But it isn't just half-baked because it was rushed out while ignoring all the feedback (although it absolutely was). It is also half-baked because Microsoft's management has no particular strategy or plan for what they want Windows to be.
So Windows 11 just feels like an "and kitchen sink" where someone picked up an iPad, noted down a bunch of random features without rhyme or reason and then told the people below them to shove them into Windows for some reason.
Then you step back and realize that very "101" features on Windows are still incomplete like the migration to Settings, Windows Search being objectively worse than the Power Toys Run (let alone Google Desktop Search RIP or FileLocator Pro), and UI elements that haven't been updated since Windows 2K.
As cliché as this sounds, Microsoft needs someone with a vision for Windows at the helm, someone they trust enough to go hands off and let them materialize that vision. Regardless of what that vision is, at least then Windows would be a something, rather than a whole host of competing ideas and contradictions i.e. a mess.
PS - Ironically the "Windows 11 PC Health Check" app symbolizes Windows 11's problems: Released in a half-complete state, pulled, then re-released as a "Preview" also in a half-complete state. The app to check if you're ready for Windows 11 is a "preview" less than 30 days before the FULL retail release of Windows 11... It is almost too perfect.
This is what drives me nuts. Why do they keep messing with the UI? Nobody wants that! Even Apple and Google have both figured out that screwing around with UX every release is a recipe for making your customers HATE you.
What I, and probably non-power users want out of windows is for it to be faster and use less power. I'd honestly be happy to go back to a Win95 interface with the latest kernel.
Microsoft needs to fire the idiots that keep messing around with the UX. It's not broke, stop trying to fix it.
I hate the UI after Win 7. For years all users that needed to dig into setting knew exactly where they were. Now they expose some through a clunky UI and you have to go digging for that that are, in fact, just the same old UI. Which has to create confusion for many users presented with their new UI only to be thrown into a totally different UI style.
The new UI should 1) actually expose all of the settings and 2) offer a toggle to default to the UI that sits behind everything anyway.
Otherwise, I just don't understand the need to tweak with UI design that roughly 20 years of Windows users have already learned.
Took the words out of my mouth. I'd prefer a UI element designed for Windows 2K over most anything designed later (with some, but few, exceptions).
I'm not sure I would characterize newer UI as more hostile. Some better adjective might be infantilizing, dumbed-down - for the most part; or there's a dichotomy between the UI for dummies part and arcane, not-well-documented, difficult-to-locate parts. This dichotomy was somewhat less pronounced in the past.
I wouldn’t go that far. It is better than the new windows 10 settings for sure but count how many clicks it takes to get to the menu to change the IP of the machine, with non resizable windows, text that is non selectable/copyable, etc. I don’t care for the old battleship-grey look, but lots of the old parts are very clunky.
Including important features that are not accessible in UI. Like all scheduled tasks run as low priority, no UI to change that.
After installing Windows for the first time in easily 6 years, I was shocked that things like the device manager and disk management still look like they're from Win95. It's not better if it's not remotely consistent
Also some of the old elements don't work well anymore. Like new menus that appear in certain folders, except you'd never know because the menu bar is hidden by default. Or forms that were never designed to resize.
The worse part is how new settings are pushed into the new UI layer under their own menus rather than being easily accessible from the control panel. I understand the need for backwards compatibility but I'd assume they would want to put together a proper replacement for the control panel that utilizes their newest technology while still being able to manage legacy application settings. But it seems you have to go through multiple screens until you find the right one that has the setting. It's really annoying.
Windows 10 is biggest garbage fire POS Windows version yet, because of their new update model. For the last several months, I've been unable to install the mandatory (for non-enterprise users) feature update patches. They fail to install with a cryptic error code and get rolled back. If I don't get this figured out soon, I'm not going to be able to get security patches anymore.
I should be able to get a version that's stable (enterprise licensees get access to LTSC versions that never are required to install feature updates), but they've denied everyone else. The best I could do was buy professional, which let me delay the patches for up to a year (instead of only a week or two). My understanding is MS laid off most of their Windows QA team, and replaced it with home users drafted to become guinea pigs plus telemetry, and the lack of it shows.
Good joke. There is nothing I can do in Windows 10 that Windows 7 didn't do better.
From start bar search to window decorations. Windows 10 has actively gotten in the way of what was a great practical experience.
Windows 11 makes the window decorations a little better (still inconsistent with poor design choices), but adding a bunch of crap that I can't opt out of on install (like teams, skype and whatever other bloatware is installed).
I have to use an actual debloating script on fresh Win 10 installs, the script only gets bigger with Windows 11.
I had loads of non-UI issues with 8, 8.1 and even more with 10. For example suspend was completely broken on a Surface Pro on 10, while on my desktop it would mess up the filesystem on a drive every few days. They fixed most of them eventually but it took a long while. I’ll prolly upgrade somewhere just to get the free license (I assume there’s gonna be a cutoff date again) and then go back to 10 right after
IFIR Windows 2000 was extremely well received by professionals (which at that time still was the target market). Windows XP was just the "consumer relesase" of Win2k and didn't actually add all that much except a new weird-looking UI theme.
I was trying to check Disk Partitions on Windows 10, so typed this into the search.
It gave me a website with some freeware tool. I had to search around again until I found the actual system tool. I don't know what a regular user would have done.
My favorite is when I see the result I want flash by and then I accidentally type the next character -- correctly -- due to momentum, and the result disappears. Then I delete the last character in an attempt to bring back the result, and then I try retyping the whole thing, but the correct result never reappears. It is gone. Only useless web results remain.
> Microsoft needs someone with a vision for Windows at the helm, someone they trust enough to go hands off and let them materialize that vision. Regardless of what that vision is
That sounds a lot like how Windows 8 went.
My personal opinion: they should have frozen the UI at Win7. The kernel improvements since that time are fine. Iterative, under the hood improvements over UI revolution.
Was about to say the same. That is exactly how Windows 8 was made. Really wish we had gotten more of a continuation of the design of Win 7 instead of everything else that’s happened since.
