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We tend to have our operating system preferences, whether it’s desktop or mobile, but that doesn’t mean we love everything about them. If you could only change one thing about your primary operating system of choice, what would it be?
Remember, you can only pick one (but feel free to choose one for your desktop OS and your mobile OS). Share yours in the comments.
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Ahem.
BLUESCREEN BLUESCREEN BLUESCREEN BLUESCREEN BLUESCREEN BLUESCREEN BLUESCREEN BLUESCREEN BLUESCREEN BLUESCREEN BLUESCREEN BLUESCREEN BLUESCREEN BLUESCREEN BLUESCREEN BLUESCREEN.
I’m done.
Note to BlueMaxima – Windows XP is a 10 year old ancient operating system… time to move on and join the modern computing world.
My biggest bugaboo about my primary OS is the awful, clumsy, illogical Finder utility that Apple inflicts upon it’s customers. Have managed to “fix” most of the shortcomings by purchasing third party bolt-on apps. Hopefully Apple will fix this, and the general GUI “staleness” of OS.X with 10.7 otherwise it’s OS will look VERY dated compared to other modern OS’s like Win7 and even Ubuntu.
I love OSX, but would have to agree. Finder needs some serious work. I think tabs would be a GREAT addition to the Finder.
Tim I’ve been using Windows 7 for some time now and have countless bluescreens on my desktop and a handful on my OEM Samsung laptop. Sadly it’s far from a thing of the past.
My gripes would be that W7 is SO SLOW and OSX (my preferred OS) needs to rethink windows resizing.
Seconded, I can’t stand the blue screen complainers. It’s about as relevant as complaining about OS9 ‘bomb’ errors on mac.
Give TotalFinder a go for Finder
http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2010/01/totalfinder-adds-tabs-hotkeys-and-other-tweaks-to-os-xs-finder/
It’s not actually a replacement, it kind of ‘augments’ finder. You may already have tried it though.
Ubuntu distribution upgrades (eg, from 10.04 to 10.10) artifacts being left behind and breaking packages. The process itself is easy and quick, and the result is great, but having to fix certain things (eg; libimobiledevice for mounting my iPhone’s filesystem) is frustrating.
iOS; everything…
Mac: I hate how Mr Jobs makes a menu disappear when I click and just miss a menu selection. If the click is still within the menu then making it disappear because I missed seems like a punishment for my haste or poor motor skills.
totally agree, it’s a complete pain. just like how the shut down process can get interupted by still open programs, sometimes it takes me 3-4 goes to get it to shut down
oh god i know. Go through a menu tree, click on one arrowed menu choice, boom! It’s all gone.
Ps I love how in the 90s we said ‘I hate how Bill Gates makes me…’ and now it’s ‘I hate how Steve Jobs makes me…’ gotta love demonization!
Desktop: Windows 7. Faster wake from hibernation. Having been spoiled by iOS and Android which give me near-instant access to apps, I want Windows to do the same.
Mobile: Android 2.2. Better integration of a music player. It’s the one thing that iOS really has over Android but surely Google can come up with an iTunes/iPod alternative that will let me kick the ol’ Apple habit.
Windows 7 ultimate on my home computer because it keeps on prompting me for an activation code
OSX window behaviour. It does my head in. I want my window to shift between fullscreen, normal (i.e. the native size of the app) and minimised, and I also want my windows to ‘snap’ to sides of the screen.
Apparently Steve Jobs thinks this is a bad thing.
Just download Cinch, its a cool little app that gives you the snapping features of windows 7. It means you can quickly maximise by dragging the window to the top of the screen.
Isn’t free ($7) but its well worth it.
Better Touch tool http://blog.boastr.net/ also adds the ‘snap-to’ windows 7 features as well as a host of other touchpad features. Highly recommended and is also free
What’s the issue. You paid for Windows. You activate Windows. That’s the end of it. It’s not rocket science or brain surgery… ???
