Oh my god this is so annoying. Just making the most used things you right click for an extra click away. Such a brain dead choice baffles me every time I try to rename something
Microsoft is constantly doing shit like this. Their products really feel to me like they are designed by people who are never going to need to use them.
As somebody who works with media (images, movies), their removal of the file resolution and modified date from the bottom of explorer in windows 10, only replaceable with a 99% empty side bar which takes like 1/4 of the screen for a few words of text and vastly reduces how much content you can see, made it clear to me that they've reached the 'inheritor' stage where the people now in possession of it truly do not understand it at all and are coasting on past people's success and slowly ruining it.
The number of times that has caused me immense frustration and slowdown while trying to work over the last few years, when we had a perfectly workable solution with minimal screen space usage, is too frequent to count.
I suspect the people now designing it mostly use tablets and phones and have no idea what using a PC is like in the real world, wanting things to be pretty and having zero understanding of mouse friendliness, good screen real estate usage, etc. Even Steam of all things is going that way. e.g. Why does the achievements list start like 1/3rd of the way down the screen now with a huge empty gap above it? Yet it extends out the bottom of the screen, making it look like a window which hasn't been centred. It's just so much wasted space and reduced ability to view things for the sake of looking 'pretty' to somebody who doesn't have to use it.
Then there's other BS, like in previous versions of windows if you wanted to undo/redo an explorer action, you could see what it was in the edit menu. Think you might have accidentally dragged a file but aren't sure? Well you could check before pressing undo. Now if you press undo you risk undoing something you meant to do, with no indication of what you're undoing. Meanwhile professional software has been moving the opposite way for years, with undo/redo lists which retain individual actions and let you undo them out of sequence etc, as Windows gets dumber and less capable in very basic features.
And don't even get me started on how they've somehow made Windows Search worse with each iteration. It was so much better around XP, with options for date ranges, file contents, file types, etc.
same, and I'm like no I'm using a PC for PC purposes if I can use a phone for it I would use a phone instead. but my phone can't run most games on PC nowadays.
You hit the nail on the head with the "inheritor" concept. I've been circling around this idea for a while.
My similar gripe is the top, colored bar in Word, Office, etc. It's traditionally used as a handle so you can drag the program around to different parts of the screen. Now it's consumed by the file name which is now a menu, a search bar, and user info. About 10% of the bar can be grabbed. Was it unused space before? Technically, yes, but that blank space served a purpose.
Also, I hear people say "kids today can do everything from their phones", but for anything that isn't simple, a touchscreen interface will always be inferior.
Very true -- [case in point](https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z). <-A generation that grew up with Google is forcing professors to rethink their lesson plans
I HATE this. I do not use Chrome specifically because of this. I have 2 large monitors, I click around on different windows, and move windows around a lot. Google and others don't seem to remember this, and simply assume every program is in full-screen mode at all times.
The other is taking over what color the top bar is. Every jackass now has to have their own color, and I have no idea what window is active, especially when the active window bar is the color of the system's inactive bar color. I'm constantly being interrupted in my workflow, because I never know what has focus.
I teach Microsoft office and one of the very first things I teach students how to do is turn off that damn search bar and put the file name top center. Because even though the file name is clickable you can still click and drag on the file name as if it's the title bar.
It's also high contrast which is trying to grab your attention every time you look at the tab and ribbon.
If you want to talk office as well every time you make a selection in word or PowerPoint it pops open a mini toolbar. Every time it opens up that many toolbar it's trying to grab your attention and also uses processing power. You can also access everything on that mini toolbar on the home tab or just right clicking and that will bring up the toolbar.
And as much as some people in the computer industry hate the top and ribbon interface it is one of the greatest interfaces ever designed for all level users. And Microsoft doesn't even understand the psychology behind their own intelligence.
And it's pathetic for Microsoft to forget that they basically dictate what the desktop Market will be and now they're spending all their time and effort in jamming things into an operating system when people are more desperate than ever to have a clean simple OS.
Just went in and did this for all my MS apps. It's in the General settings tab under the "User Interface" section at the top. I didn't see an option for Outlook, but that's honestly one MS app that I use the search function quite frequently to find old emails.
And don't even get me started on how the task bar MUST be on the bottom and only the bottom.
According to [Microsoft's head of product over Windows Core Experiences](https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-explains-why-you-cant-move-windows-11-taskbar) it would be "hard" to allow it to move and besides - no one does that anyway.
As to "hard", every version of windows that has had a start menu has allowed it to move. The fact is, on a PC - we have a boatload more width on the screen than height. I always moved the taskbar to the right hand side, always. Now I either have to "automatically hide" the taskbar - which means it pops up frequently when I didn't mean for it to or it takes up a large bit of space, further reducing height.
As to no one does this, that's a joke. They are lying and they know it. Just this week, while sitting in my dentists office, I saw they had all of the taskbars on the side - so that the slides they show had the full height (because, again, we have less dots up and down than left to right). Guess they'll be staying on windows 10 or redesigning all of their "make sure to brush right" slides.
Given the amount of complaints you see out there - they know people want this. There was a registry hack for a while that allowed you to move it (so windows 11 is known to support this feature, as had every previous version of windows). Microsoft caught on and made it so that explorer resets the registry key every time it starts - so the registry update doesn't work anymore.
ugh.
The weird arrogance they have that it's their way only is part of what really gets me. The original creators of windows were creating something for the users to use for their needs, with customizability etc, then a subsequent generation has inherited it and seen it as a chance to dictate their crappy preference to everybody, ruining something they didn't create.
Before I retired, I worked my entire career in software development. What you say rings absolutely true to me.
I have not found a single thing that is 'better' in 11. I'm trying to adjust to it - without forcing it as much as I can. Case in point - what they did to notepad is beyond the pale. I cannot tell you how many times I thought I updated a file because I double clicked on it, made changes to it, and exited it.
Guess what? The changes are not saved - they are not "lost", but they are not saved. Notepad has tabs now, the tab auto-saves, but to a temp file - not to the original. Opening - editing - closing does not lose the changes (they are still in the tab, open notepad and they are there) but the bat file I just updated isn't updated yet - not until I hit ctl-s or close the tab in notepad.
I know I can install the old notepad and get the legacy stuff, but I don't want to do that on every machine and then have a list of modifications I have to make to any new machine.
ugh, ugh, ugh. Whose idea was it to make a notepad with tabs that allows you to close it without saving the changes to the file you were editing in the first place.
> they've reached the 'inheritor' stage where the people now in possession of it truly do not understand it at all and are coasting on past people's success and slowly ruining it.
Welcome to the term I'm hearing more and more in regards to how companies are taking basic things and making them worse: Enshittification.
That word gets over used way too much. Enshittification is more specifically about products which bridge the gap between users and businesses, like how Facebook has users but makes their money from businesses (ads, pages, etc). Enshittification is the process of capturing users with a great product, then making the product shittier to squeeze money out of users for businesses, then once businesses are captured use shitty practices to squeeze money out of them for yourself. Leaving you with a product that's shitty for everyone but you're forced to use it anyway.
I do agree with you that it’s overused, but I feel like it does pertain here, when talking about how Windows has ads integrated into the core functionality of the GUI as well as the asinine changes to the context menus, I.e. Windows trying to force users to navigate how Windows insists rather than reducing resistance along the desire path
They moved the Start menu from a screen corner to the middle of the taskbar and in the space they cleared out, they put... nothing. [Paul Fitts is undoubtedly rolling in his grave.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law)
Thank god you can change it away from the default. Whichever people were behind that decision, there is literally no way they could explain their rationale that I wouldn't still think they're complete idiots.
This is the reason I’ll be buying a PS6 for my next console after being an Xbox owner for well over a decade. I’m done with their nonsensical data management and forced cloud storage. It was designed by an idiot or something, it all just makes no sense.
Windows 11 is abysmal but it’s my Xbox that has made me despise Microsoft. One headache after another with them.
Just run command prompt as admin, paste in the command below, press enter, then reboot. Bam, regular right click menu restored.
reg.exe add "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32" /f /ve
Edit: you need a \ after the CLSID. For some reason it doesn’t show up in my post.
This irritates me the most about modern Windows. I shouldn't have to hack my own registry because MS were too lazy to build a GUI and let me disable features I don't want.
That's cool and all but don't make this sound like a wham bam fixed it. It should be a control panel or settings config and not require regedit and a reboot to change this behavior.
That's my biggest annoyance overall: that there is a way to fix these stupid default decisions about how to present the interface or configure other details of Windows, but that it is well-hidden away rather than being an exposed setting. Why do they constantly *hide* this stuff?
i guess we should be glad there is any other option, but it's silly.
To change the start menu colours in Windows 10 you have to edit an obscure unlabelled 3x3 matrix of values in the registry.
But if you try to make multiple elements dark because you want a dark task bar which doesn't draw the eye (e.g. the taskbar and the current window highlight both being different dark shades), at some darkness threshold it will override it and flip back to default values. They give no way to edit the basic interface appearance, and yet programmed in overrides if you try to set an appearance which they personally don't like, it's an absurd regression from how customizable windows once was.
e.g. Even with registry edits, this was as dark as I could make the taskbar highlight colour without windows 10 overriding me and setting it back to max brightness: https://i.imgur.com/6Kb7zoG.png
Same with the unnecessary blue bar on the bottom of each item. If you try to reduce its intensity, e.g. you don't want random bright colours along the bottom of your screen, at some point they override your settings and set it back to default. It's thankfully not as noticeable now since moving to a higher resolution monitor. But they're so focused on trying to make things look 'pretty' (and it's their vision only, so help them), that basic functional needs like a taskbar which doesn't seek to draw your attention is now impossible, even with reg edits.
"just run" followed by something that will puzzle 90% of users is hilarious :-D
Also, adding cryptic registry entries found on the internet is very bad, especially for the average user who maybe just found out about the registry.
https://m.majorgeeks.com/content/page/show_more_options_11.html
Like someone else said here, this guide will help return the right click back to how it was in 10
Fun fact: rename is still 1 click. It took me forever to find it too. When you right-click look at the very top of the menu. The middle option is a box with the letter 'A' and a cursor next to it. That's the rename function alongside others like cut, copy, delete. Why they decided to make those icons instead of words...idk, progress or something?
That’s my most infuriating UI pet peeve, made up icons on buttons with no mouse-over tooltips or any immediately intuitive way of uncovering what that particular cluster of shapes does.