On windows search, I never understood why it was so bloody slow, particularly on network drives. If I traverse the same folders programmatically I get a result in seconds or less. The search function will takes an order of magnitude that, and I don’t believe it is searching anything else than file names. And don’t even dare changing the sorting order of the search result, because of course it must trigger a new search from scratch.
Which leads me to the same conclusion than many other flaws in Windows. I don’t think the windows team at Microsoft uses windows themselves. They must all have macs at home or perhaps don’t care much about computers. But clearly those obvious UX failures do not seen to annoy them.
I think that like many places nowadays, development of Windows is done by developers according to an entirely business-driven backlog, where details are first broken down into prioritizable bits before being implemented. As long as features are delivered on time in predictable increments, nobody dares to openly question the actual usefulness or quality of the resulting software for fear of impeding that smooth rollout which would make the team look bad and reduce chances of promotion and / or bonuses.
> Microsoft needs someone with a vision for Windows at the helm,
Is it possible for a project to be abused for long enough that it becomes irrecoverable from any financially sensible perspective?
I mean this seriously: I've heard the codebase for Windows is really, really ancient and making updates is a nightmare. It's almost like trying to revive a lost language.
What if Windows has passed the threshold where the cost to fix it is beyond its potential for revenue? What if it's slowly approaching the threshold where simply maintaining it is beyond its potential for revenue?
Whoever you heard that from is wrong. The codebase has evolved over time and has been actively maintained and refactored. Making updates is not a "nightmare".
> Regardless of what that vision is, at least then Windows would be a something, rather than a whole host of competing ideas and contradictions i.e. a mess.
the big problem is, and this is primarily why i dislike everything windows, is that humans are mimicry machines. if you give them tooling that's an inconsistent mess, it's going to normalize the idea of inconsistent messes, and then they will create inconsistent messes.
windows ultimately normalizes inconsistency and mediocrity- as such, it encourages these habits of mind in those who are forced to use it. if those who are forced to use it are in any sort of creative positions, they ultimately create and propagate chaos that matches the cage which they are forced to reside within.
Well said! I've long maintained that Visual Basic set back the state-of-the-art in graphical user interfaces by (at least) a decade. The original intent and purpose of graphical UIs was direct manipulation of objects on screen. VB turned it into "filling in forms with buttons to click". And that mediocrity lives with us still, the original promise/premise sadly unfulfilled.
> windows ultimately normalizes inconsistency and mediocrity
Windows 95-7 design did not, quite to the contrary. Unfortunately I can't find it again, but usually the link appears on any HN discussion about classic Windows design sooner or later... anyway, the point is that the classic Win95 design was consistent across the whole OS (for apps that used the standard OS controls). UI elements had clear shadows, borders and margins separating elements visually, color schemes by default assisted that visual separation and they were customizable (e.g. for those with accessibility needs). Additionally, menus and hotkeys were consistent across Microsoft apps with (IIRC) clear guidelines on how third party apps should use menus, so that end users didn't have to learn much.
I get it but mmc and services still lack basic features like filter/search, which is a daily pain point for me.
Is the service named "Microsoft [thing]" "Windows [Thing]" or just plain old "[Thing]" (e.g. "Microsoft Defender Antivirus Service," "Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection Service," or "Security Center")?
Metro was fucked up on many levels, but Steve Sinofsky had a really good vision for Windows that I just don't think he had enough time to see executed.
Those are completely different products. Run and Everything search for file names only. Windows Search searches in file's content too, and understand a lot of file formats.
For home computers, I said no many years ago and never looked back.
However I sometimes wonder, since strides have been made in booting Windows from USB and with introduction of WinPE, could we have a smaller, limited purpose Windows, bootable from USB drive. We could boot into this to edit Word documents or Excel spreadsheets or some other Office task, then power off.^1 It could boot to RAM so the HDD is never touched. Portable Windows. Normally, WinPE and Windows "boot disks" are used by Windows sysadmins, but there is nothing to limit usage to only Windows sysadmin stuff. A hypothetical Windows sysadmin and/or full-blown Windows-loving reader, who has succumbed to Redmond's propaganda, might think, "What could you even do with that. It would be useless." Yet Microsoft itself anticipates that someone might see the utility and they actively try to prevent such persons from using a fast, unbloated, telemetry and ad-free Windows.^2 Its one thing to require enterprise customers who pay annual fees to use bloated Windows N+1 but what about non-enterprise users. (Perhaps they dont count. They are just sources of data collection.)
Personally, I dont need Microsoft to tell me what is and what is not a "general purpose operating system". I will make that call and I will decide how I want to use it. This brazen disrespect for free-thinking users is why I dont use Windows (at home).
"Windows PE is not a general-purpose operating system. It may not be used for any purpose other than deployment and recovery. It should not be used as a thin client or an embedded operating system. There are other Microsoft products, such as Windows Embedded CE, which may be used for these purposes.
To prevent its use as a production operating system, Windows PE automatically stops running the shell and restarts after 72 hours of continuous use. This period is not configurable."
This sounds good in theory, but when Microsoft did just that in 2011 with Windows 8, it ended up backfiring on them big time.
It's pretty clear Windows has organizational and structural problems. Mainly because every product they release is always only 80% there. For some reason, whatever it is, it gets mostly finished, shipped and then abandoned and moved into maintenance mode.
Yet, it works for them. They usually always win in whatever market they go after. So I can't say they are incentivized to fix those structural problems.
>This sounds good in theory, but when Microsoft did just that in 2011 with Windows 8, it ended up backfiring on them big time.
the problem was that while windows 8 had *somebody* with a vision behind it, the vision never really made it through to the product. windows 8 was obviously the product of a dysfunctional system that was pulling in two completely opposite directions - the consumer devices side who wanted modern touch-friendly designs to compete with iPad, and the business customers who wanted the windows they were familiar with and didn't want to have to re-train their employees. and what we ended up with was a half-assed implementation in the middle.
"we want to do the best possible job of supporting the huge number of existing applications and users on our platform" is a perfectly valid vision for the future of windows. vision doesn't have to mean change. The problem with there being no vision is you get both the change and the hesitance to change.
>Microsoft needs someone with a vision for Windows at the helm, someone they trust enough to go hands off and let them materialize that vision.