But, if you have paid for it, why should you have to activate it?
Apart from not being able to stop unauthorized use, (cracked versions of 7 are available, and yes, they do work as well as the standard versions)
Clearly you haven’t had the pleasure of explaining to Microsoft support that you just replaced some faulty Ram or a Hard Drive, not the Friggin Board or CPU, and made to feel like a thief because you can’t read the tiny text on the inside of the CD/DVD. Yeah I paid for it, and the serial that came with the OS should be enough. Oh,.. and if they charged a reasonable price for it people wouldn’t feel so inclined to download cracked copies. Is that a good enough reason to be pissed. :[
Linux – Specifically Ubuntu
Getting things up and running into a state I want takes a lot of effort. To get all my mouse keys working, brightness on 2 different monitors set up correctly, my mail client talking to my MS exchange server, etc.
If things work the first time, great, if not, then its a lot of trawling through message boards and editing arcane text files to get things working.
Windows and MacOS aren’t perfect (And I would not want to use them as my primary OS) – but its far closer to plug and play.
I hate the Windows 7 search system in windows explorer. It’s completely useless for the sort of searching that i do. Unless i just dont know how to use it properly I can’t search for several specific filters at once, and then i can’t refine the search further once the results are posted. It’s fine if i want to search for Big Jpgs. But it i want to find a jpg between 30 and 400kb, that was created by a particular user between June and July. Then it seems utterly useless to me. Please correct me if i’m wrong, other than that, I love windows 7.
Actually there is another disappointment, and that is in Win7 the WindowsXP Virtual Machine mode. When i upgraded i thought, wicked! I don’t have to worry about compatibility with my old games and stuff. Unfortunately, the Virtual Machine doesn’t support and 3d hardware, which makes sense, but it’s frustrating none the less.
I guess my ultimate desktop OS would be windows with the power of the *nix commandline. (No Cygwin and mysys don’t count)
I guess that makes the crappy user experience and lack of game playing ability my pet-peeve with linux and the terrible shell for windows.
Tried Windows Powershell? It’s actually a fairly reasonable approximation of a *nix commandline. That and the GnuWin binaries and you’d almost be totally at home.
Win7 I like that when you hover your mouse over a popup thumbnail for a running program on the task bar, it shows that program window and hides all others.
But I hate that it disappears if you do the natural thing and move you mouse to the program window instead of clicking on the thumbnail first.
Windows 7: So it looks after itself & does not require any user maintenance what so ever. I want it to have MSE & automatically scheduled computer maintenance built in so deep into windows that you cant turn it off!
iOS: Magically sync everything on my Windows 7 (bookmarks!!)
Windows 7 search is absolute rubbish. The old search companion with the little dog animation was much better and also easier to use
I hate that after all this time Windows stills allows any app to steal the focus and bring itself to the foreground – regardless of if I’m in the middle of typing or about to click on something.
Unsure if OSX doesn’t allow that or if OSX app developers just aren’t as douchebaggy but I don’t get that on my MBP at home, just my work PC.
I made another comment to this effect before reading your’s Jonathon. Focus-stealing (possibly at its worst level yet in Windows 7) is by far my biggest OS headache…
Windows 7. The lack of an excellent virtual desktop manager. Every other OS seems to have this reasonably sorted and built in. Android, iOS, OSX, Ubuntu etc etc.
I am yet to find something excellent for windows that supports multi monitor use well. I’m currently using Dexpot which is the best and most customizable I have found but it seems good multi monitor support on windows doesn’t exist.
I would switch to another OS just for this but the software I need for work is very windows specific (no a virtual machine on another OS wont cut it unfortunately)
If anyone knows of something better please let me know. It needs to support multiple graphics cards and quad monitors well.
If by any chance your using any ATi graphics cards there.. you can use Hydravision to give you those kind of effects with Windows. They are part of the graphics drivers, but an addon which is a seperate download from ATi’s site.
