Windows 10 build 10041: 99 bugs on the wall, fix a bug, add a feature, 114 bugs on the wall Microsoft has released build 10041 of Windows 10, the first major update since January’s build 9926 went public. The test version is part of the US giant's “Windows Insider” program which lets enthusiasts install preview builds as they are ready. The Insider program offers “Fast” and “Slow” versions, with Fast builds more …
I have to say that I can't remember '80's GUIs looking as bad as this, though my memory is failing. One explanation may be that we did not have the computing power to do anything fancier back then, but now?
I think that the screenshots are pretty unappealing. Does it have to be this ugly?
It is better than Windows 2.1. Though not by much.
Who is all this supposed to be aimed at? I've no idea, but they do say that the "retro" look is in at the moment.
Yes. This exactly.
I Guggled some pics of the new 'icons' for a laugh and to show a few friends how bad they are. This stupid backlash against so-called skuomorphism has our best designers leaping over each other to eradicate anything the least bit nice-looking and replace it with crappy four-colour parallelograms with no perspective correction. Take the new icon for My Computer. Because it's not corrected for perspective, our eyes see the monitor part of it as a wedge, because the 'far' edge it the same fucking height in pixels as the nearest.
Look, I'm not gung-ho for a GUI dripping in wankish arty crap but are we paying through the nose for increasingly more powerful GPUs so we can sit in front of this?
First up, how many phones are going to need a My Computer, Control Panel and general Folder icons? Secondly, 4k screen? I should be so lucky! This crud just plain looks bad on anything.
Someone else mentioned the possibility of a plain icon set to reduce CPU load and therefore display more quickly? Sadly not so. Graphics are all 32 bit these days and any image is going to take the same amount of GPU grunt to render, regardless of how plain and crappy it looks. Unless one believes that they're going to do a version of Windows 10 that drops into 4-bit 16 colours so we can resurrect 486SX systems kitted out with 4MB?
"Look, I'm not gung-ho for a GUI dripping in wankish arty crap but are we paying through the nose for increasingly more powerful GPUs so we can sit in front of this?"
Its not just Microsoft. Check out the last version of the Dock in OS/X 10.10. Looks and acts like it escaped from an Atari ST.
The dock in 10.10 looks very like the one in Tiger (10.4) and earlier, losing the stupid perspective glass layer that just made no sense. The Yosemite dock is one of the best features. I've tried the last build of Windows 10 and by comparison, even the comparatively flat Yosemite has lots of subtle graphical niceness and depths that MS appears determined to eradicate from their OS. The icons on the latest Mac OS destroy these horrible efforts on Win 10.
"... or is that first desktop screenshot somewhat reminicent of early 1980's GUIs ???"
Have an upvote.
I'm, myself into retro-gaming, therefore into the said 80s GUI (AmigaOS, this stuff). And yes, W10 seems exactly like this thing !
We apparently have an OS running on 4-8 cores at 4 GHz with 4-8 GB of RAM look like my old 7 Mhz and 1 MB RAM Amiga !
World has officially gone banana.
.......and it is certainly the case that:
" It is also clear that Microsoft is making efforts to respond to feedback and to avoid a repeat of Windows 8, which was disliked by most existing users. Looks promising, but getting this thing finished, polished and stable by the summer will be a challenge."
I think that we should bear in mind that we have never seen this much of the development process of a Windows iteration so publicly before. The changes from one build to the next, the rough bits at various stages, different versions of different solutions to this or that and so on. I really think that we should restrain ourselves from commenting on each build as if it were the release candidate. Personally I have just finished installing this build and will refrain from any comment on it until I have had a chance to kick its tyres, check the oil pressure and take it for a drive.
Indeed, the active members of the Insider Program are telling MS loud and clear with each successive build what they are pleased with and (even more importantly) giving Redmond plenty of "GBH of the ear'ole" about things they are not pleased with. That kind of feedback is crucial and the various indications are that MS are taking the IP-members seriously - they would indeed be shooting themselves in both feet simultaneously very publicly if they did not.
Very wrong, it's pretty clear they're fuglyfying at least the icons and if we don't comment on that hard and often that's what will ship. I hope someone is saving the old icon resources right now ready to hack them back in over this eye bruising mistake.
I can live without pretty but nothing needs to be this pointlessly fugly and waiting won't magically make it look better. Some things need stomping on fast and vigorously, Microsoft still aren't good at listening.
........"I really think that we should restrain ourselves from commenting on each build as if it were the release candidate."
