
What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite - konchunas
https://blog.usejournal.com/what-microsoft-got-right-about-power-users-but-not-quite-8efa8de59408
======
piggycurse
Why is this blog post so negative? Microsoft are trying and giving all of the
developers the tools to help affect the project along the way.

The Terminal project was only announced 1 year ago[0]. As I understand it,
they had to more or less split how the whole conhost.exe work in order to
allow Terminal to even exist. The settings UI is far from sexy, but they're
working on it[1]. I think it's impressive to know that 6 people did that in a
year[2].

Regarding the slow startup of WSL2, yes it is slow to start, but would you
rather have to wait 5x for a git clone command[3]? They even have a deep dive
into how files are save in WSL1 which can be related to how it works in
WSL2[4]

I completely disagree with the conclusion of performance is not Microsoft's
concern. The comparison is to GNOME3 which was released in 2011. 9 years of
development compared to 1 year. "The polish just isn't there"

[0]: [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/introducing-
windo...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/introducing-windows-
terminal/)

[1]:
[https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/1564](https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/1564)

[2]: [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-
terminal-...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-
terminal-1-0/)

[3]: [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-
wsl-2/](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-wsl-2/)

[4]: [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/a-deep-dive-
into-...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/a-deep-dive-into-how-wsl-
allows-windows-to-access-linux-files/)

~~~
genr8
M$ will only open source things that don't make them their money, while at the
same time, tricking developers that they care by appropriating the communities
work and extracting as much value out of Linux for free as possible, for their
own benefit. Providing second rate hybrids masquerading as innovations, is all
they can really do, to keep people locked into Windows. I stayed on Windows
desktop for 20 years even while using linux for servers, and just gave it up
this year. Linux has its own problems but if I disagree with the status quo of
programs, I can either switch to another distro, mod the open source code
myself, or file a bug report so a real person actually does something about
it. This is too little, too late, from Microsoft, and accepting it now will
just lead to the demise of Linux.

~~~
munchbunny
I have trouble believing that Linux's demise is remotely possible at this
point. Too many huge tech companies have made their beds with it for Microsoft
to be able to change that.

Linux desktop has the opposite problem: it's always been niche for mainstream
users because its app ecosystem has never been good enough and it's often
finicky to set up, even if its support for developers has been great.

------
Grumbledour
I actually don't get Powertoys at all.

They provide basic functionality I would not even class as for power users.
Yeah, they are nice, they were nice in win95. Why do I need a separate Program
25 years later to rebind some keys or switch windows, yet every new win10
version tinkers with cortana? People say it would add "bloat", but somehow
basic functionality beneficial to many users is bloat while candy crush and
xbox whatever is not?

It is just so weird that after decades, basic functionality like bulk renaming
files that should be in explorer is still considered a "power user" feature.

~~~
pwdisswordfish2
It is not weird at all once you realise who Microsoft's management wants as
its customers. The business people at MS really do not expect nor want
customers to be fiddling around with technical stuff. They want customers to
see MS as the one who can solve all problems. The business people at Microsoft
prefer non-technical customers. Technically-minded customers are not the ideal
customers for Microsoft. A great example is Mark Russinovich. They had to hire
him to keep him quiet and under control. He had become a problem solver for
too many technically-minded customers.

In the mind of the Microsoft business person

Clippy: "Yes."

PowerToys: "Why?"

~~~
zaphar
In 1995 this might have been a true statement. In 2020 Microsoft has seen the
writing on the wall and realized that to stay at all relevant they need a seat
at the table for cloud services. The only way to succeed at that is to win
over the ultimate power user, developers.

WSL{1,2}, Windows Terminal, SQL Server on Linux, too many intiatives to count
all focused on catching up to the reality that webservices and infrastructure
are built on Linux. Whether you believe they'll succeed or not they are most
definitely trying.

~~~
abraxas
Microsoft feels very schizophrenic at this point. On the one hand I think
there exists a faction that wants to move more into the open ecosystem. On the
other though there appears to be an entrenched faction that's hell bent on
retaining as much proprietary status quo as they feel they can get away with.
Thus the command line is still incompatible with any Unix shell, the SQL
syntax subtly different to make it a pain for those coming from other
databases, proprietary sockets, threads API's and so on. It's possible to make
a Windows ecosystem interact with the rest of the world, it's just a big pain
in the butt caused by an endless stream of small pains.

