Can't speak for this product but disabling a lot of the animations, gradients, shadows & visual effects has made Windows 11 run significantly better on the computers I have it on. They didn't seem to add much value anyways.
I'm a fan of a lot of the user experience improvements being made in Windows over the last decade, such as Terminal, running Linux, Power Toys features, screenshots & recording, Paint finally getting layers, window management & more.
At the same time, I'm still not sure why we needed Windows 11 as the only good updates seem like they could have been done without it. All the visual changes have seemed to cause bugs & performance issues on relatively high powered PCs (64GB+ memory, m2 ssd drives, latest gen mid level GPU & CPU)
It seems the Windows ME, Vista, etc experiment continues to live on.
I wish there was a "power user" mode in Windows that you could activate and you'd get the ability to have classic themes (my MS themselves), classic Control Panel, no constant nudging, no weather/Xbox/Solitaire apps, etc...
Hi, Windhawk author here. Nice to see it on Hacker News.
This is just one Windhawk mod, submitted by a community member. There are hundreds others. Windhawk was created to simplify Windows customization and to make it more accessible, both for developers and users. For a more detailed introduction, check out the Windhawk release blog post:
It's incredible the effort Windows 10/11 users will go to in order to reach a somewhat functional and reliable computing experience via third party modifications, yet Linux is somehow too much effort. Just look at the instructions on that page..
Classic Windows (95-7) was the best era for Windows and always will be the best in terms of GUI. Everything that came after 7 has been a downgrade from 7's GUI.
If you run emulated Windows 98 in the browser with e.g. v86, it is faster to open the start menu on the emulated Windows 98 than on the real Windows 11 running it. Windows user experience really went downhill after 7.
I've tried these things before. Use with caution, and definitely not on a work device. They never fully uninstall and you might be left with incorrect registry keys and other weirdness. May break updates as well.
No, Windhawk's rule for all mods is that they do not permanent changes, including to the registry. Disabling the mod and rebooting will erase all effects.
I imagine it would be frustrating to be the windows shell dev who has to investigate the torrent of bizarre memory corruption bugs that inevitably occur on Windhawk users’ machines after major OS updates. There’s really no avoiding it when you detour unstable “implementation detail” sort of functions across the taskbar/systray/start/etc. especially now that c++ coroutines are in widespread usage therein.
But to be fair, I understand the demand for products like this, because of several painful feature takebacks between 10 -> 11. It would be nice if cleaner approaches like wholesale shell replacement were still as straightforward as they were prior to windows 8. The “immersive shell” infra running in explorer + the opaque nature of enumerating installed UWPs + a bunch of other things make that almost impossible today.
I've had to return to Windows for my daily work after 20 years mostly away from it. I already knew about a lot of UI and functionality regressions, but when you truly experience the defective mess that Windows has become... it's hard to take.
So while I'd love to install this mod, it seems way too fraught with potential side-effects. But it looks like there might be some minor, safe mods to explore here.
Here's one gallingly dumb thing Windows does now that I wonder if you guys can recommend a fix to: If you hover over an application's icons in the taskbar, it pops up thumbnails of the app's open windows and forces you to choose ONE. WTF. I want to bring ALL of the application's windows to the front. It's incredible that clicking on the application's icon (instead of one thumbnail) doesn't do this. Instead, it does NOTHING. Is there a fix for this?
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 47.6 ms ] threadhttps://github.com/ramensoftware/windows-11-taskbar-styling-...
I'm a fan of a lot of the user experience improvements being made in Windows over the last decade, such as Terminal, running Linux, Power Toys features, screenshots & recording, Paint finally getting layers, window management & more.
At the same time, I'm still not sure why we needed Windows 11 as the only good updates seem like they could have been done without it. All the visual changes have seemed to cause bugs & performance issues on relatively high powered PCs (64GB+ memory, m2 ssd drives, latest gen mid level GPU & CPU)
It seems the Windows ME, Vista, etc experiment continues to live on.
Yep. Sure. Going to let a Russian utility fuck with winlogon.exe. Excellent idea.
I wonder if this will have the same issues?
This is just one Windhawk mod, submitted by a community member. There are hundreds others. Windhawk was created to simplify Windows customization and to make it more accessible, both for developers and users. For a more detailed introduction, check out the Windhawk release blog post:
https://ramensoftware.com/windhawk
But to be fair, I understand the demand for products like this, because of several painful feature takebacks between 10 -> 11. It would be nice if cleaner approaches like wholesale shell replacement were still as straightforward as they were prior to windows 8. The “immersive shell” infra running in explorer + the opaque nature of enumerating installed UWPs + a bunch of other things make that almost impossible today.
So while I'd love to install this mod, it seems way too fraught with potential side-effects. But it looks like there might be some minor, safe mods to explore here.
Here's one gallingly dumb thing Windows does now that I wonder if you guys can recommend a fix to: If you hover over an application's icons in the taskbar, it pops up thumbnails of the app's open windows and forces you to choose ONE. WTF. I want to bring ALL of the application's windows to the front. It's incredible that clicking on the application's icon (instead of one thumbnail) doesn't do this. Instead, it does NOTHING. Is there a fix for this?