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What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite

66 points| konchunas | 5 years ago |blog.usejournal.com

116 comments

order

piggycurse|5 years ago

Why is this blog post so negative? Microsoft are trying and giving all of the developers the tools to help affect the project along the way.

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-...

WorldMaker|5 years ago

Regarding the Windows Terminal settings interface, the default editor is VSCode if VSCode is installed. Given the mention of VSCode later in the article I'm surprised that VSCode was not installed on this user's machine prior to attempting to edit the Settings.

(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.)

Zardoz84|5 years ago

I don't know your experience, but on my experience W10 it's painfull slow compared to a native Linux install. I don't talking about WSL1 or WSL2 its slow compared to a native Linux. I say that the whole W10 is slow, to the point that barely is usable if you not have it installed on a SSD.

dleslie|5 years ago

I switched from WSL2 back to WSL1 because the git action times on the NTFS shared drive were _minutes_ long in WSL2.

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.

genr8|5 years ago

M$ will only open source things that don't make them their money, while at the same time, tricking developers that they care by appropriating the communities work and extracting as much value out of Linux for free as possible, for their own benefit. Providing second rate hybrids masquerading as innovations, is all they can really do, to keep people locked into Windows. I stayed on Windows desktop for 20 years even while using linux for servers, and just gave it up this year. Linux has its own problems but if I disagree with the status quo of programs, I can either switch to another distro, mod the open source code myself, or file a bug report so a real person actually does something about it. This is too little, too late, from Microsoft, and accepting it now will just lead to the demise of Linux.

juliand|5 years ago

I feel like the author is nitpicking over small issues just because it's Microsoft.

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.

jonnypotty|5 years ago

I can't belive that a shitty slow terminal impresses you as the work for 6 people for a year.

Go and look up how long it took one guy to create Unix.

Grumbledour|5 years ago

I actually don't get Powertoys at all.

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.

WalterGR|5 years ago

If a feature is missing from Windows it’s a bad thing, it should be in the default installation because it’s not bloat, and users are viewed as helpless to remedy the issue.

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.

pwdisswordfish2|5 years ago

It is not weird at all once you realise who Microsoft's management wants as its customers. The business people at MS really do not expect nor want customers to be fiddling around with technical stuff. They want customers to see MS as the one who can solve all problems. The business people at Microsoft prefer non-technical customers. Technically-minded customers are not the ideal customers for Microsoft. A great example is Mark Russinovich. They had to hire him to keep him quiet and under control. He had become a problem solver for too many technically-minded customers.

In the mind of the Microsoft business person

Clippy: "Yes."

PowerToys: "Why?"

ChrisLTD|5 years ago

Agreed. My guess is that's an organizational issue. Some developers at MS would really like these features, but can't get them approved to be in the official Windows roadmap.

dgellow|5 years ago

I’m not sure why it’s important for features to be in the base install (so not in a separate package). Having theM packaged separately makes it easier to push updates, and you only install the power tools if you care about them.

That’s quite nice IMHO.

kanox|5 years ago

It's obviously a deliberate decision to keep the basic windows experience "simple".

munchbunny|5 years ago

Yup it seems pretty easy these days to just have PowerToys and the Sysinternals suite included by default. They're small footprint but they're all very useful tools for power users.

kumarvvr|5 years ago

I am guessing this is a project that separates out the power user part of customizations, into a separate package, and microsoft aims to continuously improve and add sub projects to it.

ripley12|5 years ago

I can't find it now, but I've heard the PowerToys developers talk about how the long-term goal is to move some of these features into Windows.

temac|5 years ago

> But the first launch of the Linux subsystem after system reboot is unbelievably slow.

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.

temac|5 years ago

Continuing to read:

> 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!)

nmeofthestate|5 years ago

This seems like a joke article. The 'long' startup time appears to be a second or two.

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.

Analemma_|5 years ago

The article sucks. I was hoping for a serious critique of Microsoft's new direction and the architecture of WSL2, .NET Core, etc., but it's just a handful of very trivial performance gripes, along with things the author simply doesn't understand, like the default application registered for *.json files being Notepad only until you install something better.

I wish there was a higher bar for upvoting articles besides "it bashes Microsoft, to the top with it"

alpaca128|5 years ago

> The 'long' startup time appears to be a second or two.

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.

burnte|5 years ago

I felt the same way. They were ridiculous nits.

ceronman|5 years ago

I tried WSL2 for about six months.

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.

WorldMaker|5 years ago

> No idea why Windows has to reboot so many times for a single update.

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.

konchunas|5 years ago

I like your points.

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.

projektfu|5 years ago

I think this site might want to reconsider using Medium. All of the animated screenshots were covered with ads in Safari on iOS, with no apparent way of getting past them. I had really no idea what they were talking about.

amw|5 years ago

Seconded. I had no choice but to say, "Well, I guess I'll just imagine what was in that image".

genr8|5 years ago

You might want to reconsider using Safari on iOS...

_bxg1|5 years ago

What an incredibly petty set of complaints.

- "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.

genr8|5 years ago

I agree, but its a personal blog that got self-posted to HN, its just his opinion man. You can disregard it if you want.