I did not for one moment suggest or intend to suggest that we should not comment critically at all. Far from it in fact (see my reply to RyokuMas just below your posting). The process of release followed by reaction and trenchant criticism is IMHO very important. That is however, not the same as postings along the lines of "typical M$ it's all going to be shit" (a type of posting which one see rather often on threads connected to Win10 TP) which is indeed reacting to the individual build as if it were the release candidate and contributes nothing constructive whatsoever.
"Microsoft is still working out how the Windows 10 virtual desktop feature should work. In this build, alt-tab only cycles through windows in the current desktop, and the taskbar only shows apps running in the current desktop. This means apps on other desktops are near-invisible, which could cause confusion.
“We are doing some A/B testing for this where there will be different defaults for different users,”"
So here's a clear case of functionality that simply needs a configuration option so that the user can choose which way they prefer to work. Now maybe they are just working out which behaviour should be default and include a way to switch, but on recent form I fear they are simply determining how they will force you to use it...
Anyone know if this behaviour is configurable?
Yes, this is configurable in the current build.
In Settings, System, Multitasking, there are two options.
On the Taskbar, show Windows that are Open On: Only the Desktop I am Using/All Desktops
Pressing Alt-Tab shows Windows that are Open On: Only the Desktop I am Using/All Desktops.
IMHO, Windows 7 had the best look with Aero and glass windows. Why has MS decided to chuck this and "fuglify" everything starting with Office 2013 and Windows 8? I understand that some compromise needed to be made for usability on touch screen devices, but it now looks worse than early versions of Gnome and KDE. Seriously, how hard is it to keep some of the elegant aspects of Aero and modify to support all devices. Even Win 7 with Aero turned off looks better though.
If they want to go with a more flat look, they should use Linux with the Cinnamon desktop for a while and take notes on how icons, multiple desktops, and the task bar are handled.
I think they said it looked dated, childish and OTT, and they were ashamed it ever existed.
They also claimed it it used up too much power, so that was also embarrassing for the poor dears' green cred.
A smart phone could walk the transparent rendering now of course.
Most people seemed to like it. I still use it as I can keep an easy check on a download if I put it's green bar behind the transparent task bar, so it always shows.
A few things are needed to make it excellent. I played with the latest build last night.
1) A fully customizable start menu. If you like Windows 2000 style start, you should be able to get it. Windows XP style, you got it. Windows 7 style, no problem. Windows 10 style, your choice.
1a) The Windows 10 start menu currently shows all programs (look it, on a computer it isn't an app) alphabetically. The start menu needs to go back to a hierarchy layer like all previous start menus.
2) 100% Aero available. If you don't like it, don't use it. But make it available.
3) Return my privacy! Right now, I have to uncheck so many options in Windows 10 (and Windows 8.1) to stop my OS from tracking me. Even after I uncheck all these options, the search box that you use to search programs and files on your computer also searches the web. And guess which search engine is used? It is not DuckDuckGo. And it is actually quite annoying because it seems like web results appear faster than results on your computer. I realize I cannot escape tracking, but that does not mean I should just give up.
4) Return F8! Seriously, removing the option to press F8 was perhaps the stupidest decision Microsoft made in Windows 8. And that is saying a lot. In Windows 8 if your computer gets stuck in infinite reboot loop there is no way to get to safe mode or a repair console to try and fix it. F8 needs to return immediately.
5) Stop hiding system restore.
6) Provide a proper backup program. One like you find with Windows 7, except that it prunes old backups when the disk space is full.
Wow, people really care about icons huh?
I don't think I even focus on the details after the first time I look at them, it's just the little coloured patch where I click to make $stuff happen.
Mind you, Windows 10 will be a lot more than the tenth set of desktop icons I've had to get used to over the years, I'm sure I'll be able to adapt within a few minutes.
Dude, I don't wanna go all ad hominem on yo' ass but seriously, why would you not understand that for many people, an elegant desktop is not an unreasonable 'ask'? Because we could, you know, have just stayed with the Windows 1, 2 or 3 gui as long as the functionality is there. Better yet, lets go back to greyscale!
I get where you are coming from but earlier I said I don't want wanky art. I just want good design. Don't forget, the pixel pushers at MS, Apple, Giggle et al are paid a phenomenal salary to come up with these designs. Which is partly why I'm so angry!
