Windows just keeps getting weirder. There's this regrettable dichotomy between (1) a rock solid OS core with great features like Hyper-V, PowerShell and exceptional back-compat, and (2) a crap, sluggish, inconsistent UI slapped on top, laden with ads, "Rewards" Points and tracking.
WSL2, power toys and hands down the best window management of any OS, I hate working on my MBP just due to the difficulty of managing different windows and aligning them on the same desktop.
Probably seems weird to you, but I've never got on with the Windows UI. There's too many things that steal focus. I've been XFCE for too many years now, but it doesn't change significantly that I find I have to invest time learning what's changed.
There used to be a 'tile windows' since windows 2.0 or something like that, but it did just that, splatted the windows to take up all the space.
One thing I like about X11 and Windows doesn't do it, is alt-dragging from anywhere in the window, last time I used Windows you couldn't move things around by holding alt and left clicking anywhere, you could only do that from the title bar, which means you can't slide the top of the window off the screen.
The other major thing for me is selection copy, if you highlight text, you can't middle mouse button to paste it, you have to ctrl-c first, which is just more steps.
I rarely get focus stolen on Windows 10. They now make it very difficult for applications to do this (see the allowed conditions here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/... ). In contrast, focus stealing is a way of life on XFCE, and I just have to put up with it. The settings they recommend to fix it don't actually help.
Really? There's two programs I know of that will take focus and they're both authentication prompts. The sort of thing that cranks my handle on Windows were mostly from the browser and almost anything else.
With XFCE though, I'm quite happy with the level of focus stealing, things that seem to be justifiable are at the right level, like authentication prompts.
Out of interest, what are the things that take focus for you? Maybe we're running totally different sets of programs which might give me an impression that isn't warranted.
Long time XFCE user here. Steam will absolutely steal focus. I usually start Steam and then move over to something else like the terminal or web browser and multiple times during Steam's startup it will steal focus. I just want it to start up in the background. Aside from that, I agree focus stealing isn't a huge deal in XFCE. (XFCE 4.18, Debian trixie/testing)
Now you mention it, my kid has sometimes had problems with Steam where it has started a game and we can't easily leave the game. I presumed though that was a deliberate design so that your game has focus as that's the thing that's most interactive. Usually a pkill -f <game> is needed.
I've not noticed focus stealing outside of Steam. What is steam made from, it seems very browserish.
This topic is causing some self-reflection and wonder if I am the peculiar one who does different things and just not bumping into it, I mainly work from xterm, screen, mutt, vim and a lot of time in firefox. Perhaps this combination just doesn't start things that request focus, but when in MS Windows I noticed it a lot.
You're right about steam, but now I'm on a path of wondering...
This topic confirms that focus stealing is a thing in XFCE, I have some research to do!
The Office 365 message that it is unable to log into a resource (usually because your VPN has dropped, not unusual for home workers nowadays) doesn't even go into focus when it's supposed to be at this point.
I am baffled as to how that has been allowed to go on so long. It makes Office a trainwreck usability wise.
In case you hadn't come across it yet, there's a third-party piece of software called AltDrag [0] that lets you do it. It's kind of a must have for me whenever I have to use windows. Yes this should just be builtin
you can't slide the top of the window off the screen
You can use "move" in the system menu. Once activated, the arrow keys in the keyboard will move the window outside the desktop window, not sure if you can do it using the mouse somehow.
You can also use Win+Up arrow key to maximize the window, from there you can grab the title bar to drag it somewhere (preferably inside the desktop this time).
FYI -- on my MBP I use a program called Spectacle to snap windows around, and I now have no complaints relative to what you can do on Windows.
Development on Spectacle ceased[1] and it looks like the community may have rallied around an open-source program called Rectangle, which is open source. At least, judging from this single Reddit thread lol:
[1] Although when I search for it now, I see an update from 2023 on softonic? Although the original dev's github repo for it hasn't been updated in years. https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle
I use Rectangle and still have complaints about Mac window management. Rectangle itself is great, but it's discernably a patch over a bad window management paradigm, and the awkwardness underneath pretty regularly shows through.
