Apparently the Home edition will require a Microsoft account and an internet connection. [1] Can't say I'm looking forward to this. All my Windows installations are with local accounts and I would like to keep it that way. Microsoft has already made it incredibly obnoxious to achieve this with the latest Windows 10 setups, where you have to make sure your computer is not connected to the internet to even unlock the fallback local account creation option. [2] A sad day indeed if this is no longer possible.
If that's true, then I'll be forced to move many people's PCs to another OS after decades of Windows. I hope they reverse that decision, it's so hostile.
I think a recent version of Windows I had the misfortune of setting up also required a Ms account: no option for a local install. It's also possible that I'm just stupid and didn't see it, but (shrug)
The secret is you have to install Windows 10 with the network disconnected. If it doesn't detect a network connection, it lets you create a local account
You can bypass it by either turning off the network connection prior to a new/clean installation on 20H2/21H1. If you are stuck on the account screen during the installation process, then entering wrong credentials 3 times will present you with a local account option. However, if you have completed installation, then there is an option to turn it into a local account in Settings --> User Accounts --> Change your account type.
They have really obsure stuff going on but I don't actually think they'll deny it even if you're not connected, that'll raise a LOT of legal actions against them.
I don't like that they make it mandatory, but I understand why they want to push users to using MS accounts. When I set up a PC (Android phone) for non-technical users I always make sure they have a MS (Google) account.
Things like backup and password reset are just so convenient that they outweigh the very theoretical privacy risk for most people.
It's a prelude to subscription Windows. Instead of having a family PC that everyone can use, every user with a Microsoft account will need a license. The OS for a family PC is eventually going up 5-10x in price IMO.
I replaced Windows with Linux for gaming a couple years ago, due in part to Valve's Proton. It's not perfect, but I estimate 80% of the games I play "just work" and require no tweaking. The state of things for your set of games can be evaluated with https://www.protondb.com.
- It prompts you when you try and update the non-operating-system software that came with the computer, and doesn't let you upgrade it if you don't create one.
And probably a whole lot more prompts that I missed.
It also uses dark patterns to imply that you must enter payment information for you account. Took me 15 minutes of googling to figure out how to create one without entering payment information.
So we decided to make meaningless and confusing UI changes! Nevermind that billions of people rely on their knowledge of this OS's interface, fuck 'em! We're just so damn innovative all the time!
With the growing awareness that tech giants possess intimate knowledge of our preferences, activities, and lives - and use that influence to literally addict us to technology, sell us things, influence us politically - who the f*ck wants another fantastically wealthy corporation "woven into our lives"?
I mean, honestly, does anyone else yearn for the pre-2000 Internet? It sure feels increasingly like we're living in a tech dystopia.
Do you think they finally finished the control panel transition? Window 10's control panel thing feels like it was stopped halfway through development, so they left the old stuff in there but made it hard to access. Unfortunately most of the time when you need to change something it's not on the new control panel so you have to dig for the old one instead.
When Windows 10 was first released I figured they would finish up the new control panel and deprecate the old one, but instead several years have passed with no progress whatsoever on the problem and it is still a pain point with Windows 10. Certainly it can't be that hard to copy over the missing features? Did the control panel team quit en-masse in 2015?
When Windows 10 was first released I figured they would finish up the new control panel and deprecate the old one
Some of them go back to Win2k/NT and if you start looking through them carefully, you'll probably notice the sediment layers of just about every major Windows release. I doubt that's going to change in Win 11. That said 'no progress whatsoever' is not quite accurate, most of the significant Win 10 updates have expanded what the new control panels can do.
The fun thing is too that a lot of old Win2k/NT tools / layers are the source of many security vulnerabilities. An example is font rendering in the kernel, was intended to be a performance increase back in maybe 3.1? Ended up becoming a major pain point from a security perspective.
I'm not a fan. A centered dock does look pretty, but to me it's not as intuitive as a left-aligned screen. Especially since you would be navigating to the "Start" menu a lot. Getting my mouse bottom left is more natural than "some random offset of dead bottom center".
I can't tell if the icons get larger as you hover. That sort of magnifies this problem, as the start button would shift left as other icons are highlighted.
