What about the internals? Is it still kind of a mess under the hood?
I heard they rebuilt the TCP/IP stack so it's not user land 32 bit driver anymore.
Any ideas if/when they'll modernize NTFS? Right now it's a race to the bottom to who has the worse FS, HFS+ or NTFS. WinFS or ZFS on OS X would be a godsend.
What about the registry? Any idea if they'll make that easier to manage for regular people? Am I still fucked if it corrupts?
What about sunsetting Win32? Or improving the driver model?
They're starting to get it on the UI side, but the reason why I use Mavericks as my personal machine and work on a LAMP stack has less to do with how useful or pretty the start menu is, and more to do with the godawful internals of Windows. Or have we just resigned ourselves to a crappy OS internally that we've all just gotten used to?
The registry is fine - it's people pissing around in it that break it.
Win32 - haven't touched it for years. Driver model: not my problem.
Mavericks is a crime compared to windows 8.1. I use both, regularly. It's virtually impossible to use efficiently with a keyboard unless you have twisted mutilated hands to hit meta keys galore and half the apps don't actually survive more than 2 minutes without crashing.
All these points are fine but theres no reason to flat out lie about the quality of Mavericks....
1) Keyboard shortcuts are fine, if u use a OSX all day every day you will think Windows shortcuts are bad. That and you can edit pretty much every single shortcut in OSX if you are really that offended by them.
2) If your apps are crashing every 2mins (or even more than once a week...) your computer is f'd.
Not to take away from your other excellent points, but ReFS is not exactly a modernization of NTFS, since it additionally removes quite a few features.[1]
The lack of disk quotas, deduplication, and named streams (and more) mean that it's not exactly a general-purpose filesystem, at least as far as standard Windows Domain deployments are concerned.
I suspect they'll address all of these issues eventually, and look forward to it, but as it stands you unfortunately can't just format everything as ReFS instead of NTFS and expect that everything will work. Unlike with ZFS.
I should've been way more clear about my gripe with the Windows TCP/IP stack. Why the hell does the TCP/IP stack eat itself? No other OS I've ever used has the nuttiness that is
netsh winsock reset
as a regular troubleshooting step when diagnosing network connectivity issues. I was long under the impression that the reason why that kept happening was that the NT kernel didn't have a robust TCP/IP stack of its own and was reimplementing the BSD sockets via a translation layer that was easily hooked into by godawful apps that felt like putting whatever it wanted there.
ReFS wasn't on my radar, and that's my fault.
The registry isn't fine. As of Windows 8 it can still hose a machine by going corrupt. The concept of having a centralized application database for application state and other metadata isn't a bad one, the current implementation absolutely sucks. It goes corrupt and the entire machine is rendered useless. Granted, the current solution is to just back it up and hope none of the backups corrupt either. Corruption doesn't happen from just people manually messing with it, corruption happens from a lot of apps reading and writing from it at the same time. A lot of apps not even bothering with good practices in how to handle it either.
As far as Win32 and the driver model not being your problem... When crappy apps written in 20 year old APIs and devices using crappy drivers crash your machine, then it absolutely IS your problem.
I can't speak to your use of OSX with a keyboard. However, given my choices, I'll take weird metakey combos over, "Is my TCP/IP stack going to eat itself this week?" Besides, emacs uses nothing but crappy and bizarre meta key combos and it's still a thing. So.
None of the "problems" of which you speak are actually mainstream problems. It's perfectly possible to hose your network stack in any OS. Just don't do that and you'll be fine.
USB drivers, sound drivers, printer drivers, web cam drivers, etc etc, are all using user-mode drivers since Vista. They cannot crash your system. Similarly, graphics card drivers use a special model that means they can auto-restart if they were to crash; which as it happens is exceptionally rare and often resolved by upgrading the driver.
I've used Windows ever since it first got a Registry (95) and it's never corrupted on me, ever.
I lol'd at the "or improving the driver model?", as though there is ANY mainstream OS out there with a better more flexible and stable driver model than Windows has today.
You've basically dug up a load of non-issues, fictional issues and historical issues and portrayed them as relevant issues in the world of Windows today. They aren't.
Crappy Win32 APIs where bugs are features isn't a mainstream problem? Somehow in your decades of using Windows you have never run into buggy, crash prone applications. Amazing. Even Neo couldn't dodge those bullets.
Registry may never have corrupted on YOU, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't suck when it does happen. And it happens often enough that if you're in any sort of support role, you'll see it more often than you ever care to. Oh, it's rare, but it's prone to happen. It's just godawful design(this coming from someone who likes PHP, mind you) that you have this monolithic system database that somehow everyone can write to in various ways, not all of them good.
I can't find any better sources for why I thought that the driver model itself was wrong, but I do remember that a lot of Windows crashes happen because of crappy drivers. I remember there was a specific reason for it, and it wasn't fixed in as late as Windows 7, and it's even considered a feature. So, you got me there. what ever. I can still gripe about having to wait for Windows to install a driver for my keyboard when I use bootcamp so I can play MWO or Hawken.
The fact you merely once did tech support and then moved to PHP development explains why you hold ridiculous opinions on various things.
I'm sure Winsock reset _did_ solve a lot of problems, for you. But at the same time you probably just made other problems for the poor peoples affected by your tech support. Whilst Winsock reset may have removed the particular third-party component that was causing the issue (often shitty AV software), it will have removed any others that had valid reason to be there, such as VPN software. Do some reading about LSPs (layered service providers) in the context of Winsock and educate yourself.
"Crappy Win32 APIs"
Citation needed. (Figure of speech on HN, don't worry I'm not expecting you to actually try to find one)
"Somehow in your decades of using Windows you have never run into buggy, crash prone applications."