Do they, though? No one's buying Windows because they think it's swell. They're buying it because it's the default choice that comes with a computer, and because it's the default platform for commercial software. To most consumers, Windows is just what "computers" run, along with a vague notion that "Macs" might be a bit different.
As long as Microsoft continues to enjoy its monopoly position in the desktop OS space, they couldn't give a crap if Windows is "something" or not. All they have to do is not screw it up by breaking compatibility too badly, and fart out some sort of named release every few years so people don't think Windows is "old" (the nuances of rolling release being beyond the ken of the average consumer).
I don't use such apps, not because I don't like them, but because these days I just don't trust them to not surreptitiously send an index of my system to them.
I wrote my own file search programs. It's not hard, just a few lines of code. I use them every day.
> The app to check if you're ready for Windows 11 is a "preview" less than 30 days before the FULL retail release of Windows 11
Unless something has changed recently, I believe the release of Windows 11 will only be for newly purchased devices. The update from Windows 10 to 11 won't be until sometime next year.
As I commented in another parts of this thread, you see that quite clearly in the mess of multiple teams, each advocating their own UI framework as the future of WIndows UI, as if they were the only team doing it.
It is like management let them all roam free and let the best one win.
That might have worked, if they had let the best one win. Instead, they treated the teams like a buffet - I'll take this app from this team, and that app from that team... and the result is, as you say, a mess.
Honestly I hope they keep UI elements from Windows 2000, because they are functional and informative. You don't have to use it if you don't want to. But at least it allows you to administrate the system.
MacOS is nice to use, but that is also restricted to daily use cases. If you want to administrate the system, you have an UI from the 70s, mainly the terminal. If you remove older UI elements from Windows, you are left with a useless toy box.
There is no single instance where the new setting perform better than the old ones, on the contrary it is a complete unstructured mess. They should remove it and try again in my opinion.
> As cliché as this sounds, Microsoft needs someone with a vision for Windows at the helm, someone they trust enough to go hands off and let them materialize that vision.
Completeley agree and I want to add: they need a product owner, someone who has used multiple operating systems in different form factors like OSX, iOS, Android, and Linux and can see the pros and cons of them instead of taking sides.
> and UI elements that haven't been updated since Windows 2K.
I use WindowBlinds to skin my Windows 10 to look like Windows 98. >.>
It doesn't work for programs that create their own title bars or remove them entirely (like Chrome, Firefox, and Discord), but I love having 3D buttons on my task bar and windows.
can you provide a screenshot (or link to a theme) so I can see how it looks like? All of the windows classic themes I've seen for windows 8.1+ have been pretty meh.
For me with windows 10... I spent about 2 hours trying to get it to install on my new machine while it continued to fail due an issue with it recognizing my nvme drive complaining i did not have any sada drive... in about 20 minutes after being very frustrated i downloaded ubuntu and installed... I spent the next 20 minutes installing lutris and the sims4 so my girls could play... so about 4 hours later... 40 minutes of which was to get linux installed with wine and playing video games with a then pretty nice nvidia 1080 ti graphics card... and bonus i can play sc2... i guess i don't see why people still use windows?
How can you say it is half-baked when it's still in beta? I am not saying it will be perfect when released, but we cannot judge something that's not generally available yet.
I have to agree, even though I have plenty of pro-Windows comments.
To me Windows 11 feels like Vista, and to everyone that got burned with the rewrites on the WinRT side, just using plain Win32/MFC/Forms/WPF feels liberating.
Multiple teams are fighting UI politics over WinUI, MAUI on top of WinUI, React Native with WinUI, and classical UWP is not going away (Windows 11 Store is written in it), then ASP.NET team is pushing Blazor everywhere including on Web Widgets.
I will just wait for Windows 12, whenever it comes up, the UI war will be settled by then.
> Multiple teams are fighting UI politics over WinUI, MAUI on top of WinUI, React Native with WinUI, and classical UWP is not going away (Windows 11 Store is written in it), then ASP.NET team is pushing Blazor everywhere including on Web Widgets.
Great point.
As a developer in the Windows sphere for decades, I'm used to change.
However, at this point I have no idea what I am supposed to be developing user interfaces in. Honestly, using VS Code daily as part of my stack I'm leaning towards just accepting that WebView2/Electron/etc is the future.
I have read the complaints, but VS Code is a solid piece of engineering and it "just works". If that's an example of what we can easily get cross-platform, so be it.
I'm going to get down voted for this, I realize it isn't for everyone... If it's not for you, no problem. Let me know what you prefer.
Anyways, try golang with imgui.
You can make imgui look like anything. Ontop of that, you get true cross platform binaries with native speeds with only a couple dozen lines of code and amazing dependancy management. If you've never done immediate mode front-ends, you'll be delighted.
They won't let it happen. For now they decided to just ignore the project and not give it any publicity, but the moment it gains popularity, they will definitely react. Until now they attacked it indirectly through their kernel developer saying ReactOS stole his code - in spite of the fact they took all necessary measures not to and underwent an audit. This is the same old strategy Microsoft supported during the SCO trial.
I like Windows, and I would prefer to keep everyone in my family running Windows, but Windows 10 just doesn't work as smoothly as it should considering the resources that Microsoft should be able to throw at it. Due to various latency issues in Windows 10, it feels like it was written by a couple of developers that don't fully understand the api/framework they are using. This should be their wheelhouse, since it is their OS, but it feels cobbled together. So I am slowly migrating my family to Linux as I don't have much confidence that MS will fix their shit.
I migrated from Win32 to Qt two years ago. Never looked back. Much easier to program dialogs & UI. Qt gives you macOS as well. (And UWP if you insist).
WinRT looked great, finally .NET being like Delphi and a C++ stack that looked like C++ Builder, for those moments that .NET alone won't do it.
On one side .NET Native is left to stagnate in C# 7, and C++/CX got replaced with C++/WinRT, which to this day (4 years later) still doesn't offer any kind of IDL tooling on VS (lets forget for a second that IDL exists since OLE 1.0), and requires manually merging generated files.
Then to top that, we get MAUI on top of WinUI, but with the XAML format used by Xamarin.
