Boy I could not stand Windows 8. Unfortunately, many of their techniques were copied into Linux distribution views and it made my life worse. The new start menu was perhaps the worst.

It created this massive doorway effect where I'd hit Start and the whole screen would whiz and spin and then there'd be all these moving tiles and I'll forget what I hit Start for. Frequently I'd then hit Esc, remember, and Start again. This was compounded by the fact that if you started typing after hitting start it wouldn't just filter to the applications. God knows what it would actually do but not that.

I was one of the people who enjoyed Windows Vista (which introduced sudo to Windows users) and Windows 7 and even Windows 10 after which the i7-4790k machine I had to do the Windows was no longer eligible for Windows 11 so I have no idea what that looks like.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_perception#Relation_to_e...

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72deluxe 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes you are correct that after Windows 8 we had this obsession in Linux-land with making applications more "full-screen" and less "distracting", at a time when screen resolutions were increasing significantly and you could actually make use of the increased screen resolution for multiple side-by-side windows. It seemed to be a backwards move, and I never went to GNOME 3 from GNOME 2. macOS was also guilty of this, where the "maximise" equivalent button became a daft "full screen" button (why would I need a fullscreen calculator on a 24" screen?).

The obnoxious Windows start menu was on Windows Server for a while, and it was unbearable. Sadly the Start menu in Windows 11 is just as useless, and I miss the performance of the Windows 98 / NT / 2000 / XP (in simple mode) menu where you could press Start > P > A > N (or Start > P > across right > N) and know it would go Start > Programs > Accessories > Notepad in 4 keypresses in lightning time.

We have never returned to this speed or efficiency.

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ahartmetz 3 hours ago | parent [-]

"We" have on Linux. On KDE, that't Alt-Space, kw (it probably shows KWrite now), Enter. That is KRunner, but the start menu thing has a similar feature, too.

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72deluxe 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I use Mate desktop and I know I can do Ctrl-Esc > P > Q for Programming > QtCreator (using the classic simple menu), and I have mapped Windows + R for app launch so can do something similar.

I didn't mean to lump Linuxland into one "we" but I was referring to the general flow of the landscape (particularly in GNOME land) where there was the enthusiasm to simplify (aka "remove features") and do odd UI things to remove the previous 35+ years of desktop interaction for no obvious reason.

Apologies for my generalisation.

	▲	treesknees an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Laptops with touch screens started to become standard around that time. Simplifying the UI was targeting these devices. Ubuntu’s Unity was another DE that came out targeting touch. I’m not saying I liked GNOME 3, or agreed with their decision to make life more difficult for mouse navigation and longtime power users, but it was easier to navigate with a finger. That was the obvious reason why they did it.

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realusername 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I also loved Windows Vista, the system itself was quite buggy and slow but the UI was absolutely amazing and clear.

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ale42 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Windows 7 was better IMHO: clear interface, and less buggy than Vista.

	▲	chithanh an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Windows Vista SP2 was basically identical to Windows 7 RTM, with mostly cosmetic differences. What changed is that by Windows 7 launch, PC specs had caught up with system requirements and WDDM drivers had matured and were no longer crashing all the time. So the first impression was very different.