What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite(blog.usejournal.com) |
What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite(blog.usejournal.com) |
The Terminal project was only announced 1 year ago[0]. As I understand it, they had to more or less split how the whole conhost.exe work in order to allow Terminal to even exist. The settings UI is far from sexy, but they're working on it[1]. I think it's impressive to know that 6 people did that in a year[2].
Regarding the slow startup of WSL2, yes it is slow to start, but would you rather have to wait 5x for a git clone command[3]? They even have a deep dive into how files are save in WSL1 which can be related to how it works in WSL2[4]
I completely disagree with the conclusion of performance is not Microsoft's concern. The comparison is to GNOME3 which was released in 2011. 9 years of development compared to 1 year. "The polish just isn't there"
[0]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/introducing-windo...
[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/1564
[2]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-terminal-...
[3]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-wsl-2/
[4]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/a-deep-dive-into-...
(Also yes, it is unintuitive that you may want to install VSCode first in order to edit Windows Terminal settings, but is it that much of a stretch that Microsoft would imagine early adopter power users to have VSCode lying around already on their machines? As you said, they are working on a "proper" UI for Settings still, but as a first "get it out the door MVP release", especially with all the under the hood work that took to get them there, it still seems a reasonable play.)
I didn't use WSL2 for too long and so I wonder: are processes in WSL2 manageable by Task Manager and Windows Defender as in WSL1? That integration with Windows tooling made WSL1 killer for deploying tools to non-programmers; give them a powershell script and they can run the app and manage it in a familiar way.
I haven't tried (just installed Windows 10 v1909 last night) but I don't think so, given that WSL2 sits in a VM, which WSL1 didn't.
I liked WSL1, but it had a lot of the same drawbacks that Cygwin had, which was that Windows and Linux are different enough under the hood that you start running into issues with file system performance and containers, and WSL2 fixes that at the cost of being clumsier with file management.
The solution I recall for WSL2 is to put the shared files inside the Linux instance instead of putting it in NTFS.
Linux desktop has the opposite problem: it's always been niche for mainstream users because its app ecosystem has never been good enough and it's often finicky to set up, even if its support for developers has been great.
They already admitted that they were wrong about Open Source and even though there is room for improvement, I'm happy that they are supporting power users more and more.
Go and look up how long it took one guy to create Unix.
They provide basic functionality I would not even class as for power users. Yeah, they are nice, they were nice in win95. Why do I need a separate Program 25 years later to rebind some keys or switch windows, yet every new win10 version tinkers with cortana? People say it would add "bloat", but somehow basic functionality beneficial to many users is bloat while candy crush and xbox whatever is not?
It is just so weird that after decades, basic functionality like bulk renaming files that should be in explorer is still considered a "power user" feature.
Proceeds to provide a video showing a 3s startup time to illustrate the unbelievable slowness that happens once after a reboot.
I suspect the favorite activity of the author is therefore to reboot their computer, and to quickly rush to WSL2 after that. In which case I agree the user experience is not ideal.
> Why is it animated? Or, even if it is, why is animation so slow?
Given it is not animated on my computer, I suspect it is animated when Windows is configured to have animations...
(and it if this theory is good, it is nice that they respect the disabling of animations, by the way, in contrast with the... Start Menu!)
Well, good news! I don't know when this might've changed (I have animations enabled), but I just tested it on Windows 10 2004, and the start menu doesn't animate with animations off.
The slow animated menu is quick - I'd like to see someone actually select a menu item in the time it takes for it to drop down. The animation doesn't impact usability. All a bit bizarre.
I wish there was a higher bar for upvoting articles besides "it bashes Microsoft, to the top with it"
Good to know. But sad that I had to look in the comments for this information, because for some reason the video doesn't play. I'm not sure how the article author thought it'd be a good idea to embed a video containing the same amount of information as a single number, but I guess that's considered a feature in the modern web.
I'm really glad that MS is investing in this and it's an aspect that has been long neglected. If you're a developer, and unless you're using MS stack (.NET), the experience has been always subpar.
