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Comment by iamkroot | Hacker News Reader

Wait, is this an official MS utility?

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/

Why aren't these just bundled by default??

Probably because changing stuff in the main OS is pretty complex and needs approval from many different actors at Microsoft. Releasing a simple utility application on the other hand should be much easier and isn't bound to any release cycle.

Yeah, is it localized to eleven fallback languages, and accessible to blind people, and included in the security threat model? Including anything in Windows costs serious money, so for some niche features you might need to install an out of band, less supported package.

Many things in 11 were at least inspired by powertoys, like window groups and snap layouts[0], although these are non-customizable.

0: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/snap-your-window...

As I mentioned here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31305712), because it’s targeted at a different audience and because it being separate allows it to be iterated and experimented with more quickly. When you have an install-base as large as Windows, you have to be careful with what you include as a built-in feature versus what is an add-on or option (even first party), because a change made for one class of users could be confusing or detrimental to another. This is particularly true when it comes to utilities and features that are iterated on in public and with great frequency. PowerToys occasionally ships with bugs or crashes that are completely acceptable and manageable to the audience of power users (and are usually fixed very quickly), but that could be much more of a problem if shipped to 1 billion users (and the steps you’d need to take to test against edge cases would slow down development, and the development speed is one of the best parts of PowerToys).

You can install it through the Microsoft Store, WinGet, Choclatey, Scoop or directly from GitHub. It would be nice if there was maybe a pointer to it inside the OS to alert some users of its existence, but the premise was similar to the OG PowerToys, which were downloadable off of the Microsoft website.

As I said in the linked comment, stuff from PowerToys does get upstreamed into the Windows shell, sometimes with modifications or refinements, but some of the utilities are things that wouldn’t necessarily make sense to be included by default.

I was about to say "because of the maintenance burden and separation of core and extra features" but then I remembered that half the stuff they added since win2k is borderline useless.

win2k was peak windows; all it needed was 64-bit support and cleartype

And support for high DPI displays, and Bluetooth, and modern Wi-Fi, and probably a bunch of other stuff I’m forgetting!

PowerShell, BitLocker, SSH, WinRM, Appx and msix and MDM integration come to mind. I don‘t want to go back to the days where managing Windows meant clicking around in GUIs.

my win32 needs are more modest than yours :-)

A lot of these things seem like they could cause extreme confusion for a low-ability user.

Which would be easily resolved by having them off by default?

Having said that, I don't know how window snapping being on by default isn't incredibly frustrating for someone who is simply trying to precisely position a window near a corner only to have it snap in a way they didn't want it to.

I tried a few of them and they flat out didn't work. I guess MS has decided its OS already has too much garbage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com