanced Appearance Settings/Window Border : Border width = 1
-> Advanced Appearance Settings/Window Border : Border padding = 4
-> Advanced Appearance Settings/Window Title Bars : Window title bar height = 17 (logout to apply)
Kochise,
Thanks, yes I think you may have mentioned winaero tweaker specifically before 🙂
I still think these features should be part of windows, but I’m glad to see a 3rd party developer providing solutions where microsoft won’t. I can’t say that I love the terms though…
Beggars can’t be choosers, but ideally it would be FOSS!
Now show me a single Linux distribution which allows to seamlessly run applications since 1995.
People ridicule UI layers in Windows as if it’s something bad. It’s not bad, it bloody WORKS, it shows that the stuff designed and built decades ago is still perfectly usable in 2023 (except for 16bit applications).
Kudos to Microsoft for keeping it all running.
Artem S. Tashkinov,
That feels like an arbitrary target. How did you come up with it? The thing to remember is that most of the software running on linux is FOSS and you can just run the latest version. The need to go back to old binaries is typically far less important than with operating systems where all you have is proprietary binaries.
Also I don’t know of any operating system with perfect binary compatibility going that far back. I used software and activex controls that worked with 98/ME but some software stopped working on NT branches. I had to ditch some things after switching to W2k. It may have been my favorite version of windows, but even so the compatibility wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t a huge deal since most old software becomes obsolete anyways. There is a nostalgia factor. I’d like to revisit my old vb6 programs but unfortunately many stopped working and I don’t have a computer that still runs win 98 or ME. I guess that’s what VMs are for, I’d have to pirate an old copy of windows though.
I can accept that some people and businesses may be dependent on old proprietary and unsupported software, but hopefully they are the exception and not the norm 🙂 It doesn’t seem wise to me to remain in such a position long term.
There’s nothing arbitrary about the transition from 16bit to 32, it just happened with the release of Windows 95 and then up until Windows ME many applications were 32bit but still had 16bit installers, so you needed to install them in an older version of Windows or use a VM to be able to run then in 64bit versions of Windows (e.g. Windows XP 64).
Modern Linux distros guarantee that only the software that is built exclusively for a certain version of a distro will work with this version of the distro. Period. There’s no guarantee an application built for the previous version will work. There’s no backward compatibility implied or guaranteed at all.
And I’ve never claimed Windows sports perfect backward compatibility either. It’s there, not everything works, but the vast majority of titles continue to work.
And that’s still extremely important and valuable because many software companies have gone out of business for the past 30 years, there’s no support, source code or anything, yet software still works.
All the successful popular OS’es prize backward compatibility and Linux, whose fans want it to overcome Windows, continue to think otherwise. Look where it’s gotten Linux. Nowhere. 1% (at most 2% by various estimates) desktop market share for the past 25 years.
Funnily, outside of web browsers, Wine, which brings true API/ABI backward compatibility to Linux, is perhaps the second most popular software title which further proves that backward compatibility is something people actually want, need and use.
Artem S. Tashkinov,,
You use words like “guarantee” yet the userspace ABI on linux is actually very stable for software development. Issues tend to be around 3rd party dependencies rather than the root APIs. For example X11 compatibility genuinely goes back decades, but the various toolkits developers can use to create their UIs may or may not. I don’t make light of these dependency problems, but truth be told this “DLL hell” presented a downright awful experience for some windows software as well. With this in mind, whether one has compatibility problems or not has much more to do with the dependencies the developers chose than innate operating system qualities.
You’re making a logical mistake in assuming linux marketshare numbers are caused by backwards compatibility. You haven’t actually shown that this is all that important to users picking up linux. Mac software compatibility is patchy yet 20+year compatibility clearly is not important for users buying macs. I honestly think you are putting too much weight on legacy software compatibility for average users.
Furthermore, marketshare is a terrible gauge of quality. I look at walmart killing off competitors. For better or worse sometimes it’s ruthless cutthroat business practices that win rather than quality and craftsmanship.
You are jumping to false conclusions. The lack of commercial games on linux is the obvious motivator for a cross platform portability layer. Wine/proton give linux users access to windows software & games they wouldn’t otherwise have, which has long been an obstacle for alt-os.
