“You will own nothing and you’ll be happy”
TLDR: We rewrote the taskbar and didn’t bother implementing it.
This really stuck with me. “Rewrote” implies feature parity. What they really did was replace the taskbar.
What’s weird is that given certain odd scenarios (I can’t recall it but there was a video by Enderman about it) you’ll see the old windows 10 taskbar appear, exact styling and all. So the windows 11 taskbar is quite literally just a WebView plastered on top.
“When you think about having the taskbar on the right or the left, all of a sudden the reflow and the work that all of the apps have to do to be able to have a wonderful experience in those environments is just huge.”
This is such utter fucking nonsense. They already have to deal with the concept of a “client area” that encompasses variable-sized screens and (worse) the multiple-monitor situation. Movable task bar is trivial.
the code required to move the taskbar to the top or sides isn’t actually in Windows 11, because Microsoft created the new taskbar from the ground up
Funny, I run a script on my work computer that let’s me move it. I like it on the top.
It couldn’t be that hard to make new code that achieves the same thing with the new taskbar.
It’s hardly the only feature they broke. Another stupidly simple thing was On Win10 I can click on the time and pop open the calendar from any monitor. Windows 11 only the main monitor works. It’s annoying as fuck. Everyone involved with creating this half baked piece of shit and forcing it on Windows users should kill themselves.
Harsh, but I think everyone at the entire company could and we’d be better off.
That OS is not even pretending to hide how sinister it’s being.
In a non capitalist hellhole, people would’ve quit before copying with writing any of it. They would’ve quit before they put Candy Crush on the Start menu.
I could perhaps have understood this calendar mess when they rolled out windows 11, but we’re one year later, come on.
Windows 11 came out in 2021, 4 years ago.
I got my computer in 2022 and switched to Linux this year so for a 3 year period I got to experience Windows 11 get worse in real time. Co-Pilot being built in is what completely broke me I think.
Right. All the more incomprehensible.
Probably Microsoft: copilot, rewrite the taskbar
The taskbar: I’m only down here now
laughs in KDE
Plasma is everything I used to wish Windows’ desktop could be, but isn’t because of… honestly I have no idea what they’re thinking over there. I am so glad I dumped that trainwreck. Love everything KDE <3
That’s quite an article to say they forgot about it after re-writing the task bar for no reason. It’s such a basic expected feature.
Probably written by CowPilot
just MS things. changing things for no apparent reason to make it worse to use and also remove existing features that people actually liked
I can’t move the Windows 11 taskbar because I’ve been running Linux for over 20 years. Recommended fix!
Yeah, KDE ftw
Linux is missing enterprise management tools. For all its horrible flaws, nothing like SCCM, In tune, group policy, and Active Directory (in the sense of managing group policy, not so much identity) exist for Linux. Fix that, even commercially, and you might see a real change.
There’s plenty of enterprise management tools available - these tools all existed in the Linux world before their adoption to Windows.
There’s a bunch of different configuration management tools available:
Or you could go for an MDM (Mobile Device Management) solution:
These lists are not exhaustive.
The same tools that manage data centers full of servers can also be used to manage user devices.
I’m aware of these, but invariably when discussing with my intercompany peers it’s a hard no. When a company completely ditches MS it literally makes the news. The cost vs complexity formula must not make sense (also user retraining and interoperability problems are not solved here either).
I would love to break the stranglehold MS has on general corporate productivity computing but I also want to keep my job.
Sorry, it didn’t seem like you were aware of them from the post above. There are plenty of reasons to stay with Windows, Linux lacking enterprise management tools just isn’t one of them.
People don’t generally care which OS they use as long as they can get their job done. We had one sub-division entirely on an immutable Linux desktop, another media unit was all-in on Apple products. As you say though, they’re outliers - simple inertia will keep people with Windows for a long time to come, their dominant position ensures it.
The cost vs complexity argument isn’t a compelling one either - there’s a reason so little of the internet runs on Windows.
My Linux laptop at work is enrolled in Intune
Finally someone know how IT works in the corporate world
No thanks! I’m more into abolishing capitalism than facitating it further. I’m looking forward to the end of all commercial enterprises and especially management! It should be as difficult and expensive as possible to establish hierarchical systems of digitally managing large corporations.
The amount of bullshit is incredible. The DE sets the windows position. The DE tells the apps what’s the “usable” desktop area. It worked for decades. And now “you can’t imagine the amount of work”
Fuck you microsoft. Not that I care anymore. Even your excuses are pathetic.
There was a while back some Windows developer externally lamenting how ass-backwards they were and as a result their NT kernel was woefully under-featured compared to other contemporary OSes…
Then I think they forced him to take it back and say ‘um actually our kernel is actually super awesome, my mistake’.
Microsoft is doing great when it comes to supporting the rise of linux.
I’m on linux because of Microsoft
Kubuntu, proxmox and mint checking in here fu $msft
On linux since everything M$ has done from Win 2000 onwards and their mob style practices under piece of shit Ballmer.
So, to cater to the maximum number of users at once, Microsoft applied a data-driven approach to find out which features to add now, which features to add later, and which to completely avoid.
I call bullshit, because nobody uses the “modern” devices and printers interface in windows 10, because it fucking sucks. Everyone goes to the control panel instead. In windows 11, you have to use the “modern” interface, and it drives me crazy, especially because the old, fully functional, and reliable one is still in the OS, but Microsoft decided to hide it/make it a PITA to get to.
