Are you fucking kidding me? crypto bros were angels compared to these spawns of Satan ai bros. at least during crypto craze only GPUs were on short supply and nobody except gamers were affected. RAM and storage prices affect every single consumer electronic device thus everyone.
I'd rather a setting to go back to the old right-click menu by default. It's possible to do with a registry edit, but not from a user-friendly setting.
Way too little way too late Microsoft. After 30 years I will never choose Windows again. Got on Windows with 3.1 and off the train with 11. It's not me--it's you.
As maligned as it was... I think Vista was actually servicable if all the extra visual effects and UAC stuff was turned off. It ended up looking more like a plainly styled XP desktop and ran moderately well on laptops just for a win32 C development machine (emacs, gcc/msvc cl.exe). I had this setup for windows builds, with a Linux desktop as my main machine.
At least back then more of the original engineering talent that Microsoft had was still around, and you would even run into them on irc from time to time. 20 years on, I suspect a lot of the foundational personalities that drove engineering decisions have since retired or been made redundant, and that reflects the weird UI fracturing and endless regressions. I doubt they can recover at this point.
I installed it on a laptop for a friend after not having used it since the mid 2000’s. What a piece of flaming dogshit that whole platform is. How is this the output of a multi billion dollar company?
Well then you look at a random webpage from CNN and I guess they’re all competing for how trashy they can make their products.
There can’t be any pride left at all in that place.
Sorry - I think you're right. I had a hard time telling with several of the early comments in this thread. (The new ones are more serious) What's that rule about it being tough to tell on the internet?
Linux day 1: whole day looking up which distro is usable.
Day 2: install Linux distro, total process is like 4 hours because at every step you double check that you won't lose your Windows data because it's your first time installing Linux. Realize that your distro doesn't support modern displays and never will. Call it a day because you're mentally exhausted.
Day 3: install a distro that does support modern displays. The process is only 3 hours because you're already familiar with it. Spend the rest of the day looking up which Linux programs are good replacements for Windows ones. Hint: all of them have bugs that affect your particular use cases - KDE shits itself when it sees a folder with 20k images, DaVinci Resolve has lots of issues with audio drivers and video codecs and gives zero error messages, no native Linux audio player supports all exotic music formats in my library so I need to run foobar2000 which obviously crashes when it sees WMA lossless and then UI fails to scale properly, lots of random shit like Wine installation causing system update to fail.
Day 4: connect $DEVICE. Look up drivers.
Day 44: $DEVICE works.
Day 104: $DEVICE works AND survives system update.
In my case that were keyboard (support for extra keys) and steering wheel.
Day 204: invite friends for video games. Spend the entire evening trying to fix controllers because they're fucked - if I first connect Steam Controller and then run Steam, then Steam shits itself. I need to specifically do it the other way around. Also, Xbox One controller drivers have an incompatibility with X360 controllers so I couldn't simply connect the old dongle and play like that.
> Linux day 1: whole day looking up which distro is usable.
>
> Day 2: install Linux distro, total process is like 4 hours because at every step you double check that you won't lose your Windows data because it's your first time installing Linux. Realize that your distro doesn't support modern displays and never will. Call it a day because you're mentally exhausted.
Hmmm day 2 should be: making a backup of my windows data, that way I can do the f... I want during installation.
> Day 3: install a distro that does support modern displays.
Apart from LTS/enterprise versions, all distros are running the same kernel generations. They all have the same hardware support really.
The rest of your text soup doesn't mean anything. Like this: "random shit like Wine installation causing system update to fail.", this really sounds like hallucinations and inventions.
The part about $DEVICE and drivers is like looking at a kid trying to connect a Nintendo SNES controller to a PS5 and complaining it doesn't work to well.
After another "Year of the Linux Desktop", the "It works for me on $DISTRO" is still very common reply in forum support threads.
In past I hoped Canonical will make Ubuntu the obvious (and default) choice, but it never went beyond very popular distribution. And they already have some controversial decisions on record, they literally experimented with ads in "start menu" before MS.
I mean yes, but an update on my Linux box just installed a new kernel, uninstalled the old video card driver, and didn't install a new video card driver.
I have taken to asking claude "is it safe for me to reboot now?" before restarting after updates. So far 3 times in a row it has come back with "no, your system won't startup".
Edit: I also just woke my desktop up from sleep and the alt-tab service failed to resume. Just... wut.
I am not sure you know what you are talking about. What is the "alt-tab service" you are speaking about. There is no systemd service with that name in any linux distro I have used.
Also if you are able to know that the new video card driver hasn't been installed, you also know that you can solve this by doing it yourself. In that case why wouldn't you do it?
Ultimately if all those things are too hard for you there are a number of immutable "image" based distros where packages/drivers aren't managed individually during updates and where you can always boot to the previous version. Maybe that is what you need.
Both AMD and Intel have open source graphics drivers which are upstreamed into the Linux kernel, so that situation would be impossible with an AMD or Intel graphics card. Any driver issues are a pain that nvidia decided to inflict on you.
Unfortunately this is still the reality of many Linux distros. On every update something breaks.
Just as an exMple I'm on arch myself and after last update if I use X11 screen saver with lock some service crashes and the computer cannot be unlocked.
Maybe next update will have a fix but then something else will be broken instead.
Linux (as in the kernel+user space of your choice) is a perpetual alpha. Has been for 30 years and will always be.
Whenever GTK/Gnome becomes reasonable stable it's time for a rewrite!
I stopped to care since Flatpak. Pull down the same dependencies everywhere. Oh, disk usage, right. It's 2026, and BTRFS either compresses stuff and/or deduplicates.
Get an inmutable distro. For everything else, Flatpak. For gaming, AppImages are not sandboxed but you can always create a user account for gaming and logout/login again to avoid nasty surprises.
And yet you still hear "Linux is only free if your time is worthless."
It's untrue in comparison to Windows, and MacOS (at least for software dev, when I last used it 1.5 years ago).
Linux easily has the lowest maintenance burden if you pick a boring distros. It can be a huge pit of wasted time, _if you actually want to fall into that pit._
IMO that is still kind of true. Windows 11 LTSC gives a totally bloat free experience, the only downside is you can only reasonably get it through grey market cdkey sites.
Linux, sometimes works without faff. But in my experience it's at best 50:50 if you get that, or constant crashes, hangs, broken peripherals, etc. (Of course any time you mention this the luck 50% pipe up with "it works for me".)
I have some Lenovo 'temporary UI removal tool' (don't remember its name exactly, do not care that much to look for it from this Mac) that comes back with each update. The tool, as my AI agent explains, regularly (24h) wakes the computer from hibernation (yes, I took care of being that available, I need that, despite as a MS SE says: they know me better than I, so they removed that possibility only coming back by tweaks) to check if the post-installation temporary UI something is still there, and removes if it is there. But keeps running - it is a service or what -, still waking after removal, every 24h, including weekends. Checking if the already removed UI thingy that it removed is still there. They then have some service restoring service too watching if the UI removal service was stopped/disabled/removed, restoring that. One need to kill/unset both through command line to have some remedy. Which both come back at each Windows update. Yes, it is Lenovo. But yes, it is Windows delivering this way sometimes just few days apart with frequent 'updates'.
Actually, it is a substantially worse gaming box too once you've used SteamOS/Bazzite. All it's good for right now is windows-only legacy software and anti-cheat implementations for the time being.