Left aligned makes a ton of sense until you exceed a horizontal resolution of 2k or so. The web realized this ages ago - a left aligned page doesn't work at large screen sizes. With the web it isn't as critical (often times we have a browser window smaller than our full screen), but for a taskbar that spans the full horizontal resolution, left aligned doesn't make sense when you have a 5k ultrawide. Screen sizes will continue to slowly increase, centering the taskbar is futureproofing for that.
Fitts' Law didn't stop making the corners of a screen the most reliably reached parts just because some UI designer at Microsoft likes central alignment. I expect that central placement for the Start button to be objectively less efficient for users who frequently use that button, even if it's just a small but frequent irritation.
Good news is you can still anchor the taskbar to the left. At least you can within the leaked ISO. Bad news is that the smallest taskbar size is bigger than the current smallest size.
EDIT: Sorry I misread, you meant the icons. But yeah unfortunately it sounds like you can't move the taskbar as a whole anymore. I always kept mine at the top.
yeah im at the first screenshot and it just looks awful
Have Microsoft forgotten the lessons they learned so hard since 1995? The start button being in the corner has real usability benefits.
They ruined the taskbar a long time ago, the button grouping thing is absolutely horrible and can only be partially turned off... hopefully they at a minimum kept the full button option somewhere.
And the centering... if new stuff is added and it recenters, it means things are moving all the time. eeek.
Microsoft's usability dementia started with them removing the 3D relief from toolbar buttons in Windows 98 to look like plain icons and making menubar labels indistinguishable from toolbar buttons (except text instead of icons) just for the sake of looks, despite all these having different user interactions.
Then again they were never completely consistent. For example in Win3.x design 3D elements were supposed to be for those that cause some command to be performed, yet the scrollbar visual design was the same as that of buttons.
Yeah, it looks like they finally just threw the towel in and admitted that macOS has had a superior design aesthetic, and started heading in the same direction.
Probably more a return to form than anything. I seem to recall reading a book about the early (v 1.0 - 3.11) history of Windows where a developer recounted Bill Gates looking at early builds and asking if they could make it look more like Mac. Wish I could remember the title because that's going to gnaw at me for the rest of the day.
That's the thing with these Windows UI updates. It looks great until you fire up some application like Office and then it suddenly it's the same interface you were using before. Then you have this weird mix of aesthetics.
There is no bloody touch on a desktop except on their braindead surface tablets. You can point your finger at the monitor but after some time, it hurts.
XFCE, CDE, KDE and WindowMaker and AfterStep all had the same sort of dock look for many years.
At least we can finally go from one machine to another without too much of a difference or having to learn much - particularly good for those who only use what they "know".
Rounded corners and touchscreens, is that windows 8/vista again? What i want from windows is speed . More and more people are going to be using them to work from home, and not on a tablet or a laptop, but on a good old desktop pc, their sales are going up. What's the rationale behind this kind of regression to terrible windows 8? Can i plz have snappier windows 7 with slightly cleaner look?
> app developers can now bring their own commerce into our Store and keep 100% of the revenue – Microsoft takes nothing. App developers can still use our commerce with competitive revenue share of 85/15
Except that the rounding only happened on the window decoration, which took space. The client rendering area was a full rectangle. Now, they’re cutting corners out of the client rendering area.
I use Linux now but keep windows VMs around for some legacy stuff. It takes about 5-10s to boot win7. It's snappy as heck, and reliable, even in a vm with minimal ram.
> App developers can still use our commerce with competitive revenue share of 85/15
But there isn't a perpetual Agreement guaranteeing MS won't ever increase its cut in the future when its store becomes more popular. The Store hasn't yet been terribly successful. Most of my Windows apps are installed outside the MS store: Notepad++, VSCodium, Steam, and so on. So MS will try to get more apps in the Store and then lock down Windows like iOS once it has enough apps, then increase its own cut so that it can transfer wealth from the middle class to billionaire MSFT shareholders, just like AAPL does.
>> app developers can now bring their own commerce into our Store and keep 100% of the revenue – Microsoft takes nothing. App developers can still use our commerce with competitive revenue share of 85/15
> This is great. That's how it s done
It can't go on, though. Why won't every developer turn their app "free" and use Stripe or something to shave even more off the commerce fees? Meanwhile Microsoft eats hosting/maintenance/development on the store for zero return. We saw why Apple went the IAP route even if it's unpopular among developers and the fees could afford to be reduced.