Don't put words in my mouth. Of course I've experienced buggy crash prone applications. Just as I've experienced such things on OSX and Linux. As long as such shitty apps don't bring down the OS or your Shell, all's fine really. Don't blame the OS for shitty third party crap.
"And it happens often enough that if you're in any sort of support role,"
Starting to see a pattern here. You misdiagnosed a lot of problems when you used to work in tech support, huh? Don't blame you, gets them off the phone doesn't it?
Nobody denies the Registry is stupid by design. But that doesn't make it buggy and broken like you claim. Microsoft acknowledges the Registry should never have happened and they do their best now to try to encourage better practices.
"I can't find any better sources for why I thought that the driver model itself was wrong,"
Because you won't find any but don't let me stop your desperate web searching to back up bullshit claims.
"but I do remember that a lot of Windows crashes happen because of crappy drivers"
Well thanks for that Mr Captain Obvious. Just like shitty drivers on ANY of the big 3 OSes can and do cause crashes? With the other big percentage of Windows crashes being faulty hardware. Fortunately Windows has advanced itself to such a point now where the vast majority of drivers, especially those most likely to be badly written (i.e. all things USB pretty much!) are held as user-mode processes that are unable to crash the system.
"I remember there was a specific reason for it, and it wasn't fixed in as late as Windows 7, and it's even considered a feature."
Nothing was "fixed" in Windows 7 concerning the fundamental stability of the driver model in Windows. They make subtle and often completely unnoticed resiliency improvements all the time. NT 6.0 (Vista to laymen) added the capability to automatically restart a kernel-mode graphics driver. Which happened to be quite a valuable feature at the time because Nvidia especially was really struggling to write stable LDDM (aka WDDM now, the L stood for Longhorn) graphics drivers at the time. It took them a good 6 months to sort those issues, during which time they were leaning on the inherent resiliency of the NT 6.0 kernel to keep customers sane.
From your one can tell that Windows is really engrained in your workflow. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's sometimes good to open up a bit and acknowledge the weaknesses of a system such that you can use this knowledge for future decisions.
So let me give you examples of why the registry is wrong. Let's say you or a user that you administer has a problem with Complex GUI application - for some reason it won't start anymore. What's your usual solution in Windows? Right, reinstall the thing and hope for the registry being cleaned ine the process. POSIX systems? Delete the config files either in the home folder or globally per app. OSX even has forma and location of these files standardized.
Then again, why even install an app? A userland application should never feel the need of any 'installation'. That's again how it works in OSX, mostly thanks to being registry free.
The main benefit of the Windows way is how registry settings can be pushed with the AD - but there's no reason this couldn't be solved without a registry. Containerization is where I see POSIX going in order to solve this.
Wait just a minute. The topic was registry corruption. Not whether the registry is a good or bad idea as a whole.
All I said is that the registry corruption is a non issue. It was a slight problem on Windows 9x; but it never happened to me personally. But was never an issue at any point on Windows NT based systems.
I've known for years that the registry in itself is a software design anti-pattern. It's just a giant bag of global mutable state. Of course it is bad by design. But don't let a bad design be misconstrued as something that is also buggy and prone to corruption. Because it isn't.
PS: It's not that Windows is "engrained in my workflow". Full disclosure: I use a MacBook. It's just me defending it against senseless and baseless attacks and accusations here on HN. I notice for example that people shut up when I pointed out that Windows has the most advanced pluggable driver model of any mainstream OS and that it is laughable to suggest it requires improvement to catch up; because they know it is correct.
"What about the registry? Any idea if they'll make that easier to manage for regular people? Am I still fucked if it corrupts?"
Which I also understand as a criticism on how it works in the first place. Also, I see 'corruption' not just when the whole registry is rendered unusable (which never happened to me at least and I've never read about such a case), but when applications create a state that renders them unusable, and that state persists in the registry such that one either has to reinstall his whole OS or go hack the registry (which even most electronics store supporters can't do, so without enterprise level support or deep technical know how any user is out of luck).
No, this is very very rare on things that aren't Windows.
Lots of people say "registry corruption" when they mean "cruft"; over time apps register shell extensions and various other systemwide bits and pieces that gradually reduce UI responsiveness or break in strange ways.
Yes it is. No it isn't. Yes it is. No it isn't. Repetitive much?
There's nothing wrong with the network stack in Windows. NT has always had a first class network stack and they keep improving it with every release, as is normal for any modern mainstream OS.
PS: That Google link I assume was provided for humour rather than any real substance.
So there is no real distinction here between a Winsock reset and the equivalent operations in the other 2 big OSes. The difference is that whilst Windows holds its network configuration in the Registry (ugh), the other two do not. The operations being performed is otherwise pretty much identical.
> Any ideas if/when they'll modernize NTFS? Right now it's a race to the bottom to who has the worse FS, HFS+ or NTFS. WinFS or ZFS on OS X would be a godsend.
I heard they rebuilt the TCP/IP stack so it's not user land 32 bit driver anymore.
Any ideas if/when they'll modernize NTFS? Right now it's a race to the bottom to who has the worse FS, HFS+ or NTFS. WinFS or ZFS on OS X would be a godsend.
What about the registry? Any idea if they'll make that easier to manage for regular people? Am I still fucked if it corrupts?
What about sunsetting Win32? Or improving the driver model?
They're starting to get it on the UI side, but the reason why I use Mavericks as my personal machine and work on a LAMP stack has less to do with how useful or pretty the start menu is, and more to do with the godawful internals of Windows. Or have we just resigned ourselves to a crappy OS internally that we've all just gotten used to?