Talk to large companies and what they think about backward compability and how essential it is.
Almost everything they run must be able to run for years, if not decades without interruptions. If companies use Linux, they stick with something extremely stable and proven e.g. RHEL or its clones. They don’t run your Arch Linuxes or Fedora. They f-ing care.
Commercial software developers including game studios fucking hate Linux and and there have been numerous such confessions on the net over the past two decades. In Windows you test compatibility under Windows 11 and 10 and you’re good for 1,5 billion of PCs.
In Linux you test what? How? Against which distro? How will you make sure your game works two years from now when your favourite Ubuntu rebuilds the entire fucking system from scratch using a new compiler.
God, it looks like you’ve never written a single line of code in low level languages like C or C++. Sorry, absolute most PC/console games are written in them. I know Android games which use native code to speed up game logic and physics emulation performance but those are rare.
Lower in the comments I demonstrated an app (there are others but I’m lazy to list them all) which require backward compatibility and which I can no longer run.
I don’t wanna argue with you any longer because you look like you’re arguing only instead of actually providing any actual valid factual reasonable counter-arguments you are just doubting everything I say. And I don’t remember myself everything making stuff up unless I’m super confident in it. If I’m not, I add, “I think” or “IMO”. Sorry, I’m too tired for this. Have a good day.
Backward compatibility means sh*t. Users don’t care. Commercial OSes which provide real API/ABI compatibility are popular for other reasons. Linux is perfect. Right. And users don’t ever need commercial software which obviously cannot be open sourced. Right.
Even Torvalds himself complained about this sh*t but Mr. Alfman certainly knows better: https://youtu.be/5PmHRSeA2c8?t=283
Artem S. Tashkinov,
Honestly I think large companies are more interested in support contracts with currently supported software. There can always be exceptions, but it would be pretty foolish in general for a large company to get stuck with unsupportable software.
Please provide a link. If they’re using a multi-platform game engine/interface, even a basic one like SDL, porting actually becomes quite trivial. On the other hand if they’ve written to windows specific APIs like win32 and direct X, then the porting effort becomes more substantial naturally.
Take a look in the mirror. You are extremely dogmatic and few of your arguments are well rounded.
Uh Huh…try installing Linux on older non Intel hardware then get back to me. Hell we aren’t even talking ancient, the AMD piledriver based APUs are still being sold in budget laptops in 2023, good luck Chuck getting a working driver as the last Linux driver released was nearly a half decade ago.
Say what you want about Windows but I have systems out there running with XP era drivers for obscure hardware and Win2K era applications that the company requires for their work, runs just fine in Windows 10.
bassbeast,
We’re not talking about the same thing. Artem S. Tashkinov’s talking about software backwards compatibility. You’re talking about hardware compatibility with some specific AMD APU. BTW you keep bringing this up over and over and over and over again as though it refutes any pro-linux argument…
osnews.com/story/135200/windows-11-22h2-sun-valley-2-apparently-going-public-on-september-20/
osnews.com/story/135335/microsoft-releases-windows-11-22h2-formally-dubbed-the-2022-update/
osnews.com/story/135579/used-thin-client-pcs-are-an-unsexy-readily-available-raspberry-pi-alternative/
osnews.com/story/135329/linux-optimised-for-386-and-486/
Here’s the thing though, when you buy/build system for alt-os, be it linux or any other one, it is crucial that you select components that known to work, otherwise you are leaving it purely up to chance. Worse yet, in your case I think it’s worse than chance, you’re actually cherry picking hardware that you know doesn’t work. It would be fine if your message was “make sure you don’t make the same mistake I did and be sure to select compatible hardware”. But the way you go about repeating the same hardware incompatibility as if everyone experiences the same hardware incompatibilities is FUD. I’ve built a few AMD PCs and they all ran linux fine. I can sympathize with those who’ve had compatibility trouble and not everyone is good at building and selecting computers for alt-os…but if you continually make the same mistakes without learning how to do it right, then maybe you should be buying support from a qualified linux vendor instead of going the DIY route with untested hardware.
I have some Intel Atom boards and Windows 8 and 10 can`t get 3d at all. Debian/Lubuntu – 3d by default.