And somewhat excel because excel is badly implemented on mac
honestly Linux has gotten pretty good even for gaming, I set up a Linux (Fedora) on my primary gaming rig as a lark and figured I would go back to windows but I have not really had the need to and some games actually even run better on Linux it seems.
Meh. It's been 3 years and *gestures broadly* so much else of the Windows 11 UX still leaves much to be desired: making the context-menu slightly-less-awful isn't going to bring me back to the fold when so many other aspects of Win11 are not just unappealing, but actually off-putting.
(I maintain that Windows 11's bad UX is a consequence of MS having to make a single UI for everyone, which means it'll be too dumbed-down, simplified, or inflexible for power-users (XP, Win8, Win11); or too complicated and intimidating for everyone else (Win7, Win10), or just bad for everyone (Vista)).
If Microsoft wants me to willingly buy into Windows 12, then I want the option to keep the Windows 10 UI (File Explorer, Taskbar, Start Menu, and Window Management) - I know it can be done in theory[1], I just want proper support.
DaiPlusPlus> Windows 11's bad UX is a consequence of MS having to make a single UI for everyone, which means it'll be too dumbed-down, simplified, or inflexible for power-users; or too complicated and intimidating for everyone else
That's a false choice, and pie menus are the way out of it. The same menu can lead novices by showing them labels, follow intermediate users who know roughly where things are, and get out of the way of experts who flick in the direction without waiting for it to appear. One UI, no "simple mode" and "advanced mode", and the novice turns into the expert just by using it, by self-revealing rehearsal! I went into that and the research behind it upthread.
As I titled my 1998 Xerox PARC talk: "Natural Selection: The Evolution of Pie Menus", reviewed here:
> Pie menus appealed to Hopkins because they conform to the rule that the user's attention should not be squandered. A pie menu selection offers direct feedback versus a user selection that brings up intermediate menus. The programmed pie menu ignores users' gestures except the motions to select or cancel. Hopkins uses pie menus because they take advantage of Fitts' Law, which relates fast selection speed and low error rate to the pie menus' large target size and small distance between selections.
The other half is letting users rearrange it themselves, without registry hacks. HyperCard set the precedent in 1987: the user interface was made of the same stuff as the content, so anyone could open it up and change it. Arthur van Hoff's HyperLook took that to NeWS and PostScript: users could edit not just their own nested linear and pie menus, but the live user interfaces of running apps, including the SimCity I ported to it, by copying, pasting and configuring scriptable components from "warehouse" stacks. We were taking it all the way to the window frames themselves, with a HyperCard-like window manager where you could build your own frames out of the same parts.
I discussed HyperLook and HyperCard with Alan Kay, who said "This work is so good -- for any time -- and especially for its time", and also "I wish he had done a real end-user language for this":
Simon Schneegans's Kando carries that spirit today. Its menu editor is direct manipulation all the way down: you drag and drop items and submenus right into the pie, see exactly where they'll go, and put the things you use most in the directions that feel right to your hand. That's how a power user should customize a menu, and a novice can do it too, because it's just dragging things around:
I took that idea further in MediaGraph, a music navigation prototype I made in Unity for Will Wright at the Stupid Fun Club in 2010. It has two layers of pie menus.
The first layer is ordinary nested pie menus for editing the content, with live feedback: as you move around the menu that sets a song's size or its "biome" (a cellular automaton growing around it on the map), you see the effect in the world before you commit. Same biomes merge, different biomes compete for territory.
The second layer is the content itself. The songs are laid out on a map and connected by roads, and the map is a geographic, networked pie menu. Drop one song on another and kiss them together to make a road between them, and kiss them again to break it. Drag on a song in a direction and it fires you down the road t...
If that's important to you, there's an easy option to allow using a local account during setup by dropping to command line and setting a flag. Pretty straightforward if that's your only deal breaker.
I would appreciate a link to the details about 'setting a flag.' The last version of that I used earlier this year stopped working in recent months, and I believe I saw tech news stories to the effect that Microsoft had intentionally closed that path.
For now I just use a customer-supplied email address which I used to setup a Microsoft account, setup Windows and use that account, immediately create a local-only 'admin' account with full rights, delete the online associated account, and start creating user account(s) from there.
There are also community projects like NTLite ( https://ntlite.com/ ) and Windows ISO Debloater ( https://github.com/itsNileshHere/Windows-ISO-Debloater ) for the more technically advanced that want full control to prevent the bloat from even making it to your machine during installation at all (instead of having to clean it up after the fact)
i couldnt get that to work the last time i tried but i ended up using rufus to burn the ISO which gives you options to turn off the microsoft account. it even disables the tpm2.0 check so you can install it on older hardware if you want to
Until they drop an update and retroactively force the creation of an online account. This is a game of cat and mouse that even the tech-savvy will eventually lose.
I wonder if MacOS is also going down the drain - obviously not as fast as Windows - but I believe it doesn't feel as smooth - it feels always more bloated with every updates and I find myself having to install more and more custom little tools for everything:
- Cleaning my drive from unwanted files → One app
- Organizing files based on type → another app
- A good voice-to-text → another app
- A better launcher → another app
- An incredible terminal → another app
I mean is this the way it's supposed to be? Wasn't the whole point - unwrap the macbook, load up Mac OS and LFG?
Please tell of of this better launcher? Spotlight is so bad these days. I used to be able to pull up the calculator with cmd+space..ca[enter] but lately it grabs some other completely ridiculous thing like some random file that throws an error instead. Yeah Apple that’s what I wanted, I wanted to open the Caltable.inf file, or worse if parallels is open it picks the windows calculator first before the macOS calculator? Wtf!
I’ve been using Raycast[0] to replace spotlight. Spotlight index kept randomly losing my /Applications dir, and like 90% of what I use spotlight for is Cmd + space > type in the name of the app I want to switch to/open. So it was a constant annoyance.
They have some AI stuff that they try to push on you during the install, but it can all be disabled so day to day it doesn’t bother you.
I had to install an app just to get smooth scrolling to work with my mouse. On a Mac! Apple practically invented smooth scrolling! It's like no one gives a shit about user experience anymore.
While I'm sure that would help, I still wouldn't use Windows even if it was completely free and distributed as easily as Linux. Windows has some serious problems with dark patterns like ads in the start menu and telemetry everywhere. The software is slow and bloated. The lack of a package manager makes each application run their own updater (though they did at least put the drivers inside windows update which was a step in the right direction).
Trying to understand the original Windows 11 context menu diagram as someone who hasn't used Windows 11 is surprisingly difficult. By contrast, Gnome 51's context menu (or earlier versions as far back as I remember) for a file/folder are unambiguous and easy to understand.
At the top of the Windows 11 context menu are some small icons without text for high usage actions which I assume are:
2. duplicate-in-place-with-number-appended-to-duplicate-filename or select-for-copying (copy), perhaps Gnome's "Copy to..."
3. something to do with the clipboard--maybe copy contents to clipboard
4. something to do with text entry--maybe rename the file/folder, perhaps Gnome's "Rename..."
5. share via social media applications or cloud file sharing applications, or move the file/folder locally perhaps Gnome's "Move to..."
6. move to recycle bin (delete)
Menu options with text are unambiguous for "Open", "Open with", "Compress to ZIP file", "Properties", although Gnome will state "Open with {name_of_default_app}" to make it clear exactly how a file will be opened without having to guess.
