Indeed, this is the dirty secret and shame of our industry that doesn't get acknowledged enough. We are so prone to group-think and follow-the-thought-leaders that as my parents would have said, "would you follow them off a cliff?" the answer as an industry is a clear "yes." We rarely seem to learn from the lessons of the past either.

Gnome 3 was also doing a major restructure, which forced MATE to be built. I liked some things about Gnome 3's original release, but I was insanely annoyed because a lot of it went away, I'm not sure if it was just distro specific or packages changed drastically, I don't even know how to describe the feature, but for example Gnome 3 had apps that could show / hide on the edges of your screen, so if you were logged in to MSN (or even XMPP) you could chat with someone, then it would 'hide' it was really cool how that was implemented, I was upset to never see it again on any other OS, it felt like a nice way to keep a chat window available but still out of the way.

People don't like when I say this, but it's just another piece of evidence that mobile phones ruined everything.

IIRC the true story behind that dark period is that Microsoft was making vague murmurings about suing everyone for cloning Windows XP, so everyone felt they had to run away from that.

The problem was that it was a bunch of people who had no good ideas and no insight trying to come up with new paradigms for interaction, and they were all bad. What the Linuxen desktops were doing was even worse than Win8, and the ones on that journey were all determined for some reason to deprecate the old WinXP clone UIs at the same time. Gnome really moved into a position of harassing and mocking its old users (basically regulation redhat behavior.)

Yes. The constant full screen color flashing made Windows 8 not just unpleasant to use, I was unable to use it since I literally got migraines after using it for too long.

Click on a pdf? The whole screen turns bright red for a second before loading. Click on a Word file, same but blue. It was hell to use for people sensitive to flashing lights.

I got special permission at work to stick with Windows 7 longer than the rest of the company for medical reasons.

There's also the issue of distance for a mouse cursor to travel to select something. I think the general issue is imposing one interface for every mode of input instead of options, so either select an appropriate interface depending on how the start menu was invoked (even if it's just scaling it down to a confined space) or letting people select the default however it's invoked. Yes that's going to be more work, but when we're talking about the largest corporations on the planet I struggle to believe they can't afford it.

The Windows 8 start menu is no different from Launchpad on macOS throwing up a grid of icons that takes over the screen. Except macOS doesn't have the benefit of live tiles to excuse it.

With the continuous degradation of Windows past 8.1, I slowly moved away from Surface, Windows and Touch, but even months after I have got a non-touch notebook, I still would touch my screen.

Yes, and this is a huge habit difference between Mac and Windows laptop users I know. Give a Windows user a Mac and they will habitually try to use scrollbars with their fingers. Mac users just don’t have that habit and they find it strange. The reflective MacBook screens also look awful with the slightest smudge so that enforces the “don’t touch” reflex for them, I think.

I don’t want a touchscreen laptop, but I do want a laptop that can convert to a tablet. Not to use as a tablet, but because then I can plug in a proper keyboard and just use the laptop as a monitor. If they sold non-touchscreen convertibles I’d go for that, but realistically that’s an impossible niche.

I do use one that converts to a tablet and has a stylus. But I have to do a lot of serious drawing for a living. I also appreciate coming close to book note taking without having to print stuff.

It really depends on what you do.

Yes, quite a bit. Not so much as a replacement for trackpad/keyboard/mouse, but mostly to write down notes with a stylus, or do some quick sketches. I don't do that often enough to justify carrying another device like a tablet, but regularly enough to feel limited by the absence of touchscreens.

I don't, but my kids definitely do. I think this is a generational gap largely due to "what you grew up on." A laptop having a touch screen is near the top of the list of very-nice-to-have or even must-have features for my kids

I can't imagine my working life without a touchscreen. Drag to scroll, touch to focus, pinch to zoom, just the usual stuff. I also use business style light laptops, so touch is always there and more usable/precise than the touchpad. People always get confused when they ask me for help on their machines and I reach to the screen for... nothing, usually.

I have a Surface Laptop Studio. And while Windows 11 overall kinda sucks, the ability to turn it into a little easel and the responsiveness of the pen are both great. I also like precise scrolling with the touchscreen sometimes.

The part of the hardware I really don't like is that the `Fn` key toggles fn-lock with a tap and then alt + F4 and such don't work. There's enough space to have another row of keys or something, I never want fn-lock off (I use four finger scroll for volume controls), it's infuriating. But pretty much all laptops (and shockingly some desktop keyboards) have similarly dumb behavior.

That still worked yes! But I don't think most people knew about this. You just gave me flashbacks to those days working at the local college, we would do this to restart all the machines in a classroom, we had them all on Deepfreeze so it would purge anything students downloaded / installed. We had other remote ways of doing it, but it was fun doing the shortcut too from time to time.

It did. To some extent it seems like it was a telemetry mistake that some of the easier mouse controls (an actual button for start rather than gesture; a missing obvious power button; not having a simple mouse button to get to the Charms; etc). Windows users opted into Windows telemetry all must have seemed to be keyboard-heavy (probably because only certain types of power users, such as myself, were opting in to telemetry). All of the keyboard shortcuts still worked. Some new keyboard shortcuts were added. Windows 8 was extremely useful from a keyboard shortcut viewpoint. (The Charms made a lot more sense from the keyboard.)

If you had good Live Tiles there was a ton of information density. You could have the weather, your calendar, recent emails, recent tweets, recent photos, interesting news, etc all on one at-a-glance screen (versus the phone form factor where you'd need at least some scrolling).

It felt like wasted space on the desktop because it was originally hard for desktop apps to opt-in to Live Tiles and send Live Tile updates and not enough people were using the sorts of multi-platform apps that had great Live Tiles.

Double-click Trash to get to the files.