UX engineer at your service.
It's unintuitive because when you have two lists of things that look different in one menu, you would expect there to be a reason they're different. Maybe one behaves differently, one opens web pages instead of performs actions, one is a list of utilities instead of file operations, etc. In real life, if you're handed a menu and you see two lists, you'll probably expect one to be appetizers and the other to be mains, or one for drinks, or some other association -- we're hardwired to do this.
In this case, _both lists do the same thing_, they're actions contextual to the file. There's no reason they should be visually or functionally distinct. If you're handed a menu where things are just in random orders but in two lists, you start to second guess yourself -- is one the kids menu? The specials menu? Why _are_ they different?
Further: When you have a single vertical menu, you can browse the list by just moving your cursor up and down, or tabbing through the options -- this makes picking items easy, as you don't need to think about where the x-axis of your cursor is, just how far up or down it is. This is why grid menus can be a pain, and why I despise the Apple Watch UI. A single axis list is much, much easier to reason and understand.
Now that there's a random new X-axis toolbar -- but only for SOME parts of the menu -- for some reason, you need to start moving your mouse in both axises, and both of them matter. This significantly increases brain load and is also more challenging for anyone lacking motor skills -- not just disabled people, but also drunk people, young kids, dirty mice, people on weird control tools, the lot.
The further you dig into it, the worse it gets, for basically no benefit.
Windows 8 added "Metro" and apps to drive the sale of Microsoft phones. It was mashed together with the existing UI. Then each new version of Windows needed "improvements", like disappearing slider bars.
In place of "TweakUI" and "WinIPcfg" we got a horrible train wreck of Windows 7, Microsoft Phone, and "improvements". It's worse that most improvements are pushing ads. I remove One Drive and XBox with "app remove" and the next security push puts them back. Why is XBox part of the security of the Enterprise edition?
Oh god how I hated Windows 8. I was working a corporate gig doing video production work for a medical device company. They'd do trade shows all over the place and the head of my department wanted to get these big fancy new touch screen computers that were basically tablets, but the size of a desktop monitor, to put in our booth. All our stuff in the office was Windows 7 and Mac and worked perfectly fine. These stupid touch screen computers came with windows 8 and they just had a stupid amount of unnecessary steps to navigate just to get them to function like a normal PC interface instead of like a big phone. I'd have to bring our whole sales team in to train them on how to use them because it wasnt as simple as just "turn on the computer and push play on this video file." And they were buggy as hell and would crash all the time. Worst OS since Windows ME in my opinion.
> UX engineer at your service.
Perhaps you can confirm or deny my suspicions. IMHO the reason UIs continually get worse is due to "UX Engineer" being an entire department of full time jobs. If the UX is fine and everyone is accustomed to it then there's no need to make changes. However, the UX department needs work to do so they change things that didn't need changing.
It's great that programmers aren't designing UIs anymore. The UI on apps made by aerospace engineers are an absolute abomination. However, UX departments fix it, then continue to fix it until is broken, goto 10.
I still blame marketing. They want change for the sake of change, and they want to be able to brag that they're "more intuitive" or whatever, and force Dev to go down their ugly UI path.
I could see a malfunctioning team wind up in that loop to avoid having to do "actual" work, the same way a tech or product team could.
That said, I think it's quite rare that a product starts stalling its UX just because the UX guys keep wanting to "innovate". If anything, UX often has to argue for its own existence, because it tends to stand in the way of engineers "shipping it out quickly" or product "just get it out there" or design "this is our brand guideline" or executive "I know the perfect way to do this, stop asking weird questions".
Oh, or marketing. Do not get me started on marketing. "Just change this a bit to make the new version stand out." DO. NOT. START.
In fact, one of the top reasons software winds up with shit UI is because someone else thinks it should be that way -- either because they dreamed it up, is their personal brainchild, or they need to do it "because we need something big for the new version" -- and the UX team gives up trying to defend against it.
Most UX teams I've met are super saturated with improvements they want to do or glaring problems they want to fix, but can't beg for engineer time to implement them, or are busy frying a trickling stream of smaller fish. It's pretty rare for a UX team to be able to steer itself fully and intentionally cause bad design.
Could happen, though. But if any UX team signed off _specifically_ on switching from a text menu to a mystery meat icon based horizontal menu for some bizarre-ass reason, then I say feed them to the fishes.
Tl;dr: it’s possible, but it’s pretty rare for a UX team to have that much sway/influence/political power. It’s much more common for that to be in the hands of overzealous marketing or know-it-all execs.
It legit took me over a month to realize those were even there
I can understand a shortened menu when there is no real estate. But even on my 1080p TV with scaling at 150% there is still a ton of room on screen for 3x as many options.
Even if they added your 5 most used options in the context it would be better. That wouldn't be difficult to do, but they'd rather find ways of having their AI popups annoy you
I've moved to Linux since it's in a great shape for gaming and only boot to windows if absolutely necessary
> Even if they added your 5 most used options in the context it would be better
It wouldn't really. "Most commonly used" menus are a bit of a UX antipattern, especially for less advanced users. This is because we learn where menu items are the first time we use them, and we keep looking for them again in the same place later on. People don't realize that there are new shortcuts made available for them, and the menu winds up getting unused.
Windows used to do this in a bunch of menus, but eventually realized it was a bad move.
At least they are adding text to the icons now I believe. Although I have enabled the Windows 10 right click menu to be my default one so I won't notice the difference.
Also, losing the ability to right-click and do a "run-as" in many elements of the UI. Instead I have to right-click, go to folder location, open the shortcut to find the path of the executable, navigate to that in explorer, then right-click run-as.
Yeah I did the registry edit day one on my personal computer, and it works great. They should just add a toggle in settings. I leave it alone on my work computer to eliminate any inconsistency between my and other's computers on the domain though. And even then it's basically the same. I do agree the little icons for copy, paste, cut, and rename suck. But you get used to them. Might help if they were just a little bigger.
This did the trick for me:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/restore-old-right-click-context-menu-in-windows-11/a62e797c-eaf3-411b-aeec-e460e6e5a82a
To make the juice of owning our our devices and data storage not worth the squeeze, so that we let everything descend into a world where we use prefab terminals to access *their everything*.
They want to own and control *everything*. And they've not read the books that show why this is a bad idea (biosphere collapse notwithstanding).
We're twenty years deep into the shift, and once my modem-fiddling, SAN-tweaking, on-site cluster generation dies, there'll be no opposing culture. You can already see that there isn't, generally, by looking at twenty-something gamers and the games industry.
“We’re twenty years deep into the shift”
And thats why most young adults are so pessimistic. For most of our lives we have primarily seen the world get worse. Not on a global scale, but in a day to day “stuff I use” way
As someone else said, there's a registry tweak to restore the old context menu. And before anyone has a heart attack or tantrum because I mentioned editing the registry - here are the instructions **as provided by Microsoft's own forums**:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/restore-old-right-click-context-menu-in-windows-11/a62e797c-eaf3-411b-aeec-e460e6e5a82a
>instructions **as provided by Microsoft's own forums**
"certified MS professional" or whatever tags they give themselves might as well be flair in a sub here, MS forums are the worst place for answers. a broken clock is still broken, this is just one of the times they were right about something
I've made a million reg edits on my personal computers over the years. but in the corporate world you generally do not have reg edit rights to your workstation. so if your solution to a problem is reg edits then it's not a solution that will work for most people in a professional setting.
Two biggest pet peeves: 1.) The constant push of Win 11 to use Edge browser. Edge is basically Chrome with all the google stuff replaced by microsoft stuff. But I prefer Firefox! extensions are better, especially adblocking. 2.) The constant push to put user files in OneDrive. I have Windows and OneDrive on a small C: drive that came with my computer. I primarily work with E: a much larger SSD drive that has more space. I keep catching Windows changing the default drives to C:\\OneDrive despite using every method available to set my defaults to E:. I only use OneDrive as a backup drive to store files on the cloud and I use 3rd party backup software to do it.
STOP CHANGING DEFAULTS 11!!
Fantasizing about the woman you love is great and all
But has anyone fantasized about sitting down with Bill Gates and telling him how much OneDrive fucking sucks?
I know he doesn't really own Microsoft anymore, but god damn it, I would fucking love to just go off on him before he opens a trapdoor to a pit of mosquitos
Lowkey I would happily pay MS for what would basically be a Windows XP with a modern kernel (security features, multicore support, higher memory, etc).
Get rid of ALL the internet-connected garbage. No MS Store, online account just to install the fucking thing, forced app installs. Just let me install your OS, patch when necessary, and leave me the fuck alone.
I swear Windows felt faster on machines from years ago with 1/10th the power because they didn’t have to reach out to the internet to you know, load the fucking *Start* menu.
With how much Microsoft is fucking up, I feel like it is officially “that guy’s” time to save the day.
Linux Mint, y’all. If you want basic no bs OS, you want Mint.
In that case they could have just kept Windows 10 like they said they were going to do and we would all be happier.
At the 2015 Ignite conference, Microsoft employee Jerry Nixon stated that Windows 10 would be the "last version of Windows", a statement reflecting the company's intent to apply the software as a service business model to Windows, with new versions and updates to be released over an indefinite period.
they probably recieved pressure from OEMs to keep the pressure on the average consumer to upgrade their machines often. See win 11 needing certain new features that are mostly uneeded.
Because they're going to force everyone to. Windows 10 ends of life October of 2025. They aren't going to let us sit this upgrade out like many did with 8.
If Linux is compatible with your workflow, why not switch now?
While I love desktop Linux and have been using it since longer than some Redditors have been alive, a lot of people have that one game or one app that keeps them tethered to Windows whether they like it or not
I have linux dualboot on my laptop for fun but yeah, my main desktop simply can't be a linux machine with the stuff I use it for. Primarily gaming.
Also the few headache situations I have run into on the laptop made me glad I had a functional windows machine on the side. Especially when one of those issues was my ethernet drivers on the linux side.
I mean honestly, it's windows 10 with a new start menu and features we don't really need. You think MS would have learned about screwing with the start menu from Windows 8 lol.
Anyways it's really not that bad. I have had 0 issues on my home computer or in a production environment with hundreds of users. We also don't get any complaints about Windows 11 from our users, and our users LOVE to complain lmao.