~~~
genr8
MS is so large, one hand doesn't know what any other division is doing, and
their community interaction is horrible because they make more money when
people are ill informed and just go with the flow. So even if 10% of the
company is "new blood" and was pushing open source out the back door for the
past 5 years, the upper management is just now catching on that "hey maybe
they were right".

------
temac
> But the first launch of the Linux subsystem after system reboot is
> unbelievably slow.

Proceeds to provide a video showing a 3s startup time to illustrate the
unbelievable slowness that happens once after a reboot.

I suspect the favorite activity of the author is therefore to reboot their
computer, and to quickly rush to WSL2 after that. In which case I agree the
user experience is not ideal.

~~~
temac
Continuing to read:

> Why is it animated? Or, even if it is, why is animation so slow?

Given it is not animated on my computer, I suspect it is animated when Windows
is configured to have animations...

(and it if this theory is good, it is nice that they respect the disabling of
animations, by the way, in contrast with the... Start Menu!)

~~~
trnglina
> by the way, in contrast with the... Start Menu!

Well, good news! I don't know when this might've changed (I have animations
enabled), but I just tested it on Windows 10 2004, and the start menu doesn't
animate with animations off.

------
nmeofthestate
This seems like a joke article. The 'long' startup time appears to be a second
or two.

The slow animated menu is quick - I'd like to see someone actually select a
menu item in the time it takes for it to drop down. The animation doesn't
impact usability. All a bit bizarre.

~~~
Analemma_
The article sucks. I was hoping for a serious critique of Microsoft's new
direction and the architecture of WSL2, .NET Core, etc., but it's just a
handful of very trivial performance gripes, along with things the author
simply doesn't understand, like the default application registered for *.json
files being Notepad only until you install something better.

I wish there was a higher bar for upvoting articles besides "it bashes
Microsoft, to the top with it"

------
ceronman
I tried WSL2 for about six months.

I'm really glad that MS is investing in this and it's an aspect that has been
long neglected. If you're a developer, and unless you're using MS stack
(.NET), the experience has been always subpar.

I have to agree with the author that the experience is not quite there yet.
But a lot of progress has been done. And I hope the progress continues and
maybe in the future I'll try it again.

For me there is not a single deal breaker, but it's just a thousand paper
cuts. Removing those will take time. Some of the annoying things I
encountered:

1\. Overall slowness. It's not only startup, it's in general. Not only on
heavy tasks like parallel compiling, but even for lightweight stuff, you
immediately notice when you try a real linux.

2\. Some config like setting up ssh-agent correctly are hard and different
than a real linux. No idea why.

3\. Windows Terminal development is quite fast, and sometimes things change or
break. For instance, the background color of my terminal suddenly changed and
I had no idea why. After some googling and modifying config, it was fixed.

4\. The fact that it required to sign in for Windows Preview program. (I think
this is not required anymore) but it was very annoying as it requires very
long updates that require like a million reboots. No idea why Windows has to
reboot so many times for a single update. Additionally, after every update
there was always surprises. From the harmless Edge popping up from nowhere
asking you to become default browser for the nth time, to some hardware
misconfiguration. Nothing too bad, but annoying.

5\. (This one very subjective of course) The windows UI overall is, how to say
it, a mess. Font rendering is awful. The mix of old style UI with new style UI
is horrible. Some settings will be in new style, some other settings will be
in old style.

As I said, I might try again in the future. But now I switched to Fedora and
I'm really really happy with Gnome 3 and good old real Linux. I still have the
Windows partition just in case, but I haven't booted in a while.

~~~
WorldMaker
> No idea why Windows has to reboot so many times for a single update.

It's an interesting tangent, but Insider Preview updates are fascinating from
a technical standpoint. Nearly every single one is installed closer to how
Windows' big "Feature Updates" work (as essentially full Windows images that
get built to a new folder, all the old things installed back into it, then the
old Windows folder archived or removed) than old school sets of patches to
individual files. It's been interesting as an Insider since very early in
Windows 10's life to see how much faster these updates have gotten over time.
Installing _lots_ of updates this way on Insider Preview machines seems to
have helped a lot make the big "Feature Updates" themselves faster/better/more
reliable. It's maybe not as obvious to someone installing a big Feature Update
at most twice a year, but as a long time Windows user and having seen the
gradient of change in Insiders Preview (and read some of what I could in their
discussions on the technical efforts on blogs), it has been fascinating to
watch.

WSL2 should be out of preview in the soon-to-be-rolled-out May 2020 feature
update.

------
projektfu
I think this site might want to reconsider using Medium. All of the animated
screenshots were covered with ads in Safari on iOS, with no apparent way of
getting past them. I had really no idea what they were talking about.

~~~
genr8
You might want to reconsider using Safari on iOS...