As just one example—the dock is atrocious for a browser-centric workflow. I only ever have 2 "apps" open at a time, but I have 6 Firefox windows and 2 IDE windows, and remembering where I put a specific window (or even that I already have it open!) is a chronic problem. I know about right-click to show all, but the text that pops up is small (it's a context menu, not a first-class navigation element) and that doesn't help with the discoverability problem.
I'm sure that there are other apps to patch the other aspects of the system that irritate me, but if you have to install 4 third party tools to get something close to how good Windows is out of the box then I'd say OP has a good point.
I think this must be a matter of preference. I absolutely hate Windows’ window management. I waste endless time fussing around getting windows where I want them to be.
This happens every time I unplug my laptop from external monitors, or plug it in to external monitors (even if they’re the exact same model and configuration as other monitors I’ve previously used). It’s aggravating and distracts me from what I’m trying to do.
Whereas I never have any issues on OSX, always find my windows where I expect them to be, and spend a lot less time moving and rearranging them.
The two operating systems do have different approaches to window management and to me it sounds like you simply prefer Windows, whereas I prefer OSX.
At work I have a Windows laptop that I plug into a dock with two additional monitors. Windows correctly returns windows to the screen it was previously using if I unplug and then plug the laptop back into the dock. Is that not the desired behaviour?
*bad window management for you
Believe it or not, some people actually do like to have free moving windows and such.
Also you seem to be ignorant of a lot of features of macOS, like cmd-tab, focus an app, cmd-up arrow to show the windows of the app, and so forth. Or swipe down from the trackpad on a Dock icon to show the windows of the app.
Anyway, YMMV as always.
Personally I find the window management atrocious not because of the way it was designed, which definitely works for me (and I hate the Windows’ one), but because of the bugs which they insist on never ever fixing…
> like cmd-tab, focus an app, cmd-up arrow to show the windows of the app, and so forth
It's not that I'm ignorant of these, it's that they're clunky for a browser centric workflow. The abstraction of an "app" is just plain wrong for the way that I and many others use computers these days, because one app (the browser) is home to most of the tasks I'm working on and already has its own second-level navigation in the form of tabs. The "app" layer means on Mac there are three levels of navigation to get to what I'm trying to do, which is too many.
What makes Windows (and most Linux DEs) better for the browser-centric world is that windows themselves are first class citizens—I don't have to pass through Firefox to get to GitHub.
Interesringly the default DE in MOST Linux distros is GNOME which does not do what you describe, instead it follows the MacOS approach of alt-tab going through apps and not windows. I agree it is frustrating though! Have recently moved back to Windows and their alt-tab going through windows was one of the things I liked. However Microsoft has sadly enhanced it to include groups of Windows if you have stacked them side by side. One step forward and one step backward. As is the norm for modern UX.
If you have it already, another alternative is to use BetterTouchTool and set it to override the behavior of the green corner button. For me it works just like Windows where there’s “minimize” on the yellow button and “maximize” on the green. I still use gestures like exposé but never have to worry about switching desktops or getting stuck in full screen.
On the opposite side, would you (or anybody) know of a program to show windows in a cascade/overview style, on windows? So for example have one or 2 “main” windows, and have some/all the other windows in a cascaded view in the background. I would think it would help productivity a lot.
(PowerToys doesn’t do this by itself, you have to select every window in place if I’m not mistaken.)
Out of curiosity, how many window managers have you used on Linux? I found some superior choices there but I do agree that Windows is generally ok with Mac being dead last.
Sorry for being off topic, but just tried powertoys based on your post, and holy cow! What an amazing piece of software. I particularly like the file unlocker feature, and the Windows implementation of Quick Look.
I have a question for you: If you make a Pie Chart with the time you send on each OS: Linux, Windows and Mac, what will be the percentages? Specially while you were young.
Of all the languages I speak, German is the more chaotic language by far. But most native Germans consider it the best/easiest.
For me the Windows management of Windows is horrible, but I spent like 90% of my time in Linux were I was young, even using things like "screen" that uses the command line and shortcuts to be the most efficient thing I have ever used (while requiring learning the shortcuts before becoming productive).
Today I use Mac like 95% of my time, control Linux machines with it and use Windows when the force of circumstance obliges me the 5%.
