Windows 10. Nah mate.

[pigamus]

One's 20H2, other one's 2004, both gone silvery grey

[RenegadeScrew]

I had it updated to 20H2 (prior to uninstalling it) and hadn't noticed any appearance or bloat changes.

Does the appearance chance maybe rely on it being activated?

[pigamus]

I was still using Windows 7 up until recently and had turned off updates a while ago as I had one of those processors that slowed to a crawl due to that notorious security update.

I've got this but also used this vid to remove the bloat/telemetry stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgW7iXejfqQ

Useful video, thanks - his taskbar's gone grey as well!

[Blumf]

what's the tits with there being no windows 9?

Apparently some apps (mostly Java ones) would check the Window's version string to see if it started with "Windows 9" and assume you were running Windows 95 or 98.

It's not quiet as dumb as it first sounds, but still pretty crap. Still better than the SysWoW64 dir.

[canadagoose]

If the appearance hasn't changed with 20H2 you're using dark mode. Change it to light mode (appearance settings probably) and you'll notice.

[RenegadeScrew]

But I did change it to light mode, I got rid and installed Lubuntu.

Boom, tish.

[Dex Sawash]

Was going to bitch about W10 not having shutdown shortcut but googled it instead. Window+x is supposed to bring up a shutdown menu. Thanks!

[olliebean]

If the appearance hasn't changed with 20H2 you're using dark mode. Change it to light mode (appearance settings probably) and you'll notice.

Oh wow, that's horrible. Although, if the taskbar and start menu weren't already light in light mode, what on earth was the point of it?

[mobias]

Windows 10 is such a pile of shite. I had been a devoted Apple user for almost 20 years so switched back to Windows full time recently has been a painful experience. I find it quite funny that as far as aesthetics goes PC hardware has mostly left Apple in the dust but as far as the OS in concerned nothing much has moved on for Windows since Windows 95.  I get that Windows has to do something a bit different to what OSX has to do but even so its such a backward OS.

I do find it quite funny that these high end visually incredible gaming PC's have to run this utterly drab OS.

[Replies From View]

It's 20H2 I think

all these trendy new ways of abbreviating The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

[Zetetic]

I find it quite funny that as far as aesthetics goes PC hardware has mostly left Apple in the dust

???

as far as the OS in concerned nothing much has moved on for Windows since Windows 95.

?????

[Zetetic]

I won't play computer games on anything that doesn't support Scherzo:

[mobias]

???

Granted its all down to taste but gone are the days when all PC's are in grey featureless boxes. Some new PC designs are extraordinary examples of form and function. Its Apple that seem fairly bland and conservative these days, and I say that as a past Apple fan.

?????

Going back to windows recently it just seems like time has stood still with it. I hadn't really used Windows much since the late 90's and on the surface it doesn't seem to have moved on in any great visual way. Obviously it has underneath it all but on top it just seems like its the same old. 

[Blumf]

Going back to windows recently it just seems like time has stood still with it. I hadn't really used Windows much since the late 90's and on the surface it doesn't seem to have moved on in any great visual way. Obviously it has underneath it all but on top it just seems like its the same old.

I'll second Zetetic's ???

Mac OS in 1984:


Menu at top, drives on desktop, close window button on left

Max OS in 2021:


Menu at top, drives on desktop, close window button on left

Apart from the colour and the increased resolution, the only real visual change in all that time seems to be the Dock.

Nearly four decades of the same basic interface. That's not a bad thing.

[Zetetic]

Both Mac OS and Windows have changed substantially in terms of "design language" over the years.

My vague feeling is that Mac OS was strongest, in terms of consistency and purpose, a few years back and that it's since suffered a bit from trying merge idea from iOS, iPadOS into macOS. I note that Aqua has considerably calmed down in the last two decades - high saturation and weird skeuomorphism (which I like aesthetically...) in UI elements is lot less prominent.

Windows's journey through Metro and Fluent is an incoherent mess in lots of ways, tied up with the usual MS committent to all sorts of backwards compatibility - the Settings/Control Panel thing being the obvious example of that. But I think Fluent is inoffensive and pleasant enough in quite a similar way to modern Aqua. (It's also fairly obviously quite different to Windows 98.)

Both of them feel like they've tended towards making most UI elements less interesting. Both of them use transparency and blurring quite a lot in quite similar ways, I think, to convey layering? Other than of them have followed the general tendency towards flatness (although not to the degree of Android's Material design, which seems more ideological/aesthetic than others).

I do think that Windows has much better windows management than Mac OS at this point, which I still think is weird. (Stuff like Magnet or Spectacle Rectangle tries to fix this.)

[Blumf]

That's the weird thing about the comment as, if you're talking about the look of the icons and widgets, Windows has changed massively in the past decade, never mind quarter of a century. But then, pretty much all desktop OSs have.

[Sebastian Cobb]

My main gripe with OSX is their maddening fullscreen mode, or more specifically it's the default option of the green thing in the top left of the app window, I think this should maximise and the option click should do fullscreen because fullscreen is FUCKING HORRIBLE and hides the menus.

It should be possible to swap these round (if only for accessibility reasons), but the Apple response/users' response is that Apple is infallible and it is you that is wrong for not wanting to hold down option every time.

[Zetetic]

And often maximise doesn't work as you'd expect either, and this convention of the app doing what it feels like is reinforced by some of Apple's own apps.

This does kind of feel like an example of how windows management on Mac OS has been haphazardly influenced by convictions about convergence with iOS. (In contrast to Windows, which has various features designed around navigating and resizing multiple windows on screen at once and tries to make those features discoverable in a fairly unobtrusive fashion.)