OS X: Finder’s lack of cut and paste support and generally annoying handling of file operations. Having to use drag and drop to move files and the fact that if one file in the group is read-only, the whole operation gets changed to a copy instead of move.
OS X: the dock and the applications menu. Lion will fix this with launchpad… i hope…. unless it makes it worse… thats very apple like… -crosses fingers for the next few months until lion is released-.
I dislike the dock because it sits at the bottom of the screen in an un-neat fashion. I am a mac lover but on this i prefer windows 7, with the dock like, favourite applications bar but with a more programs button nearby with the start menu.
I also like aero snap.
you may find your dock a lot more pleasant if you try Hyper Dock – it gives windows 7-like previews, and also enables aero snap on osx.
http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2010/09/hyperdock-brings-window-previews-dock-enhancements-to-os-x/
Windows 7 – speed. It takes around 3 times as long to boot on my netbook compared with Ubuntu. Also, when I right click on blank space in explorer, the context menu takes a good 20 seconds to sort itself out. On Ubuntu – instant.
Android 2.1 – FLASH! WHY MUST I ROOT TO GET FLASH?! I WANT TO LORD IT OVER iOS USERS, DAMMIT!
OSX mouse cursor behaviour. How a system favoured by designers can have such a wacky cursor movement system is beyond me.
Windows 7 does not want to cooperate with my Linux-running NAS Box. Please let me index the contents and create libraries in it!
…Geoff
iOS: Why is it so hard to turn bluetooth on an off. I just want a button on a screen somewhere instead of having to dive into however many menus.
It shouldn’t be so hard!!
That’s my reason for jailbreaking – StatusBar Settings (a.k.a. SBSettings) is a godsend.
I am IT manager for a network of 200 desktops and have seen 3 bluescreens in 3 years (all on the same Dell PC!). If you’re still getting bluescreens, you’re not doing it right…
My biggest OS gripe (Win7) is Window’s horrible treatment of window focus. I regularly open a VNC window and start typing in the PC name – when I look back at the screen, I’ve been typing into a pop up or another piece of software that has jumped in front. Incredibly annoying!
Mac OS X: Windows that grab focus no matter what you are currently doing. Example: You’re writing an email, you pause to start up an app that takes an age to load (aka anything by Adobe) you go back and are halfway through the email when the application, finally ready, leaps into the foreground like some panting dog with a saliva covered ball!
What I want: The option to tell everything to default to the background. If I’m really waiting on an app I’ll stay with it until open.
Mac: finder is stuipid. networking is a pain in the backside, single button is getting REALLY old now… MORE IS BETTER (Jeremy Clarkson POWERRRR MORE IS BETTER) gaming mice (buttons – MORE IS BETTER)…
Mac: i don’t know if i do it right, or wrong, but they keep losing their wifi settings @ work
windows: BSOD has happened 1 time in the past 2 years at my work… 350 windows based computers nad 15 macs
I have more issues with the macs than with windows based computers.
windows: startup time is longer, BUT with my laptop, its been ON since 10th of January, hasn’t been rebooted, when i leave, i just lock it and walk away.
windows: XP don’t support server 2008 group policies
mac: don’t support windows servers full stop. to the functionality i require.
i have seen more issues here on macs than windows based / linux computers… why? i thought windows was the worse OS ever, and linux only for nerds who live the basement of their mothers houses and have never seen a girl in swimware let alone naked…
Windows search is definitely my #1 hate – broken, or perhaps just very badly designed in terms of expected behaviour.
Another little thing I’ve never understood:
1. Find a reeeally long web page.
2. Click on the vertical scrollbar thumb and commence dragging it down, to move towards the bottom of the page.
3. When you’re almost at the bottom, move your mouse a couple of inches to the left or right and feel your stress level rise as the thumb snaps back to the top of the scrollbar.
4. Start over.
Argh.
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