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99% of Windows usability issues would be fixed if Windows had the guts to add this button (media.piefed.social)

submitted 2 months ago by umbraroze@piefed.social to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev

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I don't fucking know why I can't eject USB hard drives. I installed the SysInternals apps, and best they can tell me is that Dropbox is fucking with the drives. I explicitly told Dropbox to not fuck with USB drives. I don't know who's lying, I just want whoever is fucking with the drives to stop fucking with the drives, OK??? OK.

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[-] Zorque@lemmy.world 88 points 2 months ago

Either that or they were added at different times by two different teams with two different design philosophies.

[-] mobotsar@sh.itjust.works 42 points 2 months ago

It's definitely that one

[-] kazerniel@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Reminds me of that story about Windows's format dialog. It's on Xitter, so here's the text:

Dave W Plummer

I wrote [Windows's] Format dialog back on a rainy Thursday morning at Microsoft in late 1994, I think it was.

We were porting the bajillion lines of code from the Windows95 user interface over to NT, and Format was just one of those areas where WindowsNT was different enough from Windows95 that we had to come up with some custom UI.

I got out a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and choices you could make with respect to formatting a disk, like filesystem, label, cluster size, compression, encryption, and so on.

Then I busted out VC++2.0 and used the Resource Editor to lay out a simple vertical stack of all the choices you had to make, in the approximate order you had to make. It wasn't elegant, but it would do until the elegant UI arrived.

That was some 30 years ago, and the dialog is still my temporary one from that Thursday morning, so be careful about checking in "temporary" solutions!

I also had to decide how much "cluster slack" would be too much, and that wound up constraining the format size of a FAT volume to 32GB. That limit was also an arbitrary choice that morning, and one that has stuck with us as a permanent side effect.

So remember... there are no "temporary" checkins :)

[-] invictvs@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Someone told me recently that "everything temporary is permanent as long as it works good enough" or something like that.

[-] kautau@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago

yeah a fresh windows 11 install has like 20 different control panels, all built at different times by different teams using different UI toolkits. It's basically their philosophy to not unify anything but instead just keep bolting new things to different pieces of the OS, no matter how similar

[-] Scrollone@feddit.it 1 points 2 months ago

It's because they don't want to break compatibility with existing software. Which I understand, because if they broke old software then people could just migrate to Linux as well