I guess "Copy as path" might just copy the full filesystem path to the clipboard. I can't remember the last time I wanted to do that.
I guess "Always keep on this device" prevents the file/folder being backed up to some cloud storage provider. I'd rather open up an application dedicated to cloud storage backups and be able to review current backup options there all in one place for all types of data/files.
The "Free up space" option I'm less clear on--will a local application pop up and suggest what I can delete within the folder, will a cloud storage provider application pop up and suggest the file not be synchronised with the local device and only be kept in cloud storage, etc.
The bottom option "Show more options" is not expandable so I assume there are so many other options an entire new window is needed to display them all. Maybe it'll give me useful but rarely used options from a list of hundreds available, such as "count how many words are in this file" for text files...?
TBH while the menu has glaring issues (half of it is basically an ad for cloud storage), your complaints boil down to "I don't like it because I'm not familiar with it" which is not valid critique, and especially shouldn't be coming from a Linux user if you want Windows users to switch - they don't like Linux because they're not familiar with it.
My complaints are generic to human-computer interfaces. Providing small icons in close proximity is poor design per [1]. Providing icons without text is also poor design, as summarised at [2]. We can argue more about how detailed labels should be--as I would equally complain about Gnome's context labels too. For example, "Open with..." is more useful as a menu with maximum 5-10 other applications to choose from. For example, will "Compress..." replace/remove my original file if I click on this action, or just create a compressed archive alongside the original?
Halfway through writing a response I've realized that Americans have a completely different approach to icons compared to the rest of the world. In the US most traffic signs have text information on them, while in most other countries most signs are icon-only. Text is usually reserved for exceptional situations that cannot easily be represented with an icon. So we're going to be talking past each other because you'll insist that a "yield" sign absolutely needs the "yield" word, while I'll insist that it should not.
What if traffic signs had text for many years and then suddenly a bunch were replaced by new ones with only a new icon and no visible explanation of what the icon means?
I think the analogy to traffic signs is flawed even further. Traffic signs icons are also standardized, have been for many years, and are taught in required safety classes. Not even close to the situation with mystery UIs in computer programs.
> What if traffic signs had text for many years and then suddenly a bunch were replaced by new ones with only a new icon and no visible explanation of what the icon means?
That's... exactly how meaningful icons are born. First you put icon with text, and once everyone understands the meaning of the icon, you remove the text, because it's not necessary anymore.
Do you think that US drivers would be left completely clueless when seeing the "yield" sign without the text, or would they recognize the icon?
> Not even close to the situation with mystery UIs in computer programs.
Android UI offers three buttons at the bottom of the screen. There's never been any text there. Yet somehow, most people have no issues using them. How come? Follow-up question: if you wanted to put text there, whete exactly would you do that, and what would it say? In real life, what about public toilets? Many places don't have a text "toilet", they just have a symbol of two stick figures, one wearing a skirt, yet we're all fine. Emergency exit? Sometimes it's without text, just a green light with a white stickman running through a door. Red X is also widely recognized as "closed" or "don't enter".
Finally, please tell me what you see in top-right corner of a window in your computer. If you see spelled out words "minimize", "maximize", "close" then yeah. Otherwise I'd like to ask you what makes these three buttons so special that they don't need text.
Point is, "icon without text" is an idea that exists in the wild and works.
>your complaints boil down to "I don't like it because I'm not familiar with it"
dhx's complaint was Fitts's law, and familiarity doesn't touch it. Time to hit a target grows with its distance and shrinks with its size. A row of small icons packed together is slow and easy to miss on the thousandth use, not just the first. Learning what the icons mean fixes recognition; it doesn't make the targets any bigger.
You're right that unfamiliarity cuts both ways, which is why it matters whether a design teaches itself. With a pie menu, every item is the same short distance from the click and its target is a whole wedge out to the screen edge. The novice who reads the labels and moves toward one is rehearsing the gesture an expert makes without looking. Gordon Kurtenbach and Bill Buxton built marking menus on that: the slow way and the fast way are the same motion. Jack Callahan, Mark Weiser, Ben Shneiderman and I measured it at Maryland in 1988: even novices were faster with fewer errors on eight-item pie menus than on linear ones.
And as you said, half the Windows 11 menu is an ad for cloud storage. That costs every click, however familiar you get with it.
Also, the midterm elections just proved beyond a doubt, once and for all, that Trump really is a stupid idiot.
"Always keep on this device" / "Free up space" only make sense when you understand the "Desktop" and "Document" is now backed by cloud -- the file you have on your local computer is just a cache.
The former meant it have higher priority in caching, the latter is just evicting from cache immediately.
I use "copy as path" all the time. It's good for if you have scripts and want a program in a different folder to launch them (e.g AutoHotKey, Task Scheduler).
That's the one that made me ditch Win11 for Mint, a top panel + Plank Reloaded.
My entire UI workflow is top right orientated (menus, windows size/close buttons, docks) for muscle memory, so the Win10 stopped security updates forced me to switch.
Ironically a week later they extended security support for Win10 a week later.
It only too them 6 years. But still lacks the ability to set it to your desired width. Its coming sometime in the next 6 years (unless windows 12 come first, then you lose the ability to set the taskbar to the side and have ot restart the cycle).
My sister gave me his win 11 laptop to fix. 1 Tb SSD was full. Half of it was windows.old folder after 26h2 update.
Windows has 5 different ways to delete that folder and none works. They are all badly documented. It spends 1 hour reading the file list before starting to delete... On a 4 tb/second nvme drive. Then spend a day "deleting" the folder, but doesn't deletes anything.
Finally, booted an Linux rescue distro from USB and deleted the folder.
Then had to clean the winsxs folder, which was full of useless files after an update.
That's the universal way to clean up roll back installs and other Windows update related.
If that's not working for you, there's probably a much larger issue at play on her machine and would be much better off backing up her data, wiping all the partitions and installing fresh. You'll likely reclaim more than 700 GB.
The only time I've seen situations like what you're describing is when these are machines that have been in use for years and have major Windows versions on top of major Windows version stacked on top of each other, not just incremental updates.
The incredible thing is that Windows 10 was already near perfect. It would make sense to increase performance and security, but they changed the UI without improving an iota of user productivity, including removing key features of the product. Almost ever change in the past few years made Windows worse. Windows leadership should be fired and replaced by people who are actually Windows users, not MacOS users.
Cortana is literaly the reason I am on Linux now for 9 years.
Had to reinstall Windows and could not disable Cortana or even skip some weired voice output during initial setup. Immediately removed Windows again and installed Ubuntu.
I really liked Win2KPro. My son has a copy of Windows Neptune he fires up now and then.
But I also had lots of fun when Code Red and Nimda came around - full perm file navigation on computers everywhere. Any Win2k box knocking on my firewall was telling me it was wide open for use.
I remember building a lc for a client, installing 2k then SP2. Clicking around installing our software thinking “this could be my main machine. This would be good”
Oh yes, security-wise it was a nightmare. I was talking about the UX. Efficient, consistent, and pretty minimalist. Animation effects started to appear but was easy to disable.
If they’d just taken Windows 10 and applied the Windows 11 theme (Fluent) that would’ve made for an OS that I wouldn’t have minded leaving on my gaming PC. That didn’t happen, and so now it’s now running Linux.
> Windows leadership should be fired and replaced by people who are actually Windows users, not MacOS users.
