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

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Nostalgia, Minimalism, and “Comfort Food” UIs

  • Many commenters relate to the “comfort food” metaphor: they still use old-school window managers (Motif, Fluxbox, KDE, etc.) with simple solid backgrounds, often unchanged since the 90s.
  • Some argue “nothing has improved” in GUIs beyond more pixels and compositing overhead; others push back, saying modern desktops offer meaningful usability gains despite bloat.
  • 4K/HiDPI with old WMs is discussed: people report it works via xrandr scaling or tweaking X resources, sometimes better than Windows’ scaling.

Customization vs. Defaults

  • One camp now sticks almost entirely to defaults: easier bug reporting, less mental overhead, fewer configs to sync, and life being too busy to endlessly tweak.
  • Another camp insists tailoring core tools (window manager, editor, shell) pays off massively in daily productivity, especially when configs are versioned and portable.
  • Several note cognitive cost: every custom config must be remembered, backed up, and maintained; that cost grows with the number of tools.

Solid Colors and Wallpaper Systems Across OSes

  • Solid-color backgrounds frequently exhibit odd bugs or half-supported states:
    • macOS versions briefly broke solid-color selection, forcing people to fake it with small PNGs.
    • GNOME removed GUI controls for solid colors but still supports them via obscure settings.
    • Windows RDP and other flows sometimes reset or mishandle solid-color backgrounds.
  • Some argue OSes should unify everything through the “image wallpaper” path (e.g., auto-generate 1×1 PNGs) instead of separate, fragile code paths.

Perceived Software/OS Regressions and “Fake Responsiveness”

  • Logon splash behavior is linked to a broader pattern: systems show UI “early” even when they’re not ready, leading to confusing half-functional states.
  • Multiple complaints that modern apps and OSes are slower and more bloated than 90s/early‑2000s software despite vastly better hardware, often due to:
    • Heavy frameworks (Electron, browsers, VMs),
    • Network-bound designs and SaaS backends,
    • Security/monitoring agents and corporate “panopticon” software.
  • Others counter that older systems also had serious performance and reliability issues (slow disks, frequent crashes), and that we’ve traded speed for features, reliability, and connectivity.

Sleep, Power Management, and Reliability

  • Several report Windows laptops no longer truly sleep: fans and CPUs keep running, batteries drain, or machines wake randomly.
  • Some attribute this to OS-level design changes (e.g., newer sleep models), others to bad drivers, firmware, or vendor “crapware.”
  • Workarounds include hibernate-only usage, BIOS tweaks, or abandoning specific hardware vendors; macOS is widely cited as more reliable on this front.

Architecture Lessons: Timeouts, Tokens, and Capabilities

  • The Windows 7 bug is framed as a structural/API design failure: a component needed to “remember to call” a completion function.
  • Suggested alternatives:
    • RAII-style handles whose destruction automatically signals completion.
    • Capability-based designs where functions require explicit “permission” objects, making illegal states (e.g., unauthorized operations) unrepresentable.
  • Arbitrary timeouts are criticized: they hide bugs instead of surfacing them. Some describe patterns where low timeouts in test/CI and high ones in acceptance tests expose misconfigurations and slow dependencies early.

Broader Quality Culture and Corporate Software

  • Opinions on Microsoft are split:
    • Some see stories like this as normal “war stories” from complex systems, not unique incompetence.
    • Others see a pattern of 80% solutions and long-lived rough edges (Control Panel vs. Settings, OneNote limitations, Windows ads/telemetry, flaky web app architectures).
  • Similar criticism is leveled at Google and others for inconsistent permission models and UI/notification bugs, often attributed to organizational fragmentation (Conway’s Law).

Developer Psychology and Empathy

  • Several commenters find comfort that even top-tier teams ship silly bugs; it normalizes their own debugging struggles.
  • Anecdotes (e.g., arrow keys moving the mouse due to a hidden Paint window) reinforce how subtle interactions and legacy behaviors can produce baffling symptoms, even for experienced developers.