Windows 7 FAIL
January 16, 2011
[tl;dr: I try to not hate Windows, and it undermines my plan... yet again]
Most of us have a Windows installation lying around somewhere because they need it every now and then for some quirky application that won’t run in Wine. So I also have a Windows 7, which I got for free via MSDNAA, sitting around on a separate partition for these cases. As I noted in 2010 in this blog, Windows 7 is not as awful as the previous Windows releases. At times, it’s even fun to use.
But then, they’re showing you the meaning of the phrase “over-simplified user interface” again: Windows 7 removes the ability to set different wallpapers per screen. Okay, wouldn’t be so awful for an installation used so seldomly, but then this: Even when you set it to “Scale to screen size”, it will scale the image to the size of the smallest screen, and reuses this (small) image for all screens.
So I’m sitting here, at a Full HD monitor with a wallpaper as small as 1440×900. Yes, that’s awfully small when surrounded by black borders.
January 16, 2011 at 21:58
I know, it’s paid app, but i use this to solve this problem : http://www.displayfusion.com/
January 16, 2011 at 23:09
Windows surely has a long-standing history of third-party apps fixing the base system in a hackish way, like third-party virtual desktop apps or drivers adding multitudes of features that the OS is supposed to implement.
January 16, 2011 at 22:16
after two hours of trying to get windows 7 to install from a usb drive it told me my graphics card was broken and 3d was turned off – the only reason i installed it for. Thanks a lot bill.
Now im back to running XP in a vm – the only place where an OS from redmond belongs.
January 16, 2011 at 23:10
Well, not if you’re trying to play a round of Half Life 2. They keep telling me that 3D acceleration in VMs should just work, but I never actually got to that point.
January 17, 2011 at 03:02
Doesn’t HL2 work in wine?
January 17, 2011 at 04:42
Yep, it runs on mine, albeit Graphics performance is low, (mine is a 4yrs old nvidia 7400)
January 17, 2011 at 06:58
It does just fine.
January 16, 2011 at 22:18
Or how you can’t have a taskbar on both monitors. Or how the Windows taskbar is just plain nasty like when you have a pinned application it will be small next to one that’s open and if you have an opened app it doesn’t push that to the far left. It looks and feels like a crappy knock off of Mac’s taskbar.
Also where’s the virtual desktop?
January 16, 2011 at 22:40
That is a good reason to hate an OS …
If that is your only problem with Windows 7 then you should switch full time to it!
I have larger problems with any OS — including Linux + KDE — I have used than that.
January 16, 2011 at 23:11
Sure, that’s right (says someone who did hardly read any mail for two weeks because KMail was broken).
January 17, 2011 at 19:14
One difference is that with Linux or KDE, you can usually do something about the problem. Change a configuration here, install an additional package there.
With Windows, you have no such option. Either it just works, or it just doesn’t, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
January 16, 2011 at 22:41
I’ve had problems with this, too. It’s annoying, but I never really tried to find a fix, since I don’t use my Windows partition often enough for it to be worth the trouble.
Funny enough, I was wrestling with KDE over multiple displays yesterday, though not over something as trivial as setting wallpapers. Back in the KDE3 days, I used to use separate X screens without a problem, but now it seems all but impossible to do nicely because of Plasma. Plasma-desktop refuses to run if it’s already running on another display, and the only way I found to work around it was to run plasma-netbook on the second X screen and modify it to look and act like a normal desktop.
I eventually went back to a seamless desktop configuration, which is more common and apparently better tested. I was mildly annoyed, but I realised that was a good sign: it means I expected KDE to just work and was surprised when it didn’t. It means desktop Linux has reached the point where I can get annoyed at odd things not working as expected, rather than being annoyed about basic functionality being lacking.
Most of my basic functionality complaints these days are directed at Windows. Though I agree that 7 is better than older releases, it still feels like it’s missing a lot of features that I take for granted with Linux and KDE, and the features that get added seem half-baked, like the weak kioslave-esque functionality they added to apps like notepad.
January 16, 2011 at 23:13
@multiple displays: AFAIR Aaron wrote multiple blogs about this topic. No dev is running a configuration with separate X screens, which means that no or only few testing can be done for these configs.
January 16, 2011 at 23:55
I remember seeing something about the devs not having that sort of configuration, now that you mention it. I’m not surprised, since seamless is usually more convenient in almost all cases and KDE handles it very well; there’s not much reason to use separate X screens any more. In fact, the only reason I was trying to do it was because I wanted to work around some strangeness with Nvidia’s proprietary drivers when used with three or more monitors. (One of my only problems with Nvidia’s Linux support)
January 16, 2011 at 22:44
Ok, I don’t know what universe you’re from, but unless you install 3rd party software, you were never able to set a different wallpaper image per monitor in Windows.
and as far as it not scaling for your larger monitor? Check your settings. I’ve never had that issue in Windows, even in 7. =/
January 16, 2011 at 23:12
Google brings up multiple instances of this issue (I think I linked one). Also, I think to remember that XP had that setting, although this might be wrong, and I cannot check this anymore.
January 17, 2011 at 00:00
If I remember correctly, you usually couldn’t set separate wallpapers in XP without a third-party app. I think some video card drivers hacked in support for it, but it wasn’t a feature of XP.
(It’s been a while, so I could be wrong, I’ll admit.)
January 17, 2011 at 04:12
This definitely was not possible in XP without 3rd-party apps.
January 16, 2011 at 23:15
Strange, I’ve never seen a way of getting a different wallpaper on each monitor, nor does Windows stretch the wallpaper to the lowest resolution. Even in Win2000.
January 17, 2011 at 01:21
There were a few fixes that I remember encountering (e.g. using the Active Desktop on XP), but most of the multi desktop woes in Windows tend to be solved by the video card manufacturer. NVidia has utilities to set individual backgrounds and even a second taskbar, as does ATI.
January 17, 2011 at 17:20
Not possible on WinXP either. However there is an easy solution:
* open image editor of choice
* create image with size of combined Desktop
* insert desired background images at the right places
* save, set as background image.
Wish every windows problem was solvable that simple…
January 17, 2011 at 20:42
Recently I have mostly been living in Windows (7 and XP). My experience is boils down to:
(Windows) Most of the time you just get on with your work, every now and then something crops up that is infuriatingly awkward to use.
(Linux + KDE) Most of the time you just get on with your work, every now and then something crops up which is a real joy and pleasure to use.