When I was young I was mostly using Windows. For the last 15 years or so it has been macOS. I made a number of attempts (sometimes lasting months) to use Linux but it never stuck.
My conclusion is that usability is mostly about getting used to how things work and a tiny bit of customisation. There are no significant usability differences between operating systems.
The _only_ thing that I have never gotten used to and that keeps slowing me down is that app switching (Cmd+Tab) in macOS is MRU while switching windows (Cmd+`, Cmd+Shift+`) within apps is circular.
I'm finding it impossible to remember whether I have to go forward or backward to get back to the window I'm looking for within an app.
I can really recommend yabai for window management. I have reached a nearly identical config between my work mac with yabai/xkhd and my i3wm-based linux workstation.
power toys is buggy. It has had this bug that shows on non-US keyboard layouts, and of course it will never be fixed because who cares about non-US keyboard layouts?
Meanwhile on KDE I have an easy option to swap caps lock and ctrl, without having to install some weird .exe file off github.
I have no experience with macOS, or trouble believing that it's even worse than Windows. That said:
I can't use WSL or PowerToys at work for (enforced) dumb policy reasons - this is possible because they're optional bolt-ons as opposed to integral parts of Windows.
PowerToys exists because the the base functionality is poor, and the contemporary PowerToys implementation leaves a lot to be desired.
And last but definitely not least, window management in Windows, with or without PowerToys, sucks donkey balls IMO, especially in heterogenous multi-monitor systems. Aggravated by the knee-capped taskbar. I mean, it's not like window management is great anywhere, but claiming that it's somehow good in Windows is rich.
Two anecdotes: starting Windows Terminal by clicking an icon in the taskbar (W10) creates a window that's not focused. W11 does away with the alt-space keyboard shortcut to open the window operations menu.
Can you clarify what you mean excatly. What you describe is possible in Windows out of the box. I think since Windows 7 or so. Or maybe your description is of a different feature I'm not familiar with.
It's the weekend so I can't confirm this with my work laptop but I'm pretty sure using arrow keys snaps windows in their predefined configurations (half the screen). And then the annoying UI asking what you want to do with the other half pops up. I could snap it to half the screen and then resize the window to it's original size but I shouldn't have to do that.
Many years ago, they used to charge a not inconsiderable amount for Windows. Given the trend towards making an OS cheap/free, I wonder is this some corporate response driven by a department somewhere that is charged with balancing the books.
That's the worst part (and I know that most people will never buy a license because they get it through their OEM or just crack it) but Microsoft are still happy to charge you £220 for a Windows 11 Pro licence [0] and shove ads in your face.
OEM licenses are not exactly free or cheap. I was perusing the local shops a couple of weeks ago and the same exact laptop without a Windows Home license is always $100 cheaper, no exceptions. More than that for Pro or whatever the fuck it's called. So most people will buy a license, they'll simply not be aware of it. How convenient for MS.
"OEM" licenses sold by retail is not at all representative of what actual PC makers pay, which is of course going to massively vary. I wouldn't be surprised if some manufacturers, especially those who have been flirting with Linux, have instead been paid to install Windows.
> The second all my games are fully compatible with Linux natively, I'm ditching
I've been seeing this sentiment since 2001 at least. No one ever follows through; if they did we would have seen this already in the desktop stats.
You will, whether you consciously realise it or not, switch to playing windows exclusive games the minute all your games run on Linux, hence you will never switch.
Yes it is. The Y axis is "Percentage of Steam users". The fact that the Linux percentage is increasing means that the the percentage of Windows users are decreasing. The graph shows a trend of migrating from Windows to Linux.
>I've been seeing this sentiment since 2001 at least. No one ever follows through; if they did we would have seen this already in the desktop stats.
There has been an inflection point crossed lately, because of Proton and the Steam Deck. Linux is at 1.95% market share on Steam today. A year ago it was 1.3%.
I think we are at an interesting reflection point. Desktop Linux is to the point where it does pass the grandma/cousin tests for usability/install. Games were one of the big items from a compatibility perspective. Combine that with Windows 11 not working on older, viable hardware... 2025 is going to be interesting.
Those of us who used it on desktop Linux helped drive the handheld, which is really accelerating compatibility. When Windows 10 hits EOL, folks got to go somewhere - and many are not going to toss out their hardware for new.