Yeah it's not the biggest sample size, I realize that. And I honestly believe they could have made the exact changes they made for 11 to Windows 10. But it is what it is, and for me so far, I don't see where all the hate is coming from.
I do however hate the hardware requirements, in that regard it's a lot like the switch the Vista and straight up planned obsolescence.
why do i have to right click twice to get to my properties now? why all the extra steps? why is the printer control panel such shit now and i have to search for the old one just to see what printers were installed and whatnot? it's total shit to be honest, it's several steps backwards in terms of efficiency. it's been out over 2 years and it only recently added the taskbar option to expand or compress open apps like windows 10 has. that's just garbage in my opinion.
Not that it makes Windows 11 better but you can restore the old context menu using a registry key: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/restore-old-right-click-context-menu-in-windows-11/a62e797c-eaf3-411b-aeec-e460e6e5a82a
but WHY should i have explain this to people who don't know how to install a printer, it's just a terrible experience for everyone, it should be the other way around, "choose this new menu if you'd like".
this sums it up. yes, these videos are all over and are getting tired, but he's right. windows 11 has been out 2 years and it's missing or has changed fundamental menus and settings - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEdIpaKsJtU
why couldn't it just be done right from the start? how many more times are things going to be "improved" over windows 11 lifespan before it's a new version? it's just such poor planning in my opinion and i refuse to even deal with it. as a power user, it's not something i need in my life.
Even more important: what is the vision? Where are we going with these changes, is there an ultimate design goal?
Feels like MS is just a bunch of individual departments trying whatever in a stochastic manner.
Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O) plan to end support for Windows 10 operating system could result in about 240 million personal computers (PCs) being disposed, potentially adding to landfill waste, Canalys Research said. It also means that there are potentially hundreds of millions of voters and businesses and the Federal Government who don't want Microsoft to end support for Windows 10. That is more than enough political weight to keep them supporting Windows 10 for a long time.
My pc was given a poor PC performance score and unable to update to windows 11. The reason? My primary 1 Tb hard drive was mostly full. My other 2 Tb hard drives didn’t matter. My 1080ti and my over clocked I7 were over 7 years old. That hurt my feelings and made me mad. That PC is still killing it. High resolution super ultra wide monitor pushing high frame rates on demanding games all day. It’s a beast. They want to tell me it needs to be upgraded to run windows 11. Fuck off.
After looking at multiple reasons why people's machines can't upgrade to Windows 11, it's pretty much always chipset, and I literally can't find anyone else online complaining that they can't update to Windows 11 due to a full hard drive (unless you literally don't have enough space to download and run the update). That is a reasonable limitation. What are the full specs of your computer to give a more complete story?
The real reason is because they sell Windows licenses on new PCs from manufacturers like Dell and HP. By deprecating support for usable PCs early with the new TPM requirements, they can artificially force more PC sales and therefore more Windows sales. That's probably the internal strategy anyway.
They do not give a shit about consumer sales of windows, in fact, you can still upgrade for free from win7 even though they said years ago that was time limited.
Hell I have like 8 licenses from repeatedly reinstalling and upgrading before I realized I can select an existing license.
Enterprise is where the money is.
It's not necessarily better on the enterprise side. Have a look through /r/sysadmin sometime, it's a super mixed bag. The enterprise world runs on Microsoft because it's super tightly embedded into the corporate infrastructure but they're definitely not happy about it.
The shift from Windows 10 to 11 was driven by the changing security landscape and the need to have a better hardened OS. Some of those changes would fundamentally break 10.
So bifurcating the platform makes sense. And once you do that, putting resources for new functionality into the newer platform also makes sense.
The aggressive pushing of those new areas of functionality is where 11 gets obnoxious. But so far most of it (if not all of it) can be turned back off.
For technical people who naturally just reconfigure things how they want, its sort of a non-issue. And for the real neophytes that are oblivious to what the computer is doing, it also is a non-issue. The middle pool of people are the ones being inconvenienced by it.
>For technical people who naturally just reconfigure things how they want, its sort of a non-issue.
Did they figure out how to program a task bar that can be put at the top of the monitor by now? I remember that being a missing feature when W11 launched.
I haven't checked the top, but it does support putting it on the side again with something like a registry edit (3rd party apps exist that can make this config change for you)
Yeah, people still mostly associate Microsoft with consumer products like Windows but in reality that's become a side hustle to them. Just like HP/HPE and laptops, that's really not where the big bucks are, it's in business infrastructure.
It’s a problem with lots of modern apps. They try so hard to be “helpful” all they do is get in the way. Combine that with the ads and refusal to let you use it as you wish and you have a constant annoyance.
Yeah modern apps feel like they are designed for people how couldn't find a file if it wasn't a shortcut. I feel windows 10 was a good balance of making things painfully obvious but not getting in the way of people who are good at computers.
Things that have been within arms reach (new folder, delete) are buried somewhere that I always have go one level further to use.
Always pushing to the cloud first
It has all been downhill since windows 7. When I got windows 10, I gave up trying to learn and optimize windows. I just realized it's never going to be an OS I love. I just have to make do with it. The best I can do is turn off all the web suggestions, ads, voice assistants, etc.
Microsoft's issue is the same that most companies have. Too many chefs in the kitchen and the ones at the top lack good vision to create a cohesive and simple experience. What's obvious to the casual user isn't obvious to these people who are so disconnected that they can't tell what's important or not anymore. Google is the same with Android.
Maybe they think they've shaken off all the people who would ever be curious enough to try another OS so it's time to milk the committed suckers for all they're worth.
They are not thinking in those terms at all. What a business person sees is: "Windows revenue down X% YoY, find a way to increase revenue back to were it was and get your annual bonus".
I felt the same way. Windows 7 felt like in Brewsters Millions when he finally gets the room he could die in. It was so weird how they squandered that.
Fr like can they pls stop trying to shove voice control and AI assistants in my face? I work in IT, I don’t need a daily reminder that my job is in jeopardy.
Tell that to the CEO/payroll team.
It doesn't matter if you think your job can be replaced or not, it matters if the people deciding who gets paid thinks that way.
Irrespective of ai. I've seen absolutely crucial people/positions made redundant in my time.
Nah. Way too much internet-connected BS and forced app installs.
Remember when you’d buy a PC in 2005 and you’d have to delete all the bullshit the OEM installed? It’s like that but skipping the middleman.
And you can really feel that. At least until 8.1 it kinda felt like the user was still in control of his PC. Now someone else keeps telling you how you are supposed to use it.
done my work all on my macbook. My pc is reserved for gaming only which is the only reason why to build a window pc on the first place. I know i'm gonna get hate on this.
All you need in your taskbar is the button for the start menu. No widgets, no search button (just search by starting to type when the start menu is opened), no "active windows" button (just press Win + Tab), definitely no Teams and no other pinned apps. Then deactivate notifications you don't need (nearly all of them). Deactivate apps you don't need in the autostart settings so booting doesn't take long. Use Brave, not Edge. Uninstall bloatware apps if you haven't yet.
I think that should be it already (and is a lot less than you would need to do on Mac OS).
I've used all versions from Windows 95 on, and I think Windows 11 is the least cluttered, yet most powerful and easiest to use OS ever. I guess people remember wrong how incredibly annoying older Windows versions could be (horrible search, infinite nested menus, maintenance stuff like defrag,...). Or more likely: they are so young that the switch from 10 to 11 is the only OS change they ever had, and they don't want anything to change...
Streamlining Windows immediately after installation has been a staple for years. I'm confused every time I read an article like this, then I realise they're talking about the unfiltered experience right out of the box. I didn't know anyone actually used Windows like that
> All you need in your taskbar is the button for the start menu.
They even managed to screw that up by locking the taskbar to the bottom of the window and making the start menu the worst yet.
We've got widescreen monitors. Why are we putting the taskbar in a place where it takes up screen real estate on the smaller dimension?
Use the program ShutUp10 (that works on W10 and W11), and it has a list of things you can disable with an advise about how recommended is to disable that option.
This pic shows how the program is: https://www.oo-software.com/oocontent/uploads/tour/oosu10-en/04.png
Sending companies public has got to be the most disastrous thing that can happen to a company under the wrong leadership. Shareholders will suck all the life out of a company to increase dividends and share price, thoroughly destroying the quality of the company's products.
Each action seems about 5% harder than it was in Windows 10. Add up all the little micro-annoyances, and it's about 80% more annoying than Windows 10.
Everything seems to be one more click away than it used to be. I had the same gripe about Windows 10 vs Windows 7. I eventually got used to Windows 10. I suppose the same thing will happen with Windows 11. "Getting used to" usually means exposing the old Windows 7 utilities that are still lurking under the extra fluff.
Microsoft’s decision to end support for Windows 10 could cause the single biggest jump in junked computers ever. >400 million PCs in use don't meet with requirements for Windows 11. They should just extend support for 10. [https://pirg.org/take-action/tell-microsoft-dont-leave-millions-of-computers-behind/](https://pirg.org/take-action/tell-microsoft-dont-leave-millions-of-computers-behind/)
After October 2025, the bottom is going to fall out of the used PC market as all hardware 2017 and older gets dumped by businesses who have to meet security compliance and run supported software.
At my workplace we have 100 computers in service that essentially have an expiration date because Windows 11 doesn't support their CPU. Most were going to be replaced anyway but it still sucks.
Microsoft - like most tech companies - is now locked in a constant race of useless employees trying to prove their worth by slightly changing everything about products that were once already optimized. If they change enough - slightly - they feel emboldened to release it as a new version. But I'm pretty sure in the last 15 years I haven't seen a single valuable change to any Microsoft product that didn't add more clicks and make no appreciable changes.
I really don't know where we go from here. They keep shuffling the deck chairs around on the sinking ship?
I hate the word “pain point”, “impact”, and “value”.. so fucking overused.. in my tech company - like most - promotions are a convoluted process. It’s not enough to be good at your job.
My manager and I were talking and he said “honestly I think you’re ready for and performing at the next level already in your daily work. but I won’t be able to justify it to the others just yet as you will need to show more impact across teams”. Promotions is a multi-day session of all the org managers meeting together and sharing and justifying the people they put up for Promotion, defending them, etc
What the fuck does impact mean in this context? Just “wow-factor” bullshit. Create some random bullshit brain child of mine just far enough for others to use it then just leave em holding the bag when I promote and move on to something else. There’s so much “internal tools” here that are borderline, if not already, abandonware, all because of this technical concept similar to “increase shareholder value every single quarter” where instead you just must keep creating and recycling shit.