In the video, they're spending the first 20 seconds filing down the corners of the logo, having a big reveal of the blue Windows logo with rounded corners. This leads into the rest of the feature reveal, all round things now. But in the "end credits", the same blue Windows logo is back to its sharp cornered self again. Is this a subtle hint to the UI inconsistencies that are still to be expected after the major version bump, or is there another meaning?
> The only real question is, will I still be able to get to the Network card configuration page that's been the same for the last 15-20 years. [I use it every day and don’t want them to make it into some simplified screen]
Microsoft truly can’t win!
One person praises it for being ugly while another for its beauty, while another criticises the central alignment of the taskbar and another says it’s a fundamentally stupid choice.
They could mostly win by making the new stuff actually fully functional; although any change would be annoying, the biggest part of "and don’t want them to make it into some simplified screen" is "simplified".
I don't know how this doesn't bug other people more. It's completely unfinished. Plenty of settings haven't moved from their XP or Windows 7 menus, as new "metro" 8/10 settings menus are created that have missing settings, new settings, and conflicting settings.
The new W10 interface to set a static IP will conflict with the old one (adapter properties) without telling you. Happy debugging.
As a late adopter to Win10 who hadn't been in a Windows environment since the early days of Win7, I was shocked how jarring ugly and inconsistent it was.
Win11 from what they've revealed looks like a moderate improvement? But I know what they're not showing is how the desktop will look with several non-native MS applications open, the nonsense of the theming across Office applications, and Explorer with its inexplicable tab bars.
It makes me disappointed that something so ubiquitous and essential to peoples' work can't aspire to be aesthetically, if not beautiful, at least nice.
The ODBC Driver interface for configuration is tied to the old dialog.
The interface for the drivers was designed around GetOpenFileName() as it was at the time.
One of the features of GetOpenFileName/GetSaveFileName is that the structure passed in can include two special options- a function pointer to a hook routine, as well as a custom dialog template which windows will insert.
The functions were improved in Windows 95 with the "Explorer style". Even old programs get this style at the very least, because windows will imply the flag.
unless a template or hook routine is specified. See if a hook routine or template is specified and the OFN_EXPLORER flag is not, then the hook routine or template was designed for the old-style dialog. Windows uses the old-style dialog in this instance so that the program can run and doesn't crash.
The ODBC Driver configuration uses a dialog template to add the "read Only" and "Exclusive" checkboxes. That is why it shows the old style dialog.
People might say, "They should update it"
Update what?
If GetOpenFileName()'s ability to fallback to the old-style dialog is removed, than you won't see this dialog. Instead, it will crash. Cool. great experience.
the driver interface? OK great. so now there is a new version of the ODBC Driver interface. Now all the ODBC Drivers need to be updated. Some of the drivers were written by companies that are either out of business or rather different. I have this sneaking suspicion that Paradox software isn't going to be writing a new ODBC Driver for the MS-DOS Database.
Just drop everything? OK Cool.... so now companies get forcibly upgraded to Windows 11 and literally cannot do business because they rely on them in some manner. "They should upgrade". I won't get into that except to say it's the stupidest thing I've ever heard, but companies in that position are far more likely to find ways to not upgrade the software that caused the problem so, you know, they can keep doing business. And not upgrading the OS is certainly cheaper than countless thousands of man-hours in upgrading their Business software.
And a big thing people don't understand about backwards compatibility is it's not just about old programs working. It's about new ones working to.
If Microsoft removed all "backwards compatibility", than practically nothing would actually work. Software would be constantly crashing, sending error reports, etc. Now, call me crazy, but somehow that doesn't seem like it's a great experience. And if upgrading to Windows X+1 suddenly caused programs to crash left & right, nobody is going to blame the programs.
Thanks for the read. Actually, I have no problem with Win95 (and previous) era UI components, it's the layers of inconsistencies on top of that bothers me. The Windows 95 is still the best Windows UI of all times.
a very fair, honest review. yes, software ages with time, and with time piles of new layers are added and others cannot be removed for very obvious reasons.
people who fail to understand this have basically no clue about complex systems evolution over tens of years, or have only produced their own cloud-managed service.
so, yeah, Microsoft is faring very well. OSes after windows 7 are extremely stable considering the diversity of components and packages that run on top of it.
apple killing all backward compatibility is not necessarily a good thing. we are talking right to repair? then what what right does an OS vendor to kill backwards-compatible components?
