> you definitely feel a considerable amount of extra latency everywhere vs. e.g. a 500Mhz PowerBook G3 running OS 9 or OS X 10.2-10.4
Odd thing...
While I agree regarding the snappiness of older OSes, the Mac was for me always a bit of an odd exception.
I started on Macs in the 680x0 era and Mac System 6, and I worked on them through 7.x, 8.x, 9.x and into OS X.
For me, no PowerPC edition of either Classic or OS X ever felt as responsive as Classic on a 680x0 Mac. I narrowly missed out on a Quadra 840 on Freecycle over 15 years ago and still regret it -- that was the fastest 68040 Mac ever made.
NeXTstep was of course originally built on and shipped on 68030 -- it's a CISC native OS. PowerPC Classic was always mostly running emulated 680x0 code.
I read analyses of Mach API calls that explained that calls on RISC were less efficient in register usage or something.
But then, Intel Macs came along. Mac OS X returned to x86 from PowerPC. And suddenly Mac OS X felt snappy again in a way it never did for me on PowerPC.
As an old-time Motorola user I was conflicted about Intel Macs. Macs weren't meant to be PCs. I didn't want Windows on a Mac. But the feeling of using 10.4 on Intel converted me: it felt snappy and responsive in a way Windows NT never did on Intel.
(NT was built on RISC and ported to Intel, the reverse of NeXTstep.)
I thought I didn't like Apple computers, but in hindsight I remember feeling that the eMac/G5's that I was using at school were clunky and slow compared to the contemporary Windows XP machines.
This was 2005- so XP on period correct hardware was extremely lean in comparison.
I think the latency was a pretty substantial reason for this in retrospect. I did not have nearly the same experience in 2012 when I bought my first Macbook Pro. (which I purchased because it was a UNIX that could run Microsoft Office and our VPN software... and I've been a MacOS user on/off ever since).
I never used a PowerPC Mac, I bought the first new computer they unveiled after the iPhone. But I did go through the Apple Silicon transition, and let me tell you computing is great!
That M1 Macbook Air killed any sort of desire to get an iPad or any other computer for that matter. I'm looking forward to upgrading this year or next year, but somehow even that feels superfluous. Except for RAM. Damn low RAM.
> Well, getting escorted out definitely doesn't happen here either at least.
It 100% does. It happened to me in Brno, Czechia, and this February I interviewed someone to whom the same thing happened and who was attempting to sue for unfair dismissal.
I know nothing of your objections, so this is more about how I think of mine and how they relate to these kinds of changes.
Being a power users is difficult, I think the best way to do software is to make it APL complicated and only educate one guy in it. The way power users in Excel/Emacs/Accounting software out perform user friendly stuff is amazing. But somethings are meant for the masses, e.g. opening a file.
Dumbing down or magification of interfaces was needed for many other reasons. Gnome and Ribbon were necessary changes IMO, what we had was never going to improve. Of course I wish there was elements that could be reused elsewhere, but that is a pipedream of Smalltalk proportions.
I am now stuck with windows at work, and it is a horrible experience. Everything is so needlessly complicated. In the same way Linux is. I do believe Gnome did manage to improve things, at least when I look at children using Mac, Linux and Windows as power users. My view is that the complexity of Linux is still a little bit easier to understand, but that is just because of a long history and easy abstractions.
I think core objections are often not compatible with products that need to fit and be produced for many people. I do software that is used once by many this has changed my view if GUIs for ever, especially in regards to desktops.
> I never understood the issue with the ribbon UI. Epecially for Office it was great, so much easier to find stuff.
1. I don't need to find stuff.
I knew where stuff is.
2. I read text. I only need menus. I don't need toolbars etc. and so I turn them all off.
I cannot read icons. I have to guess. It's like searching for 3 things I need in an unfamiliar supermarket.
3. Menus are very space efficient.
Ribbons hog precious vertical space. This is doubly disastrous on widescreens.
4. I am a keyboard user.
I use keys to navigate menus. It's much faster than aiming at targets with the mouse and I don't need to look. The navigation keys don't work any more.
Ribbons help those who don't know what they are doing and do not care about speed and efficiency.
They punish experts who do know, don't search, don't hunt, and customise themselves and their apps for speed and efficient use of time and screen space.
> They punish experts who do know, don't search, don't hunt, and customise themselves and their apps for speed and efficient use of time and screen space.
The problem is, most users are utterly braindead, they barely manage to type at speed instead of pecking at single keys. The astonishment I've gotten in some places for literally nothing more than Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V is more than enough proof.
That's also IMHO a large portion of why Linux never really took off on desktop. UX/UI people are rare enough to begin with, most of them don't work on FOSS in their free time, and so development is primarily done by nerds for nerds. That's great if you already know something about the application - but usually the learning curve is so steep that most users frustratedly give up. And documentation is either not existing, incomplete or horribly outdated, and StackOverflow etc. are even worse.