I have to agree with the author that the experience is not quite there yet. But a lot of progress has been done. And I hope the progress continues and maybe in the future I'll try it again.
For me there is not a single deal breaker, but it's just a thousand paper cuts. Removing those will take time. Some of the annoying things I encountered:
1. Overall slowness. It's not only startup, it's in general. Not only on heavy tasks like parallel compiling, but even for lightweight stuff, you immediately notice when you try a real linux.
2. Some config like setting up ssh-agent correctly are hard and different than a real linux. No idea why.
3. Windows Terminal development is quite fast, and sometimes things change or break. For instance, the background color of my terminal suddenly changed and I had no idea why. After some googling and modifying config, it was fixed.
4. The fact that it required to sign in for Windows Preview program. (I think this is not required anymore) but it was very annoying as it requires very long updates that require like a million reboots. No idea why Windows has to reboot so many times for a single update. Additionally, after every update there was always surprises. From the harmless Edge popping up from nowhere asking you to become default browser for the nth time, to some hardware misconfiguration. Nothing too bad, but annoying.
5. (This one very subjective of course) The windows UI overall is, how to say it, a mess. Font rendering is awful. The mix of old style UI with new style UI is horrible. Some settings will be in new style, some other settings will be in old style.
As I said, I might try again in the future. But now I switched to Fedora and I'm really really happy with Gnome 3 and good old real Linux. I still have the Windows partition just in case, but I haven't booted in a while.
- "It takes ~3 seconds for WSL2 to start up the first time"
- "Windows Terminal [gasp] has animations"
- "The new spotlight search isn't already flawless"
- "File explorer right-click menus have... too many things in them"
(Paraphrasing, of course)
And I honestly wonder if the flickering thing is a problem with the author's GPU or something. Seems to happen everywhere and I've never seen it on my machine.
Command prompt & Powershell both have GUI settings editors.
Now, I will fully cop to out-dated docs being annoying, particularly when most of the configuration isn't really obvious or self-documenting. But complaining about Microsoft of all people offering highly flexible text-based configurations is hugely ironic to me.
VSCode didn't have a GUI settings editor for quite a while.
Fundamentally.
Try to schedule a simple script to run once an hour, while the user is logged in. No other conditions. Nothing complex.
Wait an hour and wait to see one window pop open running your script.
Wait one work-day. Work on your machine. Observe 10+ executions of that script, in parallel, on the mark the script was scheduled to run once.
Watch this get worse every day, until reboot. And then it slowly starts collapsing on itself again.
Not even this simple use-case works. It’s just unbelievably broken.
The UI can be a bit complicated, but on the other hand the Task Scheduler itself provides quite much functionality. You can for example trigger tasks based on events which are generated by Windows or applications (the same events that are visible in Event Viewer).
That speed extremely impressive. Not sure why he's comparing it to how long it starts to run a linux terminal on his linux machine? Shouldn't he be comparing it to how long it takes to e.g. start a different type of VM on windows, or how long it takes to cold start a Wine thing on Linux?
I guess the author never used any Gtk+ 3 file dialog :-P. Honestly the fact that you can perform actual file manipulation, use shell extensions (e.g. version control overlay icons), etc put it above pretty much every other file dialog except perhaps KDE's (but AFAIK even that doesn't have all the functionality you'd see in a regular file manager window).
Having said that, yes, it is unnecessarily slow and not because of the features above since some applications use older versions of the dialog that still have these features but appear instantly. Not sure why the "full fledged" version is slow.