Those icons and the UI look terrible. They really need to compare it to all past versions and really think "what would be better", not "how can we imitate Apple without really having a mind of our own and doing what the users want". But, moreover- I really hope they don't rush this release out. I'd be ok with them dropping promised features, even if it does look like crap, and instead focusing on quality. And, they need to be as sure as they can that it will work on everything. It will be one hell of a QA cycle each time, and they are going to have a high expense on that side.
But I can't get past how absolutely atrocious it looks.
I'm considering the unthinkable and get a mac next time around. Apple and its locked down mentality are brutal but ANYTHING is better than this.
I'd go full Linux if I could go without office and adobe stuff (and I'll shoot the first commenter who mentions gimp and libreoffice)
Software-speaking MacOS is not locked down at all (yet). It's a BSD. If you want UNIX stuff you've got X11.app and MacPorts/DarwinPorts/Homebrew. If you don't want iCloud then you skip past the first-login nag and you never hear about it again. If you don't want to use the Apple-supplied programs then you can just forget about them and run an alternative.
I have Linux Mint, VmWare Player and Windows Build 9926 as a guest OS. VMTools even allows me to enter a password to log in to Windows. In Windows itself I have Word ( downloaded via an Office365 account ) which is is one of the Start jobs for Windows.
So from the Linux desktop I can get straight into Word with a few clicks. In effect, Word is on my LINUX desktop.
get a Mac. Use Google docs for your document creation. Enjoy happy life. Seriously, the shackles that MSFT have on people with office is amusing. You give MSFT power each time you make that kind of statement. To hell with proprietary document formats. Office is a bloated bit of software that only tethers you to Windows unnecessarily.
Back in the 90's I worked for Microsoft (tech support for Windows) while Windows 95 was being developed. We were encouraged to have a look at the new product, play with it, see what we thought. The one thing that surprised everyone was how different the released version looked compared to the even the last few test builds, in fact, even the last build prior to RTM. Since then I've learned not to take appearances too seriously until a product actually goes final, no matter what product it may be.
One thing we learned from the Win8 fiasco is how determined 10's Microsoft is to impose change on Windows look&feel. So desperate to become relevant on mobile, they ignored the sheer ugliness of the resulting desktop, ignored public feedback and we've recently heard insiders claim they ignored 80% unfavourable feedback from their own employees.
They tried so hard not to look like IOS or Android and succeeded. Like or loath it, Googles flat icons look good (but are so cryptic I struggle to use the apps), IOS at least looks well drawn (in a childs toy way). Microsoft just look amateur and lacking in visual cues.
While the functional parts of Win10 are still in flux, the UI is heading in only one direction. It remains to be seen if enough pressure can be applied to force change. My bet is they'll need catastrophic take up of Win10 upgrades before that happens. Which means I'll be risking the security of Win10 with even more 3rd party fixes, I'm already running multiple UI hacks to make 8.1 acceptable :(
I really do hope so, Pawl. It's just that the icon sets for pre-release builds of earlier Windows normally had the icons locked down pretty early. You mentioned Windows 95 - well, my Beta of 95 was 95% the same, graphically, as the boxed retail copy. And the icons were 100% identical IIRC.
I've been running it on a 5 year old desktop replacement laptop--2 GHz C2D that's been updated to 8GB of RAM. It works ok once it's running; it doesn't feel much different from Win7. But the startup times are terrible. It takes about twice as long to get to the login screen if nothing goes wrong and sometimes it stops at a black screen for a couple minutes. Then, once you log in, it's useless for another couple minutes while a Metro background process eats up the entire CPU. I haven't looked at memory specifically, but it doesn't seem substantially worse than Win7 on that point. Mind you, it is running the Metro framework in the background, even if you haven't opened any apps.
Maybe once they optimize it, it'll get back to Win7 speeds.
Your post made me wonder, so I did a quick Google about Windows 7 and virtual desktops. For whatever reason, Windows XP and Windows 7 have virtual desktops available but they are hidden away. Sysinternals offers a little utility to interface with those desktops (actually there are a bazillion utilities available but I personally feel most comfortable when its from Sysinternals) and give you up to four. Unless you are not allowed to use 3rd party software you might like to have a look:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc817881.aspx
NT has had multiple desktops since the early 90s. SysInternals did a tool to let you use them. For whatever reason, Explorer (and Program Manager before it) never made use of them. For what it's worth (which is 1 vote in a survey that no-one is conducting) it is the feature that I turn off first when I install a Linux system. I have windows and I know how to minimise them, so I don't need another kind of virtual screen space.