The backwards compatability on Windows is truly great, particularly compared to Linux and macOS (where messages fired off when buttons are clicked silently disappear nowhere, and the button does nothing)....
Readit News
Microsoft announces Windows 11 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27618805
--
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/24/22548480/windows-11-home-...
[2] https://www.howtogeek.com/442609/confirmed-windows-10-setup-...
See https://www.neowin.net/news/windows-11-home-requires-interne...
Also, as for legal actions, strongly doubt it. Apple has required an Apple ID on their iPhones and iPads for years during setup.
Things like backup and password reset are just so convenient that they outweigh the very theoretical privacy risk for most people.
Thankfully I only use that machine for gaming.
- They ask you to when you buy it
- They ask you to in an email after you buy it
- It prompts you during install
- It prompts you right after you installed
- It prompts you when you try and update the non-operating-system software that came with the computer, and doesn't let you upgrade it if you don't create one.
And probably a whole lot more prompts that I missed.
It also uses dark patterns to imply that you must enter payment information for you account. Took me 15 minutes of googling to figure out how to create one without entering payment information.
So... "no".
So they will finally get what they couldn't finalize in W10. These folks have no shame.
Folks, if you were thinking Windows 11 will bring less telemetry, you were wrong :-)
So we decided to make meaningless and confusing UI changes! Nevermind that billions of people rely on their knowledge of this OS's interface, fuck 'em! We're just so damn innovative all the time!
I mean, honestly, does anyone else yearn for the pre-2000 Internet? It sure feels increasingly like we're living in a tech dystopia.
But Windows is less and less a money maker for Microsoft, so it's the obvious route.
When Windows 10 was first released I figured they would finish up the new control panel and deprecate the old one, but instead several years have passed with no progress whatsoever on the problem and it is still a pain point with Windows 10. Certainly it can't be that hard to copy over the missing features? Did the control panel team quit en-masse in 2015?
Some of them go back to Win2k/NT and if you start looking through them carefully, you'll probably notice the sediment layers of just about every major Windows release. I doubt that's going to change in Win 11. That said 'no progress whatsoever' is not quite accurate, most of the significant Win 10 updates have expanded what the new control panels can do.
I feel like they're just aligning with macOS now. Not that I'm complaining, the video and the interface all are sexy.
I can't tell if the icons get larger as you hover. That sort of magnifies this problem, as the start button would shift left as other icons are highlighted.
There's a name for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law
and the fact that their UI people somehow have forgotten about it speaks volumes.
Deleted Comment
> Taskbar functionality is changed including: Alignment to the bottom of the screen is the only location allowed.
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-specifica...
EDIT: Sorry I misread, you meant the icons. But yeah unfortunately it sounds like you can't move the taskbar as a whole anymore. I always kept mine at the top.
Have Microsoft forgotten the lessons they learned so hard since 1995? The start button being in the corner has real usability benefits.
They ruined the taskbar a long time ago, the button grouping thing is absolutely horrible and can only be partially turned off... hopefully they at a minimum kept the full button option somewhere.
And the centering... if new stuff is added and it recenters, it means things are moving all the time. eeek.
Then again they were never completely consistent. For example in Win3.x design 3D elements were supposed to be for those that cause some command to be performed, yet the scrollbar visual design was the same as that of buttons.
The bad news is Apple is fucking it all up, having apparently put iOS people in charge of macOS. The new safari looks insanely bad.
At least we can finally go from one machine to another without too much of a difference or having to learn much - particularly good for those who only use what they "know".
Deleted Comment
> app developers can now bring their own commerce into our Store and keep 100% of the revenue – Microsoft takes nothing. App developers can still use our commerce with competitive revenue share of 85/15
This is great. That's how it s done
I wouldn't mind a complete visual regression to Windows 7. In fact, I remember that Win 7 Aero only had rounded corners.
Except that the rounding only happened on the window decoration, which took space. The client rendering area was a full rectangle. Now, they’re cutting corners out of the client rendering area.
Windows 8 distinctly had no rounded corners. The metro design language was quite square
But there isn't a perpetual Agreement guaranteeing MS won't ever increase its cut in the future when its store becomes more popular. The Store hasn't yet been terribly successful. Most of my Windows apps are installed outside the MS store: Notepad++, VSCodium, Steam, and so on. So MS will try to get more apps in the Store and then lock down Windows like iOS once it has enough apps, then increase its own cut so that it can transfer wealth from the middle class to billionaire MSFT shareholders, just like AAPL does.