As a longtime Mac user, Windows leadership decisions don’t make any sense to me either. I have precisely zero interest in making 11 my primary OS… XP, 7, or 10 wouldn’t have been ideal but if I had no choice but to work with Windows those would be greatly preferable to 11.
> As a longtime Mac user, Windows leadership decisions don’t make any sense to me either.
To be sure, as another Mac user, they make sense in that they want Apple's revenue and reputation. The problem is they categorically refuse to invest in their engineering staff to even remotely the degree Apple does, which is reflected in the "quality" of the products on offer.
Everyone wants to be Apple, and they're all convinced despite ongoing proof to the contrary, that they can do it for pennies on the dollar. It's genuinely kind of pathetic how desperate they are to be Apple.
Microsoft's talent pool is deeper and equally smart. The problem is in the leadership, which grew fat and lazy and permitted a continuously terrible corporate culture and unfocused plan, and in the design. Microsoft's historical game plan is to copy and leverage its scale, but you can't copy and leverage scale in design or in management.
> If they’d just taken Windows 10 and applied the Windows 11 theme
That is what they did. They took windows 10 added the theme and taskbar/start from the triple failed 10x added arbitrary cpu cutoff and released as 11.
I've recently switched from windows to Mac and it was so refreshing using a system that does not purposely work against the user. I don't agree with many design decisions in Mac (wtf is up with tabbing into apps I've closed, or not being able to tab through instances of an app without a separate shortcut?!) but at least they're not shoving telemetry and ads down your throat.
(many) apps keep running without windows — all you closed was the last open window. cmd-~ switches between windows within a running app. this has been the case since the classic Mac days, & while it seems to drive those who come from Windows bonkers, long-term Mac users (at least all I've known) appreciate this small aspect of macOS as it makes a clear distinction between apps & windows. newer apps (some from Apple) which break this model are still maddening to use.
That's fine, but I do not want to tab into an app whose last windows I have purposely closed. I closed it so I have a cleaner slate of apps to work with. If chrome is closed, it should not show up until I open it again. Not just windows but also linux make much more sense in that regard.
It's annoying because the x button on the windows is now a completely useless widget to me, and I have to close apps via cmd+q instead. It's even more annoying that I can't actually close Finder, even though I'm using a different filebrowser.
1. do this on a non-us layout
2. do this with Firefox / Chrome and its in-private window. Those are not reachable with neither shortcut for me.
Mac is the most culturally colonialist minded thing in my experience, its i18n support is terrible for smaller languages.
The "windows bonkers" model is strangely copied by most third party windowsin systems, as it makes sense, with having the recency based tab order, and being a global list. For us who work with more than a single software and often have to work between two different software, maybe an editor and a terminal... it is usually pretty handy.
That is fucking annoying on mac. If i close the window, why is it useful to still have the application running without any windows. For example Finder? It still appears when alt tabbing, but when selecting it i get nothing. How is this a good design or good ux?
You must be using a different macos than me, or have not attempted to connect a mouse (Scroll Reverser), an external display (BetterDisplay), wanted to have sane power management (Amphetamine), want to reach all application windows with only the keyboard, wanted to close modal popups with only the keyboard, etc...
About telemetry, and ads: It is also present in MacOS, but less invasive indeed. And about not showing something down my throat: the other day my iphone just told me in declarative, with a single accept button: now your system will be updated to ios27 (download of updates was enabled, with manual confirmation).
Also having to unlock every app after every brew update in the applications as they "have been downloaded from the internet"... it is not something i'd call refreshing and not working against me.
> want to reach all application windows with only the keyboard
So damn true. I never got the point of the MacOS windows management approach. It's a joke.
* Switch between non-minimized application windows: "⌘ + Tab" (but not between windows of the same application!)
* Switch between open windows of the same application: "⌘ + `" <- Yes, that's backtick, a different physical key depending on the keyboard language layout, WTF! (but doesn't work for minimized windows of that application)
* Switch between open and minimized windows of the same application: "Ctrl + ArrowDown" and use arrow navigation.
And yes, there's Exposé button/gesture, which, again, doesn't show minimized windows and doesn't work with an arrow navigation.
> it was so refreshing using a system that does not purposely work against the user.
I don't share this optimism, Apple has not been a hardware-first/computers company in a very long time and nowadays makes more bucks profiling your consumption habits to sell you "content" on their ever more "content-consumption" oriented devices.
Edit: just to add to that the same ads (for cloud storage and premium services) that people in the Microsoft world get pissy about very much exists on that side of the fence. It's a race to the bottom, Apple isn't there to lead by example.
macOS is just a bit behind the curve. For instance a couple of years ago macOS added Windows Vista style permission popups, and Apple really doesn't want you to install UI apps outside the App Store, which is essentially the equivalent of "Windows SmartScreen".
> The incredible thing is that Windows 10 was already near perfect.
This is a ridiculous statement given how many people complained about it at the time!
There seems to be a common cognitive bias where things in the past are considered good and things in the present bad. So a few years from now, a bunch of people would say "Windows 12 is so bad, the incredible thing is that Windows 11 was already near perfect", completely forgetting the sentiment at the time.
Windows 8 hasn't been vindicated by time yet, Windows releases have been more of a pendulum where every other major release is widely adopted (not necessarily beloved) after a misbegotten major release.
>. Almost ever change in the past few years made Windows worse.
I feel like this is the point. Microsoft don't want to support a consumer desktop OS anymore, and are pushing people to other devices, where their profitable cloud services are also available.
MS wants you to pay for authentication, office, cloud services etc without having to do consumer support or anything like that. I reckon they see Apple as the perfect partner for this, someone with a desktop experience compatible with their cloud experience.
Because designers must design, programmers must program and managers must manage to ear a paycheck you have to change things even when they don't need changing. When you put this into a context of a greedy corporation that is completely self serving, i.e using the platform to serve their needs instead of those of the user it's inevitable that the product will turn into shit from the user perspective.
The biggest improvement in Windows 11 is increased locking of small users into Microsoft ecosystem and Microsoft cloud services.
This is not a improvement for the users, it's a improvement for Microsoft shareholders, because many users may decide to pay for additional Microsoft services (additional revenue after paying for the operating system) and it allows Microsoft to monetize customer data (Microsoft learned this business strategy from Google).
"
Home and Pro (since version 22H2) edition installation requires internet connection and Microsoft account login (only if for personal use on Pro) is mandatory unless manually bypassed to create a local user. However, Microsoft has since blocked one of the last remaining easy bypass methods that allowed local account creation during initial setup, complicating the bypass process further. All other editions are excluded from this requirement.
"
Don't forget having to shove all the "recommendation" and "suggestion" systems into it, too, so they could add random sponsored apps to your Start menu primed and ready to install as soon as you clicked on them at the same time they push more notifications at you to use more OneDrive.
> The biggest improvement in Windows 11 is increased locking of small users into Microsoft ecosystem and Microsoft cloud services.
It is true that it was a major scam by Microsoft against its users when they forced them to sign into an online Microsoft account during the Windows 11 installation. Especially the stubbornness and determination with which they patch all the loopholes in the installation process (just to make it impossible to install Windows without an online account) is remarkable.
But in all fairness:
* Microsoft practically stopped charging users for upgrades since Windows 10. Windows 10 could be installed for free from older Windows, and Windows 11 is again a free upgrade from Windows 10.
* How many macOS users actually press "Setup later" when setting up a new Mac and use macOS without an Apple account? I think there will be very few of them.
