💾 Archived View for thrig.me › tech › windows.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 03:17:37. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I did try to run Windows back when I worked for some corporation or the other. The experience was not very good.
First up, there are various distractions. You can waste time trying to disable them, but those little menu bar geegaws and whatnot will after some amount of time, maybe after an update or who knows will turn themselves back on again. Not an experience I'd pay money for. The pop-up contagion has also spread to the modern web, which is also pretty much unusable.
Second, something billing itself as the Windows firewall would (sometimes) interrupt an application startup with a dialog box stating that "outlook.exe" was a dangerous program (duh?) and you could either not start outlook or waste time getting rid of the pop-up, which I guess is what everyone else did as well, in which case what was the pointless pop-up to a non-admin user even for? I eventually went back to mutt.
Outlook once took 25 minutes to become usable following a reboot (the OS "booted" much faster than that). Maybe remote folders or whatever had a hang-over? I remember this fondly because some senior vice president wanted something urgently at the time. Apparently that corporation is now handing out Apple M1 laptops, which could be seen as an improvement over schleppware Windows on potato Dells.
Years later I apologized to a customer; we were having trouble finding something that an outlook interface redesign had hidden who knows where. I mean what else do you tell them? Sorry that Microsoft keeps dicking around with the interface which means you must periodically learn a totally new application that only happens to carry the old name?
A coworker recommended Visio; I remarked that the interface was not very good (compared to, say, Aldus PageMager, Clarisworks, or OmniGraffle) and he apologized, yeah, it was better before Microsoft bought it. This is something of a common theme; I recall that Adobe ruined PageMaker, and so did Apple Clarisworks. Regardless, most all the Windows interfaces rub me the wrong way, like I'd try to drag something in Word to move it--no, for that you need an awkward right-click or something. Also in a previous job customers had begged to not have Microsoft Word 6 installed--maybe it was too big and too slow and too bloated? And that was years after Joel Spolsky claimed that bloatware did not exist. Heh. Meanwhile, I still recall the look on the scientist's face when I told him that Execl had been corrupting his genomic data. Yeah, Excel does that, you need to click here and twiddle these options, and to watch it like a hawk to ensure that options do not ever turn themselves back on again. Some decades later and after who knows how much corruption those genome sequences apparently got renamed.
Anyways, Windows XP was pretty much the worst operating system that I've ever used.
Someone else's computer was broken, again. Who knows what the user had been doing, but when I got there the wifi was disconnected (it likes to do this) and there was "a program with a gibberish name hath crashed" window. Eh. Anyways, it took multiple tries to get the wifi actually connected again--wifi on OpenBSD has never been this difficult--and then of course their Gmail was showing a blank white page which only a force refresh corrected, though that might have been Firefox or Gmail or both being stupid.
Windows is still terrible.