“You will own nothing and you’ll be happy”
“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.
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
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.
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
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 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…
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 “
It is a registry key that you can add to return it to normal. If you want I can find it for you!
What’s funny here is that in Microsoft’s Feedback Hub, the feedback related to “taskbar”, with the highest number of upvotes, is the one that asks the company to “Bring back the ability to move the taskbar to the top and sides if the screen on Windows 11”. We are not sure which data Microsoft used to get to such a conclusion…
The one they get from their
spywaretelemetry, probably.Skewed telemetry probably, as most users that are aware you can move the taskbar are also aware you can just disable the phone home crap and will therefore not show up in the statistics.
Because microsoft sucks at ux
That’s disappointing; I always thought the one thing they got right was the 98/XP interface that Cinnamon copied.
Just because they suck at it now doesn’t mean they always have
Join team Linux!
Simple solution is to switch to Linux. Ubuntu Cinnamon 24.04LTS had worked great for me so far.
If you absolutely can’t or won’t switch look at openshell https://open-shell.github.io/Open-Shell-Menu/
What this essentially means is that when the taskbar sits at the bottom, Windows and third-party apps know exactly how much horizontal space they have to work with.
Ah, so I assume they will remove support for any resolutions other than 1920x1080, since they need a consistent horizontal size, and that’s the most common.
I’ve been using ExplorerPatcher to correct this and it works pretty well.
I’m using Linux Mint to correct this and it works even better