I've been Windows 10 user for many years, but just few days ago I bought new laptop and went with Windows 11.
Honestly it's the same for me. Taskbar is a bit weird and start menu is a bit weird, but I was able to turn off unwanted features, so it's not bad right now.
I'm mostly Linux user and my Windows usage is more about gaming, but I did some programming with it as well.
That's why a lot of us still works on Windows 10. I'm always laughing hearing that on Win 11 even Task Manager breaks not showing process list, randomly. Clipboard on RDP breaks every few connections and requires killing process or restart.
The funniest is when next person calls me and asks if he really needs creating Micro$hit account to just use PC for local stuff.
I hope someone at big corp will be so bored one day that he'll just start releasing Win 10 updates after reverse engineering the mechanisms and we will get Win 10 support again.
The rule still alive and stands strong - every second Windows is just a crap. ME, Vista, 8 and now 11.
One thing that drives me nuts is just how they refuse to take the time and update all the settings pages to the new style. I don't hate the new style, in fact I think it is pretty okay (better than macos and KDE in some things, worse in others).
Like if you dig even slightly below the surface you get a dialog window straight from windows 95. Network settings for example, something I routinely have to deal with. It is absurd VPN companies make full-blown windows desktop software to tweak VPN settings on your PC because the default windows UI is so crap.
There is just so much of this old stuff on Windows that you run into if you need to do anything past the surface. So many old programs they just couldn't be bothered to rewrite to a new standard. Settings is what most people run into but the registry editor, all the permissions stuff, networking settings, the entirity of the control panel is a miss mash of different eras and on and on.
For me the incredible thing is that Win 11 has any users. Microsoft announced Win 10 as the last OS, with updates from there on out. I assume the only reason Win 11 came into existence was to change EULA for more tracking and ads. I certainly never saw anything about how 11 is this fundamentally different thing that 10 couldn't have been updated into, that's why I have to assume it's for legal / user-hostile reasons.
Everybody should have simply ignored them. Win 10 yes, whatever you're trying to pull with 11, no. What could MS have done about that? Threaten to end support and then relent when nobody takes the bait?
- then download vmware workstation pro (you ll need to create a free account to get the download link on their website)
- install vmware workstation pro
- turn internet off
- plug your pendrive in with the rufus w11 x64 iso on it (mind ya, this pen drive ll first need full formatting before burning a w11 image to it)
- press f2 to reach bios in vmware settings and make it boot from pendrive
- turn internet off on your machine (DO NOT keep it on)
- install w11 (keep a 100gb for vmware)
- without updates it ll load real fast and you wont need an MS account (rufus takes care of it)
- while it installs, download revo uninstaller pro on a separate machine https://onefiles.net/9d170d01078634b5 (latest version 5.4.x) and put it inside a second pendrive / portable hdd
- once w11 loads, it ll ask you to enter a password, keep existing password blank and enter literally anything for a new password
- voila you are done with w11 setup inside vmware
- now connect the 2nd pendrive with revo and install it (need to clean uninstall many tools, hence we need this one)
- now go to search bar and type check for updates and update everything on w11 inside vmware
- next stop get unigetui from ms app store or from here https://devolutions.net/unigetui/ (it is a package manager responsible for installing just about everything else with auto updation of all packages)
- the open unigetui and search for the following packages vlc, winrar, winhance
- winhance is the fully customizable debloater you ll need to turn off all telemetry (we ll debloat after installing all the other requirements)
- next go to ms app store and install python or open powershell and type python
- the open unigetui and search for the following packages vlc, winrar, winhance
- winhance is the fully customizable debloater you ll need to turn off all telemetry (we ll debloat after installing all the other requirements)
- next go to ms app store and install python or open powershell and type python
- mind you this installs a python version manager that lets you install and uninstall multiple python versions
- after this python version manager is setup, install a specific version of python like
```
py install 3.13
```
- next we need a node.js version manager, use fnm for it
Installed Windows 11 on a VM over the weekend for running a specific program. The lengthy multi-reboot updates are just like I remember from Vista. Except now they show advertisements.
Grateful 2008 was Year of the Linux Desktop for me.
I recently got my hands on a windows machine - I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t actually excited to use windows after a 15 year hiatus
What a heaping pile of you know what. You need Microsoft accounts to download basic apps from the App Store
You get nagged and nagged to enter a windows account
Having grown up with it, it’s an incredibly odd feeling using it. Modern ui…modern ui…modern ui…and then BAM a weird screen directly ported from windows 98 (or 2k, you get the point)
An OS that was always incredibly intuitive to me all of a sudden just felt like a disorganized mess. Want to see your Ethernet adapters? Good luck, you’ll open 10 other settings menus/search results before finally getting to the options you need. Advanced sound settings? Same
My headset wasn’t working, after clicking through a bunch of options at some point I loaded a wizard with very specific questions that I’d never seen before and wouldn’t how how to get back to, it randomly worked
Still a bunch of bloatware, still can’t be on for more than a day without having to reboot, everything I remembered that was bad with made worse by bad ux
These days they even tried to remove the option of installing windows with an internet connection, aka ms account
> Users will get a “customize menu” button that controls what commands appear when they right-click their mouse
Good, though doesn't seem to be include the ability to control icons, name and accelerator keys, so still a long way to reach the user ergonomic heaven...
After using Windows since I was a pre-teen I finally switched to Omarchy. Its incredible having claude (or other agent) to manage all the random linux config. Its not just good enough its better than Windows in every way. (OK I dont game)
It's a drag that products like Windows are stuck forever the way they are. Or, rather, that they're stuck the way they are but then command such market share that nothing new ever comes and sees the light of day. It's so boring that folks are so resistant to UI change. I'd be more than happy to never see the classic Windows context menu again, but others clamored for it so hard that MS brought it back. Windows is doomed to keep generating billions for Microsoft until one day it doesn't, which I guess is what they're going for.
It also seems silly to tie the decline of Windows to UX discontent. Windows is in decline because it's increasingly irrelevant in the post-PC, post-USA world.
196 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 44.7 ms ] threadAt least back then more of the original engineering talent that Microsoft had was still around, and you would even run into them on irc from time to time. 20 years on, I suspect a lot of the foundational personalities that drove engineering decisions have since retired or been made redundant, and that reflects the weird UI fracturing and endless regressions. I doubt they can recover at this point.
I got off on Windows 95.
Support for Gaming - not Wine, but hardware support and performance.
Well then you look at a random webpage from CNN and I guess they’re all competing for how trashy they can make their products.
There can’t be any pride left at all in that place.
https://lite.cnn.com/
Sometimes, some articles don't have content, but eh. Works for me.
NPR's site is nice too:
https://text.npr.org/
Day 2: install Linux distro, total process is like 4 hours because at every step you double check that you won't lose your Windows data because it's your first time installing Linux. Realize that your distro doesn't support modern displays and never will. Call it a day because you're mentally exhausted.
Day 3: install a distro that does support modern displays. The process is only 3 hours because you're already familiar with it. Spend the rest of the day looking up which Linux programs are good replacements for Windows ones. Hint: all of them have bugs that affect your particular use cases - KDE shits itself when it sees a folder with 20k images, DaVinci Resolve has lots of issues with audio drivers and video codecs and gives zero error messages, no native Linux audio player supports all exotic music formats in my library so I need to run foobar2000 which obviously crashes when it sees WMA lossless and then UI fails to scale properly, lots of random shit like Wine installation causing system update to fail.