~~~
llampx
Why?

------
_bxg1
What an incredibly petty set of complaints.

\- "It takes ~3 seconds for WSL2 to start up the first time"

\- "Windows Terminal [gasp] _has animations_ "

\- "The new spotlight search isn't already _flawless_ "

\- "File explorer right-click menus have... too many _things_ in them"

(Paraphrasing, of course)

And I honestly wonder if the flickering thing is a problem with the author's
GPU or something. Seems to happen everywhere and I've never seen it on my
machine.

~~~
genr8
I agree, but its a personal blog that got self-posted to HN, its just his
opinion man. You can disregard it if you want.

------
ChrisLTD
It'd be nice if it were faster, but considering the usefulness of WSL, I'm
cool waiting ~3 seconds for the terminal to load the first time after boot.

~~~
yadco
3 seconds for a virtual machine (wsl2 under the hood is hyperv) is quite good.

------
snazz
If you have VS Code installed, the JSON configuration for the Windows Terminal
won't open in Notepad.

~~~
benbristow
The config file still seems like a cop-out for "we couldn't be arsed to build
a GUI settings editor". Excusable at alpha/beta, not a final release.

Command prompt & Powershell both have GUI settings editors.

~~~
snazz
VS Code's configuration is a GUI skin over JSON, so that's probably what they
should do with the terminal as well.

~~~
genr8
Yea. But that was added later, and theres still important JSON build-system
files that you need to edit manually to this day. JSON isnt descriptive enough
to auto-translate the raw files into a functional GUI. They seem to think its
better off as text, but that goes against everything else on Windows
mentality, and its not documented properly.

------
kfk
We are 30+ years and Windows Task Scheduler is still broken. Compare that to
simple .txt files to schedule anything you need in Linux. Windows took the UI
path for users and that's OK, but most of Power users are still much better
off with text files and simple utilities (like crontab) that work. This type
of ecosystem is completely broken on Windows, I don't think it can be fixed,
it is too much of a paradigm shift. On the same token trying to do good
UI/User experience is still too hard on Linux. I take no issue with Windows,
business users, friends and my parents are probably better off with it, but
the "power" stuff? Please don't.

~~~
fetbaffe
How is Windows Task Scheduler broken?

~~~
amw
Can't bulk-kill processes, for one. Not searchable, for two.

~~~
fetbaffe
Haven't used it in a long time, but looking at it now, the GUI is definitely
clunky and those features are missing.

Wasn't there another GUI during the Windows XP days?

~~~
WorldMaker
That MMC snap-in hasn't changed much in the NT era of Windows. You might be
recalling 95-ME's even worse task scheduler?

------
alkonaut
> That is how long it takes to start WSL terminal for the very first time
> after reboot

That speed extremely impressive. Not sure why he's comparing it to how long it
starts to run a linux terminal on his linux machine? Shouldn't he be comparing
it to how long it takes to e.g. start a different type of VM on windows, or
how long it takes to cold start a Wine thing on Linux?

------
badsectoracula
> Open or save file Dialog is just the worst in all regards.

I guess the author never used any Gtk+ 3 file dialog :-P. Honestly the fact
that you can perform actual file manipulation, use shell extensions (e.g.
version control overlay icons), etc put it above pretty much every other file
dialog except perhaps KDE's (but AFAIK even that doesn't have all the
functionality you'd see in a regular file manager window).

Having said that, yes, it is unnecessarily slow and not because of the
features above since some applications use older versions of the dialog that
still have these features but appear instantly. Not sure why the "full
fledged" version is slow.

------
4cao
The history of Microsoft is the history of workarounds on top of workarounds,
year after year, rinse and repeat. Here's a novel thought: instead of
providing yet another iteration of workarounds for the power user, how about
just fixing it for every user.

Take for instance the Start Menu. When the Win-X "quick access" menu was added
years ago, it was essentially an admission that the Start Menu is not the best
way to start at least some things. It didn't really get much better since but
the Search and Run functionality was integrated into it. Now one of the
PowerToys replaces the Win-R menu as a yet another clumsy attempt at fixing
the Start Menu by bypassing it. And it seems no new functionality beyond what
is already implemented elsewhere is being added, except everything will of
course get a different alternate look. Some more discussion about it here:
[https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/44](https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/44)

It looks like there isn't anyone at Microsoft who can take a look at the big
picture and decide what they actually want to accomplish with the UI in the
medium run. Different groups of people come and go, keep adding different
things, abandon them, after a while somebody else starts off with yet another
approach in parallel without drawing any conclusions from the failed previous
one, etc. The lack of co-ordination really amazes me. Microsoft used to once
advertise with the slogan "Where do you want to go today?" These days it seems
to me they're not going anywhere, just running in circles.

