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You "never understand" these posts and then list off a ton of crap I shouldn't have to do to an OS to make it usable.

The default experience of using windows is downright user-hostile and it reveals the thinking of the corporation behind it. Yeah, you _can_ do all that to make it somewhat usable, but when alternatives exist that are much less of a pain, I'll be taking those.


My point was that the article is logically flawed. The user mode of the OS sucks, so let's run the same user mode with a different kernel? What?

I don't care about configuration. I've had to do plenty of configuration on Linux as well; it's just different (text files instead of GPO/registry). I'm not sure I can list all the Arch Linux wiki articles I've read trying to get one driver or another feature working.

I am not here to convince anyone to stop using one platform or another. They're different tools that solve different problems, and I run all of them. I have a Linux laptop for work, a Windows laptop/desktop for personal use, a Proxmox hypervisor on my homelab running a variety of LXC containers, Linux and Windows Server guests.


>The user mode of the OS sucks,

Not from the perspective of Microsoft. It sells OneDrive and Office 365. It makes money from ads.

>so let's run the same user mode with a different kernel?

The kernel is a piece of legacy cruft that isn't necessary for selling OneDrive and Office 365. It's only a cost. Throw that out and replace with an off the shelf Linux kernel. With some minor tweaks, it can sell OneDrive too. Then you can fire a lot of kernel developers. The line goes up.


> The kernel is a piece of legacy cruft that isn't necessary for selling OneDrive and Office 365.

The kernel is running OneDrive and Office 365. It's making money hand-over-fist.


It also makes non-zero money from selling and maintaining Windows.

My experience of Linux (and Mac OS) has been the opposite; they are extremely painful to make usable.

Yes, I have to disable a lot of stuff to get Windows the way I like it. But that's still exponentially easier than having to add, install, or perhaps even buy a lot of stuff to maybe get Linux/Mac to behave kind of how I want it to.


Having been a longtime Windows user, an on/off Linux desktop user, and now primarily a Mac user, I really think it's just what you're used to. Each desktop environment has its own strengths and weaknesses, and trying to bend one to be like the other is going to end in frustration. The userland of each OS is sufficiently different that different desktop metaphors break in different ways when you try to port them. MacOS will never have a taskbar, Windows will never have a functional dock and system menubar, and Linux will never have a cohesive toolkit because it's too fragmented. But each has its strengths and the key to productivity is to work with the desktop as designed rather than against it.

My experience with paid independent Mac desktop apps (e.g. Little Snitch, Al Dente, Daisy Disk, Crossover, anything from Rogue Amoeba etc.) is that they try a lot harder to integrate well with the system than equivalent freeware apps on Windows. MacOS is definitely "missing" some features out of the box (per-app volume control?) but makes up for it with certain things largely being more seamless, especially with regard to drivers (in my experience).

I also miss Linux DEs some days for their extreme customization potential and low resource usage. But it's hard to achieve compatibility between the "best" applications of each DE and GTK and Qt have their own warts.

Just go with the flow, and if Windows jives with you then more power to you. I can't stand it anymore though.


> Having been a longtime Windows user, an on/off Linux desktop user, and now primarily a Mac user, I really think it's just what you're used to

I've also used all three OS's in anger and largely agree.

I like to call that sort of attitude YOSPOS, named after one of the technology-oriented subforums on Something Awful. It stands for "Your Operating System is a Piece Of Shit."

Which OS? Your OS, whichever one (the royal) You happen to be using at the time. They all stink for different reasons, and it's just a matter of which OS's annoyances you decide to put up with.

That said, good lord, Windows 11 has been rough. I actually don't mind most of the UI changes, but the AI psychosis and the general lack of stability has made Windows 11 one of the only versions of Windows I can remember that started mediocre and kept getting worse with updates instead of better.


Every OS sucks. Pick the one that you feel sucks the least for you at the time.

https://youtu.be/CPRvc2UMeMI

It's really really not a new sentiment.

From the description on this 14-year-old video:

  An older song, from back in the days of XP and OS X.3.

> You "never understand" these posts and then list off a ton of crap I shouldn't have to do to an OS to make it usable.