Day 4: connect $DEVICE. Look up drivers.
Day 44: $DEVICE works.
Day 104: $DEVICE works AND survives system update.
In my case that were keyboard (support for extra keys) and steering wheel.
Day 204: invite friends for video games. Spend the entire evening trying to fix controllers because they're fucked - if I first connect Steam Controller and then run Steam, then Steam shits itself. I need to specifically do it the other way around. Also, Xbox One controller drivers have an incompatibility with X360 controllers so I couldn't simply connect the old dongle and play like that.
Hmmm day 2 should be: making a backup of my windows data, that way I can do the f... I want during installation.
> Day 3: install a distro that does support modern displays.
Apart from LTS/enterprise versions, all distros are running the same kernel generations. They all have the same hardware support really.
The rest of your text soup doesn't mean anything. Like this: "random shit like Wine installation causing system update to fail.", this really sounds like hallucinations and inventions.
The part about $DEVICE and drivers is like looking at a kid trying to connect a Nintendo SNES controller to a PS5 and complaining it doesn't work to well.
I mean yes, but an update on my Linux box just installed a new kernel, uninstalled the old video card driver, and didn't install a new video card driver.
I have taken to asking claude "is it safe for me to reboot now?" before restarting after updates. So far 3 times in a row it has come back with "no, your system won't startup".
Edit: I also just woke my desktop up from sleep and the alt-tab service failed to resume. Just... wut.
Also if you are able to know that the new video card driver hasn't been installed, you also know that you can solve this by doing it yourself. In that case why wouldn't you do it?
Ultimately if all those things are too hard for you there are a number of immutable "image" based distros where packages/drivers aren't managed individually during updates and where you can always boot to the previous version. Maybe that is what you need.
Just as an exMple I'm on arch myself and after last update if I use X11 screen saver with lock some service crashes and the computer cannot be unlocked.
Maybe next update will have a fix but then something else will be broken instead.
Linux (as in the kernel+user space of your choice) is a perpetual alpha. Has been for 30 years and will always be.
Whenever GTK/Gnome becomes reasonable stable it's time for a rewrite!
(And I'm a Linux user since red hat 7.2)
It's untrue in comparison to Windows, and MacOS (at least for software dev, when I last used it 1.5 years ago).
Linux easily has the lowest maintenance burden if you pick a boring distros. It can be a huge pit of wasted time, _if you actually want to fall into that pit._
Linux, sometimes works without faff. But in my experience it's at best 50:50 if you get that, or constant crashes, hangs, broken peripherals, etc. (Of course any time you mention this the luck 50% pipe up with "it works for me".)
10 was better, but I’d pay for a modern version of windows 2kpro UI. Bring back msn messsenger.
It’s basically a gaming box, everything else is on a Mac or Linux machine, all on my desk.
And somewhat excel because excel is badly implemented on mac
I'd pay for this, compatible with Windows 11 apps, but basically works like NT4.
(I maintain that Windows 11's bad UX is a consequence of MS having to make a single UI for everyone, which means it'll be too dumbed-down, simplified, or inflexible for power-users (XP, Win8, Win11); or too complicated and intimidating for everyone else (Win7, Win10), or just bad for everyone (Vista)).
If Microsoft wants me to willingly buy into Windows 12, then I want the option to keep the Windows 10 UI (File Explorer, Taskbar, Start Menu, and Window Management) - I know it can be done in theory[1], I just want proper support.
[1] https://lesferch.github.io/OldExplorer/
That's a false choice, and pie menus are the way out of it. The same menu can lead novices by showing them labels, follow intermediate users who know roughly where things are, and get out of the way of experts who flick in the direction without waiting for it to appear. One UI, no "simple mode" and "advanced mode", and the novice turns into the expert just by using it, by self-revealing rehearsal! I went into that and the research behind it upthread.
As I titled my 1998 Xerox PARC talk: "Natural Selection: The Evolution of Pie Menus", reviewed here:
https://baychi.org/calendar/19981013/
> Pie menus appealed to Hopkins because they conform to the rule that the user's attention should not be squandered. A pie menu selection offers direct feedback versus a user selection that brings up intermediate menus. The programmed pie menu ignores users' gestures except the motions to select or cancel. Hopkins uses pie menus because they take advantage of Fitts' Law, which relates fast selection speed and low error rate to the pie menus' large target size and small distance between selections.
The other half is letting users rearrange it themselves, without registry hacks. HyperCard set the precedent in 1987: the user interface was made of the same stuff as the content, so anyone could open it up and change it. Arthur van Hoff's HyperLook took that to NeWS and PostScript: users could edit not just their own nested linear and pie menus, but the live user interfaces of running apps, including the SimCity I ported to it, by copying, pasting and configuring scriptable components from "warehouse" stacks. We were taking it all the way to the window frames themselves, with a HyperCard-like window manager where you could build your own frames out of the same parts.
I discussed HyperLook and HyperCard with Alan Kay, who said "This work is so good -- for any time -- and especially for its time", and also "I wish he had done a real end-user language for this":
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
Simon Schneegans's Kando carries that spirit today. Its menu editor is direct manipulation all the way down: you drag and drop items and submenus right into the pie, see exactly where they'll go, and put the things you use most in the directions that feel right to your hand. That's how a power user should customize a menu, and a novice can do it too, because it's just dragging things around:
https://kando.menu
I took that idea further in MediaGraph, a music navigation prototype I made in Unity for Will Wright at the Stupid Fun Club in 2010. It has two layers of pie menus.
The first layer is ordinary nested pie menus for editing the content, with live feedback: as you move around the menu that sets a song's size or its "biome" (a cellular automaton growing around it on the map), you see the effect in the world before you commit. Same biomes merge, different biomes compete for territory.
The second layer is the content itself. The songs are laid out on a map and connected by roads, and the map is a geographic, networked pie menu. Drop one song on another and kiss them together to make a road between them, and kiss them again to break it. Drag on a song in a direction and it fires you down the road t...
For now I just use a customer-supplied email address which I used to setup a Microsoft account, setup Windows and use that account, immediately create a local-only 'admin' account with full rights, delete the online associated account, and start creating user account(s) from there.
https://rtech.support/guides/bypass-11/
I have a Microsoft account, but I prefer to use a local account to avoid a lot of the "value add" that comes from using the Microsoft account.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11
There are also community projects like NTLite ( https://ntlite.com/ ) and Windows ISO Debloater ( https://github.com/itsNileshHere/Windows-ISO-Debloater ) for the more technically advanced that want full control to prevent the bloat from even making it to your machine during installation at all (instead of having to clean it up after the fact)
I'd recommend creating a sysprep answer file (with LLM's its pretty easy, also rufus can do it) instead of the trick mentioned above.
- Cleaning my drive from unwanted files → One app
- Organizing files based on type → another app
- A good voice-to-text → another app
- A better launcher → another app
- An incredible terminal → another app
I mean is this the way it's supposed to be? Wasn't the whole point - unwrap the macbook, load up Mac OS and LFG?
https://www.alfredapp.com/
They have some AI stuff that they try to push on you during the install, but it can all be disabled so day to day it doesn’t bother you.
0: https://www.raycast.com/
At this point both Windows and OSX are rent seeking, squeezing as much money as they can out of their users.
[0]: https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/worldwide-pc-shipments-have...
