prengle

shocked i didnt already make an account here ages ago as ive been following ross since around 2013 but whatever, this vid was particularly cathartic for me as someone that's been poking at the windows shell's guts for years and i still feel like going on a tangent maybe its just my tism acting up again but i dont actually agree with a lot of your views regarding the *perfect* desktop gui - i dont need mouse gestures and so on, i actually like the standard windows 9x desktop paradigm. it isnt perfect and it can absolutely be improved upon (for a short time i used bbzero/bblean for windows and that comes with the right click start menu-esque thing most linux window managers do and i actually liked it a lot, although i still just open a lot of programs straight from explorer... which i should probably fix), but ive stuck to it since i was a squirmy little embryo and it generally works for me. i even love the raw beveled "classic" windows 9x theme you derided really early on. however every single thing you said about large software manufacturers (coughmicrosoftcough) gradually removing customization options and crippling their products in the name of """accessibility""" was absolutely spot on. this has been a widespread practice for the last decade at least but im going to illustrate this with an example thats been killing me from the inside for yeeeears: and multiple people in this thread and the youtube comments and so on have already alluded to this (grrr...) but the "circle launcher" concept you brought up is called a pie menu and theyve been around in some form since the late 60s, and yes, don hopkins has advocated for them for yeeeears and he was the dude at maxis responsible for adding them into the sims. this is what i get for always being late to the party.. edit: whoops!! i forgot about stardock and all of their windows customization tools and that ross explicitly mentioned them several times in the video. i really really dislike them and i wouldnt recommend their software at all to anyone, not just because its paid proprietary software that barely works (well, so is windows, but... y'know...) but as far as i can tell, they actually changed their eula last year. if you buy ANY stardock product, you get to activate "one (1) copy of the Software on one (1) unique personal computer" and thats it! im not even going to try explaining why this is a vile fucking business practice, it should be blatantly obvious. just dont bother with stardock.