Windows 95 certainly had tools to do it. On Linux/etc, FVWM had them, CDE, had them, and many others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_desktop
Oh, and I looked: KDE1 had much nicer icons than that screenshot above. But, I'd be shocked if there wasn't some form of icon/theme customization option in 10 if you don't like them.
https://www.kde.org/screenshots/kde1shots.php
Matt, KDE 3 was mentioned as it was the first desktop environment I used with Linux. I was gobsmacked that I could split my activities between several screens. 1 for software development, 2 for emails, 3 for documentation, 4 for el Reg etc etc
I'm aware that there are 3rd party utilties/hacks but if you are in a mega-corp environment then it's doubtfull you would be able to install them and most domestic non-power users probably wouldn't even be aware of the concept.
Ken, I'm shocked that you turn it off! But each to his own way of working
Why is it so ugly?
The flat square corners make it look cheap and nasty. They may improve the icons in the final version but I suspect the rest will still look like it was designed for a 5 year old.
On security, I read somewhere that everything you type is sent back to muckrosoft to "improve the search features" I don't think I want to use this for online banking (or anything else!)
This is to make Win8 look good. If they really want to mess with people's minds just go back to Win2 and Dos 5 the ugly duckings of 1990 vintage.
It seems that the powers that be have forgotten that the market place is the enterprise sector ( Not the consumer as this has long flow to Android etc.) and that no-one wants to spend a week at least retraining their staff !
( The average employee just uses an office suite an accounting program,cash register and what used to be called in the dim and distant past a typist or a tracer if not the generic term office worker and a hello girl or counter jumper, store man delivery clerk or general dogs body. Not highly trained university graduate.) If one works out the cost of a trainer plus the loss of time at a monomial $20 per hour per staff member the real cost of changing to this would be about : $50(Trainer) x $30 (staff member) x 8 x 5 ( cost per week) x $1000 x5 (loss of productivity per staff member) about $17k per worker per week for a single employee . The cost of introducing this O/S to the work place becomes astronomical. If the powers that be then do a small calculation of what it would cost a small micro business to update from an XP. system to Win 10. Is there any doubt as to why PC sales have fallen in a heap and this is just going to make matters worse. Win 10 preview is not even capable of playing Skyrim as my grandson informs me.
It beats me why they are trying to re-invent the wheel again. They have 2 readily acceptable O/S's which are in daily use chasing rainbows or trying to regain a market that has left them is a waste of money.
Firstly I am surprised that "some people didn't like windows 8" I thought it was universally accepted that Windows 8 was a piece of shit. https://lawrieaj.wordpress.com/2013/07/06/so-is-windows-8-1-as-shit-as-windows-8-00/
As to multiple desktops, I win ad a nauseam. Multiple desktops have been available on Windows since Windows 95/NT3.5 as far as I am aware. Russinovich from Sysinternals has had a version available forever. The main problem multiple desktops is that it not really as useful as it at first seems. I played with them under NT 4 when I had one of the first Matrox Millennium video cards. It was capable but the idea just didn't work too well.
Oh, come on. All you guys commenting here about how "fugly" it is, are the same guys who used to bitch about aero taking up cpu cycles and grumbling about pointless graphics effects, and reciting about how aero was the first thing you turned off before switching back to a true retro, pre XP visual style. Now here you all are grumbling about aero being taken away. Make up your fucking minds!
I've just been playing around with it, and it's actually OK so far. *Gasp*
It looks and acts like a simple shell to the software that you can install. Which is what you'd expect from an OS, isn't it? - Just an faint outline of control, not some monster waiting to growl at the user with indecipherable error messages.
That's the impression it gives anyway.
Yes, I am a little disappointed (!), I thought I'd hate it, but there's no point in lying. I need to give it some more time though...
I have the same build and my start menu is transparent too, well only just, I can barely see anything behind it and I'm on the same build as you so I don't understand how the tiles are getting in the way. If anything the transparency I have on my newly downloaded 10041 build could do with more transparency lol. Cant even make out icons except a vague shape. In terms of bugs I had to put in 1 script to get mail and people, calendar to work. Live tiles don't update to well sometimes but then again it is a preview build and I am supposed to be on the fast lane so bugs are warned and expected.
Cortana works great cant wait till full intermigration. Personally I haven't found any more bugs but I'm using this pc as my daily go to pc and I'm not looking hard for them, I'm just using the machine the same way I usually do. Wish they'd change the icons I'm not a big fan.
I do like the big square setting icon I sometimes see in the top that might be a design to use across the board. I am surprised how well it works for a developer preview.
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