Anyone following the now 2100+ issues on Github, community calls, change of roadmap of what WinUI 3.0, Reunion and XAML Islands were supposed to be originally, and where they are going after Windows 11 announcement, can only be dismayed.
They don't seem to either get the complaints, or most likely, are stuck in a position where they cannot publicly acknowledge them.
OS/2 was actually much better than this with CSet++, while SOM had metaclasses and implementation inheritance, with Smalltalk and C++ support.
Still, I can equally well rant about other platforms, it is all a matter of which flaws we are willing to put up with.
I have some concerns with Qt. Not the functionality, but the implementation of some of it. My primary concern is that it doesn't respect the OS's anti-aliasing settings. It defaults to making fonts anti-aliased, even if you don't want them to be. Because of this, last year I stopped updating an app using Qt.
The higher resolution a display is, the less and less you need anti-aliasing so it's unnecessary in the 4K and up era. Also while I am not on a 4K display, I find AA fonts blurry compared to nice crisp hinted non-AA fonts.
Winforms will never die. If I was looking to make an investment into a skillset that will still be really useful in thirty years, I would go deep on WinForms.
I can't even track these UI techs anymore. I thought WinUI is the new version of the UI layer of UWP and all apps who use WinUI are actually still considered UWP apps? I genuinely don't know, can somebody enlighten me?
Ive been using win 11 on my laptop for a couple months now.
I like the new UI, it feels simpler and less gaudy. The drop down menu expansion thing is fine. I also prefer the redesign of the settings app. I find casting my screen and bluetooth works better. Windows has been missing something decent window snapping features forever and although it's a bit clunky I appreciate that it's there.
The only thing that has annoys me is the taskbar not disappearing when its supposed to, leading to it covering the bottom of maximized applications. Most of the time its not there but sometimes it'll just stick after coming up.
I didn't know about the android apps feature but I might give it a shot when I go home. Widgets I just haven't used at all despite being aware of them.
I still have win10 on my desktop. I don't remember the switch being painful when I went to the rolling release windows insider on my laptop. Frankly win10 is fine too, so unless there's an android app I want to play around with I wouldn't bother switching.
I also have the issue with the taskbar sometimes not disappearing but I've had the same issue on Windows 10, various Linux DEs and macOS. It must for some reason be a more difficult problem than it would seem.
The biggest issue I have with Windows 11 is that the taskbar can't be moved from the bottom without a registry hack. I find the biggest UI improvement to be in the file manager.
I also find the whole thing to be a little better performing than Windows 10.
Exact same for me, gave Windows 11 a try, really liked all the new features, only downgrade is not being able to put the taskbar on the side of the screen. Arch Linux will always be my daily, but I think they've done a good iteration, other comments probably haven't actually tried it.
"Windows has been missing something decent window snapping features forever and although it's a bit clunky I appreciate that it's there."
I've been using windows 11 for a few months as well. For window snapping, I simply enjoy Powertoys and will stick to that since it gives me more customization options.
My biggest annoyance is that they've removed the ability to open the task manager by right-clicking the taskbar. Instead, I have to right-click the Windows icon in the bottom left. Just ... why? What benefit is there to not letting me right-click anywhere on the bottom part of my screen? Do none of these muppets even use Windows?
I have been using Windows 11 as a daily driver and don't really understand people's hostility towards it. It is definitely an upgrade over Windows 10. Comparing it to Vista is nonsensical. I don't agree with a few decisions (like making centering the menu a default?) but most are easily fixed. I would like to see them delay it to fix some problems, but it's possible those will already be fleshed out by launch.
People just don't like change. There will be lots of weeping and wailing an gnashing of teeth, then people will grow accustomed to it. Same happened with 8 and 10. The furor over 8's missing start menu was intense, even though it takes literally seconds to install Classic Shell and get a better start menu than Windows 7 ever had.
In 3-4 years the cycle will repeat again with Windows 12.
Why change something that you already are familiar with and already sunk time to master your own workflow on? Let that be people’s decision, not get it forced down their throats. Windows has been taking control from the users, became agressive with telemetry, inability to control when you want to apply upgrades, lost work on sessions due to automatic upgrades, removed settings after upgrade, interminable waits after upgrde when you really need the computer urgently to do something on and a lot of other things moved about back and forth because Microsoft couldn’t take their time and make a sound decision and stick with it.
I've been using the beta for a week or so. It's pretty nice honestly. I got the beta because you can setup different wallpapers for each of your virtual desktops. I really like that feature and found nothing else either much better or worse.
I do find the search function is snappier and more accurate though. If anything this is a return to windows 7. It is definitely not problematic like vista or 8.
A lot of the features were already part of the insiders version of Windows 10 before 11 was announced. Seeing as its a free upgrade, I think of it as just another one of the semi-yearly Windows 10 upgrades (i.e. Windows 10 21H2), rather than a whole new OS. Upgrade for the same reasons you kept Windows 10 up to date.
...but its a free upgrade. If you think it's worse that is on thing but so its just been better except for the stupid fucking right click context menu.
I really like Windows 11. Hyper-V has some MASSIVE updates which noone talks about, as well as stuff like the network stack being rewritten. It's better to view this as a Windows 10 Refresh with alot done behind the scenes and a new UI. Not much of this is talked about though, outside of really niche highly technical circles.
There's some false narrative about it which is bizarre.
> Hyper-V has some MASSIVE updates which noone talks about, as well as stuff like the network stack being rewritten
Maybe be the change you want to see... Try talking about those things.
I've heard nothing about either one, do you have an article or articles? Microsoft hasn't done a very good job communicating the non-UI changes. Insiders have measured performance losses but no significant gains yet.
Hard to call people criticizing other things a "false narrative" when there's been near no communication on the things you're bringing up, and they don't mitigate the complaints.
Can't think of a single "MASSIVE" update since transition to win7 64bit.
It's all fluff for what it is.
There basically hasn't been a good reason to upgrade windows other than arbitrary security update cutoffs, and mostly arbitrary caps to max DirectX version you can run.
I wouldn't be surprised if it would be a downright downgrade overall performance and responsiviness wise.