Microsoft are still happy to charge you £220 for a Windows 11 Pro licence...
You can buy Windows 10 Pro OEM licenses for less than 20€ online. I did just that for a familiar three months ago. The installation was validated and associated with the Microsoft account no problem.
Then you can "upgrade" to Windows 11 free of charge, if that's your thing.
NT was far more resource-demanding (i.e. "sluggish") than 9x due to all the abstractions - it's just the hardware that progressed so fast in a few years that it was kind of irrelevant.
That's true, NT was much more resource demanding but there were other mitigating factors too. Drivers were either inefficient and or badly written, the video driver imposed inflexible rules on software's access to the underlying hardware and its plug-and-play feature was brain-dead from the outset. Most of these problems weren't fixed until Windows 2000.
Incidentally, I've always thought W2K—taken all round—as the best version of Windows, it's the version with minimal dross and useless stuff and MS hadn't got into spying on users by that stage.
I feel like almost all software since roughly the advent of the CD-ROM, when distro size stopped being a major limit, has been in a race to outbloat Moore's Law.
The difference between NT and modern bloat (like electron) is that it was very much necessary bloat, the sort that makes computing safer and more reliable (running more things in user mode rather than with kernel authority, true multitasking), as opposed to abstractions that exist solely to boost productivity and make developers happy assembling their library lego blocks. But that 'bloat' made it too expensive in hardware requirements for the home user which is why the NT line had to exist separately from the 9x series until XP. And if anything, unfortunately, Microsoft kept making more compromises with NT that I wish they never did. NT 3.5 ran the graphic stack in user mode. They put it in the kernel for NT4 and only started backtracking on that sort of monolithic design with Vista. (Vista was a controversial OS but most of the architectural decisions they've made with it were the right ones and those decisions still live on in Windows 7, 8, 10 and 11).
IIRC in about 1989 NT 3.1 was a very solid an reliable system.
The problem was it did no do IP
It was mostly downhill from there.
I got my first Linux machine in about 1992 and lost touch
But keeping windows NT patched, and keeping it running IP reliably were incompatible for a while
Did not stop its wide introduction in my world as IP servers.
It was as if software managers did not know any other systems existed.
Linux was considered "a toy" because it was free, it was much more reliable than NT (as was BSD I hear)
Sun were the other option but I saw no one spending the money
It was buggy, unreliable, insecure NT servers all the way
Still is for some. Squeezing into a Windows instance on Azure, fifteen mouse clicks, three context switches, and you have emulated rsync... Still making money selling terrible software, but now as a service....
WinPE and other stripped-down unofficial "distros" of Windows do exist. Someone will try to run the Win2k shell on a Win11 kernel, if it hasn't already been done. Based on what MS has done with backwards-compatibility, I wouldn't be surprised if it almost "just works".
For compatibility mode, there's a bunch of old theming stuff. If you manage to crash a program in the right way, you can even get a Win2k-style grey-and-blue window to appear in some places, though it's hidden well.
This is the company that put the entire Windows 95 memory manager into later versions of Windows to keep compatibility, there are tons of old code paths still lying in wait for old software to reuse.
You can't use this stuff as your main UI well, it's no longer tested or optimised for that use case.
This is a great summary. Terminal and WSL2 were really nice additions to all of that other cool shit like hyper-v, sandbox, etc. But, I still rather just use Proxmox/Linux...
With five tabs open in Notepad, since they are placed in the titlebar, there remains only about 1 cm of titlebar by which I can grab the window to drag it around. This area is distinguished only by a short vertical pale grey line like a pipe character, because it's not cool to have a border around any interface element any more apparently. So I often drag a tab off the window by mistake and have to put it back and hunt for the small part that's actually the titlebar.
Then there's the way they put search into a fixed floating window, which when you search upward sits on top of the search result, obscuring it.
I sometimes think I’m the only person in the universe who doesn’t prefer tabs. I already have a way to manage multiple windows worth of content: my OS’s Window Manager. Why would I want every application I run to also implement its own custom window management—visually and functionally inconsistent from every other application’s custom window management?
I feel applications that do tabs are just like applications that do their own custom quirky File-Open dialog even though my OS provides a standard one.
