I still can not believe that when I right click on a file, the option to rename the file is no longer in the right click menu. The menu that appears contains a couple dozen different options, none of which are to rename the file. Somehow they decided that renaming is so unimportant of an operation that they shoved it into a sub menu, under "More Options", which, when selected, causes a whole new set of actions to appear, one of which is rename. So it's now a multi-step process to get to the option to rename a file.
How on EARTH did people sign off on that? It's such an unbelievable usability issue.
It’s still there in a little set of icons you have to memorize the meaning of and that will be changed two versions from now by the next PM who wants to juice up their resume.
How could you have missed that the "more options" option brings up a context sub menu... or no wait... it brings up a different menu that has different spacing, no icons, a different font AND THE SAME OPTIONS! It appears to be the unchanged legacy menu.
You have to picture it, no one stopped whoever did this.
I assume the two-level design was the only way to speed up the context menu without breaking compatibility with some existing shell extensions.
Specifically, the older design allows shell extensions to register callbacks that must run — in some cases synchronously, on the UI thread — before a context menu displays.
In Windows 11, these "legacy" shell extension context menu callbacks need never run unless "Show more options" is chosen.
The "more options" menu duplicates items in the first because it's identical to the Windows 10 context menu (again, I assume, because compatibility).
I've always hit F2 to rename stuff so hadn't noticed it wasn't in the menu any more, but I hate how the menu loads in now so you can't reliably click on anything until it's done its little dance and stopped shuffling things around.
The author has a little whine fest to try to make windows sound great & Linux sound insane:
> There are some things that Windows does very well compared to macOS and Linux. All the games are there, for one thing, and Windows runs on all sorts of hardware without a lot of fiddling. You do not have to spend a thousand dollars minimum on a non-upgradable machine to use it. 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.
But on Windows now it requires hunting through all kinds of really bad low-quality web pages to see if you can tweak some behavior that you are absolutely fed up & at the end of your rope with. Desperate to find some special registry setting you can fiddle with, or lately, use ViveTool/StagingTool to tweak incredibly opaque Feature IDs that might possible help. Windows has become the configuration nightmare that Linux was, and there's nothing remotely as comforting or capable as a command line there to help you scout shit out & try to improve things with; with Windows you're stranded & alone.
The author also clearly hasn't spent a lick of effort trying to install a vaguely modern end-user-centric distro in a decade. Nor are they aware that basically every game except Destiny 2 and Modern Warfare (and some others with particularly pernicious root-kitting anti-cheat software) runs great on Linux. My new years resolution was to stopping booting my desktop/gaming PC into Windows unless I need it, and it's been so lovely, games so near universally work, and things like playing a game while watching movie - where windows gives me 3 fps of movie - run butter smooth.
Perhaps it has been added but back in the day Windows had no GUI option to batch rename files either.
GUIs have limitations, decided by someone else. This is one reason I dislike them. The command line probably has its limits, too, but it's far more flexible than a GUI.
For that reason I use F2 exclusively (second most used shortcut in Explorer after Ctrl+Shift+N for New Folder. I hate the delay needed to click, read the menu and find the right option.
> Luckily there's a registry key to turn this crap off. I don't have it to hand right now but it's easy to find.
That's useful to know - if I ever have to update my personal computer to 11. For my work computer, I've gotten used to using shift+right click to bypass the new (buggy, slow loading) right click menu and go straight to the old one
It's directly in the right click menu. It's an icon that looks like a cursor. It looks like what happens when you rename a file. It's also in the More Options menu if you prefer extra steps. Doesn't sound like you do.
Back in the day it was possible to replace "explorer.exe" as the shell.
One had to write their own app, but it could take over start menu, explorer, and desktop. Is that still a thing? I made on (2003) it worked on Win2k and 98 IIRC.
Edit: the app has to have special entry points (not regular
WinMain) and regedit a bunch to make it work.
I used to run LiteStep, and I remember the one productivity feature it had over regular Windows was virtual desktops. Windows 10 natively supports those now, and I have mostly given up on all desktop eye candy things.