I would caution against being giddy about rewrites. As an end user, you should always be skeptical of brand new fresh off the factory bugs in rewrites, especially when the rewrite is of something as complex as a network stack.
The ui alone is basically enough for me to not touch it for a while. I dont need any of the new features and there are loads of anti features i tthe ui (rightclick menu, taskbar icons for more than 1 window, changing default apps, etc)
I dont understand what's driving these changes, but they seem so use hostile that it puts me off the whole os.
Am I alone in assuming they'll just do the Windows 10 unwanted upgrade, again, when 11 adoption rate isn't where they want it to be? Choice doesn't matter to these mega corps, so long as we use their stores and view their ads. Thank god for Gnu and Linux!
That's the most probable scenario and I wouldn't be surprised that in the end they'll lower the requirements for 11 even more. Back then, the marketing tactic of "hurry up, limited-time offer only" was in the use for this free Windows 10 upgrade but people were still able to get the upgrade after the deadline; then, some used the obscure way of getting the upgrade by special offer for people with accessibility issues.
> Choice doesn't matter to these mega corps
Choice doesn't matter and it's an OK policy to annoy user periodically with options, suggestions, offers, up until it gives up and agrees for something it didn't want in first place but wants to get rid of the annoying notifications or whatever form this harassment takes. The permanent "No, thank you, I'm not interested" doesn't exist in corporate world too - there's only place for "Fine but we will ask you again and again", sadly.
> then, some used the obscure way of getting the upgrade by special offer for people with accessibility issues.
On that note, it was removed, so now the only way I know that works is to do an in-place upgrade via the Windows 10 installation media ('upgrade this pc now') then sign in with a Microsoft account to get your license attached to the MSA, then you can do a full reinstall and keep the license.
I agree. There is a lot of fear mongering coming out of Microsoft now, like their "we can't promise security upgrades" for people who ISO install on unsupported hardware.
Honestly, the Linux desktop experience has come so far in the past 10 years. Sure I don't think it's perfect, but it's nowhere near as bad as it was in 2008 where Windows was still king and Linux had bugs everywhere in every distro and every desktop environment. I think people should seriously consider Linux now if they can't take anymore of Microsoft's shit
Anecdotal, but I have a 2015 Lenovo X1 Carbon running Ubuntu 20 (gnome 3.38), a 2020 MBP and a 2019 MS Surface Laptop 3 (windows 10).
The recent Gnome experience on hardware half a decade older than the Surface laptop is so much snappier than Windows. I dred MacOS and Windows updates these days but I'm generally very pleased with updates to Ubuntu/Gnome.
Furthermore everything just works, too, which is what I grew up to expect from Windows, but literally yesterday the Surface laptop bricked itself installing an update. I have daily problems using Windows with WSL, too. It's infuriating.
I used to feel stable and assured using Windows, but these days Windows is an endless labyrinth of dialog boxes, it's hard to comprehend how anyone could take it seriously any longer. Maybe I'm getting old.
I totally agree. There are still times you will need to investigate why something isn't working on linux. But the upside is when you do, there's almost always a way to make it work the way you want.
In stark contrast with Windows 10 which has had features like window snapping at edges when dragging something across the boundary between monitors that you just can't turn off. Or updates that seem to obey their own arcane rules instead of requiring a simple sudo [package-manager] [update-command]
How does bitwig do with multi channel audio? I need 32 in and 32 out. I have Merging and RME available as audio devices, but I don't suspect that either of them would actually work with multi-channel recording, despite both of them offering drivers.
If someone could guarantee rock solid stability, I *might be willing to switch, even though I'm fairly invested in the Ableton / VST world. 10 years of projects will likely force me to always run mac / windows unless Ableton decides to build for linux in the future. Who knows, maybe ARM will force their hand.
Between Proton and WSL we're getting closer to a true "write once run anywhere" world where host platform won't matter so much. Devs will be free to develop with whatever tech stack they like most, make a canonical build, and other platforms will be able to run it.
What's going to be hilarious is that much like dosbox became the best way to run old dos programs even if they might still technically run on windows, wine/proton will be (and sometimes already is) the best way to run many older windows programs. Particularly I'm in love with proton's fullscreen magic that doesn't actually mess with your display mode, so e.g. I can run Touhou games fullscreen in proton with my display at 4k despite them only supporting 480p fullscreen -- running on Windows will try to set my display mode to that with varying success. At some point we'll be running old Windows programs on Windows with wine/proton through WSL.
If WSL2 is your killer Windows application, then upgrade to Windows 11 whenever you can. WSL2 on Windows 10 suffers from some FS corruption bug [1]. The bug is currently fixed only in Windows 11 Insider Builds. It is uncertain if/when the fix will be backported to WSL2 for Windows 10.
But other than that, Windows 11 is mostly Windows 10 with a different shell. So it's not like it will disrupt your workflow or something.
Readit News
But it isn't just half-baked because it was rushed out while ignoring all the feedback (although it absolutely was). It is also half-baked because Microsoft's management has no particular strategy or plan for what they want Windows to be.
So Windows 11 just feels like an "and kitchen sink" where someone picked up an iPad, noted down a bunch of random features without rhyme or reason and then told the people below them to shove them into Windows for some reason.
Then you step back and realize that very "101" features on Windows are still incomplete like the migration to Settings, Windows Search being objectively worse than the Power Toys Run (let alone Google Desktop Search RIP or FileLocator Pro), and UI elements that haven't been updated since Windows 2K.
As cliché as this sounds, Microsoft needs someone with a vision for Windows at the helm, someone they trust enough to go hands off and let them materialize that vision. Regardless of what that vision is, at least then Windows would be a something, rather than a whole host of competing ideas and contradictions i.e. a mess.
PS - Ironically the "Windows 11 PC Health Check" app symbolizes Windows 11's problems: Released in a half-complete state, pulled, then re-released as a "Preview" also in a half-complete state. The app to check if you're ready for Windows 11 is a "preview" less than 30 days before the FULL retail release of Windows 11... It is almost too perfect.
Also known as "the good part"... Everything else about Windows UI since then has only gotten less usable and more hostile.
What I, and probably non-power users want out of windows is for it to be faster and use less power. I'd honestly be happy to go back to a Win95 interface with the latest kernel.