At the top of the Windows 11 context menu are some small icons without text for high usage actions which I assume are:
1. select-for-moving (cut), perhaps Gnome's "Move to..."
2. duplicate-in-place-with-number-appended-to-duplicate-filename or select-for-copying (copy), perhaps Gnome's "Copy to..."
3. something to do with the clipboard--maybe copy contents to clipboard
4. something to do with text entry--maybe rename the file/folder, perhaps Gnome's "Rename..."
5. share via social media applications or cloud file sharing applications, or move the file/folder locally perhaps Gnome's "Move to..."
6. move to recycle bin (delete)
Menu options with text are unambiguous for "Open", "Open with", "Compress to ZIP file", "Properties", although Gnome will state "Open with {name_of_default_app}" to make it clear exactly how a file will be opened without having to guess.
I guess "Copy as path" might just copy the full filesystem path to the clipboard. I can't remember the last time I wanted to do that.
I guess "Always keep on this device" prevents the file/folder being backed up to some cloud storage provider. I'd rather open up an application dedicated to cloud storage backups and be able to review current backup options there all in one place for all types of data/files.
The "Free up space" option I'm less clear on--will a local application pop up and suggest what I can delete within the folder, will a cloud storage provider application pop up and suggest the file not be synchronised with the local device and only be kept in cloud storage, etc.
The bottom option "Show more options" is not expandable so I assume there are so many other options an entire new window is needed to display them all. Maybe it'll give me useful but rarely used options from a list of hundreds available, such as "count how many words are in this file" for text files...?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law
[2] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/icon-usability/
I think the analogy to traffic signs is flawed even further. Traffic signs icons are also standardized, have been for many years, and are taught in required safety classes. Not even close to the situation with mystery UIs in computer programs.
That's... exactly how meaningful icons are born. First you put icon with text, and once everyone understands the meaning of the icon, you remove the text, because it's not necessary anymore.
Do you think that US drivers would be left completely clueless when seeing the "yield" sign without the text, or would they recognize the icon?
> Not even close to the situation with mystery UIs in computer programs.
Android UI offers three buttons at the bottom of the screen. There's never been any text there. Yet somehow, most people have no issues using them. How come? Follow-up question: if you wanted to put text there, whete exactly would you do that, and what would it say? In real life, what about public toilets? Many places don't have a text "toilet", they just have a symbol of two stick figures, one wearing a skirt, yet we're all fine. Emergency exit? Sometimes it's without text, just a green light with a white stickman running through a door. Red X is also widely recognized as "closed" or "don't enter".
Finally, please tell me what you see in top-right corner of a window in your computer. If you see spelled out words "minimize", "maximize", "close" then yeah. Otherwise I'd like to ask you what makes these three buttons so special that they don't need text.
Point is, "icon without text" is an idea that exists in the wild and works.
dhx's complaint was Fitts's law, and familiarity doesn't touch it. Time to hit a target grows with its distance and shrinks with its size. A row of small icons packed together is slow and easy to miss on the thousandth use, not just the first. Learning what the icons mean fixes recognition; it doesn't make the targets any bigger.
You're right that unfamiliarity cuts both ways, which is why it matters whether a design teaches itself. With a pie menu, every item is the same short distance from the click and its target is a whole wedge out to the screen edge. The novice who reads the labels and moves toward one is rehearsing the gesture an expert makes without looking. Gordon Kurtenbach and Bill Buxton built marking menus on that: the slow way and the fast way are the same motion. Jack Callahan, Mark Weiser, Ben Shneiderman and I measured it at Maryland in 1988: even novices were faster with fewer errors on eight-item pie menus than on linear ones.
And as you said, half the Windows 11 menu is an ad for cloud storage. That costs every click, however familiar you get with it.
Also, the midterm elections just proved beyond a doubt, once and for all, that Trump really is a stupid idiot.
The former meant it have higher priority in caching, the latter is just evicting from cache immediately.
My entire UI workflow is top right orientated (menus, windows size/close buttons, docks) for muscle memory, so the Win10 stopped security updates forced me to switch.
Ironically a week later they extended security support for Win10 a week later.
I'm still waiting for Mozilla to give back the option to delete MRUs from the Firefox navbar.
Oh, it's absolutely has nothing with how they push sponsored links there. Absolutely.
Finally, booted an Linux rescue distro from USB and deleted the folder.
Then had to clean the winsxs folder, which was full of useless files after an update.
In the end I cleaned 700 gb wasted.
That's the universal way to clean up roll back installs and other Windows update related.
If that's not working for you, there's probably a much larger issue at play on her machine and would be much better off backing up her data, wiping all the partitions and installing fresh. You'll likely reclaim more than 700 GB.
The only time I've seen situations like what you're describing is when these are machines that have been in use for years and have major Windows versions on top of major Windows version stacked on top of each other, not just incremental updates.
Shift delete bypasses the relocation of files to the recycle bin.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/do-more-with-surface...
Had to reinstall Windows and could not disable Cortana or even skip some weired voice output during initial setup. Immediately removed Windows again and installed Ubuntu.
But I also had lots of fun when Code Red and Nimda came around - full perm file navigation on computers everywhere. Any Win2k box knocking on my firewall was telling me it was wide open for use.
Then it got a virus.
30 minutes after I finished installing windows.
> Windows leadership should be fired and replaced by people who are actually Windows users, not MacOS users.
As a longtime Mac user, Windows leadership decisions don’t make any sense to me either. I have precisely zero interest in making 11 my primary OS… XP, 7, or 10 wouldn’t have been ideal but if I had no choice but to work with Windows those would be greatly preferable to 11.
To be sure, as another Mac user, they make sense in that they want Apple's revenue and reputation. The problem is they categorically refuse to invest in their engineering staff to even remotely the degree Apple does, which is reflected in the "quality" of the products on offer.
Everyone wants to be Apple, and they're all convinced despite ongoing proof to the contrary, that they can do it for pennies on the dollar. It's genuinely kind of pathetic how desperate they are to be Apple.
Can they instead aim to be what Apple was? Being what Apple is or going where Apple is heading is rather gross.
That is what they did. They took windows 10 added the theme and taskbar/start from the triple failed 10x added arbitrary cpu cutoff and released as 11.
No, it's just made it worse for you. You aren't the customer though. Enterprises are customers, you're just a lowly user.
Hopefully one day someone at Microsoft will remember that customers are actually made out of users.
That's fine, but I do not want to tab into an app whose last windows I have purposely closed. I closed it so I have a cleaner slate of apps to work with. If chrome is closed, it should not show up until I open it again. Not just windows but also linux make much more sense in that regard.
It's annoying because the x button on the windows is now a completely useless widget to me, and I have to close apps via cmd+q instead. It's even more annoying that I can't actually close Finder, even though I'm using a different filebrowser.
Mac is the most culturally colonialist minded thing in my experience, its i18n support is terrible for smaller languages.
The "windows bonkers" model is strangely copied by most third party windowsin systems, as it makes sense, with having the recency based tab order, and being a global list. For us who work with more than a single software and often have to work between two different software, maybe an editor and a terminal... it is usually pretty handy.
About telemetry, and ads: It is also present in MacOS, but less invasive indeed. And about not showing something down my throat: the other day my iphone just told me in declarative, with a single accept button: now your system will be updated to ios27 (download of updates was enabled, with manual confirmation).
Also having to unlock every app after every brew update in the applications as they "have been downloaded from the internet"... it is not something i'd call refreshing and not working against me.