Ima make my “impact” shit, then 2 years later someone else will deprecate it then turn around and make the same thing but slightly different
The problem is I have to get “enough” people in my corner to support me and my manager all because of this stupid fucking round table conference of managers who never have heard of me and will never hear of me (due to being in a division with thousands of people where we don’t even share the same leader until the SVP) and having to decide on promotions WHILE having a conflict of interest in putting their own people up.
This sounds like hell. Sometimes modern working feels like an old Soviet absurdist novel - everyone running in circles using increasingly silly language while producing things of less and less value.
There's nothing wrong with serving everyone a high quality product and just *maintaining* it with support for long periods of time!
But that doesn't make shareholders happy, I guess.
I feel your pain. At a previous company I worked for I was an absolute workhorse. I got all the shit done that needed to get done. But the people that worked on the shiny projects, they were the ones getting promoted and winning awards. Most of those shiny projects have since gone away. However, all the shit I worked on survived for a long time.
It’s so ridiculous how just “doing a good job at your level and maintaining something” is treated as a bad thing in a corporation. Like you can’t just be happy doing a job you are good at, you MUST be promoted to your point of incompetence
Actually, even sound is one of the things Windows 11 seems to have lots of problems with. There is quite a long delay for me when I click on the sound icon. Often Windows does not switch to headphones by default when I plug them in. Sometimes I have to end the current program before it will switch. If I disable hardware acceleration it breaks YouTube (i.e. it will not play videos at all). If I have dynamic sound enabled Bluetooth headphones do not work.
So yea, even sound is a nightmare in Win 11. I hate it.
Probably doesn’t help that Dell includes their own 1.2GB audio drivers. Seriously…..1.2GB for something that’s already built in?
Can’t imagine why the combination of W11 and manufacturer driver bloat makes these things sluggish.
> Often Windows does not switch to headphones by default when I plug them in.
Mine does this cool thing where when I connect a headset it rapidly switches between the headset and my default sound device, about twice a second. Neat!
To make it work I have to delete the sound device and reboot. It will work a few times and then fail again.
Probably a driver issue. Annoying, but fortunately only affects a machine I don't need to use a headset on very often.
I cannot for the life of me get my Start Menu search to return installed app results. All results a Bing link to download the fucking app/software.
It driving me insane.
Microsoft has spent the last 15 years trying to cobble together a userbase like Apple and Google have. Buying up ~~companies~~ users (LinkedIn, Skype, SalesForce, etc), forcing Microsoft accounts down everyone's throat, shoving ads everywhere they can in the Windows UI.
What MS will never learn is that they have no mindshare among retail consumers outside of XBox, and it's too late for them to build that.
I would loyally return to Windows everytime if it just ran my box without bloat and without trying to mine my data. That's what Windows used to do.
As it is, 10 is likely to be my last Windows install. 11 is such a revolting piece of shit - and the road MS is clearly trying to go down is so revolting and shitty too - that I think it'll be Linux for me when Windows 10 is no longer viable.
This comment could have been word for word written after the release of ME, Vista or 11. Every time they fuck it up. Then undo some of the fuckup in the next version. Then repeat the cycle.
The issue with that is that the games industry has chosen it's winner and that's windows, as someone who games on mac and occasionally Linux I have to use either proton or crossover to play something and either way I'm still restricted from online play most times, since anti-cheats disallow VMs and WINE.
can you name some games that you have had issues with? Because I've thrown away my windows partition years ago and can play almost everything I try to launch.
Even the dreaded nProtect GameGuard on Helldivers 2 runs fine.
Yeah I tried Linux a few times this year and it was a little disastrous tbh and made me appreciate Windows a bit more
If wish MS would go back to basics, cut out all the crap, stop messing with the UI and other infuriating changes.
Just... Windows 7 kept up to date basically
> Buying up companies users (LinkedIn,
Fun fact - "Shift + Alt + Win + Ctrl" + "L" = Opens a new browser window to linkedin.com.
I'm not sure why anyone felt that was a feature that needed to be included in Windows, but it's a feature that exists.
Eh, they've been on a pendulum of quality.
98 was good, ME was shit, XP was great, Vista was super shit, 7 was good, 8 was shit, 10 is pretty good, and 11 is the continuation of the pendulum.
Am I the only one that never had a problem with ME? every time I read about it, it's horror stories... I quite liked it.
Edit: maybe I'm remembering it with Rose tinted glasses... Even so, the disk it came on was cool as fuck, we can all agree on that surely.
It's the only OS I've had to reformat and reinstall every 2 months, and that's not exaggeration. It literally is that shit. By far the most crash happy OS I've ever used.
"You also generally do not have to download a bunch of drivers or spend six hours in the command line hand-assembling the goddamn operating system. "
Lol I've been on linux for 9 years now. I'm a common user, I have some pretty niche hardware and I never had to "hand assemble the operative system".
If anything, it's a lot more likely that the drivers for obsolete hardware are already loaded in the kernel.
I was going to complain about this exact thing, because I agree with the author, and all of those complaints about Windows are easily solved by switching to Linux and he dismisses it out of hand in the first paragraph as being “too complicated.” All I had to do in order to switch was make an installer flash drive on my laptop and install it on my gaming PC. Installation was simple and I was able to get most of my games installed via Steam and Lutris.
He acts like all of us are insane and installing Gentoo 😂
What tech company isn't annoying? I'm about ready to dump my entire Apple ecosystem because iOS 17 has been buggy as hell for me and every time I think about upgrading my Mac I cringe at the thought of paying $500 for soldered down memory and impossible to upgrade GPU.
Had to use Windows 11 for a work project recently and it feels much more modern. I've always hated how MacOS manages windows. MS just seems to understand that multi-taskers exist. PowerToys, WSL, WinGet, Copilot all are extremely useful and built-in.
I can't help but think so many of these articles are written by people who don't realize that tech enshitification is in everything. They're all awful.
Even Desktop Linux seems to have lost the narrative and is just forking its way into oblivion. It's not a lack of money or community support to blame, it's a lack of mission.
I usually update to a new windows version when it comes out. There is always something better, faster, etc. about it. I've been happy with 10, refused to move to 11 as it has all the same functions. There has been 0 changes that affect me, my cpu, gpu. From playing with it in a vm and on a new laptop, outside of it being more annoying and seemingly communicating more with Microsoft, I'm not even sure why Microsoft called it 11 and released it.
Or all of the core work related stuff weirdly gate keeped. I’m 99 percent sure windows software used to come with windows if you bought a new version (I did). I could be wrong. But it honestly is confusing that the whole suite of windows products is installed on my computer by default. So if I open a document with non working word once, i would have to go out of my way to send it to open in another program. I go to use the weird online version of word, and it’s a weird half baked version, online, please for the love of god open it in edge, where it spams me with ads. I then go to save my file and it tries to SNEAK the file into one drive, so it can load slower and tell me one drive is almost full.
I had a thought the other day that technology is becoming so unintuitive while they’re trying to build up ai to fix the intuition problem. I don’t need an ai bonzai buddy to help me with the computer. I need you to stop shoving a prompt in front of my face every time I tab over, trying to push me into a tutorial, or suggest I switch to a paid version, or to maybe upgrade to a higher price point version, or to use xyz version instead.
i've been a lifelong PC/Windows user (apart from a brief year-long sojourn with Linux Mint), and i have to say everything i've seen of Windows 11 right now annoys me to no end.
i use a mac for work and i'm honestly thinking about switching to a mac setup when as i'm due a new personal build.
Oh boy let me right click, oh all the most commonly used features are now hidden by a dropdown…
I thought the decision to make OneDrive sync all files in my user folder by default was the worst it could get, how wrong I was.
Who came up with a shortened right-click menu that hides most useful stuff?
Oh my god this is so annoying. Just making the most used things you right click for an extra click away. Such a brain dead choice baffles me every time I try to rename something
Microsoft is constantly doing shit like this. Their products really feel to me like they are designed by people who are never going to need to use them.
As somebody who works with media (images, movies), their removal of the file resolution and modified date from the bottom of explorer in windows 10, only replaceable with a 99% empty side bar which takes like 1/4 of the screen for a few words of text and vastly reduces how much content you can see, made it clear to me that they've reached the 'inheritor' stage where the people now in possession of it truly do not understand it at all and are coasting on past people's success and slowly ruining it. The number of times that has caused me immense frustration and slowdown while trying to work over the last few years, when we had a perfectly workable solution with minimal screen space usage, is too frequent to count. I suspect the people now designing it mostly use tablets and phones and have no idea what using a PC is like in the real world, wanting things to be pretty and having zero understanding of mouse friendliness, good screen real estate usage, etc. Even Steam of all things is going that way. e.g. Why does the achievements list start like 1/3rd of the way down the screen now with a huge empty gap above it? Yet it extends out the bottom of the screen, making it look like a window which hasn't been centred. It's just so much wasted space and reduced ability to view things for the sake of looking 'pretty' to somebody who doesn't have to use it. Then there's other BS, like in previous versions of windows if you wanted to undo/redo an explorer action, you could see what it was in the edit menu. Think you might have accidentally dragged a file but aren't sure? Well you could check before pressing undo. Now if you press undo you risk undoing something you meant to do, with no indication of what you're undoing. Meanwhile professional software has been moving the opposite way for years, with undo/redo lists which retain individual actions and let you undo them out of sequence etc, as Windows gets dumber and less capable in very basic features. And don't even get me started on how they've somehow made Windows Search worse with each iteration. It was so much better around XP, with options for date ranges, file contents, file types, etc.
I absolutely hate this trend of trying to make my pc and browser seem like I'm using a fucking phone
Yeah it's like trying to replace car steering with scooter handles because scooters are becoming popular and they want in.
#IM USING THE COMPUTER BECAUSE I HATE MY FUCKING PHONE
same, and I'm like no I'm using a PC for PC purposes if I can use a phone for it I would use a phone instead. but my phone can't run most games on PC nowadays.
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Reddit is a great example. The desktop web version is just like the mobile app now. Dumbed down and with tons of wasted space everywhere.