In the context of changes Microsoft could make, that list of instructions is there for demonstration purposes. It's about how if Microsoft wanted to clean up their mess, they have a far far easier method than what's suggested in the article.

> when alternatives exist that are much less of a pain, I'll be taking those

That's a different topic from the article and the comment you replied to.


By way of example — I can (and did) remove the ads from the Start Menu on Windows 10 Professional. But there's literally no reason they should've been there to begin with.

Large majority of population considers Windows usable as is, that is why you still see Windows at best buy and not Linux powered desktops, other than castrated Chromebooks.

Thing is there is no reason Microsoft’s Linux distro wouldn’t be just as horrible to use “out of the box”.

UX problems != low-level engineering issues.

I think most people agree that current Windows sucks due to a combination of engineering neglect and deliberate enshittification.

But how the OS is put together and some of the debug tooling (WinDbg, ProcDump, Windows Performance Analyzer, ttd, graphics debuggers etc) mean that it's much easier to debug complex apps like games on Windows. Windows had this stuff since forever.

And due to the stability of the system architecture and the QA MS does mean that Windows might be shitty in some ways, but institutional knowledge has built up over the decades.

Linux in contrast is like the ship of Theseus.

A lot of the work Valve has done on Linux was to plug these gaps and had to develop similar tooling on Linux, otherwise its impossible to fix full-stack problems where the user clicks in a videogame, and something does or does not happen on the screen.

I'm not glazing Windows, I'm just infuriated by the persistent feeling of technical superiority of Linux people, who don't even bother to understand the problems, and explain away the lead Microsoft has as some sort of shadowy anti-user conspiracy, rather than the fact that Windows does a lot of things that users care about better than Linux.


That's cool, I'm having trouble thinking of a similar design for something like fusilli or penne though.

I just put my strainer on a scale and pour dry pasta into that to measure.


It's actually more ingenious for spaghetti, because for fusilli/etc, you can just put scales on the packaging.

Say that you divide 500 grams in 6 servings (84ish grams each), you only need to print 4 lines on the package. You can do it either externally if the packaging is transparent, or you can even do it internally if it's not (like a carton Barilla box).

All you need to do is to empty it till when vertical it reaches levels at around the next line.


Clever !

I was thinking of something like a sugar dispenseur (turn the container to fill a volume, and this volume becomes you serving), but your solution is way more economical and space efficient.


Can't say it's mine, I've seen it on a rice package!

I myself thought of a solution similar to yours, or even more complex solutions like revolving doors or having an internal chamber the size of a serving with two lids that can't be both open at the same time..

But to be honest, I don't think any of this is really useful beyond a restaurant where sizes are fixed (and indeed use pasta-specific ladles to have standard portions). Depending on the day of the week or how many and who's at home I'm still better doing the math with a scale than predefined servings.


> Can't say it's mine, I've seen it on a rice package!

Similar thing on UK butter - on a 250g block, there's 50g markings[0] on the wrapper to make simple(ish) weights easy.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/11ogzqj/... (only decent photo I could find on the webs and we don't currently have any butter in the fridge)


Why not just label each tablespoon and then just remember a tablespoon is 14g and do quick division.

US butter is similar, each stick is marked with tablespoons, cups, and fractional pounds.

That wouldn't work because pasta settles, so a given weight doesn't correspond directly to a given volume.

I don’t think you are looking for the level of precision where that would matter.

You could have a lid that folds back from the top of the box to form a cup that the box could pour into.

Or just take a deep dish and fill it with dry pasta. At some point you get a feeling for it.

> Most japanese brands are very timid, honda only produces a 50cc equivalent.

I believe Honda's CUV-e is 125cc equivalent. They plan to release more electric mopeds / motorcycles in the coming years too, from what I've read. I can try to find sources if you want.


My ideal airline would be one where you show up to the airport with your luggage, check it in, and then they knock you out and load you on the plane.

You get woken up at your destination after they've taken you off the plane. It would be the closest thing you can get to teleportation.

Then the airline wouldn't have to fuss with preparing shitty food and coffee or deal with annoying passengers. A win for everyone!



Basically this but they won't even have to trick me to knock me out.

they had this in "the 5th element"

I would recommend _not_ vibe coding it if it's a game you actually want to see become real, and instead pick up Godot or Unreal or Unity.

