Former Microsoft director of user experience trashes Windows 11 Start menu
windowscentral.com
windowscentral.com
Ah, the guy that brought us touch-friendly tiles. On desktop. He makes good points, though.
Interestingly, on both my laptops (2013 MBP and a 2015 Lenovo gaming laptop) Windows says that they "don't meet minimum requirements to install Windows 11". They're perfectly reasonable machines and Windows 10 runs smooth as butter on both of them, since when did Microsoft got so picky? Anyway, I'm sort of glad, because if the machines were eliglble for the Windows 11 upgrade, I'm sure MS would just go for it one night without my permission.
Though, if you really want to run Windows 11, easy workarounds[2] exist for both.
For what it's worth, I'm currently running Windows 11 on a 2011 MacBook Pro — in BIOS mode, actually, because EFI support for Windows is broken on this particular model — and hardware support is no worse than it is on supported versions of Windows (meaning mostly OK except for the lack of GPU switching and precision touchpad drivers), and considerably better than it is on recent, similarly unsupported Mac OS versions (this machine — my emergency "for the rare cases where I actually need a laptop" box — is currently triple-booting Windows 11 [BIOS], macOS Monterey [EFI], and Linux [EFI]).
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/min...
Overall, I find Gnome to at least be more consistent than Windows and no adverts in the activities/applications menus are of course appreciated. However, every major release tends to force the user to relearn certain how to use your desktop principals.
As in the sense of re-education? Or brainwashing? Or maybe just outright monetization of the user (as start menu adverts would indicate)?
Genuine upgrades (esp. security, bugfixes) are one thing but the practice is extremely prone to abuse. Previews are rarely robust enough and you always end up having to change your workflow to conform with questionable (or seemingly arbitrary) "improvements".
Many times I just feel like a rat in an A/B test lab.
So I embraced minimalism; I don't even bother with a full DE these days. I used to love gimmicks like wobbly windows but the novelty wears off fast. I just run a stable and trustworthy WM now (OpenBox, if you're curious) and cherry-pick everything else.
Ever since I've found my environment to be much more comfortable and serene... likely more productive too. YMMV
I've been hearing people make this vow for decades now, but they almost never follow through.
>a level of arrogance I thought had been extinguished in Microsoft after the Windows 8 debacle. Clearly it hasn't.
Microsoft has always been arrogant; this is nothing new.
How do you know that? Do you follow up on random online people making this claim a few months down the line to make sure they are really running Linux now?
Windows XP toy's are us UI, DX10 being Vista only, Windows 7 new UI, Windows 8 new UI, Windows 8.1 new UI, UWP focus, ....
ChromeOS and Android don't count as Linux desktops, given the only thing Linux about them, is their usage of the Linux kernel, considered by Google an implementation detail and not exposed as public userspace APIs to the respective store apps.
I'd dual-boot to play games, but I want to be able to run Ableton simultaneously with web browser/etc.
I just don't think Ableton would run very well in a virtual machine with acceptable latency.
And yet, Macs still need third-party software to do window management properly. Not even Monterey lets you snap windows by simply dragging them to the side of the screen, a feature both Windows and all Linux DEs have had for the past 15+ years!
It's unfortunate that you now need to pay the same 10 bucks for the Rectangle equivalent on Windows (that being StartAllBack), but ultimately Windows has passed the point where it needed to sell itself as being better and easier to use and now just chases new shiny at the expense of what happens when you purposefully ignore Fitts' Law so people who want to do actual work need to pay to get the old features back. I guess that's just the way it goes sometimes.
Monterey doesn't do this out of the box (I don't believe I'm using it wrong- even if there is an unpublished keyboard shortcut to trigger it, I don't have to use such a shortcut in any other WM), and the behavior it does have is severely lacking.
For starters, you have to manually hover over the button hiding the feature to use it, and that button isn't on the edge of a window (worst-case for accessibility, per Fitts' Law). Additionally, its window-arranging features aren't capable of arranging more than 2 windows on the screen (you can't do it by quadrant like you can with other tilers), and it also puts them into full-screen mode so it both hides the menu bar and you can't easily just pull them out of the arrangement like you can with other WMs.
I don't believe there are currently any plans to fix this, and that might be just as well (the term 'Sherlocked' originates from Apple for a very good reason), but the fact that it took them 15 years to come up with a half-assed version of what Windows was doing in 2006 isn't actually that great a look.
If I were an engineer on Windows and I saw every day how take up of useful improvements I'd worked on were being held back because of the ego of this team I'd be livid. At what point does senior management step in to clean house?
Right so a location problem. Solved by placing this content in a more appropriate place, behind a button "offers and recommendations" or similar.
Turns out users don't want to be smacked in the face with a wet fish around every corner of the Windows UI. They want good IA and honestly helpful information. UX design is easy when tied to ethics.
Searching for Chrome in Windows is clear intent and should return Chrome first, followed by secondary results such as "other web browsers" and EDGE might be listed first, then competitor browsers. You can favor your own product while still being helpful & accurate.