💾 Archived View for thrig.me › tech › windows.gmi captured on 2024-02-05 at 10:49:51. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-04-19)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I did try to run Windows back at some corporation or the other. The experience was no good.
First up, there are various distractions. You can waste time trying to disable them, but the menu bar geegaws will after some amount of time turn themselves back on again. Not an experience I'd pay money for. This pop-up contagion has also spread to the modern web.
Second, something billing itself as the Windows firewall would sometimes interrupt a startup with a dialog box stating that some "outlook.exe" was a dangerous program. Like, duh? Microsoft has many hits in the CVE charts. I eventually went back to mutt. Outlook once took 25 minutes to become usable following a reboot; the OS had "booted" much faster than that. I remember this fondly because some senior vice president wanted something urgently at the time. Apparently that corporation now hands out Apple M1 laptops, which might be 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, somewhere. I mean what else do you tell them? Sorry that Microsoft keeps fiddling with the interface which means you must periodically learn a totally new application that only happens to bear the old name? So much for their productivity, and mine trying to help.
A coworker years ago 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, the Windows interface invariably rubs me the wrong way, like I'd try to drag something in Word to move it--no, for that you need a right-click or who knows? No thanks.
In a previous job customers had begged not to have Microsoft Word 6 installed--maybe it was too big and too slow and too bloated? And that was years after some Joel Spolsky chap had 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 untwiddle themselves, assuming you want to keep using Excel. Some decades later and after who knows how much corruption the genome sequences got renamed.
Windows XP was pretty much the worst operating system that I've ever used. It's not too terrible if there's a fullscreen game covering it up, but in that case there could be FreeBSD or QNX under the hood and I wouldn't care less.
Various technical threads point to Microsoft now getting into spyware and ad spam. Who knew they could get even worse over time?
https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2011/02/problem-isnt-email-its-microsoft.html