I'm sure an LLM could output something or other that resembles a vague concept of a game but you're not going to prompt your way into something that's actually fun for a human to play.


I think their point also covers this - since it's so easy to scroll, you can always just do a little two finger scroll wiggle to have it appear and see where you are. And that's only if you haven't configured it to always display.


You don't even have to scroll. Placing two fingers on the pad makes the scrollbar appear immediately. I'm happy for each additional pixel of space on my screen, but I also think a scrollbar should be completely configurable userland behavior.


It should, unfortunately apple doesn't believe the same I suppose. I'm lucky enough that I'm happy with their defaults and don't spend much time thinking about tweaking stuff on my computers, but I can understand it being super frustrating if you're not okay with the available settings.


Yeah. Defaults should make the details of the system go out of the user's way, for >95% of the users, >95% of their time. The remaining <5% of users are power users and hackers, and the remaining <5% of usage are strong taste and individual hacks.


> but I also think a scrollbar should be completely configurable userland behavior.

It is configurable, right in System Preferences > General. (Or I guess it's "Settings" now on modern systems, don't know what menu it's in there.)


Based on some discussions of users that have already downloaded Tahoe, I was under the impression that this is no longer possible? Also, I think it’s not possible to have the scroll bar outside of the window instead of overlaying some content.


Hmm. I haven't used Tahoe myself, but this piece by John Gruber would seem to imply the option still exists. Maybe it got moved? https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/01/12/macos-26-cut-co...

I dread the day I must find out :)

P.S.: seems like the setting still keeps the scroll bar on top of the windows content (e.g. a website), not outside of the content.


Traditionally the setting has moved the scroll bar outside of content. I can’t say for sure what they’ve done in Tahoe, but I’m not sure how else it would work—if the scroll bar is persistent it will persistently cover your content.

Many of the complains surrounding the former iOS7 and today's Liquid Glass are tied to the requirement of the interface never moving. Which isn't just an unreasonable requirement, but a ridiculous one.

Just like iOS7+ it is possible to position and layer interface elements in a way where the visual effects will render a screenshot difficult to read, but in practice the elements are frequently in motion or as you've already pointed out easy to make them move. That motion is what negates the layering problems, thus making visual occlusions rare, short-lived and easily resolved.

There is a certain unreasonableness in ignoring that reality, and also ignoring that there is a user setting to keep a full-sized version of the scroll bars always visible.

This isn't to take away from legitimate criticisms such as the issue with the resize hotbox not being updated to match the more rounded corners, but rather highlight that not all online forum criticisms comes from a bona fide place.


> since it's so easy to scroll, you can always just do a little two finger scroll wiggle to have it appear

That changes the effort required to show useful information from zero to more than zero. Which, while it not be a great quantitative change, is an enormous qualitative change.

Like Chesterton's Fence, it was there for a reason.

"At last (and at least) we have reclaimed that narrow vertical strip of screen real estate on the screens eastern-most vestige! Now to find a good use for it!"

The true annoyance is that in many cases explicitly enabling them does not restore the original functionality.


There is an imbalance between the harms you're pretending to endure versus:

1. The trivial ability it is to resolve, and

2. The existence of an easily accessible user setting to enable the behaviour that you desire.

Fundamentally your complaint thus comes down to a gripe that the OS's defaults don't match your completely subjective idea of how just one of many OS elements should work.

Which raises such an interesting question, because of all of the UX behaviours present on macOS - this is your hill?


At last (and at least) we have reclaimed that narrow vertical strip of screen real estate on the screens eastern-most vestige! Now to find a good use for it!"

...extra padding?


I read the same exact thing 6 months ago.


We did something like that for a hiring project once:

https://github.com/tonarino/acoustic_profiler


> I was minimizing time so spent while she was minimizing number of washes

I'm probably just slow, but I'm not following. Do you mean because you went fast, you had to run another cycle to clean everything properly?

If you haven't already, you should watch the Technology Connections series on dishwashers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHP942Livy0


Since I’m rushing to load it as fast as possible the packing is not as good as hers so some dishes are left out. Overall this leads to more loads.


Ahhh that makes sense!


Do you two ever play friendly games of Tetris against one another?


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