The exception is Blender. They got some serious money IIRC, cleaned up their act, and now there's a headline of some movie or game using Blender every few weeks.
The sad thing is that Windows has a great keyboard UI and it's superbly accessible for people with visual and motor disabilities.
Who have reduced earning opportunities because they are disabled, so FOSS should be great for them, but it isn't, because the nerds don't know CUA and don't know the keyboard UI. They spend their time mastering a couple of ancient apps like Vi and Emacs and ignore the fiery furnace of UI R&D that followed for the next 20Y after those early efforts.
Learn Windows' keyboard UI and you can drive the whole OS and all its apps with the speed of a genius Vim user with 20 years' practice. It makes Emacs look like a wet paper pad and a burned stick compared to a Moleskine notebook and a top quality fountain pen.
Xfce comes close and implements maybe 75% of the UI but once you are in an app all bets are off.
> Learn Windows' keyboard UI and you can drive the whole OS and all its apps with the speed of a genius Vim user
Do you have a reference for this? I've often needed to control Windows using only a keyboard and failed to do so. I'm aware of most shortcuts in this list[1] but these are for a few very specific things. (As an aside, I also remember controlling the mouse with the numpad using the Mouse Keys accessibility setting but this is worse than both keyboard shortcuts and the mouse.)
Look for underlined single letters in menus. With apps that use the "classic" style menus instead of ribbons or plain Electron crap, the single letters are the key.
I'm curious to know if this is what lproven meant in their comment above. Alt + a-z to access menu items is available in every OS and all "native" apps, but you can't "drive the OS and all apps" this way.
For example, I would like to set options that are a few menus/button clicks deep in the Windows control panel (either the "classic" or new variant) using keyboard shortcuts/navigation. Or navigate the Windows registry editor. I'm not aware of a way to do this.
No, it's not in all native apps. KDE reinvents its own set of keystrokes, for instance, and half the KDE apps have no menu bars any more... And there's no global way to force them either.
Yes, the control panel and RegEdit are totally keyboard controllable.
You can literally just unplug the mouse from a Windows desktop and it remains totally 100% operable.
Some apps may not, because the developers didn't do their jobs right, but the OS is.
Windows actually had a decent built-in manual system with CHM, tooltips and whatnot. Even games could and did use it, like EarthSiege 2.
Back in the days when application developers stuck to the Windows-provided widgets instead of doing their own UI, it was wonderful. Symbols were consistent across applications, as were color schemes (IIRC, if you wrote your CSS correctly, Internet Explorer would pass these on to websites!) and behavior.
> And documentation is either not existing, incomplete or horribly outdated, and StackOverflow etc. are even worse.
Or the documentation is very complete, but only useful if you read and comprehend it in its entirety. Open source devs need to understand that not everyone using their software wants to become an expert in it. They just want to get a task done and the software is facilitating completing that task. That is something totally normal and those users should not be thought of as less important than the power users.
On a Mac, that's fine. On Windows, it's not, because then I can't control the app any more.
I have been using Word since version 4 on DOS and version 5 on Classic MacOS. On Windows, I used WinWord 1, 2, 6, 95, 97, 2000, XP and 2003... then 4 years later MS ripped out the UI I knew backwards and had known for about 16 years, since 1991, and replaced it with one inferior in every way for me.
I'm not denying it might be better for others but for me it's now a waste of disk space.
The old versions do all I need, so I keep them. For everything except Word, there is LibreOffice.
But LibreOffice Writer has no outline mode, and I am a writer: that is THE killer function of Word for me.
So, Word 97 under WINE on Linux and Word 2003 when I have to use Win10 or -- shudder -- Win11.
Odd thing...
While I agree regarding the snappiness of older OSes, the Mac was for me always a bit of an odd exception.
I started on Macs in the 680x0 era and Mac System 6, and I worked on them through 7.x, 8.x, 9.x and into OS X.
For me, no PowerPC edition of either Classic or OS X ever felt as responsive as Classic on a 680x0 Mac. I narrowly missed out on a Quadra 840 on Freecycle over 15 years ago and still regret it -- that was the fastest 68040 Mac ever made.
NeXTstep was of course originally built on and shipped on 68030 -- it's a CISC native OS. PowerPC Classic was always mostly running emulated 680x0 code.
I read analyses of Mach API calls that explained that calls on RISC were less efficient in register usage or something.
But then, Intel Macs came along. Mac OS X returned to x86 from PowerPC. And suddenly Mac OS X felt snappy again in a way it never did for me on PowerPC.
As an old-time Motorola user I was conflicted about Intel Macs. Macs weren't meant to be PCs. I didn't want Windows on a Mac. But the feeling of using 10.4 on Intel converted me: it felt snappy and responsive in a way Windows NT never did on Intel.
(NT was built on RISC and ported to Intel, the reverse of NeXTstep.)
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