Windows 10 is getting yet another redesign this time next year - Sensationalist Headlines

https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/133590/a985d602-3e2c-420a-a1b7-61994c5adaad/image.png kind of a mess since i haven't had the time to properly dive into it, i would love to make my own theme and icons but it's a daunting task. it dualboots into macOS though and the background I use is the default teal from windows 95/98 https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/133590/ba0ae4f6-fc31-4900-8685-5f470fa5986e/image.png

I don't know where people got that idea from. The 3.1 and 9x UI elements stuck around for a long time after XP came out. XP was just out long enough to let that die out. And technically, the Win95 stuff hasn't disappeared yet. Just browse around the Windows folder. You'll find a few dozen 16 color icons still kicking. Face it, UI consistency was never Microsoft's forte.

If you blow through shell32.dll you'll see tons of stuff from every icon set from 10 to 3: https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/441/a0bd8b5e-a416-41f5-97c6-d705bdfbb0e2/shell3.PNG https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/441/14678bcf-b767-44c3-87d3-e00fdf45f69a/shell2.PNG https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/441/8f57c1d5-2403-4eb3-a5a9-bc381a31b82c/shell.PNG

And this is pretty much it. Shit isn't consistent in Windows, because MS is more concerned with making sure stuff works. Because of some crappy program someone wrote 15 years ago, they have to retain that XP UI, or else the program UI breaks and they can only move it over once they are sure it is 99% compatible. The fact that we have programs and scripts at work that are nearly 25 years old, yet all function perfectly in Win10 32 bit, is quite frankly insane if you think about it. Because Win10 still retains the Windows 3.1 buttons and UI elements used.

not for long!

Try hitting Win+R and type in "dialer.exe"

technology of tomorrow, today!

Yeah, in some very rare cases you can even still get the Win3.1 folder tree dialog to pop up when a program is browsing for files. Y'know, this thing: https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/198768/7aab17bf-9eef-4ddd-9d73-47847311166d/image.png And it's true, the fact that Win10 still natively works with certain programs as far back as a quarter-century ago is a damn miracle in and of itself, and Microsoft should absolutely be commended for making it possible. Especially considering all of that was on vastly different hardware to what we all run nowadays. I still have a copy of Microsoft Image Composer that I sometimes use for raster graphics work, as no other program has really come close to its interface and workflow since (aside from maybe Inkscape, but that's a vector graphics program and gets kinda clunky for raster work). Its last update was in 1997. That means the last system it was designed in consideration for was Win95, only one version newer than Win3.1. It still runs pretty much as well as it did back then, if limited in applicability to today's standards. By all sane expectations, that ought to be unthinkable; the Game Boy Color was a future product when this thing stopped being updated. ... That being said, I do think it would be wise if Microsoft started adopting a legacy-free policy for Windows going forward, at least for the base product. I think it would do the OS a ton of good to drop a lot of those old assets and compatibility code, and - for the lay-user who sticks almost entirely to modern software on reasonably recent machines - giving them as consistent and polished an experience as possible when fresh out of the box. Cut out huge swathes of that rat's nest of executables and DLLs, shrink the install footprint, give us all as clean a slate as we can get, and bring everything that's left completely up-to-date. For power users, the compatibility stuff for older versions of Windows could come in the form of optional installs, like how it handles language packs. There's a reason almost none of us have parallel ports or serial ports or floppy drives on our computers anymore, and that's because every now and then, you just need to do a good pruning. If any of that old stuff is still needed, we can make an adapter to plug it into the modern tech.

Yup, with you all the way on that one. Unfortunately, that would require modularizing everything ala unix style. I say unfortunately, because every time they try and tear it apart they seem to give up halfway through. User-space is still spilling everywhere, and the solutions for dll hell still don'treally address the underlying architectural issues imo.

Win 10 is such a nightmare when you work in tech support and you have computer illiterate people that only just now have upgraded from win 7 and the interface keeps changing.

The thing is, I'm sure Microsoft considered this- but where do you start cutting? It's like a city built on top of another city, on top of another. It all supports each other and removing legacy support could have side effects no one saw coming.

This only works if there's an icon there. If you have the menu bar there it does nothing (ie firefox, chrome) Also it closes that Window, don't do it on anything important.

