Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?

It also shows you the screen you set it for, and a boolean to set it for all screens at once.

Something that should be a default option, or a single-tap switch in settings, turned into a chore consisting of a period of agonising disbelief, doubt, denial, search, and eventually bitter acceptance.

I suspect this is related to the System Preferences rebuild, since it's worked fine for 20+ years of OS X before that.

However, I've noticed, there's not much point in changing it. Showing the desktop is a waste of screen real estate because of the generations of abuse of desktop shortcuts. Even if you are careful, it becomes a cluttered wasteland (on Windows anyways). I just learned to never use the desktop for anything and always have windows up on various monitors.

There's the peak GNOME experience.

Quite a capable machine for my uses.

Not supported in Windows 11. Maybe with some additional config? Can’t be bothered with something hat might turn out to be fragile and need more maintenance than I can be bothered with. That’s a young man’s gane.

Ok, I’m about due to give Linux another tickle anyways.

Hmm, which distro… can always give a few a spin.

Keep it simple, Pop!_OS.

Installed fast, no issues, runs fine, stable. Seems entirely usable.

Customisations? Nah, keep it simple.

I’ll set a black background though.

Nope.

Makes me think it must have something to do with their corporate culture and how they work, since their developers, to my knowledge, never had a reputation for being weak. Maybe it's just because they have such a gigantic user base for everything they do, that 80% is the best business value. Though I doubt that a bit, as a third party developer, it makes me avoid their products where I can.

I'm certain that some idiotic change just like the ones suggested in the article destroyed this perfectly working feature, and nobody is bothered to fix it because it would impact the latest harebrained scheme to make my 10 year laptop do AI in its sleep and suggest helpful ads about the things it couldn't help overhear while "sleeping".

and it has migrated to web apps today - where doing something causes the UI to show a loading/progress wheel, but it takes forever in actuality (or on start up of the webpage, you get a blank screen with placeholder bars/blurred color images etc).

And this is the so-called responsive design...

Just your regular reminder that nix is good actually.

"I have a bug, you can get a full VM that reproduces it with 'nixos-rebuild build-vm --flake "github:user/repo#test-vm" && ./result/bin/run-*-vm'"

And the code producing that VM isn't just a binary blob that's a security nightmare, it's plain nix expressions anyone can read (basically json with functions).

And of course applying it to a new machine is a single command too.

Is it? The vast majority of the time, I change settings/set things up the way I want, and then... leave them for literally years. Hell, I can directly restore a backup I have of Sublime Text from years ago and my customizations will work.

  void doFoo(PermissionToDoFoo permission, ...){...}

  from request import getAuth, respond
  \\  Maybe<AuthenticationData> getAuth(Request request)
  \\  void respond(String response)
  from permissions import askForPermissionToDoFoo
  \\  Maybe<PermissionToDoFoo> askForPermissionToDoFoo(AuthenticationData auth)

  response =
    try
      auth <- getAuth(request)
      permission <- askForPermissionToDoFoo(auth)
      doFoo(permission)
      "Success!"
    fail
      "Oopsie!"

  respond(response)

We all like to think we have picked up habits that immunize us from certain kinds of error but large software systems are complex and bugs happen.

The number of people in here taking ‘Raymond Chen tells an anecdote about the time a dumb bug shipped in Windows and was fixed two weeks later’ as an indictment of Microsoft’s engineering culture is frankly embarrassing. Trading war stories is how we all get better.

It would be better for us all if culturally, the reaction to a developer telling a story of how they once shipped a stupid bug were for everyone to reply with examples of worse stuff they’ve done themselves, not to smugly nod and say ‘ah yes, I am too smart to make such a mistake’.

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/

A similar (slightly older) laptop I own boots from fully off to the KDE desktop in 25 seconds total including typing my password.

I think they're trying to emulate Apple who has had stocks integration by default for years, including being alongside the other pre-installed apps like SMS and Mail on the first iPhone. I imagine Apple did it to cement themselves as a high-class lifestyle brand, even though I'm sure there was never a time where most iPhone users were doing a lot of day trading.

I wonder what percentage of Windows users rely on the stock ticker in the start menu though...

Their other distributions are very good as well, especially for Windows XP because they bundle a lot of important drivers for old software to work correctly

In test and CI we had this set to a very low number. In acceptance (manual testing, smoke testing) to a very high number.

This was useful because it showed three things:

- Network- and services- configuration bugs, would immediately give a crash and thus failing test. E.g. firewalls, wrong hosts, broken URIs etc.

- Slow services would cause flickering tests. Almost always a sign that some service/configuration/component had performance problems or was misconfigured itself. Quick fix would be to increase the timeout, but re-thinking the service - e.g. replace with a mock if we couldn't control it, or fixing its performance issues, the proper- and often not that hard- fix. Or re-thinking the use of the service, e.g. by pushing it to async or a job queue or such another fix.

- Stakeholders going through the smoke-test and acceptance test would inevitably report "it's really slow" showing the same issues as above but in a different context and with "real" services like some external PSP, or SMTP.

It was really a very small change: just some wrappers around http-calls and other network calls, in which this config was used, next to a hard rule to never use "native" clients/libs in the code but always our abstraction. This then turned out to offer so much more benefits than just this timeout: error reporting, debugging, decoupling.

It wasn't javascript (Ruby, some Python, some Typescript) but in JS it would be as easy as `function fooFetch(resource, options) { return fetch(resource, options) }` from day one, then slowly extended and improved with said logging, reporting, defaults etc.

I've since always introduced such "anti-corruption" layers (facades, proxy, ports/adapters) very early on, because once you have "requests.get("http://example.com/foo/bar")' all throughout your python code, there's no way to ever migrate away from "requests" if (when!) it gets deprecated, or to add said timeout throughout the code. It's really a tiny task to add my own file/module that simply imports "requests" and then calls it on day one, and then use that instead.

Years ago, I had a bug so bizarre I nearly convinced myself the machine was haunted. My mouse pointer started drifting—not randomly, but only when I pressed the arrow keys. Up arrow? Cursor nudged north. Down arrow? There it went again. I was convinced some accessibility setting or keyboard remap had gone haywire. I rebooted. I checked drivers. I even briefly entertained the idea that my codebase was cursed.

Three hours in, I realized the true culprit: MSPaint. I had opened it earlier, and because the canvas was selected, the arrow keys were actually moving the selection box—which, by delightful Windows design, also moved the mouse cursor. I wasn’t losing my mind. Just... slowly drawing rectangles in the background every time I hit an arrow key.

I closed MSPaint, and poof—my “haunting” ended. I haven’t trusted that application since. Great for pixel art, less great for your sanity.

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You and ChatGPT sound identical.