FWIW, I have had to support a proprietary binary on linux, which depended on a specific version of a shared library. It sucked. I’m not sure what I would do today if that requirement still existed. Containers? Snap? IDK it was awful and likely not secure.
Not sure if you checked on XP, but a lot of NT incompatibilities with 9x code went away with XP. So while I understand why everyone loved windows 2k, it was not great for those that needed the 9x code compatibility.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
Yes, I completely agree. Most users don’t stray far from managed repos or software managers, but when you’re responsible for managing dependencies by hand, it becomes a DLL hell. Manual dependency resolution totally sucks. I’ve handled it a number of ways in the past, but I think an isolated/container environment may be the cleanest way to handle this so as to keep dependency issues from propagating to other software.
Hard for me to say because any software that exhibited incompatibilities at the time got updated and/or replaced with supported software. It was atypical for me to have a need to go back and run older binaries that I had already replaced.
It’s not that all the compatibility layers are stupid or unwelcome, yes MS should be lauded for maintaining compatability. But that wasn’t what the article was about, it was about that MS should update it’s own system software rather than maintaining different looks for system settings and admin software.
PS Which application from 1995 would you still want to run? (This applies to both Linux and Windows!)
I do run a very old game called Stars! from 1995 (Windows) but it works flawlessly under Linux as well.
Linux file says:
stars!.exe: MS-DOS executable, NE for MS Windows 3.x (EXE)
OK I have to correct myself, this Windows 16bit executable (GUI app) works only under Linux, not on Windows 10. Isn’t that ironic, don’t you think?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars! (needs the exclamation mark)
Specialized engineering software that was discontinued due to sudden death of the single author and terrible undocumented spaghetti code with a full comprehensive testing suite.
My stupid apps from highschool including my somewhat awful ide I wrote.
If after 25 years of use, the management of the company refuses to pay for a replacement of this unmaintainable application, I hold them accountable for this COBOL-like death trap. Nice of MS though to make it technically still possible. But I think you could do the same with Linux, just never update your computer. Note that my Windows app from 1995 still works on an up to date Manjaro linux laptop.
Linux backwards compatibility is better than you think.
The kernel is very backwards compatible, assuming you have all the right libs in place then binaries from the early linuxes will actually still run on a current x86_64 kernel. Linus is very strict on anything that breaks userland.
Source compatibility is also very good, i have code that predates Linux entirely (intended for sunos and other old unix systems of the day) that still compiles and runs on today’s linux systems.
What gets people, is the fact that modern distros do not include the backwards compatibility libs by default, in fact many distros for 64bit machines don’t even include 32bit libraries by default. The reason for this is that there’s actually very few people who want to run old binaries on a current linux system. Most of the things you run on linux are open source, so you can just recompile them for the new system. Most software you’d run on linux is also free, so there is far less reason not to run the latest version.
A lot of stuff built decades ago is severely lacking in modern secure coding practices and security features. It might be fun to run as a hobby or a learning exercise, but you really shouldn’t be running things like that in any kind of serious production environment.
Question for Linux people: Do you just ignore all the times when an application is built for QT/KDE, or GTK/Gnome, or the endless other desktop options and GUIs that isn’t the one you are currently using? My personal experience is that Linux is far worse about this. Plus it’s not like anything critical is changing. There’s barely anyone who has any problem continuing to use theses apps after such minor changes.
I’ve been using Linux exclusively for more than two decades but I don’t want to be among “Linux people”, it sounds almost insulting to me, I just use what I like to use. I could have used Haiku or FreeBSD if they suited my needs.
Now on to your question: I don’t care about graphical toolkits, I only care when applications which I used extensively don’t get ported to new versions of toolkits, and there’s no way to install/use them and that has happened a lot. For instance, I love KNetStats from KDE 3.x and no one has bothered to port it (I’ve even offered money for a port). As a result I gave up on it. I can compile it manually but I don’t want to have kdelibs3 (they are still available in Fedora 37) installed on my system as I already have both Qt5/Qt6 installed.
Speaking of Qt6. Qt5’s QtWebKit component has been deprecated and hasn’t been maintained for years (thus it contains known vulnerabilities) and now the two Qt5 applications that I use, QuiteRSS and GoldenDict, are both in jeopardy as they can be dropped any time. The developers behind them have lost interest and distros don’t have the manpower to port them to QtWebEngine (Chromium based HTML engine).
