The problem is that Windows with all its warts now is still far ahead of the competition in that department (desktop GUI). Whether that's due to monopoly or being actually better, it doesn't matter. The fact is competition is almost non-existent.
I don't think that's true anymore. Gnome with two tweaks (put the min/max buttons back on the window header and move the main menu to the bottom of the screen so it works like the old win 10 task bar) and it's streets ahead of Windows 11. It's a great blessing in disguise when Microsoft decide your old laptop won't support Windows 11.
The article mentioned all the UI generations you can find in Windows. Linux is even worse. Once you leave the menus your desktop environment provides, it becomes a design free for all. Sometimes you'll see UI styles from another environment (run Kompare in Gnome), sometimes you get ancient X UIs.
I get your point and I'd raise you the suite of Microsoft products:
- Word, PowerPoint, Excel, all one style
- Teams, different style
- Notepad, different style
- Paint, different style
That's just within the MS ecosystem, leave that ecosystem and you rapidly find the same style mess that you get on Linux. It's basically due to the many different GUI frameworks, not the OS itself, hell MS supplies a whole list of frameworks that look different from each other.
Even MacOS/iOS which are _really_ good at having a cohesive UI style suffer from this problem.
I'd argue that if this is a valid complaint with Linux DEs (be it GNOME/KDE/what have you) then it's an equally valid complaint for Windows.
If GNOME bundled Kompare or other KDE programs you might have a point. You wouldn't blame Apple for the look of LibreOffice on macOS so why blame GNOME for the non-GNOME programs?
The GP wasn't blaming Gnome, they were complaining about the Linux GUI desktop in general. Running a KDE app on Gnome was just an example; they could just as well have mentioned the opposite and still not be "complaining about KDE ".
I don't mind the big borders, although most of the time I'm using dual 2k screens.
The borders don't seem that much bigger than the ones in Windows 10. As for the extensions, I've been enabling those via extensions.gnome.org and have no problems so far on Buster or Bullseye.
Dash-to-panel helps, but it doesn't go far enough for me. It doesn't work well in vertical orientations: for instance, status icons should be arranged in horizontal rows. In a single column they take up far too much space.
In my opinion, Window management on Mac is bad compared with everything that isn't Mac. On the other hand, there's lots to like about Macs, so I keep using them.
I'm still using programs daily that I acquired in the 90's,some of which was last updated in the 90s.
Updating the OS is one thing, there will be change, and none of us likes change, but it doesn't cascade down to having to change every detail of my work flow.
So maybe it's the only thing Windows has, but for me anyway it's a pretty big "only".
It's also the bane of its existence, because it means that they can NEVER retire anything, because by doing so they would break backwards compatability.
And that's actually how we ended up here. They can never get rid of even Win16 GUI (let alone Win32) because it would break shit written for Windows 3.1 (yes, there are still some dialogs in Windows 11 that use Windows 3.1 file select dialog, namely the ODBC Data Source Administrator (32-bit)[0].
So they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Win32 isn't being used for anything they are making now, but it's used by other people, and more importantly it's used by all the old apps.
So now they have to justify ETERNAL support for an essentially deprecated API. Which they obviously aren't doing, which is why we're here.
> I'm still using programs daily that I acquired in the 90's,some of which was last updated in the 90s.
Unless they are extremely domain specific, surely there are modern alternatives?
Actually windows 64 bit won't run 16 bit programs, that part has been gone for a decade or so.
Yes there are probably alternatives, but that's the point, I like the way it's working now - I don't want to find new equivalents and then discover what's missing from them.
But I'm not sure what the existance of win32 has to do with anything - it's not like it stops win64 from working.
I can't speak for Windows 11 as I didn't use it, but Windows 10 feels better. macOS feels very dumbed down and Apple takes decisions instead of letting the user do it.
I say KDE is the best desktop if they could just get their shit together and debug it on all hardware configurations. It's absolutely miles ahead of Windows in features, however, as a power user I can fix it if it gets wonky, but a regular user shouldn't be expected to.
> The problem is that Windows with all its warts now is still far ahead of the competition in that department (desktop GUI)
Same with Windows Explorer. Finder in macOS is still terribly crippled compared to it:
-It can't even perform folder merges in many cases, only allowing you to "Replace" the entire folder.
-You can't pause/resume file transfers.
-Cancelling large transfers is like canceling a print job in the 00's - it might cancel, but if it does it will be when 95% of the job is done anyway and you're screwed.
-You aren't shown metadata of any files you are prompted about.
-Batch management of file conflicts/actions not possible.
Most of these features were added to Explorer all the way back in Vista 15 years ago.
GNOME is way better the Windows UI, checked out what options there where when win11 came out and i have been on fedora ever since, really modern UI and none of the Microsoft bs
Windows 7 was a GUI horror show compared to pretty much anything else at the time. Ugly font rendering, e.g. Especially if you have a ton of open windows, Windows has always been amazingly bad at helping the user manage them. Multiple / desktops can finally be enabled since Windows 10 (without hackery), but are still a pain. The font rendering has improved but is nowhere near MacOS. I could go on for a while. In my experience, the only people who think Windows has superior GUI have never truly worked with other desktops.