Microsoft needs to fire the idiots that keep messing around with the UX. It's not broke, stop trying to fix it.
The new UI should 1) actually expose all of the settings and 2) offer a toggle to default to the UI that sits behind everything anyway.
Otherwise, I just don't understand the need to tweak with UI design that roughly 20 years of Windows users have already learned.
I'm not sure I would characterize newer UI as more hostile. Some better adjective might be infantilizing, dumbed-down - for the most part; or there's a dichotomy between the UI for dummies part and arcane, not-well-documented, difficult-to-locate parts. This dichotomy was somewhat less pronounced in the past.
Including important features that are not accessible in UI. Like all scheduled tasks run as low priority, no UI to change that.
Windows 2K + cleartype would be perfect.
Also some of the old elements don't work well anymore. Like new menus that appear in certain folders, except you'd never know because the menu bar is hidden by default. Or forms that were never designed to resize.
* Windows 3.0 was perceived as buggy
* Windows 3.1/3.11 was a major improvement
* Windows 95 was extremely unreliable
* Windows 98 sort of addressed most of the issues
* Windows 2000 was a weird amalgamation of the NT kernel and 98/ME look'n'feel that wasn't received well
* Windows XP fixed that
* Windows Vista was universally hated
* Windows 7 addressed most of its issues
* Windows 8 was a nonsense with phone-style UI on desktops, tablets and servers
* Windows 10 fixed it
Now it's time for another crappy release to get people really excited about upgrading to Windows 12 in a year or two.
Windows 10 is biggest garbage fire POS Windows version yet, because of their new update model. For the last several months, I've been unable to install the mandatory (for non-enterprise users) feature update patches. They fail to install with a cryptic error code and get rolled back. If I don't get this figured out soon, I'm not going to be able to get security patches anymore.
I should be able to get a version that's stable (enterprise licensees get access to LTSC versions that never are required to install feature updates), but they've denied everyone else. The best I could do was buy professional, which let me delay the patches for up to a year (instead of only a week or two). My understanding is MS laid off most of their Windows QA team, and replaced it with home users drafted to become guinea pigs plus telemetry, and the lack of it shows.
Good joke. There is nothing I can do in Windows 10 that Windows 7 didn't do better.
From start bar search to window decorations. Windows 10 has actively gotten in the way of what was a great practical experience.
Windows 11 makes the window decorations a little better (still inconsistent with poor design choices), but adding a bunch of crap that I can't opt out of on install (like teams, skype and whatever other bloatware is installed).
I have to use an actual debloating script on fresh Win 10 installs, the script only gets bigger with Windows 11.
Come on Microsoft...
XP was bloated in comparison.
Deleted Comment
It gave me a website with some freeware tool. I had to search around again until I found the actual system tool. I don't know what a regular user would have done.
I'm not really a Windows user.
I'm not really sure what's so problematic with searching settings, but other platforms I use (macOS, iOS) are not really much better in this regard.
That sounds a lot like how Windows 8 went.
My personal opinion: they should have frozen the UI at Win7. The kernel improvements since that time are fine. Iterative, under the hood improvements over UI revolution.
Which leads me to the same conclusion than many other flaws in Windows. I don’t think the windows team at Microsoft uses windows themselves. They must all have macs at home or perhaps don’t care much about computers. But clearly those obvious UX failures do not seen to annoy them.
Is it possible for a project to be abused for long enough that it becomes irrecoverable from any financially sensible perspective?
I mean this seriously: I've heard the codebase for Windows is really, really ancient and making updates is a nightmare. It's almost like trying to revive a lost language.
What if Windows has passed the threshold where the cost to fix it is beyond its potential for revenue? What if it's slowly approaching the threshold where simply maintaining it is beyond its potential for revenue?
There's definitely code rot in Windows, but that's probably due to compatibility reasons with third party code rather than actual bad design.
the big problem is, and this is primarily why i dislike everything windows, is that humans are mimicry machines. if you give them tooling that's an inconsistent mess, it's going to normalize the idea of inconsistent messes, and then they will create inconsistent messes.
windows ultimately normalizes inconsistency and mediocrity- as such, it encourages these habits of mind in those who are forced to use it. if those who are forced to use it are in any sort of creative positions, they ultimately create and propagate chaos that matches the cage which they are forced to reside within.
Windows 95-7 design did not, quite to the contrary. Unfortunately I can't find it again, but usually the link appears on any HN discussion about classic Windows design sooner or later... anyway, the point is that the classic Win95 design was consistent across the whole OS (for apps that used the standard OS controls). UI elements had clear shadows, borders and margins separating elements visually, color schemes by default assisted that visual separation and they were customizable (e.g. for those with accessibility needs). Additionally, menus and hotkeys were consistent across Microsoft apps with (IIRC) clear guidelines on how third party apps should use menus, so that end users didn't have to learn much.
This is good.
mmc.exe and its apps is used for actual work in IT.
Is the service named "Microsoft [thing]" "Windows [Thing]" or just plain old "[Thing]" (e.g. "Microsoft Defender Antivirus Service," "Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection Service," or "Security Center")?
'Everything' is a freeware tool that should be installed by every Windows user.
https://www.voidtools.com/
For home computers, I said no many years ago and never looked back.
However I sometimes wonder, since strides have been made in booting Windows from USB and with introduction of WinPE, could we have a smaller, limited purpose Windows, bootable from USB drive. We could boot into this to edit Word documents or Excel spreadsheets or some other Office task, then power off.^1 It could boot to RAM so the HDD is never touched. Portable Windows. Normally, WinPE and Windows "boot disks" are used by Windows sysadmins, but there is nothing to limit usage to only Windows sysadmin stuff. A hypothetical Windows sysadmin and/or full-blown Windows-loving reader, who has succumbed to Redmond's propaganda, might think, "What could you even do with that. It would be useless." Yet Microsoft itself anticipates that someone might see the utility and they actively try to prevent such persons from using a fast, unbloated, telemetry and ad-free Windows.^2 Its one thing to require enterprise customers who pay annual fees to use bloated Windows N+1 but what about non-enterprise users. (Perhaps they dont count. They are just sources of data collection.)
