Agreed - I'm also a light user of KDE and exactly the same as I said about the Mac applies to KDE. The Mac improved a lot, although it's still more flexible to use 3rd party stuff. I'm not aware of any extra window management available in KDE although as stated I'm only a light user of it really (my gaming box is a Bazzite install with KDE).

People switched to Google because it had a nice clean white page with a single search box, while AltaVista was going the 90s fad portal route. Clean interface and simplicity was thee key,

There's lots of talk about how Google's search algos were better than AltaVista but honestly, at first, they weren't. They were close and they improved, but the loading speed and simplicity advantage that Google had over AltaVista is what bought them time to improve. Remember too that one reason AltaVista was better was that people optimised to be found by it, and not for Google. As time went on, more people learned what Page Rank was (long since gone) and started to optimise for that instead, thus speeding up the switch.

Lesson: Don't go complex. Don't go shoving extra stuff at people that they haven't asked for. Give them the simplest thing possible, and they will use it.

Another thing that pisses me off is the language confusion. I have a system in english, google is configured in english and when I do a search in english all the top replies are in the language of the country I'm in.

of course you have to authenticate, but you run all of the software to administer it on a client, not sitting at the console. The console had only the most barebones capability, usually user management. The tools to administer ran on the client.

...it makes sense to have a headless server operating system when you're mostly running commodity spin-up/spin-down headless servers. Microsoft's server operating system was still largely based on the idea of running on a baremetal self-contained box, even though Microsoft servers had long, long since been used in the virtual machine space. If anything they're quite far behind the curve on this.

The Novell Netware model adapted to the VM era is what makes sense, where the tools don't require logging in to the server at all in order to administer the environment.

IBM is and has always been a services/consultant business, even when they made products.

I'm not so sure about the UI. The history of Microsoft and UI for the past 40 years is that they're happy to abandon their incumbent UI for different. We saw that with Windows 3.x to '95 and NT4, with Windows 98 and the integration of Spyglass Mosaic Internet Explorer, with the transition from Windows ME and Windows 2000 to Windows XP, the subsequent further transition from XP to Windows 7, and the rework from Windows 8.x to Windows 10. We even saw it with Windows 10 to Windows 11.

They change their UI because their customers don't see the OS being new/different unless they change their UI. If the UI looks the same then the average untrained end user doesn't know the difference and doesn't see a value in spending the money to upgrade.

So many VPs will be using these to read email and surf teh web.

Unless you use amplitude modulation on the "lazer" and bounce it off the ionosphere.

[Apollo shakes his fists at space going worshipers who ignore him, packs bags for space trippin']

Phat Lazer Beats was that other thug in Mos Eisley.

[settles back in big blue comfy couch and grabs for–]

"Oh, never mind"

"Finger Quotes"

How do you know they exist in the first place? Start menu is a copy of the Apple menu as enhanced by an ancient shareware utility called "Hierarchical Menus". That add-on does exactly what the start menu does, allowing shortcuts to be grouped in folders etc. and for nesting of folders. It predates the Start menu by a few years.

One of the points was to be able to organise by category. I might not know what the thing-to-set-up-a-disk-partition is called, but it's probably in a menu hierarchy called "Utilities" and I can go look. It's discoverable, and it should be there.

Pinned things? Probably a set of defaults that are easily removable would be my preferred answer (which is what they do), but I could also settle for none until you put it there. But I very much disagree that nothing at all should be in the Start menu except your own choices.

I mean - the Apple's "Microsoft - Start Your Photocopiers!" definitely applied to the start of the Win 7 era. It was pretty much a straight lift of Aqua, ironically (given this post's subject) with more flexibility on positioningthe task bar vs the Dock. Certainly Windows didn't introduce pinning apps.

By the end of it though, I thought that Win7 had better actually window management than the Mac did, and even with the split view stuff etc. that's been introduced since I still feel that in order to get the same flexibility of window management that I get in Windows I need to install 3rd party stuff on the Mac.

Admittedly I haven't sat down and done a feature-to-feature comparison for a while there, but yep: will definitely give MS the edge of the ability to re-arrange your windows on the screen.