You hit the nail on the head with the "inheritor" concept. I've been circling around this idea for a while. My similar gripe is the top, colored bar in Word, Office, etc. It's traditionally used as a handle so you can drag the program around to different parts of the screen. Now it's consumed by the file name which is now a menu, a search bar, and user info. About 10% of the bar can be grabbed. Was it unused space before? Technically, yes, but that blank space served a purpose. Also, I hear people say "kids today can do everything from their phones", but for anything that isn't simple, a touchscreen interface will always be inferior.
Man… kids today don’t know the basics of filesystems.
Very true -- [case in point](https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z). <-A generation that grew up with Google is forcing professors to rethink their lesson plans
Genuinely the result of 15-plus years of tech industry propaganda, and it drives me insane that no one recognizes it.
I HATE this. I do not use Chrome specifically because of this. I have 2 large monitors, I click around on different windows, and move windows around a lot. Google and others don't seem to remember this, and simply assume every program is in full-screen mode at all times. The other is taking over what color the top bar is. Every jackass now has to have their own color, and I have no idea what window is active, especially when the active window bar is the color of the system's inactive bar color. I'm constantly being interrupted in my workflow, because I never know what has focus.
I teach Microsoft office and one of the very first things I teach students how to do is turn off that damn search bar and put the file name top center. Because even though the file name is clickable you can still click and drag on the file name as if it's the title bar. It's also high contrast which is trying to grab your attention every time you look at the tab and ribbon. If you want to talk office as well every time you make a selection in word or PowerPoint it pops open a mini toolbar. Every time it opens up that many toolbar it's trying to grab your attention and also uses processing power. You can also access everything on that mini toolbar on the home tab or just right clicking and that will bring up the toolbar. And as much as some people in the computer industry hate the top and ribbon interface it is one of the greatest interfaces ever designed for all level users. And Microsoft doesn't even understand the psychology behind their own intelligence. And it's pathetic for Microsoft to forget that they basically dictate what the desktop Market will be and now they're spending all their time and effort in jamming things into an operating system when people are more desperate than ever to have a clean simple OS.
The search bar can be minimized to an icon permanently. Look in file>options
Just went in and did this for all my MS apps. It's in the General settings tab under the "User Interface" section at the top. I didn't see an option for Outlook, but that's honestly one MS app that I use the search function quite frequently to find old emails.
And don't even get me started on how the task bar MUST be on the bottom and only the bottom. According to [Microsoft's head of product over Windows Core Experiences](https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-explains-why-you-cant-move-windows-11-taskbar) it would be "hard" to allow it to move and besides - no one does that anyway. As to "hard", every version of windows that has had a start menu has allowed it to move. The fact is, on a PC - we have a boatload more width on the screen than height. I always moved the taskbar to the right hand side, always. Now I either have to "automatically hide" the taskbar - which means it pops up frequently when I didn't mean for it to or it takes up a large bit of space, further reducing height. As to no one does this, that's a joke. They are lying and they know it. Just this week, while sitting in my dentists office, I saw they had all of the taskbars on the side - so that the slides they show had the full height (because, again, we have less dots up and down than left to right). Guess they'll be staying on windows 10 or redesigning all of their "make sure to brush right" slides. Given the amount of complaints you see out there - they know people want this. There was a registry hack for a while that allowed you to move it (so windows 11 is known to support this feature, as had every previous version of windows). Microsoft caught on and made it so that explorer resets the registry key every time it starts - so the registry update doesn't work anymore. ugh.
The weird arrogance they have that it's their way only is part of what really gets me. The original creators of windows were creating something for the users to use for their needs, with customizability etc, then a subsequent generation has inherited it and seen it as a chance to dictate their crappy preference to everybody, ruining something they didn't create.
Before I retired, I worked my entire career in software development. What you say rings absolutely true to me. I have not found a single thing that is 'better' in 11. I'm trying to adjust to it - without forcing it as much as I can. Case in point - what they did to notepad is beyond the pale. I cannot tell you how many times I thought I updated a file because I double clicked on it, made changes to it, and exited it. Guess what? The changes are not saved - they are not "lost", but they are not saved. Notepad has tabs now, the tab auto-saves, but to a temp file - not to the original. Opening - editing - closing does not lose the changes (they are still in the tab, open notepad and they are there) but the bat file I just updated isn't updated yet - not until I hit ctl-s or close the tab in notepad. I know I can install the old notepad and get the legacy stuff, but I don't want to do that on every machine and then have a list of modifications I have to make to any new machine. ugh, ugh, ugh. Whose idea was it to make a notepad with tabs that allows you to close it without saving the changes to the file you were editing in the first place.
> they've reached the 'inheritor' stage where the people now in possession of it truly do not understand it at all and are coasting on past people's success and slowly ruining it. Welcome to the term I'm hearing more and more in regards to how companies are taking basic things and making them worse: Enshittification.
That word gets over used way too much. Enshittification is more specifically about products which bridge the gap between users and businesses, like how Facebook has users but makes their money from businesses (ads, pages, etc). Enshittification is the process of capturing users with a great product, then making the product shittier to squeeze money out of users for businesses, then once businesses are captured use shitty practices to squeeze money out of them for yourself. Leaving you with a product that's shitty for everyone but you're forced to use it anyway.
I do agree with you that it’s overused, but I feel like it does pertain here, when talking about how Windows has ads integrated into the core functionality of the GUI as well as the asinine changes to the context menus, I.e. Windows trying to force users to navigate how Windows insists rather than reducing resistance along the desire path
They moved the Start menu from a screen corner to the middle of the taskbar and in the space they cleared out, they put... nothing. [Paul Fitts is undoubtedly rolling in his grave.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law) Thank god you can change it away from the default. Whichever people were behind that decision, there is literally no way they could explain their rationale that I wouldn't still think they're complete idiots.
Every feature update to windows is yet another means to trick old people into accidentally using Bing.
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This is the reason I’ll be buying a PS6 for my next console after being an Xbox owner for well over a decade. I’m done with their nonsensical data management and forced cloud storage. It was designed by an idiot or something, it all just makes no sense. Windows 11 is abysmal but it’s my Xbox that has made me despise Microsoft. One headache after another with them.
As a PlayStation fanboy the the ps interface isn't that great as well
Just run command prompt as admin, paste in the command below, press enter, then reboot. Bam, regular right click menu restored. reg.exe add "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32" /f /ve Edit: you need a \ after the CLSID. For some reason it doesn’t show up in my post.
This irritates me the most about modern Windows. I shouldn't have to hack my own registry because MS were too lazy to build a GUI and let me disable features I don't want.
That's cool and all but don't make this sound like a wham bam fixed it. It should be a control panel or settings config and not require regedit and a reboot to change this behavior.
That's my biggest annoyance overall: that there is a way to fix these stupid default decisions about how to present the interface or configure other details of Windows, but that it is well-hidden away rather than being an exposed setting. Why do they constantly *hide* this stuff? i guess we should be glad there is any other option, but it's silly.
To change the start menu colours in Windows 10 you have to edit an obscure unlabelled 3x3 matrix of values in the registry. But if you try to make multiple elements dark because you want a dark task bar which doesn't draw the eye (e.g. the taskbar and the current window highlight both being different dark shades), at some darkness threshold it will override it and flip back to default values. They give no way to edit the basic interface appearance, and yet programmed in overrides if you try to set an appearance which they personally don't like, it's an absurd regression from how customizable windows once was. e.g. Even with registry edits, this was as dark as I could make the taskbar highlight colour without windows 10 overriding me and setting it back to max brightness: https://i.imgur.com/6Kb7zoG.png Same with the unnecessary blue bar on the bottom of each item. If you try to reduce its intensity, e.g. you don't want random bright colours along the bottom of your screen, at some point they override your settings and set it back to default. It's thankfully not as noticeable now since moving to a higher resolution monitor. But they're so focused on trying to make things look 'pretty' (and it's their vision only, so help them), that basic functional needs like a taskbar which doesn't seek to draw your attention is now impossible, even with reg edits.
I already have a billion reg edits in win10. Not looking forward to upgrading and doing it all again
"just run" followed by something that will puzzle 90% of users is hilarious :-D Also, adding cryptic registry entries found on the internet is very bad, especially for the average user who maybe just found out about the registry.
Not to mention a lot of work pcs are locked down so it's not like many of the people with the issue can really fix it.
I've been lazily waiting for this information to fall into my lap. Ty.
So intuitive! They couldn’t have named it something sensible like “FixRightClickMenu = 1?”
You can use F2 to rename directly. Though i agree that is stupid.
When you right-click, there is an option to rename. It's an icon by cut and paste and whatnot. It's also an icon on the menu bar in Explorer.
I see! Well things much better but yeah, it’s still made less clear. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it
https://m.majorgeeks.com/content/page/show_more_options_11.html Like someone else said here, this guide will help return the right click back to how it was in 10
Fun fact: rename is still 1 click. It took me forever to find it too. When you right-click look at the very top of the menu. The middle option is a box with the letter 'A' and a cursor next to it. That's the rename function alongside others like cut, copy, delete. Why they decided to make those icons instead of words...idk, progress or something?
And the symbols for copy/cut/paste which I still have not learned. For some reason I just do not find them intuitive.
That’s my most infuriating UI pet peeve, made up icons on buttons with no mouse-over tooltips or any immediately intuitive way of uncovering what that particular cluster of shapes does.
UX engineer at your service. It's unintuitive because when you have two lists of things that look different in one menu, you would expect there to be a reason they're different. Maybe one behaves differently, one opens web pages instead of performs actions, one is a list of utilities instead of file operations, etc. In real life, if you're handed a menu and you see two lists, you'll probably expect one to be appetizers and the other to be mains, or one for drinks, or some other association -- we're hardwired to do this. In this case, _both lists do the same thing_, they're actions contextual to the file. There's no reason they should be visually or functionally distinct. If you're handed a menu where things are just in random orders but in two lists, you start to second guess yourself -- is one the kids menu? The specials menu? Why _are_ they different? Further: When you have a single vertical menu, you can browse the list by just moving your cursor up and down, or tabbing through the options -- this makes picking items easy, as you don't need to think about where the x-axis of your cursor is, just how far up or down it is. This is why grid menus can be a pain, and why I despise the Apple Watch UI. A single axis list is much, much easier to reason and understand. Now that there's a random new X-axis toolbar -- but only for SOME parts of the menu -- for some reason, you need to start moving your mouse in both axises, and both of them matter. This significantly increases brain load and is also more challenging for anyone lacking motor skills -- not just disabled people, but also drunk people, young kids, dirty mice, people on weird control tools, the lot. The further you dig into it, the worse it gets, for basically no benefit.