ChrisLTD|5 years ago

It'd be nice if it were faster, but considering the usefulness of WSL, I'm cool waiting ~3 seconds for the terminal to load the first time after boot.

yadco|5 years ago

3 seconds for a virtual machine (wsl2 under the hood is hyperv) is quite good.

snazz|5 years ago

If you have VS Code installed, the JSON configuration for the Windows Terminal won't open in Notepad.

yalooze|5 years ago

I believe it opens in whatever your default application is for *.json files.

benbristow|5 years ago

The config file still seems like a cop-out for "we couldn't be arsed to build a GUI settings editor". Excusable at alpha/beta, not a final release.

Command prompt & Powershell both have GUI settings editors.

joaomoreno|5 years ago

Also, you get fantastic Intellisense, since the JSON schema reference is included in the document.

kfk|5 years ago

We are 30+ years and Windows Task Scheduler is still broken. Compare that to simple .txt files to schedule anything you need in Linux. Windows took the UI path for users and that's OK, but most of Power users are still much better off with text files and simple utilities (like crontab) that work. This type of ecosystem is completely broken on Windows, I don't think it can be fixed, it is too much of a paradigm shift. On the same token trying to do good UI/User experience is still too hard on Linux. I take no issue with Windows, business users, friends and my parents are probably better off with it, but the "power" stuff? Please don't.

fetbaffe|5 years ago

How is Windows Task Scheduler broken?

jpalomaki|5 years ago

The Task Scheduler can export and import tasks from XML. There's also SchTasks.exe command to manage the tasks from the command line.

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).

alkonaut|5 years ago

> That is how long it takes to start WSL terminal for the very first time after reboot

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?

badsectoracula|5 years ago

> Open or save file Dialog is just the worst in all regards.

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.

4cao|5 years ago

The history of Microsoft is the history of workarounds on top of workarounds, year after year, rinse and repeat. Here's a novel thought: instead of providing yet another iteration of workarounds for the power user, how about just fixing it for every user.

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.

WorldMaker|5 years ago

I think it's an interesting refutation to Google's "one search box to rule them all" philosophy. Over the course of Windows Vista through 8.1 Microsoft attempted just that at a consumer scale that Google could only wish they could impact "where they live". (As much as people assume people live in the browser, Windows is still Windows.) The evidence mounted up overwhelmingly that people didn't want just one search box, that Google is wrong (they've yet to unify their search boxes like they claim to philosophically anyway), and that the context of where a search box appears matters, and so Windows 10 has seen the re-separation of search boxes.

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.

genr8|5 years ago

Microsoft is so large, and so disjointed, its not as simple as you make it out to be. The corporate culture prevents it. You forgot all the bureaucratic middle managers whos sole job is to enforce IT Silo'ing and gatekeep other teams from intruding into their area. I hate to say it like this, but the boomers created this mentality on purpose. Its rampant in incumbent tech/IT/dev, and fundamentally opposed to freedom of information and open source, because its focused on maintaining control and power and keeping people in their pre-designated place. If it was only a tech problem, we could absolutely solve this, but its a socio-political one first.

therealmarv|5 years ago

that are actually the small little things which are fast on a Mac. This seconds of thought are also clearly visible on some Ubuntu machines... Gnome is not always optimized and Snap programs make you think your laptop is frozen.

konchunas|5 years ago

Contrary to release notes latest Gnome 3 in Ubuntu 20.04 is slower on my machine compared to the previous one in 19.10. That's why I switched to XFCE which is super snappy. Not i3 snappy, but really close. I've also experienced increased startup time with Snap, Flatpak and AppImages regardless of DE.

chesimov|5 years ago

I have recently moved to a macbook pro for work, having used Ubuntu on my prior machine. In my experience, the mac (despite having significantly more modern specs) is more buggy and just not quite as snappy for these little things. Opening windows, menus, terminals takes longer (even with the swoopy animations turned off). Wake from sleep also takes longer, and a few times a week it is frozen for a few minutes on wake. Maybe I have a lemon.

schoolornot|5 years ago

> Recently Windows team made a few stunning announcements

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.

whywhywhywhy|5 years ago

You can't whinge about time spent on animations and then also complain about flickering. Teams being told that design doesn't matter is why so few developers on windows and linux care about flickering at all.

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.

cm2187|5 years ago

Can windows terminal be used remotely? The only remote terminal I am aware of in windows is remote powershell but it sucks badly. It takes ages to come online after a reboot, is unencrypted by default, and because of security issues cannot interact with windows update.

mickeypi|5 years ago

Yes, you can do that with ssh even from cmd.exe. Windows ships with an ssh server too, you just have to enable those features.

CawCawCaw|5 years ago

For such a powerful power user, it seems that the author never had any JSON editors set up on his environment, removed the default keyboard shortcuts from Terminal, and couldn't figure out how to customize the context menu. Hmmmm.

bromonkey|5 years ago

"It doesn’t have no syntax highlighting," ...[scrolls down] (Blockchain engineer): ahhhhh, ok

All jokes aside, author: "no" should be "any" in this sentence. Double negatives are rarely used in English.

caribousoup|5 years ago

Putting ads in your 3 second blog animations? Really? Comes across as incredibly trashy.

Unrelated to the article, sorry. I have never seen this before...

konchunas|5 years ago

I'm sorry for that. As Streamable states: ads will be shown as soon as video becomes popular. But they didn't state exactly how popular. I couldn't find any other convenient method to embed small animations with fine quality and ability to pause them. Any recommendation is appreciated.

alex_duf|5 years ago

Comparing with my current macos build, it seems like a bliss to use really.