Take for instance the Start Menu. When the Win-X "quick access" menu was added years ago, it was essentially an admission that the Start Menu is not the best way to start at least some things. It didn't really get much better since but the Search and Run functionality was integrated into it. Now one of the PowerToys replaces the Win-R menu as a yet another clumsy attempt at fixing the Start Menu by bypassing it. And it seems no new functionality beyond what is already implemented elsewhere is being added, except everything will of course get a different alternate look. Some more discussion about it here: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/44
It looks like there isn't anyone at Microsoft who can take a look at the big picture and decide what they actually want to accomplish with the UI in the medium run. Different groups of people come and go, keep adding different things, abandon them, after a while somebody else starts off with yet another approach in parallel without drawing any conclusions from the failed previous one, etc. The lack of co-ordination really amazes me. Microsoft used to once advertise with the slogan "Where do you want to go today?" These days it seems to me they're not going anywhere, just running in circles.
i3 isn't even snappy, the default application launcher can take up to 10 seconds to open on my old laptop.
There is a faster application launcher you can use instead, but you have to hunt through github issues to find out about it. The i3 project maintainers seem to actively object to telling users about 3rd party components and simultaneously refuse to integrate them or improve the default behaviour.
Of course, the problem is often that with other options some assembly is probably required. But looking at the mess gnome extensions are, that might actually be not that much of a difference.
I'm a heavy Ubuntu and Mac user, and wake from sleep is much quicker on Mac (as in it wakes before I open the lid completely).
Multiple Macs, multiple Ubuntu machines (although I've given up trying to get a perfect Ubuntu laptop, so that's desktop only these days)
More and more telemetry in each subsequent OS release. The fact I had to flip 6 switches off during OOBE on a brand new MS Surface followed by a "hosed" Windows Update run tells me they still haven't figured out what their power users want.
Although I definitely agree that it's absurd that in 2020 an operating system doesn't have a standard built in way to reconfigure key shortcuts in any application installed.
All jokes aside, author: "no" should be "any" in this sentence. Double negatives are rarely used in English.
Unrelated to the article, sorry. I have never seen this before...
If a feature is missing from MacOS or Linux it’s a good thing, it was rightly left out of the default installation to avoid bloat, and users are viewed as empowered to install software themselves.
Can’t win.
In the mind of the Microsoft business person
Clippy: "Yes."
PowerToys: "Why?"
WSL{1,2}, Windows Terminal, SQL Server on Linux, too many intiatives to count all focused on catching up to the reality that webservices and infrastructure are built on Linux. Whether you believe they'll succeed or not they are most definitely trying.
If it was true what you are telling, doubt they woild provide loads of diagnostic tools for windows, debugging tools, kernel symbols, performance tools, etc.
That’s quite nice IMHO.
Bulk renaming files for example is not something only power users do, it is something only power users can do because it just does not exist and/or is not discoverable for a normal user.
And also as a power user, it is annoying to find a program for every basic thing the system should be able to do.
On the other hand, maybe we should hand it to MS that they so greatly embrace the Unix Philosophy on that point?
It's useful to have a laboratory to test things with less impact if the experiments fail.
It's an interesting tangent, but Insider Preview updates are fascinating from a technical standpoint. Nearly every single one is installed closer to how Windows' big "Feature Updates" work (as essentially full Windows images that get built to a new folder, all the old things installed back into it, then the old Windows folder archived or removed) than old school sets of patches to individual files. It's been interesting as an Insider since very early in Windows 10's life to see how much faster these updates have gotten over time. Installing lots of updates this way on Insider Preview machines seems to have helped a lot make the big "Feature Updates" themselves faster/better/more reliable. It's maybe not as obvious to someone installing a big Feature Update at most twice a year, but as a long time Windows user and having seen the gradient of change in Insiders Preview (and read some of what I could in their discussions on the technical efforts on blogs), it has been fascinating to watch.
WSL2 should be out of preview in the soon-to-be-rolled-out May 2020 feature update.
People all over the comments accusing me of nitpicking. I can agree with that. But I also feel like this happens because of what you call "a thousand paper cuts". It works, but feels surprisingly unpleasant.
Allowing us to run Unix command line in Windows is a great achievement for Windows team, props to them. But it isn't yet comparable to the real deal like Linux or OSX. The speed, the looks, the integration. I'm actually surprised that (subjectively) Linux UI with all that fragmentation looks a bit more consistent than one of Windows.