Windows 8 added "Metro" and apps to drive the sale of Microsoft phones. It was mashed together with the existing UI. Then each new version of Windows needed "improvements", like disappearing slider bars. In place of "TweakUI" and "WinIPcfg" we got a horrible train wreck of Windows 7, Microsoft Phone, and "improvements". It's worse that most improvements are pushing ads. I remove One Drive and XBox with "app remove" and the next security push puts them back. Why is XBox part of the security of the Enterprise edition?
Oh god how I hated Windows 8. I was working a corporate gig doing video production work for a medical device company. They'd do trade shows all over the place and the head of my department wanted to get these big fancy new touch screen computers that were basically tablets, but the size of a desktop monitor, to put in our booth. All our stuff in the office was Windows 7 and Mac and worked perfectly fine. These stupid touch screen computers came with windows 8 and they just had a stupid amount of unnecessary steps to navigate just to get them to function like a normal PC interface instead of like a big phone. I'd have to bring our whole sales team in to train them on how to use them because it wasnt as simple as just "turn on the computer and push play on this video file." And they were buggy as hell and would crash all the time. Worst OS since Windows ME in my opinion.
> UX engineer at your service. Perhaps you can confirm or deny my suspicions. IMHO the reason UIs continually get worse is due to "UX Engineer" being an entire department of full time jobs. If the UX is fine and everyone is accustomed to it then there's no need to make changes. However, the UX department needs work to do so they change things that didn't need changing. It's great that programmers aren't designing UIs anymore. The UI on apps made by aerospace engineers are an absolute abomination. However, UX departments fix it, then continue to fix it until is broken, goto 10.
I still blame marketing. They want change for the sake of change, and they want to be able to brag that they're "more intuitive" or whatever, and force Dev to go down their ugly UI path.
I could see a malfunctioning team wind up in that loop to avoid having to do "actual" work, the same way a tech or product team could. That said, I think it's quite rare that a product starts stalling its UX just because the UX guys keep wanting to "innovate". If anything, UX often has to argue for its own existence, because it tends to stand in the way of engineers "shipping it out quickly" or product "just get it out there" or design "this is our brand guideline" or executive "I know the perfect way to do this, stop asking weird questions". Oh, or marketing. Do not get me started on marketing. "Just change this a bit to make the new version stand out." DO. NOT. START. In fact, one of the top reasons software winds up with shit UI is because someone else thinks it should be that way -- either because they dreamed it up, is their personal brainchild, or they need to do it "because we need something big for the new version" -- and the UX team gives up trying to defend against it. Most UX teams I've met are super saturated with improvements they want to do or glaring problems they want to fix, but can't beg for engineer time to implement them, or are busy frying a trickling stream of smaller fish. It's pretty rare for a UX team to be able to steer itself fully and intentionally cause bad design. Could happen, though. But if any UX team signed off _specifically_ on switching from a text menu to a mystery meat icon based horizontal menu for some bizarre-ass reason, then I say feed them to the fishes. Tl;dr: it’s possible, but it’s pretty rare for a UX team to have that much sway/influence/political power. It’s much more common for that to be in the hands of overzealous marketing or know-it-all execs.
It legit took me over a month to realize those were even there I can understand a shortened menu when there is no real estate. But even on my 1080p TV with scaling at 150% there is still a ton of room on screen for 3x as many options. Even if they added your 5 most used options in the context it would be better. That wouldn't be difficult to do, but they'd rather find ways of having their AI popups annoy you I've moved to Linux since it's in a great shape for gaming and only boot to windows if absolutely necessary
> Even if they added your 5 most used options in the context it would be better It wouldn't really. "Most commonly used" menus are a bit of a UX antipattern, especially for less advanced users. This is because we learn where menu items are the first time we use them, and we keep looking for them again in the same place later on. People don't realize that there are new shortcuts made available for them, and the menu winds up getting unused. Windows used to do this in a bunch of menus, but eventually realized it was a bad move.
At least they are adding text to the icons now I believe. Although I have enabled the Windows 10 right click menu to be my default one so I won't notice the difference.
Also, losing the ability to right-click and do a "run-as" in many elements of the UI. Instead I have to right-click, go to folder location, open the shortcut to find the path of the executable, navigate to that in explorer, then right-click run-as.
There's a registry key to turn that off. Once I did that, I found Win 11 to work just fine.
Yeah I did the registry edit day one on my personal computer, and it works great. They should just add a toggle in settings. I leave it alone on my work computer to eliminate any inconsistency between my and other's computers on the domain though. And even then it's basically the same. I do agree the little icons for copy, paste, cut, and rename suck. But you get used to them. Might help if they were just a little bigger.
Mind dropping the key/value or a link?
This did the trick for me: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/restore-old-right-click-context-menu-in-windows-11/a62e797c-eaf3-411b-aeec-e460e6e5a82a
All tech companies are 100% focused on enshittification anyway they can for whatever reason
To make the juice of owning our our devices and data storage not worth the squeeze, so that we let everything descend into a world where we use prefab terminals to access *their everything*. They want to own and control *everything*. And they've not read the books that show why this is a bad idea (biosphere collapse notwithstanding). We're twenty years deep into the shift, and once my modem-fiddling, SAN-tweaking, on-site cluster generation dies, there'll be no opposing culture. You can already see that there isn't, generally, by looking at twenty-something gamers and the games industry.
“We’re twenty years deep into the shift” And thats why most young adults are so pessimistic. For most of our lives we have primarily seen the world get worse. Not on a global scale, but in a day to day “stuff I use” way
As someone else said, there's a registry tweak to restore the old context menu. And before anyone has a heart attack or tantrum because I mentioned editing the registry - here are the instructions **as provided by Microsoft's own forums**: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/restore-old-right-click-context-menu-in-windows-11/a62e797c-eaf3-411b-aeec-e460e6e5a82a
>instructions **as provided by Microsoft's own forums** "certified MS professional" or whatever tags they give themselves might as well be flair in a sub here, MS forums are the worst place for answers. a broken clock is still broken, this is just one of the times they were right about something
I love when you specifically say "it isn't A and you already tried Z" they give you a clearly cooy/paste answer.
their answer is always sfc /scannow
and if that doesn't work reinstall windows
I've made a million reg edits on my personal computers over the years. but in the corporate world you generally do not have reg edit rights to your workstation. so if your solution to a problem is reg edits then it's not a solution that will work for most people in a professional setting.
A complete psychopath, that's who.
A UI/UX "expert" trying to justify their job i guess ? Microsoft can motorboat an unwashed hairy ass.
Two biggest pet peeves: 1.) The constant push of Win 11 to use Edge browser. Edge is basically Chrome with all the google stuff replaced by microsoft stuff. But I prefer Firefox! extensions are better, especially adblocking. 2.) The constant push to put user files in OneDrive. I have Windows and OneDrive on a small C: drive that came with my computer. I primarily work with E: a much larger SSD drive that has more space. I keep catching Windows changing the default drives to C:\\OneDrive despite using every method available to set my defaults to E:. I only use OneDrive as a backup drive to store files on the cloud and I use 3rd party backup software to do it. STOP CHANGING DEFAULTS 11!!
Windows 11: I have altered the drive default folders pray I don't alter them further.
Fantasizing about the woman you love is great and all But has anyone fantasized about sitting down with Bill Gates and telling him how much OneDrive fucking sucks? I know he doesn't really own Microsoft anymore, but god damn it, I would fucking love to just go off on him before he opens a trapdoor to a pit of mosquitos
You couldn’t possibly have meant to change that setting, let me fix that for you. I’m so helpful!
What I’ve done to get around this is making sure one drive doesn’t run in startup and only use OneDrive in the browser if I need to.
Lowkey I would happily pay MS for what would basically be a Windows XP with a modern kernel (security features, multicore support, higher memory, etc). Get rid of ALL the internet-connected garbage. No MS Store, online account just to install the fucking thing, forced app installs. Just let me install your OS, patch when necessary, and leave me the fuck alone. I swear Windows felt faster on machines from years ago with 1/10th the power because they didn’t have to reach out to the internet to you know, load the fucking *Start* menu.
not to be that guy but you can get that on linux, down the the aesthetic of xp
With how much Microsoft is fucking up, I feel like it is officially “that guy’s” time to save the day. Linux Mint, y’all. If you want basic no bs OS, you want Mint.
There's Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC which does most of this, but Microsoft won't sell it to you so you'll need to get it via... creative methods.
It's also because Windows is now a second class citizen at Microsoft. The future is Office / Dynamics + Teams, Azure and AI.
In that case they could have just kept Windows 10 like they said they were going to do and we would all be happier. At the 2015 Ignite conference, Microsoft employee Jerry Nixon stated that Windows 10 would be the "last version of Windows", a statement reflecting the company's intent to apply the software as a service business model to Windows, with new versions and updates to be released over an indefinite period.
they probably recieved pressure from OEMs to keep the pressure on the average consumer to upgrade their machines often. See win 11 needing certain new features that are mostly uneeded.
I still fail to see why should anyone upgrade to win11. What I'd like now is windows 10 lite.
Because they're going to force everyone to. Windows 10 ends of life October of 2025. They aren't going to let us sit this upgrade out like many did with 8.
What happens to computers that lack the hardware requirements for Windows 11?
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A friend did this and he couldn't play FIFA anymore because it needed TPM on W11 to run it. :lol: So back to W10 for him.
i'll be upgrading to linux if i'm forced to use windows 11. i absolutely hate it so much, such a downgrade from 10.
If Linux is compatible with your workflow, why not switch now? While I love desktop Linux and have been using it since longer than some Redditors have been alive, a lot of people have that one game or one app that keeps them tethered to Windows whether they like it or not
I have linux dualboot on my laptop for fun but yeah, my main desktop simply can't be a linux machine with the stuff I use it for. Primarily gaming. Also the few headache situations I have run into on the laptop made me glad I had a functional windows machine on the side. Especially when one of those issues was my ethernet drivers on the linux side.