GTK2 is also EOL and I have a ton of applications which use it.
That’s Linux/Open Source for you. You can rely/depend on nothing unless you have the money/experience to maintain something you need. BTW, this problem applies to FreeBSD as well as the OS uses a ton of the same packages, including libraries, toolkits, DEs, applications, etc. I’ve even heard that FreeBSD wants to migrate to Wayland as well.
Heyyy I’m a Linux people. 🙂
I don’t understand your question… Are you asking, how can I complain about Windows application user interfaces being inconsistent when Linux software application user interfaces are so inconsistent? Easy, they’re both crap. 😉
First of all, about my setup, I don’t use a desktop environment. For around 10 years now I’ve been using the very simple Openbox window manager and have loved it. For GUI applications, I use the best tool for the job regardless of toolkit. I’ve worked hard to apply the same theme to GTK, Qt, and whatever other toolkit that pops up but it’s really hard to do, and my results are not that impressive.
But, no joke, much of my time with Linux of the past 23 years has been grumbling about, “Why can’t Linux have a nice consistent user interface theme like Windows???” …but then I realized, oh, I guess software on Windows isn’t really that consistent either. OMG my biggest pet peeve is disc burning software on Windows. Why does every one of them insist on completely re-inventing how the GUI should look?? Ah well, it used to bug me, but nowadays I just think it’s funny.
UI consistency is the #1 reason I found Haiku and fell in love with it. But that was before they added Qt applications, and more recently GTK applications. It makes me a little sad, but ultimately I decided it’s a good thing. The more software the better.
As a person paying for at least one OEM DSP copy of Windows since Windows XP, I find the UI inconsistencies in things like icons and spinner animations embarrassing. I mean, I do get it that UI redesigns are time consuming, but can’t they hire some intern to make sure that at least all icons and spinners are consistent?
Apple has no problem doing this, and it’s one of the things that give Macs their premium feel.
When it comes to Windows, Microsoft is a backward compatibility provider.
Here we go again. Windows users back in the blue corner. Linux back to your red corner please, thanks.
Nice article. Hopefully someone at Microsoft is reading it.
I do find it encouraging that I actually needed to read this article to actually notice most of these inconsistencies. Using Windows 11 on a day-to-day basis, I didn’t really notice, and tbh stuff like the Run dialog is lightly skinned so that it doesn’t stand out too much. Ironically, the Metro remnants stick out a lot more IMHO, even though under the hood Windows 10 and 11 are extremely similar.
A lot of the older layers are ones that most users will never see, not one of my not tech friends have ever configured ODBC. a lot of these are ones that nerds, techs and admins will see, and frankly, i like the fact some of these work and look the same as they always have
From the article: “Another fundamental change in Windows 11 is the location of the Start button which, after 27 years, has been moved from the left-hand corner to the center of the screen”.
Well, that “fundamental” change I could do in most of DEs I used in the past 15 years, as they were all customizable. But I couldn’t be bothered most of the time…
Windows is a dinosaur. This especially started to show in the lest decade or so. When Microsoft wanted to introduce Metro and that effort more or less failed. Similar to their mobile efforts. Where they were at least a decade behind. In regards to technologies such as GNU/Linux and Java. Anyway. From UI point of view they didn’t produce anything meaningful for around a decade now. The truth being nobody asked them to. Back when Windows has started. They copied the UI paradigm they didn’t invent. Over the years have polished it. People in general being OK with that. The idea Microsoft will now invent something new in regards to UI. That people will like much more. I somehow doubt that. Especially as such decisions are and will be heavily influenced by possible monetization. Just like Metro was. They more or less have two options. Go back to Windows 7 and don’t fix what ain’t broken. Or to justify new versions of Windows from UI perspective. To introduce theming, port Compiz to Windows … And justify new Windows versions based on that. Some bling. That is look you can finally rotate a cube on Windows. All in all until Windows has a monopoly on desktop. They are good. Once something new comes along. Then in my opinion Windows will be in trouble. As it will show. That Windows really is a dinosaur. And not much Microsoft can do about it. As they don’t want to undermine their current position. Hence they are not open for introducing changes. And as they are not doing that. They are already a decade or more behind.