I'll probably upgrade my desktop with the next generation AMD CPUs, and I somewhat dread having to choose between Windows 10 (which will probably not be supported on this newer hardware), or Debian, because I sure as hell won't be using Windows 11.
“ 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.”
Is it me or has the quality of writing coming from the verge gone downhill in recent years? I remember they used to be awesome - but this statement alone made me uninterested in anything else the author had to say as it’s just factually incorrect.
Other than power user distros (arch, gentoo, etc) Linux has been one click install and ready to go just like windows for a decade (Ubuntu, fedora, etc) and provides a very good OOBE nowadays.
Also, once you remove “my laptop came with windows preinstalled” - yes you do spend time messing with drivers, a uniquely windows problem. If you’re lucky windows update will grab them all, but that’s still requiring user interaction. God forbid windows update doesn’t have it and you have to go hunting on the OEM’s website for it.
I wholeheartedly agree with their sentiment that windows has become a nuisance and I’d call it approaching unusable the more money Microsoft tries to extract from it, but the author/editor really should do research first before they try to write an eye catching sentence.
> Other than power user distros (arch, gentoo, etc) Linux has been one click install and ready to go just like windows for a decade (Ubuntu, fedora, etc) and provides a very good OOBE nowadays.
So my experience with Ubuntu and Fedora on a new Thinkpad T14s Gen 3 (AMD) laptop has been a mixed bag. Lenovo state that this is an Ubuntu supported notebook so everything should have been compatible with no tinkering but that was not my experience.
You're right, OOBE with distros today is good. But in day to day usage there were three very annoying problems:
1. The display flickers due to AMD's variable refresh rate feature (doesn't happen on Windows) - fixing this required a custom kernel with VRR disabled
2. The speakers sounded very quiet and anemic due to the laptop shipping with Dolby Atmos tuning - fixing this in Linux required installing Windows (which supports Atmos), recording a special diff file in Windows Audacity with Atmos tuning on/off and then importing that into PulseAudio on Ubuntu to give it the same speaker tuning profile
3. The trackpad scroll speed was way too fast and Gnome annoyingly offers no way to customize this - the solution is to edit one of the libinput-config files
Granted the big stuff like Wifi, Bluetooth, GPU, printing and sleep all worked perfectly - even Steam + Proton worked out the box with games like Arkham Knight and Witcher running as well as Windows but little issues like those three above required a good few hours of tinkering in the command line and make things frustrating enough that I think The Verge author's point stands.
I guess a couple years down the road we'll need even more inoffensive words for these ones we've created. It is similar to people on social media using word seggs instead of sex because god forbid the algoritm gets a stroke
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How on EARTH did people sign off on that? It's such an unbelievable usability issue.
Does having been a UX PM on Windows 11 on your resume actually help you or hinder you at this point?
You have to picture it, no one stopped whoever did this.
Specifically, the older design allows shell extensions to register callbacks that must run — in some cases synchronously, on the UI thread — before a context menu displays.
In Windows 11, these "legacy" shell extension context menu callbacks need never run unless "Show more options" is chosen.
The "more options" menu duplicates items in the first because it's identical to the Windows 10 context menu (again, I assume, because compatibility).
reg.exe add "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32" /f /ve
That brings back the legacy right-click menu.
> There are some things that Windows does very well compared to macOS and Linux. All the games are there, for one thing, and Windows runs on all sorts of hardware without a lot of fiddling. You do not have to spend a thousand dollars minimum on a non-upgradable machine to use it. 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.
But on Windows now it requires hunting through all kinds of really bad low-quality web pages to see if you can tweak some behavior that you are absolutely fed up & at the end of your rope with. Desperate to find some special registry setting you can fiddle with, or lately, use ViveTool/StagingTool to tweak incredibly opaque Feature IDs that might possible help. Windows has become the configuration nightmare that Linux was, and there's nothing remotely as comforting or capable as a command line there to help you scout shit out & try to improve things with; with Windows you're stranded & alone.