I hope Microsoft addresses all these problems, but guessing from previous experience it make take a while.
One of those "context" switches that Microsoft finds is a useful context to know is "power user" versus "regular user": regular user Start Menu versus power user Win+X, regular user Search and Run versus power user Win+R/PowerTopys Run. (At one point in Windows 8 Microsoft tried to use the Win+R shortcut for something that wasn't "power user run a thing" and nearly saw a revolt.) It becomes a self-selecting "reveal" of different feature sets to match what features the user thinks they are ready for.
It says run once and it literally launches 10+ within the same 100ms.
That’s just broken.
Get-ScheduledTask -TaskPath "\UpdateTasks\" | Stop-ScheduledTask
Wasn't there another GUI during the Windows XP days?
https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/949
Reported 7 years ago...
A lot of companies, big ones, have their IT setups primarily on Windows. These are customers who make up a huge chunk of Microsoft's revenue. Linux is a small concern at best for them and is not the rest of the world.
What you call "schizophrenic" to me is the reality that Windows has massive user segments of consumers, developers, servers, and enterprise IT, and they all want different things, so Microsoft ends up making something for each group. Linux doesn't have that problem because, for better or worse, it doesn't have much of a footprint for consumers and enterprise IT.
Comparing the most important product(s) at MS with any other MS product/project and arguing they are somehow "equal" in the eyes of MS (because press releases, marketing) is a losing game.
Debugging stuff and analyzing performance stuff doesn't make me feel like MS would like to hide internals.
What requirement do you have that has to be managed without going over to the Linux side of the system?
- Move files: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft...
- File hashes: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft...
- Grep: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft...
Of course they do. It's called Powershell.
If people want/need to do something such as bulk renaming, they can online search for it, as they do for everything else, which will tell them they can install a package from the windows store.
Doesn’t seem that crazy to me as an expectation from end users.
Also, I don’t think that when Microsoft says “power users” they mean developers or equivalent, more like people who would feel “I want more from my system than just consuming content”.
Having a single package to install for those users is a quite flexible approach.
Or they'll find some sketchy exe file, and here comes the malware! Windows is really broken in terms of package distribution, and requiring people to go online and search for something so simple is hassle, dangerous, and decreases discoverability for software that really ought to be included in a vanilla install (unlike Cortana, which is a massively bloated feature that many people don't want, but can't get rid of, sort of like Bixby).
And even the few who would do a search would probably stop at the scary though of "installing" something.
As a technical person, these are regular observations from my parents or non-technical work colleagues.
The game development scenario feels to me like a case where a Windows based toolchain is going to be more coherent. I might be missing something though.
No, we don't/won't support a Linux port of our product at this time, and as a primary developer it's not worth my time to be hassled by it.
But WSL1 is _so nice_. I've fought with MSYS, MSYS2, Cygwin, various other bash environments and such, and I find none are quite as good as WSL1+X410.
And, let's be honest, if WSL2 is just another VM then it's a worse product than the other VMs that are available and far more mature. Hell, Canonical's Multipass is as good or better.
I really don't get why they went the VM route with WSL2. It seems to totally wipe out any advantage that WSL had over the other VM products.
I really don't get why they went the VM route with WSL2. It seems to totally wipe out any advantage that WSL had over the other VM products.
They're not deprecating WSL1 yet. You can still use it. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-faq#what-w...
But if you're looking for reasons, here are some officially stated ones. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-about
I/O performance and support for using Docker inside WSL seem like big ticket items. I'd agree with them that the trade-off of convenience sharing files between the two OSes for better support running Linux things in WSL is worth it.
I got tired of having to find patches/hacks/bespoke branches of tools I find interesting just to have them work in half-baked POSIX environments.
If they think Docker is more important than seamless desktop integration then obviously developers like myself are not as important to them as sysadmins who want to run docker services, I suppose.
I really, really want a proper and seamlessly integrated Linux environment on my Windows machine.