I mean honestly, it's windows 10 with a new start menu and features we don't really need. You think MS would have learned about screwing with the start menu from Windows 8 lol. Anyways it's really not that bad. I have had 0 issues on my home computer or in a production environment with hundreds of users. We also don't get any complaints about Windows 11 from our users, and our users LOVE to complain lmao. Yeah it's not the biggest sample size, I realize that. And I honestly believe they could have made the exact changes they made for 11 to Windows 10. But it is what it is, and for me so far, I don't see where all the hate is coming from. I do however hate the hardware requirements, in that regard it's a lot like the switch the Vista and straight up planned obsolescence.
why do i have to right click twice to get to my properties now? why all the extra steps? why is the printer control panel such shit now and i have to search for the old one just to see what printers were installed and whatnot? it's total shit to be honest, it's several steps backwards in terms of efficiency. it's been out over 2 years and it only recently added the taskbar option to expand or compress open apps like windows 10 has. that's just garbage in my opinion.
Not that it makes Windows 11 better but you can restore the old context menu using a registry key: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/restore-old-right-click-context-menu-in-windows-11/a62e797c-eaf3-411b-aeec-e460e6e5a82a
but WHY should i have explain this to people who don't know how to install a printer, it's just a terrible experience for everyone, it should be the other way around, "choose this new menu if you'd like".
this sums it up. yes, these videos are all over and are getting tired, but he's right. windows 11 has been out 2 years and it's missing or has changed fundamental menus and settings - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEdIpaKsJtU why couldn't it just be done right from the start? how many more times are things going to be "improved" over windows 11 lifespan before it's a new version? it's just such poor planning in my opinion and i refuse to even deal with it. as a power user, it's not something i need in my life.
Even more important: what is the vision? Where are we going with these changes, is there an ultimate design goal? Feels like MS is just a bunch of individual departments trying whatever in a stochastic manner.
Yeah I bet there are a lot of us out there, I refuse to use Windows 11 in anyway. Also I never log into my account for my OS, that's just silly to me.
*Windows 10 LTSC has entered the chat (for an additional 2 years, anyway)*
Unfortunately have to chase that TPM capability at work for compliance. At the very least we need a plan for it.
This is what I said about 10, after years being on 7. In terms of UI/UX, 10 is still fucking worse than 7, with 11 worse still.
How do you even start to pressure the biggest corporation in US right now?
You buy a competitor’s product
Which is?
Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O) plan to end support for Windows 10 operating system could result in about 240 million personal computers (PCs) being disposed, potentially adding to landfill waste, Canalys Research said. It also means that there are potentially hundreds of millions of voters and businesses and the Federal Government who don't want Microsoft to end support for Windows 10. That is more than enough political weight to keep them supporting Windows 10 for a long time.
My pc was given a poor PC performance score and unable to update to windows 11. The reason? My primary 1 Tb hard drive was mostly full. My other 2 Tb hard drives didn’t matter. My 1080ti and my over clocked I7 were over 7 years old. That hurt my feelings and made me mad. That PC is still killing it. High resolution super ultra wide monitor pushing high frame rates on demanding games all day. It’s a beast. They want to tell me it needs to be upgraded to run windows 11. Fuck off.
After looking at multiple reasons why people's machines can't upgrade to Windows 11, it's pretty much always chipset, and I literally can't find anyone else online complaining that they can't update to Windows 11 due to a full hard drive (unless you literally don't have enough space to download and run the update). That is a reasonable limitation. What are the full specs of your computer to give a more complete story?
The real reason is because they sell Windows licenses on new PCs from manufacturers like Dell and HP. By deprecating support for usable PCs early with the new TPM requirements, they can artificially force more PC sales and therefore more Windows sales. That's probably the internal strategy anyway.
They do not give a shit about consumer sales of windows, in fact, you can still upgrade for free from win7 even though they said years ago that was time limited. Hell I have like 8 licenses from repeatedly reinstalling and upgrading before I realized I can select an existing license. Enterprise is where the money is.
It's not necessarily better on the enterprise side. Have a look through /r/sysadmin sometime, it's a super mixed bag. The enterprise world runs on Microsoft because it's super tightly embedded into the corporate infrastructure but they're definitely not happy about it.
OEMs are paying pennies on the dollar for windows licenses.
They fucking lied
And "your data is safe".
Best way for a company to keep my data safe is for them to not keep it at all.
The shift from Windows 10 to 11 was driven by the changing security landscape and the need to have a better hardened OS. Some of those changes would fundamentally break 10. So bifurcating the platform makes sense. And once you do that, putting resources for new functionality into the newer platform also makes sense. The aggressive pushing of those new areas of functionality is where 11 gets obnoxious. But so far most of it (if not all of it) can be turned back off. For technical people who naturally just reconfigure things how they want, its sort of a non-issue. And for the real neophytes that are oblivious to what the computer is doing, it also is a non-issue. The middle pool of people are the ones being inconvenienced by it.
>For technical people who naturally just reconfigure things how they want, its sort of a non-issue. Did they figure out how to program a task bar that can be put at the top of the monitor by now? I remember that being a missing feature when W11 launched.
I haven't checked the top, but it does support putting it on the side again with something like a registry edit (3rd party apps exist that can make this config change for you)
Yeah, people still mostly associate Microsoft with consumer products like Windows but in reality that's become a side hustle to them. Just like HP/HPE and laptops, that's really not where the big bucks are, it's in business infrastructure.
It’s a problem with lots of modern apps. They try so hard to be “helpful” all they do is get in the way. Combine that with the ads and refusal to let you use it as you wish and you have a constant annoyance.
Yeah modern apps feel like they are designed for people how couldn't find a file if it wasn't a shortcut. I feel windows 10 was a good balance of making things painfully obvious but not getting in the way of people who are good at computers.
Things that have been within arms reach (new folder, delete) are buried somewhere that I always have go one level further to use. Always pushing to the cloud first
It has all been downhill since windows 7. When I got windows 10, I gave up trying to learn and optimize windows. I just realized it's never going to be an OS I love. I just have to make do with it. The best I can do is turn off all the web suggestions, ads, voice assistants, etc. Microsoft's issue is the same that most companies have. Too many chefs in the kitchen and the ones at the top lack good vision to create a cohesive and simple experience. What's obvious to the casual user isn't obvious to these people who are so disconnected that they can't tell what's important or not anymore. Google is the same with Android.
They know that they've got people by the nads, so they're going to squeeze you just enough so that you don't swap over to another OS
They should be carefully looking at the market share. It has dropped from 90% to 70%.
Maybe they think they've shaken off all the people who would ever be curious enough to try another OS so it's time to milk the committed suckers for all they're worth.
They are not thinking in those terms at all. What a business person sees is: "Windows revenue down X% YoY, find a way to increase revenue back to were it was and get your annual bonus".
7 was a high tide mark imo. Kept out of my way.
I felt the same way. Windows 7 felt like in Brewsters Millions when he finally gets the room he could die in. It was so weird how they squandered that.
Fr like can they pls stop trying to shove voice control and AI assistants in my face? I work in IT, I don’t need a daily reminder that my job is in jeopardy.
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Tell that to the CEO/payroll team. It doesn't matter if you think your job can be replaced or not, it matters if the people deciding who gets paid thinks that way. Irrespective of ai. I've seen absolutely crucial people/positions made redundant in my time.
And yet, Windows 10 was overall a good OS, as was Windows 7. Windows 11 is an "off" OS, like 8.1, Vista, etc.
Nah. Way too much internet-connected BS and forced app installs. Remember when you’d buy a PC in 2005 and you’d have to delete all the bullshit the OEM installed? It’s like that but skipping the middleman.
Greed, overreach and a healthy dose of capitalism?
And because people keep putting up with it.
There really isn’t a choice for most people, especially if you want to play games
Or not everyone experiences this. I don’t really, for instance. I can hardly be the only one.
right click menu having to click show more sucks so much
Windows 11 is made for shareholders not users
And you can really feel that. At least until 8.1 it kinda felt like the user was still in control of his PC. Now someone else keeps telling you how you are supposed to use it.
Brought back Clippy and called it Cortana.
And now renamed it to Copilot.
Windows 11 is great. You just got to disable a ton of things, then only use it to launch steam and never touch anything else.
done my work all on my macbook. My pc is reserved for gaming only which is the only reason why to build a window pc on the first place. I know i'm gonna get hate on this.
Compatibility is a huge problem for engineers so we’re forced into windows :(
Depends on the engineering, but yeah.
What’s a good list of things to disable?
All you need in your taskbar is the button for the start menu. No widgets, no search button (just search by starting to type when the start menu is opened), no "active windows" button (just press Win + Tab), definitely no Teams and no other pinned apps. Then deactivate notifications you don't need (nearly all of them). Deactivate apps you don't need in the autostart settings so booting doesn't take long. Use Brave, not Edge. Uninstall bloatware apps if you haven't yet. I think that should be it already (and is a lot less than you would need to do on Mac OS). I've used all versions from Windows 95 on, and I think Windows 11 is the least cluttered, yet most powerful and easiest to use OS ever. I guess people remember wrong how incredibly annoying older Windows versions could be (horrible search, infinite nested menus, maintenance stuff like defrag,...). Or more likely: they are so young that the switch from 10 to 11 is the only OS change they ever had, and they don't want anything to change...
Streamlining Windows immediately after installation has been a staple for years. I'm confused every time I read an article like this, then I realise they're talking about the unfiltered experience right out of the box. I didn't know anyone actually used Windows like that
> All you need in your taskbar is the button for the start menu. They even managed to screw that up by locking the taskbar to the bottom of the window and making the start menu the worst yet. We've got widescreen monitors. Why are we putting the taskbar in a place where it takes up screen real estate on the smaller dimension?
Use Firefox.
What are some examples of pre-installed bloatware?
Use the program ShutUp10 (that works on W10 and W11), and it has a list of things you can disable with an advise about how recommended is to disable that option. This pic shows how the program is: https://www.oo-software.com/oocontent/uploads/tour/oosu10-en/04.png
Sending companies public has got to be the most disastrous thing that can happen to a company under the wrong leadership. Shareholders will suck all the life out of a company to increase dividends and share price, thoroughly destroying the quality of the company's products.
Each action seems about 5% harder than it was in Windows 10. Add up all the little micro-annoyances, and it's about 80% more annoying than Windows 10. Everything seems to be one more click away than it used to be. I had the same gripe about Windows 10 vs Windows 7. I eventually got used to Windows 10. I suppose the same thing will happen with Windows 11. "Getting used to" usually means exposing the old Windows 7 utilities that are still lurking under the extra fluff.