The author also clearly hasn't spent a lick of effort trying to install a vaguely modern end-user-centric distro in a decade. Nor are they aware that basically every game except Destiny 2 and Modern Warfare (and some others with particularly pernicious root-kitting anti-cheat software) runs great on Linux. My new years resolution was to stopping booting my desktop/gaming PC into Windows unless I need it, and it's been so lovely, games so near universally work, and things like playing a game while watching movie - where windows gives me 3 fps of movie - run butter smooth.
Once UI started with material design, hamburger, removing top menus, ribbons of icons, it has all been downhill.
They still care about the UI.
But Windows 7 was the last time our interests were aligned.
GUIs have limitations, decided by someone else. This is one reason I dislike them. The command line probably has its limits, too, but it's far more flexible than a GUI.
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Luckily there's a registry key to turn this crap off. I don't have it to hand right now but it's easy to find.
But yeah that doesn't excuse anything. Setting up a new windows now takes ages to decrap it.
That's useful to know - if I ever have to update my personal computer to 11. For my work computer, I've gotten used to using shift+right click to bypass the new (buggy, slow loading) right click menu and go straight to the old one
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Windows is an adequate operating system if one bothers to learn to use it properly.
Mikhail Parakhin has accomplished more to destroy Microsoft's desk top OS monopoly than anyone else.
"Best of Breed" is Windows 7. It's been all downhill since there.
On the odd occasion that I must use Windows (and gets less and less each year) I use Windows 7 as a VirtualBox 'guest' on Linux.
If I didn't use HP software for multi-page scanning to PDF with my HP MFP, I wouldn't need Windows at all.
One had to write their own app, but it could take over start menu, explorer, and desktop. Is that still a thing? I made on (2003) it worked on Win2k and 98 IIRC.
Edit: the app has to have special entry points (not regular WinMain) and regedit a bunch to make it work.
Edit2: found this https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/18ipo7f/why_does...
Which points to https://cairoshell.com/
Awesome!
I used to run LiteStep, and I remember the one productivity feature it had over regular Windows was virtual desktops. Windows 10 natively supports those now, and I have mostly given up on all desktop eye candy things.
Is it me or has the quality of writing coming from the verge gone downhill in recent years? I remember they used to be awesome - but this statement alone made me uninterested in anything else the author had to say as it’s just factually incorrect.
Other than power user distros (arch, gentoo, etc) Linux has been one click install and ready to go just like windows for a decade (Ubuntu, fedora, etc) and provides a very good OOBE nowadays.
Also, once you remove “my laptop came with windows preinstalled” - yes you do spend time messing with drivers, a uniquely windows problem. If you’re lucky windows update will grab them all, but that’s still requiring user interaction. God forbid windows update doesn’t have it and you have to go hunting on the OEM’s website for it.
I wholeheartedly agree with their sentiment that windows has become a nuisance and I’d call it approaching unusable the more money Microsoft tries to extract from it, but the author/editor really should do research first before they try to write an eye catching sentence.
So my experience with Ubuntu and Fedora on a new Thinkpad T14s Gen 3 (AMD) laptop has been a mixed bag. Lenovo state that this is an Ubuntu supported notebook so everything should have been compatible with no tinkering but that was not my experience.
You're right, OOBE with distros today is good. But in day to day usage there were three very annoying problems:
1. The display flickers due to AMD's variable refresh rate feature (doesn't happen on Windows) - fixing this required a custom kernel with VRR disabled
2. The speakers sounded very quiet and anemic due to the laptop shipping with Dolby Atmos tuning - fixing this in Linux required installing Windows (which supports Atmos), recording a special diff file in Windows Audacity with Atmos tuning on/off and then importing that into PulseAudio on Ubuntu to give it the same speaker tuning profile
3. The trackpad scroll speed was way too fast and Gnome annoyingly offers no way to customize this - the solution is to edit one of the libinput-config files
Granted the big stuff like Wifi, Bluetooth, GPU, printing and sleep all worked perfectly - even Steam + Proton worked out the box with games like Arkham Knight and Witcher running as well as Windows but little issues like those three above required a good few hours of tinkering in the command line and make things frustrating enough that I think The Verge author's point stands.
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