[touchingcloth]

the Settings/Control Panel thing

It's this sort of thing which makes Windows feel like it's been stagnant. A lot of the most important admin features haven't changed one jot (well, half a jot perhaps) since 95, so no matter what the main OS looks and feels like, as soon as I need to remove a program or update a driver or partition a disk I feel like I've been transported back in time three decades.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I'd rather seldom-used, but important under-the-hood features to be aligned with my muscle-memory rather than being rearranged to stay 'current' but that's just me.

[olliebean]

I'd rather seldom-used, but important under-the-hood features to be aligned with my muscle-memory rather than being rearranged to stay 'current' but that's just me.

Or worse, removed entirely because they mistake "seldom-used" for "not worth maintaining."

[Zetetic]

And what Windows does in practice, for better or worse, is usually maintain legacy interfaces while providing new ones (that, in recent years, are at least feeling a bit more consistent and reusable - PowerShell being the obvious example of that).

[Sebastian Cobb]

Although saying that I had to jump on a windows server today and my experience is counter to all of this. I think it was WS 2016 because it used metro heavily and I think 19 has dialled that back a little.

Anyway, I just needed to poke around on it and wanted to search for files by a certain extension and fuck me the search tool was fucking woeful, some weird full-screen mess that looked like it hadn't loaded properly. It couldn't find the extension I wanted, or *.txt or *.exe and I'm fairly sure it had some of those on there. After googling it turns out the search service needed to be enabled (?) and I had to piss about in server manager to enable that and then some weird settings via windows explorer to get to another screen to tell it what to actually look for.

Then it still couldn't find fuck all until it had built the index.

I think windows search peaked with the annoyingly cutesy XP dog and has been going downhill since.

[touchingcloth]

Windows search is bafflingly shit, only slightly less bafflingly so than Google Drive's.

MacOS feels like it makes incremental improvements to the guts of the OS with each major release, and usually without deprecating lesser-used stuff unilaterally. A recent update removed the ability to run the native "secure erase" (write zeroes/random data to taste) on flash media, but mainly because that's not very effective for flash storage rather than people not using it.

The very latest OS has completely changed the way stone things are administered, though, as system files are stored in a read only partition which even sudo-ing and unmounting won't help you with unless you boot in safe mode. I think I like that, but it does mean I can't change my wallpapers as easily, though arguably it's no bad thing to make it hard as hell to get into certain parts of an OS.

[Zetetic]

usually without deprecating lesser-used stuff unilaterally

Disabling 32-bit applications seems a fairly major counterexample to this.
About to kill OpenGL. About to disappear Python, Perl and Ruby.

(Which is not me saying that these things are bad to do.)

[Zetetic]

I think I like that, but it does mean I can't change my wallpapers as easily, though arguably it's no bad thing to make it hard as hell to get into certain parts of an OS.

It turned out to be pain in the arse when the Radeon 6490M in my laptop finally committed suicide. (You have to go through a slightly dance involving disabling SIP, shuffling drivers around the place, writing to PRAM, reloading drivers etc. if you want a computer that both actually boots ever again and isn't trying to start a fire.)

[Blumf]

Windows search is bafflingly shit

It is total shit. Used to be one of those processes that hammered the hard drive endlessly for 'indexing' that never seemed to result in any searches actually working.

This helps a lot:
https://tools.stefankueng.com/grepWin.html

[Sebastian Cobb]

Windows search is bafflingly shit, only slightly less bafflingly so than Google Drive's.

IntelliJ is like this too. A massive kitchen sink IDE that has so many features you can't find the ones you want and even when you do it can't get the basics right. An example of something that does many jobs badly. Which is almost always what the worst software is and what genuinely good software usually ends up becoming.

Which brings me round to begrudgingly admitting Microsofts VS Code is actually relatively nice as it's more than a text editor but slightly less than a full-fat IDE and well supported plugins you can add yourself to bloat it up if you wish. Works well on Linux and OSX too. It's UI is pretty nice and doesn't feel exactly 'microsofty' either.

This isn't entirely relevant, but I hate it and certain colleagues who think it's imperative to write code it can understand so its code completion works, even if that means writing code that is objectively less functional, egregiously verbose or less readable.

[Sebastian Cobb]

It is total shit. Used to be one of those processes that hammered the hard drive endlessly for 'indexing' that never seemed to result in any searches actually working.

This helps a lot:
https://tools.stefankueng.com/grepWin.html

Yes in the XP days you would've had to have been daft or rich enough to afford a mega pc to turn indexing on but at least the dog found stuff even if it took some time.

[touchingcloth]

It turned out to be pain in the arse when the Radeon 6490M in my laptop finally committed suicide. (You have to go through a slightly dance involving disabling SIP, shuffling drivers around the place, writing to PRAM, reloading drivers etc. if you want a computer that both actually boots ever again and isn't trying to start a fire.)

Apart from hard drives, I've never changed any hardware in any of my Macs, so I can't really speak to how well they play with PCI peripherals compared with Windows. Back 15 years ago they played much more nicely with audio devices connected over serial ports than Windows could manage.

It's probably fair to say that Windows having to cater to a wider market of modders (my hunch is I'm not alone in basically not changing my Macs from their factory forms) is one of the reasons they perhaps can't make add drastic changes to the fundamentals as easily. Not to mention the proportion of corporate users of Windows compared to Mac Server versions.

The depreciation of 32bit stuff was noisily flagged for at least two major versions of OSX if I recall correctly, and I can't remember which if any 32 bit software I was using at the time didn't get an update in time, though I bet many corporate environments would struggle to make the switch completely with any real speed.