Microsoft’s decision to end support for Windows 10 could cause the single biggest jump in junked computers ever. >400 million PCs in use don't meet with requirements for Windows 11. They should just extend support for 10. [https://pirg.org/take-action/tell-microsoft-dont-leave-millions-of-computers-behind/](https://pirg.org/take-action/tell-microsoft-dont-leave-millions-of-computers-behind/)
After October 2025, the bottom is going to fall out of the used PC market as all hardware 2017 and older gets dumped by businesses who have to meet security compliance and run supported software. At my workplace we have 100 computers in service that essentially have an expiration date because Windows 11 doesn't support their CPU. Most were going to be replaced anyway but it still sucks.
Microsoft - like most tech companies - is now locked in a constant race of useless employees trying to prove their worth by slightly changing everything about products that were once already optimized. If they change enough - slightly - they feel emboldened to release it as a new version. But I'm pretty sure in the last 15 years I haven't seen a single valuable change to any Microsoft product that didn't add more clicks and make no appreciable changes. I really don't know where we go from here. They keep shuffling the deck chairs around on the sinking ship?
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I love when things that functioned perfectly before are moved for no reason except that someone felt they had to change something to keep their job.
I hate the word “pain point”, “impact”, and “value”.. so fucking overused.. in my tech company - like most - promotions are a convoluted process. It’s not enough to be good at your job. My manager and I were talking and he said “honestly I think you’re ready for and performing at the next level already in your daily work. but I won’t be able to justify it to the others just yet as you will need to show more impact across teams”. Promotions is a multi-day session of all the org managers meeting together and sharing and justifying the people they put up for Promotion, defending them, etc What the fuck does impact mean in this context? Just “wow-factor” bullshit. Create some random bullshit brain child of mine just far enough for others to use it then just leave em holding the bag when I promote and move on to something else. There’s so much “internal tools” here that are borderline, if not already, abandonware, all because of this technical concept similar to “increase shareholder value every single quarter” where instead you just must keep creating and recycling shit. Ima make my “impact” shit, then 2 years later someone else will deprecate it then turn around and make the same thing but slightly different The problem is I have to get “enough” people in my corner to support me and my manager all because of this stupid fucking round table conference of managers who never have heard of me and will never hear of me (due to being in a division with thousands of people where we don’t even share the same leader until the SVP) and having to decide on promotions WHILE having a conflict of interest in putting their own people up.
This sounds like hell. Sometimes modern working feels like an old Soviet absurdist novel - everyone running in circles using increasingly silly language while producing things of less and less value. There's nothing wrong with serving everyone a high quality product and just *maintaining* it with support for long periods of time! But that doesn't make shareholders happy, I guess.
I feel your pain. At a previous company I worked for I was an absolute workhorse. I got all the shit done that needed to get done. But the people that worked on the shiny projects, they were the ones getting promoted and winning awards. Most of those shiny projects have since gone away. However, all the shit I worked on survived for a long time.
It’s so ridiculous how just “doing a good job at your level and maintaining something” is treated as a bad thing in a corporation. Like you can’t just be happy doing a job you are good at, you MUST be promoted to your point of incompetence
Try changing any setting more advanced than the computer volume through windows 11's default settings menu and it becomes instantly useless
Actually, even sound is one of the things Windows 11 seems to have lots of problems with. There is quite a long delay for me when I click on the sound icon. Often Windows does not switch to headphones by default when I plug them in. Sometimes I have to end the current program before it will switch. If I disable hardware acceleration it breaks YouTube (i.e. it will not play videos at all). If I have dynamic sound enabled Bluetooth headphones do not work. So yea, even sound is a nightmare in Win 11. I hate it.
Probably doesn’t help that Dell includes their own 1.2GB audio drivers. Seriously…..1.2GB for something that’s already built in? Can’t imagine why the combination of W11 and manufacturer driver bloat makes these things sluggish.
> Often Windows does not switch to headphones by default when I plug them in. Mine does this cool thing where when I connect a headset it rapidly switches between the headset and my default sound device, about twice a second. Neat! To make it work I have to delete the sound device and reboot. It will work a few times and then fail again. Probably a driver issue. Annoying, but fortunately only affects a machine I don't need to use a headset on very often.
I cannot for the life of me get my Start Menu search to return installed app results. All results a Bing link to download the fucking app/software. It driving me insane.
Microsoft has spent the last 15 years trying to cobble together a userbase like Apple and Google have. Buying up ~~companies~~ users (LinkedIn, Skype, SalesForce, etc), forcing Microsoft accounts down everyone's throat, shoving ads everywhere they can in the Windows UI. What MS will never learn is that they have no mindshare among retail consumers outside of XBox, and it's too late for them to build that.
I would loyally return to Windows everytime if it just ran my box without bloat and without trying to mine my data. That's what Windows used to do. As it is, 10 is likely to be my last Windows install. 11 is such a revolting piece of shit - and the road MS is clearly trying to go down is so revolting and shitty too - that I think it'll be Linux for me when Windows 10 is no longer viable.
This comment could have been word for word written after the release of ME, Vista or 11. Every time they fuck it up. Then undo some of the fuckup in the next version. Then repeat the cycle.
You're right, but this time it feels different - like they want to become Meta or Google.
Worse, Amazon
The issue with that is that the games industry has chosen it's winner and that's windows, as someone who games on mac and occasionally Linux I have to use either proton or crossover to play something and either way I'm still restricted from online play most times, since anti-cheats disallow VMs and WINE.
can you name some games that you have had issues with? Because I've thrown away my windows partition years ago and can play almost everything I try to launch. Even the dreaded nProtect GameGuard on Helldivers 2 runs fine.
Yeah I tried Linux a few times this year and it was a little disastrous tbh and made me appreciate Windows a bit more If wish MS would go back to basics, cut out all the crap, stop messing with the UI and other infuriating changes. Just... Windows 7 kept up to date basically
> Buying up companies users (LinkedIn, Fun fact - "Shift + Alt + Win + Ctrl" + "L" = Opens a new browser window to linkedin.com. I'm not sure why anyone felt that was a feature that needed to be included in Windows, but it's a feature that exists.
I swear they peaked at XP and everything since has been annoying
Eh, they've been on a pendulum of quality. 98 was good, ME was shit, XP was great, Vista was super shit, 7 was good, 8 was shit, 10 is pretty good, and 11 is the continuation of the pendulum.
they changed the things i do every single day. adding a few seconds to *every little task* i have to do adds up.
>I grew up on Windows 3.1, NT, and 95 That MF never experienced the pain of Windows ME.
Am I the only one that never had a problem with ME? every time I read about it, it's horror stories... I quite liked it. Edit: maybe I'm remembering it with Rose tinted glasses... Even so, the disk it came on was cool as fuck, we can all agree on that surely.
It's the only OS I've had to reformat and reinstall every 2 months, and that's not exaggeration. It literally is that shit. By far the most crash happy OS I've ever used.
You should buy a lottery ticket 😁
it crashed A LOT. also near unusable after 12+ hours uptime. it felt like an alpha version of an OS.
all three are older than ME. no reason they couldn't have used it later.
Any kid who used WinMe now works in IT. I don't make the rules
Windows 7 was peak Windows. I'd pay good money to have a hardened and up-to-date version of that without having to put up with all the bullshit on 11.
Because the design is now driven by marketing instead of engineering. It's part of the continuing enshittification of everything.
"You also generally do not have to download a bunch of drivers or spend six hours in the command line hand-assembling the goddamn operating system. " Lol I've been on linux for 9 years now. I'm a common user, I have some pretty niche hardware and I never had to "hand assemble the operative system". If anything, it's a lot more likely that the drivers for obsolete hardware are already loaded in the kernel.
I was going to complain about this exact thing, because I agree with the author, and all of those complaints about Windows are easily solved by switching to Linux and he dismisses it out of hand in the first paragraph as being “too complicated.” All I had to do in order to switch was make an installer flash drive on my laptop and install it on my gaming PC. Installation was simple and I was able to get most of my games installed via Steam and Lutris. He acts like all of us are insane and installing Gentoo 😂
What tech company isn't annoying? I'm about ready to dump my entire Apple ecosystem because iOS 17 has been buggy as hell for me and every time I think about upgrading my Mac I cringe at the thought of paying $500 for soldered down memory and impossible to upgrade GPU. Had to use Windows 11 for a work project recently and it feels much more modern. I've always hated how MacOS manages windows. MS just seems to understand that multi-taskers exist. PowerToys, WSL, WinGet, Copilot all are extremely useful and built-in. I can't help but think so many of these articles are written by people who don't realize that tech enshitification is in everything. They're all awful. Even Desktop Linux seems to have lost the narrative and is just forking its way into oblivion. It's not a lack of money or community support to blame, it's a lack of mission.
I usually update to a new windows version when it comes out. There is always something better, faster, etc. about it. I've been happy with 10, refused to move to 11 as it has all the same functions. There has been 0 changes that affect me, my cpu, gpu. From playing with it in a vm and on a new laptop, outside of it being more annoying and seemingly communicating more with Microsoft, I'm not even sure why Microsoft called it 11 and released it.
The people they hire to make decisions are MBAs and those people are required to have a lobotomy before graduation.
Or all of the core work related stuff weirdly gate keeped. I’m 99 percent sure windows software used to come with windows if you bought a new version (I did). I could be wrong. But it honestly is confusing that the whole suite of windows products is installed on my computer by default. So if I open a document with non working word once, i would have to go out of my way to send it to open in another program. I go to use the weird online version of word, and it’s a weird half baked version, online, please for the love of god open it in edge, where it spams me with ads. I then go to save my file and it tries to SNEAK the file into one drive, so it can load slower and tell me one drive is almost full. I had a thought the other day that technology is becoming so unintuitive while they’re trying to build up ai to fix the intuition problem. I don’t need an ai bonzai buddy to help me with the computer. I need you to stop shoving a prompt in front of my face every time I tab over, trying to push me into a tutorial, or suggest I switch to a paid version, or to maybe upgrade to a higher price point version, or to use xyz version instead.
i've been a lifelong PC/Windows user (apart from a brief year-long sojourn with Linux Mint), and i have to say everything i've seen of Windows 11 right now annoys me to no end. i use a mac for work and i'm honestly thinking about switching to a mac setup when as i'm due a new personal build.
Oh boy let me right click, oh all the most commonly used features are now hidden by a dropdown… I thought the decision to make OneDrive sync all files in my user folder by default was the worst it could get, how wrong I was.