~~~
WorldMaker
I think it's an interesting refutation to Google's "one search box to rule
them all" philosophy. Over the course of Windows Vista through 8.1 Microsoft
_attempted just that_ at a consumer scale that Google could only wish they
could impact "where they live". (As much as people assume people live in the
browser, Windows is still Windows.) The evidence mounted up _overwhelmingly_
that people didn't want just one search box, that Google is wrong (they've yet
to unify their search boxes like they claim to philosophically anyway), and
that the context of where a search box appears _matters_ , and so Windows 10
has seen the re-separation of search boxes.

One of those "context" switches that Microsoft finds is a useful context to
know is "power user" versus "regular user": regular user Start Menu versus
power user Win+X, regular user Search and Run versus power user
Win+R/PowerTopys Run. (At one point in Windows 8 Microsoft tried to use the
Win+R shortcut for something that wasn't "power user run a thing" and nearly
saw a revolt.) It becomes a self-selecting "reveal" of different feature sets
to match what features the user thinks they are ready for.

------
therealmarv
that are actually the small little things which are fast on a Mac. This
seconds of thought are also clearly visible on some Ubuntu machines... Gnome
is not always optimized and Snap programs make you think your laptop is
frozen.

~~~
konchunas
Contrary to release notes latest Gnome 3 in Ubuntu 20.04 is slower on my
machine compared to the previous one in 19.10. That's why I switched to XFCE
which is super snappy. Not i3 snappy, but really close. I've also experienced
increased startup time with Snap, Flatpak and AppImages regardless of DE.

~~~
Dayshine
> Not i3 snappy

i3 isn't even snappy, the default application launcher can take up to 10
seconds to open on my old laptop.

There is a faster application launcher you can use instead, but you have to
hunt through github issues to find out about it. The i3 project maintainers
seem to actively object to telling users about 3rd party components and
simultaneously refuse to integrate them or improve the default behaviour.

~~~
snazz
Are you talking about dmenu? That's always been fast on my machine (sway, not
i3).

~~~
Dayshine
Yup, although it's i3 not dmenu causing the problem.

[https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/949](https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/949)

Reported 7 years ago...

------
schoolornot
> Recently Windows team made a few stunning announcements

More and more telemetry in each subsequent OS release. The fact I had to flip
6 switches off during OOBE on a brand new MS Surface followed by a "hosed"
Windows Update run tells me they still haven't figured out what their power
users want.

------
whywhywhywhy
You can't whinge about time spent on animations and then also complain about
flickering. Teams being told that design doesn't matter is why so few
developers on windows and linux care about flickering at all.

Although I definitely agree that it's absurd that in 2020 an operating system
doesn't have a standard built in way to reconfigure key shortcuts in any
application installed.

------
cm2187
Can windows terminal be used remotely? The only remote terminal I am aware of
in windows is remote powershell but it sucks badly. It takes ages to come
online after a reboot, is unencrypted by default, and because of security
issues cannot interact with windows update.

~~~
mickeypi
Yes, you can do that with ssh even from cmd.exe. Windows ships with an ssh
server too, you just have to enable those features.

~~~
cm2187
Thanks. I wasn't aware of that. But it looks like it is a recent thing only
available on the latest version of windows server.

------
CawCawCaw
For such a powerful power user, it seems that the author never had any JSON
editors set up on his environment, removed the default keyboard shortcuts from
Terminal, and couldn't figure out how to customize the context menu. Hmmmm.

------
bromonkey
"It doesn’t have no syntax highlighting," ...[scrolls down] (Blockchain
engineer): ahhhhh, ok

All jokes aside, author: "no" should be "any" in this sentence. Double
negatives are rarely used in English.

~~~
konchunas
Got it, thanks!

------
caribousoup
Putting ads in your 3 second blog animations? Really? Comes across as
incredibly trashy.

Unrelated to the article, sorry. I have never seen this before...

~~~
konchunas
I'm sorry for that. As Streamable states: ads will be shown as soon as video
becomes popular. But they didn't state exactly how popular. I couldn't find
any other convenient method to embed small animations with fine quality and
ability to pause them. Any recommendation is appreciated.

------
alex_duf
Comparing with my current macos build, it seems like a bliss to use really.