Personally, I dont need Microsoft to tell me what is and what is not a "general purpose operating system". I will make that call and I will decide how I want to use it. This brazen disrespect for free-thinking users is why I dont use Windows (at home).
1.
https://www.hirensbootcd.org/
2.
"Windows PE is not a general-purpose operating system. It may not be used for any purpose other than deployment and recovery. It should not be used as a thin client or an embedded operating system. There are other Microsoft products, such as Windows Embedded CE, which may be used for these purposes.
To prevent its use as a production operating system, Windows PE automatically stops running the shell and restarts after 72 hours of continuous use. This period is not configurable."
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactur...
It's pretty clear Windows has organizational and structural problems. Mainly because every product they release is always only 80% there. For some reason, whatever it is, it gets mostly finished, shipped and then abandoned and moved into maintenance mode.
Yet, it works for them. They usually always win in whatever market they go after. So I can't say they are incentivized to fix those structural problems.
the problem was that while windows 8 had *somebody* with a vision behind it, the vision never really made it through to the product. windows 8 was obviously the product of a dysfunctional system that was pulling in two completely opposite directions - the consumer devices side who wanted modern touch-friendly designs to compete with iPad, and the business customers who wanted the windows they were familiar with and didn't want to have to re-train their employees. and what we ended up with was a half-assed implementation in the middle.
"we want to do the best possible job of supporting the huge number of existing applications and users on our platform" is a perfectly valid vision for the future of windows. vision doesn't have to mean change. The problem with there being no vision is you get both the change and the hesitance to change.
Do they, though? No one's buying Windows because they think it's swell. They're buying it because it's the default choice that comes with a computer, and because it's the default platform for commercial software. To most consumers, Windows is just what "computers" run, along with a vague notion that "Macs" might be a bit different.
As long as Microsoft continues to enjoy its monopoly position in the desktop OS space, they couldn't give a crap if Windows is "something" or not. All they have to do is not screw it up by breaking compatibility too badly, and fart out some sort of named release every few years so people don't think Windows is "old" (the nuances of rolling release being beyond the ken of the average consumer).
I don't use such apps, not because I don't like them, but because these days I just don't trust them to not surreptitiously send an index of my system to them.
I wrote my own file search programs. It's not hard, just a few lines of code. I use them every day.
https://www.wired.com/story/windows-10-privacy-settings/
Unless something has changed recently, I believe the release of Windows 11 will only be for newly purchased devices. The update from Windows 10 to 11 won't be until sometime next year.
It is like management let them all roam free and let the best one win.
MacOS is nice to use, but that is also restricted to daily use cases. If you want to administrate the system, you have an UI from the 70s, mainly the terminal. If you remove older UI elements from Windows, you are left with a useless toy box.
There is no single instance where the new setting perform better than the old ones, on the contrary it is a complete unstructured mess. They should remove it and try again in my opinion.
Completeley agree and I want to add: they need a product owner, someone who has used multiple operating systems in different form factors like OSX, iOS, Android, and Linux and can see the pros and cons of them instead of taking sides.
I use WindowBlinds to skin my Windows 10 to look like Windows 98. >.>
It doesn't work for programs that create their own title bars or remove them entirely (like Chrome, Firefox, and Discord), but I love having 3D buttons on my task bar and windows.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11
Oh no, that's the one feature I was looking forward to, and only because I was hoping it would be better than Power Toys Run.
Love the burn.
Dead Comment
To me Windows 11 feels like Vista, and to everyone that got burned with the rewrites on the WinRT side, just using plain Win32/MFC/Forms/WPF feels liberating.
Multiple teams are fighting UI politics over WinUI, MAUI on top of WinUI, React Native with WinUI, and classical UWP is not going away (Windows 11 Store is written in it), then ASP.NET team is pushing Blazor everywhere including on Web Widgets.
I will just wait for Windows 12, whenever it comes up, the UI war will be settled by then.
Great point.
As a developer in the Windows sphere for decades, I'm used to change.
However, at this point I have no idea what I am supposed to be developing user interfaces in. Honestly, using VS Code daily as part of my stack I'm leaning towards just accepting that WebView2/Electron/etc is the future.
I have read the complaints, but VS Code is a solid piece of engineering and it "just works". If that's an example of what we can easily get cross-platform, so be it.
And yet it had an issue for quite some time where animating the cursor flashing was taking an enormous percentage of CPU.
Anyways, try golang with imgui.
You can make imgui look like anything. Ontop of that, you get true cross platform binaries with native speeds with only a couple dozen lines of code and amazing dependancy management. If you've never done immediate mode front-ends, you'll be delighted.
It would be interesting to see older systems retasked to a free clone OS, potentially running most/all of the same software.
https://reactos.org/project-news/reactos-in-2020/
I want to play modern games but with the Windows 98 desktop experience.
WinRT is the OS/2 of the 21st century.
On one side .NET Native is left to stagnate in C# 7, and C++/CX got replaced with C++/WinRT, which to this day (4 years later) still doesn't offer any kind of IDL tooling on VS (lets forget for a second that IDL exists since OLE 1.0), and requires manually merging generated files.
Then to top that, we get MAUI on top of WinUI, but with the XAML format used by Xamarin.
Anyone following the now 2100+ issues on Github, community calls, change of roadmap of what WinUI 3.0, Reunion and XAML Islands were supposed to be originally, and where they are going after Windows 11 announcement, can only be dismayed.
They don't seem to either get the complaints, or most likely, are stuck in a position where they cannot publicly acknowledge them.
OS/2 was actually much better than this with CSet++, while SOM had metaclasses and implementation inheritance, with Smalltalk and C++ support.
Still, I can equally well rant about other platforms, it is all a matter of which flaws we are willing to put up with.
The higher resolution a display is, the less and less you need anti-aliasing so it's unnecessary in the 4K and up era. Also while I am not on a 4K display, I find AA fonts blurry compared to nice crisp hinted non-AA fonts.
Remember, they did the same thing with Windows 10 a couple of times.
From https://www.pcworld.com/article/3623008/windows-11-faq-featu... rather than the horses mouth but I expect it is correct.