So damn true. I never got the point of the MacOS windows management approach. It's a joke.
* Switch between non-minimized application windows: "⌘ + Tab" (but not between windows of the same application!)
* Switch between open windows of the same application: "⌘ + `" <- Yes, that's backtick, a different physical key depending on the keyboard language layout, WTF! (but doesn't work for minimized windows of that application)
* Switch between open and minimized windows of the same application: "Ctrl + ArrowDown" and use arrow navigation.
And yes, there's Exposé button/gesture, which, again, doesn't show minimized windows and doesn't work with an arrow navigation.
I don't share this optimism, Apple has not been a hardware-first/computers company in a very long time and nowadays makes more bucks profiling your consumption habits to sell you "content" on their ever more "content-consumption" oriented devices.
Edit: just to add to that the same ads (for cloud storage and premium services) that people in the Microsoft world get pissy about very much exists on that side of the fence. It's a race to the bottom, Apple isn't there to lead by example.
This is a ridiculous statement given how many people complained about it at the time!
There seems to be a common cognitive bias where things in the past are considered good and things in the present bad. So a few years from now, a bunch of people would say "Windows 12 is so bad, the incredible thing is that Windows 11 was already near perfect", completely forgetting the sentiment at the time.
I feel like this is the point. Microsoft don't want to support a consumer desktop OS anymore, and are pushing people to other devices, where their profitable cloud services are also available.
MS wants you to pay for authentication, office, cloud services etc without having to do consumer support or anything like that. I reckon they see Apple as the perfect partner for this, someone with a desktop experience compatible with their cloud experience.
This is not a improvement for the users, it's a improvement for Microsoft shareholders, because many users may decide to pay for additional Microsoft services (additional revenue after paying for the operating system) and it allows Microsoft to monetize customer data (Microsoft learned this business strategy from Google).
" Home and Pro (since version 22H2) edition installation requires internet connection and Microsoft account login (only if for personal use on Pro) is mandatory unless manually bypassed to create a local user. However, Microsoft has since blocked one of the last remaining easy bypass methods that allowed local account creation during initial setup, complicating the bypass process further. All other editions are excluded from this requirement. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_11#Setup
It is true that it was a major scam by Microsoft against its users when they forced them to sign into an online Microsoft account during the Windows 11 installation. Especially the stubbornness and determination with which they patch all the loopholes in the installation process (just to make it impossible to install Windows without an online account) is remarkable.
But in all fairness:
* Microsoft practically stopped charging users for upgrades since Windows 10. Windows 10 could be installed for free from older Windows, and Windows 11 is again a free upgrade from Windows 10.
* How many macOS users actually press "Setup later" when setting up a new Mac and use macOS without an Apple account? I think there will be very few of them.
Honestly it's the same for me. Taskbar is a bit weird and start menu is a bit weird, but I was able to turn off unwanted features, so it's not bad right now.
I'm mostly Linux user and my Windows usage is more about gaming, but I did some programming with it as well.
I hope someone at big corp will be so bored one day that he'll just start releasing Win 10 updates after reverse engineering the mechanisms and we will get Win 10 support again.
The rule still alive and stands strong - every second Windows is just a crap. ME, Vista, 8 and now 11.
Like if you dig even slightly below the surface you get a dialog window straight from windows 95. Network settings for example, something I routinely have to deal with. It is absurd VPN companies make full-blown windows desktop software to tweak VPN settings on your PC because the default windows UI is so crap.
Everybody should have simply ignored them. Win 10 yes, whatever you're trying to pull with 11, no. What could MS have done about that? Threaten to end support and then relent when nobody takes the bait?
- here is my production grade setup for agentic ai on windows 11
- setup windows 11 with Rufus boot to disable online MS account creation https://rufus.ie/en/
- [download window 11 x64 iso from here ](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11)
- then download vmware workstation pro (you ll need to create a free account to get the download link on their website)
- install vmware workstation pro
- turn internet off
- plug your pendrive in with the rufus w11 x64 iso on it (mind ya, this pen drive ll first need full formatting before burning a w11 image to it)
- press f2 to reach bios in vmware settings and make it boot from pendrive
- turn internet off on your machine (DO NOT keep it on)
- install w11 (keep a 100gb for vmware)
- without updates it ll load real fast and you wont need an MS account (rufus takes care of it)
- while it installs, download revo uninstaller pro on a separate machine https://onefiles.net/9d170d01078634b5 (latest version 5.4.x) and put it inside a second pendrive / portable hdd
- once w11 loads, it ll ask you to enter a password, keep existing password blank and enter literally anything for a new password
- voila you are done with w11 setup inside vmware
- now connect the 2nd pendrive with revo and install it (need to clean uninstall many tools, hence we need this one)
- now go to search bar and type check for updates and update everything on w11 inside vmware
- next stop get unigetui from ms app store or from here https://devolutions.net/unigetui/ (it is a package manager responsible for installing just about everything else with auto updation of all packages)
- the open unigetui and search for the following packages vlc, winrar, winhance
- winhance is the fully customizable debloater you ll need to turn off all telemetry (we ll debloat after installing all the other requirements)
- next go to ms app store and install python or open powershell and type python
- the open unigetui and search for the following packages vlc, winrar, winhance
- winhance is the fully customizable debloater you ll need to turn off all telemetry (we ll debloat after installing all the other requirements)
- next go to ms app store and install python or open powershell and type python
- mind you this installs a python version manager that lets you install and uninstall multiple python versions
- after this python version manager is setup, install a specific version of python like
``` py install 3.13 ``` - next we need a node.js version manager, use fnm for it
https://github.com/Schniz/fnm - once installed, it may need to be added to environment variables manually
- once again choose a specific version of node.js and install it using
``` fnm install 23.12.0 ``` check fnm --help for commands - next we need a java version manager, use jvms for it
https://github.com/ystyle/jvms
- pretty self explanatory
- now install git and again it ll give you some trouble over environment variables, command not recognized etc, fixable with some gpt help
- at this point, we got git, node version manager, java version manager and python version manager and are ready to rumble
- install vscode/ visual studio whatever
- install codex
- install claude
- install opencode (both cli via npx and desktop app) and check t...
What a heaping pile of you know what. You need Microsoft accounts to download basic apps from the App Store
You get nagged and nagged to enter a windows account
Having grown up with it, it’s an incredibly odd feeling using it. Modern ui…modern ui…modern ui…and then BAM a weird screen directly ported from windows 98 (or 2k, you get the point)
An OS that was always incredibly intuitive to me all of a sudden just felt like a disorganized mess. Want to see your Ethernet adapters? Good luck, you’ll open 10 other settings menus/search results before finally getting to the options you need. Advanced sound settings? Same
My headset wasn’t working, after clicking through a bunch of options at some point I loaded a wizard with very specific questions that I’d never seen before and wouldn’t how how to get back to, it randomly worked
Still a bunch of bloatware, still can’t be on for more than a day without having to reboot, everything I remembered that was bad with made worse by bad ux
These days they even tried to remove the option of installing windows with an internet connection, aka ms account
Just bad, there are a lot of annoyances to fix
Good, though doesn't seem to be include the ability to control icons, name and accelerator keys, so still a long way to reach the user ergonomic heaven...
It also seems silly to tie the decline of Windows to UX discontent. Windows is in decline because it's increasingly irrelevant in the post-PC, post-USA world.