Transparent windows and widgets make it more like Vista.
> This is great. That's how it s done
It can't go on, though. Why won't every developer turn their app "free" and use Stripe or something to shave even more off the commerce fees? Meanwhile Microsoft eats hosting/maintenance/development on the store for zero return. We saw why Apple went the IAP route even if it's unpopular among developers and the fees could afford to be reduced.
Deleted Comment
The official Microsoft logo is still flat square.
[1] https://ntdotdev.wordpress.com/2021/02/06/state-of-the-windo...
> The only real question is, will I still be able to get to the Network card configuration page that's been the same for the last 15-20 years. [I use it every day and don’t want them to make it into some simplified screen]
Microsoft truly can’t win!
One person praises it for being ugly while another for its beauty, while another criticises the central alignment of the taskbar and another says it’s a fundamentally stupid choice.
Just pull the band aid fast. Can't adjust the UI for inconsistencies in long time users muscle memory. They will adjust to a consistent UX.
I don't know how this doesn't bug other people more. It's completely unfinished. Plenty of settings haven't moved from their XP or Windows 7 menus, as new "metro" 8/10 settings menus are created that have missing settings, new settings, and conflicting settings.
The new W10 interface to set a static IP will conflict with the old one (adapter properties) without telling you. Happy debugging.
Win11 from what they've revealed looks like a moderate improvement? But I know what they're not showing is how the desktop will look with several non-native MS applications open, the nonsense of the theming across Office applications, and Explorer with its inexplicable tab bars.
It makes me disappointed that something so ubiquitous and essential to peoples' work can't aspire to be aesthetically, if not beautiful, at least nice.
The ODBC Driver interface for configuration is tied to the old dialog.
The interface for the drivers was designed around GetOpenFileName() as it was at the time.
One of the features of GetOpenFileName/GetSaveFileName is that the structure passed in can include two special options- a function pointer to a hook routine, as well as a custom dialog template which windows will insert.
The functions were improved in Windows 95 with the "Explorer style". Even old programs get this style at the very least, because windows will imply the flag.
unless a template or hook routine is specified. See if a hook routine or template is specified and the OFN_EXPLORER flag is not, then the hook routine or template was designed for the old-style dialog. Windows uses the old-style dialog in this instance so that the program can run and doesn't crash.
The ODBC Driver configuration uses a dialog template to add the "read Only" and "Exclusive" checkboxes. That is why it shows the old style dialog.
People might say, "They should update it"
Update what?
If GetOpenFileName()'s ability to fallback to the old-style dialog is removed, than you won't see this dialog. Instead, it will crash. Cool. great experience.
the driver interface? OK great. so now there is a new version of the ODBC Driver interface. Now all the ODBC Drivers need to be updated. Some of the drivers were written by companies that are either out of business or rather different. I have this sneaking suspicion that Paradox software isn't going to be writing a new ODBC Driver for the MS-DOS Database.
Just drop everything? OK Cool.... so now companies get forcibly upgraded to Windows 11 and literally cannot do business because they rely on them in some manner. "They should upgrade". I won't get into that except to say it's the stupidest thing I've ever heard, but companies in that position are far more likely to find ways to not upgrade the software that caused the problem so, you know, they can keep doing business. And not upgrading the OS is certainly cheaper than countless thousands of man-hours in upgrading their Business software.
And a big thing people don't understand about backwards compatibility is it's not just about old programs working. It's about new ones working to.
If Microsoft removed all "backwards compatibility", than practically nothing would actually work. Software would be constantly crashing, sending error reports, etc. Now, call me crazy, but somehow that doesn't seem like it's a great experience. And if upgrading to Windows X+1 suddenly caused programs to crash left & right, nobody is going to blame the programs.
people who fail to understand this have basically no clue about complex systems evolution over tens of years, or have only produced their own cloud-managed service.
so, yeah, Microsoft is faring very well. OSes after windows 7 are extremely stable considering the diversity of components and packages that run on top of it.
apple killing all backward compatibility is not necessarily a good thing. we are talking right to repair? then what what right does an OS vendor to kill backwards-compatible components?