I'm glad I'm on unsupported hardware.
They had quite clear goals.
If they bring back Aero I'll be happy.
There is always hope ;-)
At this stage, the 3rd party gui libraries are looking better and better i.e. Electron.NET https://smackeyacky.blogspot.com/2021/08/electronnet-cross-p...
XP - decent
Vista - horrorshow
7 - alright (compared to vista)
8 - horrorshow
10 - alright (compared to 8)
11 - horrorshow
Personally I will never use it unless I really need to and then kicking and screaming but that is my observation.
At least Vista had a real start menu. Yeah, early Vista was rough, but by SP2 all the problems were fixed.
NT 3.51 — solid
NT 4.0, 2000 & XP — less, less and less solid
Vista — premature
7 — ok
8 — borked
10 & 11 — untouchable
XP - decent
Vista - horrorshow
7 - alright (compared to vista)
8 - Not too bad
8.1 - alright
10 - dumpster fire
11 - another dumpster fire
9x - please no!
2000 - great
ME - oh god, make it stop!
It's possible that MS will just force-update everyone to Windows 11.
I like the new UI, it feels simpler and less gaudy. The drop down menu expansion thing is fine. I also prefer the redesign of the settings app. I find casting my screen and bluetooth works better. Windows has been missing something decent window snapping features forever and although it's a bit clunky I appreciate that it's there.
The only thing that has annoys me is the taskbar not disappearing when its supposed to, leading to it covering the bottom of maximized applications. Most of the time its not there but sometimes it'll just stick after coming up.
I didn't know about the android apps feature but I might give it a shot when I go home. Widgets I just haven't used at all despite being aware of them.
I still have win10 on my desktop. I don't remember the switch being painful when I went to the rolling release windows insider on my laptop. Frankly win10 is fine too, so unless there's an android app I want to play around with I wouldn't bother switching.
The biggest issue I have with Windows 11 is that the taskbar can't be moved from the bottom without a registry hack. I find the biggest UI improvement to be in the file manager.
I also find the whole thing to be a little better performing than Windows 10.
I've been using windows 11 for a few months as well. For window snapping, I simply enjoy Powertoys and will stick to that since it gives me more customization options.
In 3-4 years the cycle will repeat again with Windows 12.
People don't like clearly unfinished products rushed to market before they're ready.
I do find the search function is snappier and more accurate though. If anything this is a return to windows 7. It is definitely not problematic like vista or 8.
Now better wait for Windows 12 until they make their mind what Windows desktop APIs are supposed to look like.
There's some false narrative about it which is bizarre.
Maybe be the change you want to see... Try talking about those things.
I've heard nothing about either one, do you have an article or articles? Microsoft hasn't done a very good job communicating the non-UI changes. Insiders have measured performance losses but no significant gains yet.
Hard to call people criticizing other things a "false narrative" when there's been near no communication on the things you're bringing up, and they don't mitigate the complaints.
It's all fluff for what it is.
There basically hasn't been a good reason to upgrade windows other than arbitrary security update cutoffs, and mostly arbitrary caps to max DirectX version you can run.
I wouldn't be surprised if it would be a downright downgrade overall performance and responsiviness wise.
I would be very interested in learning about this. Do you have any references ?
I dont understand what's driving these changes, but they seem so use hostile that it puts me off the whole os.
Have a URL for this?
> Choice doesn't matter to these mega corps
Choice doesn't matter and it's an OK policy to annoy user periodically with options, suggestions, offers, up until it gives up and agrees for something it didn't want in first place but wants to get rid of the annoying notifications or whatever form this harassment takes. The permanent "No, thank you, I'm not interested" doesn't exist in corporate world too - there's only place for "Fine but we will ask you again and again", sadly.
On that note, it was removed, so now the only way I know that works is to do an in-place upgrade via the Windows 10 installation media ('upgrade this pc now') then sign in with a Microsoft account to get your license attached to the MSA, then you can do a full reinstall and keep the license.
[1]: https://www.protondb.com/
The recent Gnome experience on hardware half a decade older than the Surface laptop is so much snappier than Windows. I dred MacOS and Windows updates these days but I'm generally very pleased with updates to Ubuntu/Gnome.
Furthermore everything just works, too, which is what I grew up to expect from Windows, but literally yesterday the Surface laptop bricked itself installing an update. I have daily problems using Windows with WSL, too. It's infuriating.
I used to feel stable and assured using Windows, but these days Windows is an endless labyrinth of dialog boxes, it's hard to comprehend how anyone could take it seriously any longer. Maybe I'm getting old.
In stark contrast with Windows 10 which has had features like window snapping at edges when dragging something across the boundary between monitors that you just can't turn off. Or updates that seem to obey their own arcane rules instead of requiring a simple sudo [package-manager] [update-command]
It's almost as pretty as my MBP, and vastly more usable than Windows. And I have everything I really need (with first class Linux support):
* Gaming - Steam + Proton
* Digital Audio Workstation - Bitwig
* Video Editing - DaVinci Resolve
* 3d Modeling - Blender
* 2d Image - Gimp (this one could be a lot better)
-----
The only thing I can imagine dual booting into Windows for is Oculus Link. But I don't really think it's worth it.
If someone could guarantee rock solid stability, I *might be willing to switch, even though I'm fairly invested in the Ableton / VST world. 10 years of projects will likely force me to always run mac / windows unless Ableton decides to build for linux in the future. Who knows, maybe ARM will force their hand.
https://pixlr.com/
What's going to be hilarious is that much like dosbox became the best way to run old dos programs even if they might still technically run on windows, wine/proton will be (and sometimes already is) the best way to run many older windows programs. Particularly I'm in love with proton's fullscreen magic that doesn't actually mess with your display mode, so e.g. I can run Touhou games fullscreen in proton with my display at 4k despite them only supporting 480p fullscreen -- running on Windows will try to set my display mode to that with varying success. At some point we'll be running old Windows programs on Windows with wine/proton through WSL.
Dead Comment
But other than that, Windows 11 is mostly Windows 10 with a different shell. So it's not like it will disrupt your workflow or something.
[1] https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5895