They keep re-implementing things.
Just the Start menu. You can see how 95 evolved into 98 evolved into ME, then they changed it for XP, and they never stopped making big pointless changes. In many cases, those big pointless changes have been lengthening the process of going from the bare desktop to the thing you need by adding pointless screens and dialogs. Or, like the Start menu, they just drastically redesigned it such that a user used to Win XP tries to use 7 and they just…stare at it because it’s not what they were expecting. Windows 7’s Start menu might even be objectively better, Microsoft’s software engineers could very well produce good research documentation about UI design based on observing or polling users about what features they wanted and then they made the thing people seemed to want, but to people who got used to how it already worked the new thing was bad because it’s different.
I could be convinced Windows 8.1 is a mental unwellness simulator. In Sierra’s FMV horror game Phantasmagoria 2, the player character goes insane at work, and this is simulated by the paperwork he’s working on flashing scarier words for a split second. You’re reading this document and then near the bottom of the page an ordinary word like “recommended” turns to “murdered” for a few frames. Win 8.1’s animated tiles reminded me of that. Plus the whole “The desktop and all normal Windows apps therein is itself just an app that can be run in split screen next to special phone-like single tasking apps which pretty much only we will develop for and we won’t include desktop versions of so you have to deal with this.” I hate Windows 8.1.
What’s real fun is you can tell when they abandoned work on a project by which drastically different UI it’s encrusted with. The modem dialer looks like Windows XP, the fax program looks like Vista, some things have the flat purple stank of 8, some things have the dark glass look of early 10.
For printers, go to DEVICES > let it load it all > more devices settings (towards bottom) - to open old school printer control panel. Major pain in the ass.
for power users? absolutely. but nobody who isn’t tech savvy even knows what control panel is anymore.
Over the years I came to realize that tech savvy when it came to windows doesn’t actually mean anything. It just means you are able to fight through the bullshit and get things done with what you have.
"Microsoft applied a data-driven approach to find out which features to add now, which features to add later, and which to completely avoid.
Unfortunately, for the enthusiasts who had a left-aligned or vertical taskbar in Windows 10, you would have to settle for the fact that Microsoft’s data shows such users are really small when compared to the number of users who are asking for other newer features in the taskbar."
100% of the users that are smart enough to care about moving the task bar are also smart enough to turn off all optional telemetry. This sadly a part of why tech companies are making products for the dumbest people and pushing away power users.
I just find it hilarious that the top/right/left toolbar was possible in windows 95/98/ME
but its to much of a technical problem to do today.
I guess thats what you get with AI doing all your coding…
If your thinking way is true, I am trully afraid of how many people used ai in win10…
How tf do they get telemetry for features that haven’t been added yet.
Microsoft Recall
So I’m forced to use windows at work like the majority of my industry.
The start bar is still a thorn in my side since we switched from 10 to 11.
Standard office set up is 2 x 1920x1200 monitors and a 1920x1080 laptop. Some just leave the laptop shut when docked.
I preferred having it on a stand and using the lap top screen real estate.
In windows 10 I could make a monitor the primary and have a start bar only on the laptop. Not being able to do that in windows 11 is fucking annoying. They also fucked up auto hide start bar, it’s always jumping up for bullshit I don’t care about and not hiding when it should. I gave in and accepted I can’t have those bottom few lines of screen real estate because they are Microsoft’s.
As an engineer I do sometimes get feelings of imposter syndrome. But then I look at what Microsoft did to the start bar in windows 11 and think well at least I didn’t do that.
They didn’t just rewrite it, they rewrote it in
fecesReactThat’s the start menu. They probably built the task bar with Electron.
So many people at work are having frustrating issues with Windows now.
It takes so fucking long to start up. Sure, you get a desktop and can open a program, but it just keeps locking up repeatedly for a good 20 minutes while whatever bloatware is running in the background during startup.
They cram OneDrive down your throat and it has constant issues.
They put so much shit in your way, in the name of “productivity” it makes your actual productivity worse.
FUCK COPILOT.
It’s the one drive cramming that really gets me, well also changing the right click context menu to hide cut and paste, wtf.
But seriously, not letting you move the Onedrive pin down the hotlinks sidebar out of the way? Extremely annoying.
Kill it in the registry.
I thought it was just me, it’s so fucking “bulky” and slow on my work computer. Specs are fine on the laptop, windows 11 is just trash even without bringing up what it’s lacking and difficult to navigate.
And I know my way around windows very well, I can do nearly all my tasks with just a keyboard, don’t even need a mouse for the gui.
Oh man, I remember marveling at BeOS in the day and for a brief moment in time when SSDs first hit the scene you could have a credibly fast Windows boot… Nowadays it’s worse than ever despite super fast storage, fastest CPUs, and gobs of RAM…
I honestly just want my old right mouse click back.
Easily sorted and the old right-click menu can be reinstated along with a whole loads of other tweaks -
“People find the right-click menu overwhelming, so we’ll reduce it from 23 options to 19 options. That’ll make it less confusing and won’t annoy the people who now need an extra click for basic functionality “
Its just a registry entry that you have to change.
It is a registry key that you can add to return it to normal. If you want I can find it for you!