They manage 2 entirely different contexts. When I want to check my mail, I know I just have to go to Firefox and hit the first tab; not cycle through 200 unorganized windows
Some window managers, such as Fluxbox, support "tabbed windows". You can group windows into one "superwindow" and then switch these in a titlebar. Maybe this is what the GP meant?
My number one grievance with Win11. Also, I think it's in the top 3 of all feature requests on Microsoft Feedback by votes. Yet, no movement. It feels so anachronistic to force the waste of space that is a horizontal task bar, in an age of wide (and still widening) screen aspect ratios. Microsoft's UX team is... not good at their job, to put it very mildly.
It’s weird right? 1. keeps me firmly on the platform, I find it a delight how often things “just work”. Run a linux app? Just works. Hook up some niche 15yo printer? Just works. Run a game/demo made 20 years ago? Just works. Even MS Paint very much still just works.
It all just works and then the perfectly good Mail app is forcing my mom to switch to the new Outlook, which is Mail, but messier, with ads. What?
I wish Satya Nadella would pull a Steve and yell at some people for this shit. It’s eroding trust in the company that they maintained for so many decades, that can’t be a good long term game can it?
Nadella probably cheers for more ads revenue, more Azure lock-in, more o365 subscriptions, more edge market share and more silly AI usage because those must be the KPIs at this point, and it doesn't really matter nor shows in those KPIs whether they grew from inherently user-hostile patterns or based on merit and quality.
Game made 30 years ago needs dosbox, an open source project, to just work.
Game made with directx6 20 years ago will render in CPU and just work but be so slow to be unplayable. Then you need to replace the .dll and make it link with an open source library that reimplements dx and converts the calls to the new API, so that it can actually render in hardware.
Yes, solitaire.exe still works. 3d games less so.
I'm full of games like star wars jedi outcast or so that no longer work on windows.
Or my personal disappointment: Microsoft Flight Simulator X. Feels like that ought to work on Windows 10, but I couldn’t get it to. If I remember correctly it did work fine on Windows 8.1 strangely enough.
Having been yelled at repeatedly by an exec, please don't really do this. It is never constructive. Even yelling by Steve Jobs was unwarranted. If you have to yell at people there is a bigger problem which must be resolved first.
What comes to mind are the Office subscription prompts that come up frequently with updates and the OneDrive, basically, ad that is in the settings app.
I think there are others, but I believe I've figured out how to turn most of it off.
They push lots of MS when setting up Windows. My most recent install had them try to bribe me to sign up for a gaming service with a free month. That was only one example I saw during the install process alone. Doesn't include the shit I find actually using Windows itself. My first few days using Windows was spent working out how to uninstall or disable so much crap.
The hoops you have to jump through to use a local account are a prime example of user hostility. Sure it’s technically possible, but only if you are power user that searches online and figures out how. That’s the general feeling I have with Windows these days, it is technically possible to get it to work the way I want, but it generally feels like I’m fighting an adversary. Sure it’s currently possible to win, but it’s definitely not a good feeling, and not moving in the right direction.
Note if you installed with a local account and expect Bitlocker to work: make sure to actually enable it. With a local account.
Bitlocker may state that it's on, but by default, it doesn't encrypt the drive unless you log in to a Microsoft account or manually add a key protector.
This is documented on a Microsoft site somewhere, but it's shit like this that make me wary of the "bypass Microsoft's shit" approach; the bypass methods often lead to behaviour that Microsoft never bothered to test and has side effects they don't bother to warn you about.
PowerShell isn't bad. It's a paradigm shift, but the concept and execution are god (not great, but good). I recommend you seriously give it a chance, it's probably one of the only Microsoft things I miss on Linux (other commenters, i'm aware I can use PS as a Linux shell, but that requires trusting Microsoft to keep it good.)
An object oriented language that takes the piping concept and improves it so one can actually form pipelines that make sense and not waste limited resources in just parsing text. However at the same time add more powerful and efficient text parsing tools. So one can actually script on the go with ease.
An object oriented language that is not C which is the language which most stubborn Unix developers usually reach for when their shell is too inefficient or too unwieldy for certain tasks and create even more security holes.