I'd actually turn it around. Instead of cutting from the current mess, start with a blank slate. Put back in the bare minimum needed to get the Windows shell running at full functionality. Then modern desktop apps built with Win10 in mind, as well as UWP apps. Take that baseline and then completely rewrite all the components that comprise it according to the latest standards, while still making sure all the new code spits out the same output for any particular input as it did before. Go one version back, to Win8. Stuff that was deprecated in Win10, find out what that needs to be reintroduced to work. Rewrite all that to modern standards and package it as a compatibility extension to the Win10 core. Then go another one back, to Win7. Same process, although the Win7 module is instead stacked on top of the Win8 one. It would depend on the Win8 module already being installed, and just sees the Win10 core and Win8 module on top of it as just one big singular Win8 core. Then Vista legacy support is stacked on top of Win7, seeing it on top of the Win8 module on top of the Win10 core as just an even bigger Win7 core. XP support dependent on Vista. And so on, each version further back like an additional layer of different-colored candy on a jawbreaker, that further layers would see as just a bigger and bigger jawbreaker (there's also a Sonic 3 & Knuckles cartridge analogy to be made in there, but I'm tired and can't think straight). The idea is that rather than more modern software being an ever-climbing tower of patchwork on top of a very old base, it's flipped around so that the base itself rewritten from scratch to be completely modern, and older functionality is added back in as modules on top of that. Basically building backwards. As each version further back in the release order has to piggyback on having the modules for all chronologically subsequent versions present first, it both guarantees that support is methodically reintroduced in reverse order from the current standard so that nothing breaks from newer functionality it's dependent getting rewritten and at the same time allows users to only install compatibility modules for as far back as they need. Like plugging a USB-A dongle into a machine that only has USB-C ports, so that you can then plug a serial port adapter into the USB-A port. But if you don't need the serial port, then you can just forgo that adapter and stick with the USB-A dongle, or even just stick to the machine itself if all your stuff is on USB-C these days. At least, that's how I would do it, but I'm not a software engineer so I've probably glossed over a million reasons as to why that wouldn't work.

anything important will ask you about unsaved changes. It's just a close button

I run some software at work that doesn't do that. Don't rely on programs to be done intelligently. Also, some stuff can take ages to open up, don't want to sit through it again.

I have a rectangular monitor. I think everyone does. Get rid of the rounded corners

I actually like the look of the new design.

I can't believe nobody remembers that a rounded corner window will fully filly the screen when maximized. The bottom corners were squared anyway in XP.

As someone with a single monitor I enjoy the fact that all my windows line up perfectly when I section them up, having a bunch of rounded gaps is going to drive me insane.

Oh, are we posting linux desktops? https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/249570/71b1ee9a-4e55-481e-bcfc-ab3b26a87c72/editorpng.png Ignore the garbage program in vim

is i3 fun/nice in your opinion? i almost tried to get into it but bailed because it didn't seem worthwhile at the moment due to a whole host of issues i had with my computer.

have a few friends that swear by it. I can't really get into it either. Mostly because it's not really applicable to my daily use as of now. I might give it a go next time I get a new laptop, but for now I'm settling for MacOS/Pop!_OS dualboot. even though that comes with its own set of headaches. How is battery life on Linux distress still so damn lacking? Pop easily has the best power management built in and I still only get half the battery time MacOS gives me.

macOS killed my battery, it barely holds a charge for more than 30 minutes now and I'm not sure what I did wrong. I use linux for gaming so I'm not on it as often and it's always plugged in when I do.

Even gently riced Gnome 3 looks better and operates much more smoothly than Windows. I remember back on 7 where you could could smash the windows key, the start menu would immediately appear without any lag, you could hammer any half complete search term in, smash enter and most of the time get the program you wanted. Its not like that anymore, half the time you have Bing interjecting with unsolicited web searches, and the rest Windows fails to locate core system components in its results. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/450868/51aeff39-c7fd-4c6a-a8f0-9b66d8af3db2/Screenshot from 2019-05-08 01-44-13.png

The idea for me is that I set up workspaces for various tasks that get loaded at startup and then it serves as a distraction-free environment that uses nearly zero battery because everything is so spartan.

I'd check if it's old or worn out. My battery gets 7-8 hours on MacOs. but it's also a Mac, so there isn't any hackintoshery going on that could be a factor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0DDQumaaCg

one possible solution now that we're seeing higher resolutions and bigger monitors could be the introduction of a tiling manager and window gaps, basically what peachy posted above. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/133590/c52189fd-e75d-49ba-ba7f-506108c9dd91/image.png you could argue that the gaps are wasting space but we can afford that nowadays and the tiling has been a lot nicer for me than the way i've been stacking and hiding my windows on 1366x768