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Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

That's interesting that it started reverting into Windows 10.

It makes you wonder how the thing is built. Like rather than modifying the code, Windows 11 is like a service that run on top of 10 and modifies a few UI things near the end of the startup process. Was that just some kind of hack due to time constraints? Or is the Windows codebase really that much of a delicate ecosystem when it comes to not breaking legacy software so they couldn't even modify the taskbar or file explorer without wrecking something?

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I developed windows during the Windows 10 timeframe. Although I left before windows 11 was conceived, it's painfully obvious that it is just a UI reskin on top of 10. This was preordained by certain organizational choices made during my time there; namely, that the "Shell" team responsible for the start menu, desktop, and other UI tidbits[0] was completely divorced from the rest of windows development, with their own business priorities and so on. This was the team responsible for Windows 8/.1, so as you can imagine they were somewhat sidelined during Windows 10 development. It appears they have their revenge, first and foremost from the promised-never-to-happen rebranding (whereby they jettisoned the Windows 10 brand which was an embarrassment for that team and that team only). That the result is only a reskinned 10 is the natural result because that is the only part of the product they have the authority or ability to change.

The Shell team was trying to push this same new UI during my whole time at Msft, with at least three cancelled attempts that I was aware of even from an IC perspective. By the end the embarrassment was contagious.

[0] Plus Edge, as part of the same vestigial business unit. This explains the central position of advertising in the reskin, because Edge in all of its forms was always meant to drive ad revenue. That is the distinct business priority I mentioned earlier, which sets this organization apart from Windows (NT,win32,etc.) development proper, which was shifted to Azure.

> Windows (NT,win32,etc.) development proper, which was shifted to Azure.

In what sense?

From what I've seen, there's been virtually no development of Windows for Azure. Most of its features are simply being dropped on the floor and are being replaced wholesale by things that aren't that integrated.

Recently, I was required to use a PC that had Windows 11 on it. I tried to set it up like the rest of my computers, which involves moving the task bar from the bottom of the screen to the side, which I've done for years in Windows.

Yeah, W11 doesn't support that. If you do some digging you'll find MS claiming it's a large technical lift that they have no current plans to do.

What does this mean with regards to your question? Not much. But that regression in functionality, in an area that every other OS I use supports and has supported for years, definitely suggests the thing is a hack. In my humble uninformed opinion.

They have since added the ability to do this.

Do you have a link? It seems it still requires a 3rd party app.

The location of the Windows 11 taskbar cannot be set through any UI options. They do not officially support changing the location of the taskbar according to available documentation. The upgrade message inside Windows 10 explicitly calls out this deficiency along with other before continuing. There are registry hacks that change the location, but this is unsupported.

Docs: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/how-to-use-the-t...

>registry hacks that change the location, but this is unsupported.

I am imagining the dire warning next to this prompt. Don't rewire the position of the taskbar or your computer just might catch a virus.

In other words, it seems they removed the UI to change it but left the underlying code alone, presumably because it's an easier change and they want to judge how much people would complain first (before, possibly, later re-enabling the UI to do it and praising themselves for how much better they've made things.)

I just looked into this like...last week, and couldn't find anything, and if it's possible without third-party add-ons, I'd be extremely surprised. But I won't consider that to be the case until I see a link with instructions that work.

This is false.

Isn't it pretty well known that every other version of Windows is a badly-done flop?

98/2000 were great, ME wasn't, XP was great, Vista was awful, 7 was great, 8 was really awful, 10 is excellent, 11 is therefore almost certainly one to skip.

I'm kind of surprised so many people are installing Windows 11, given the history (and the fact that it doesn't support common CPUs like the Intel i5). I'll just wait for W12.

Not sure if true, but it’s always felt like the flops were just a new GUI skin on top of the previous good OS. Mostly in weird ways because they end up trying to redesign some things they already got right.

Vista was pretty good on decent hardware especially after it's SP1. Most of the troubles came from OEMs putting it on hardware it should not have been on and MS allowing that. It's other source of troubles was changing up the driver model in big ways and companies like Nvidia not being ready in the beginning. I built my first PC after Windows 7 came out. However some peice of hardware in there caused W7 to blue screen after about 5 minutes use every time. Vista though was rock solid and I honestly ended up liking it's desktop more than W7, only thing I missed was window snapping.

Windows 11 also supports i5s...It just doesn't support i5s from 6 years ago, nor i7s from then.

It does indeed support common CPUs like the Intel i5 (and a bunch of others I forgot existed): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/mi...

But if you're referring to lack of official support for 9th gen and older CPUs, then it is indeed a pain in the butt. Plenty of valid computers losing official support because reasons is a travesty, but at least W10 is still getting updates for a while I guess? FWIW I have a PC with an i7-7700 and no TPM running W11 for the heck of it, and it runs fine, but it wasn't happy about it. This is just the TV PC, so nothing critical; I wouldn't do this on anything even remotely important.

Yeah, I'm certain it'd run just fine if I force-installed it despite the warning. The only ways I can think of that they could possibly screw it up so badly that it wouldn't work would surely have also been noticed by people with newer CPUs.

But it's a good enough reason not to jump to an 'off' release. Why bother going to all the trouble of installing something you don't even want, when it gives you the easy out of claiming it's incapable of running?

Still annoying that they blacklisted perfectly serviceable hardware that has years of life left. I'm not a fan of the "everything's disposable, programmed obsolescence" stuff. And I know these CPUs are still being sold and used (because they are still plenty usable and can meet almost everyone's needs).

> Isn't it pretty well known that every other version of Windows is a badly-done flop?

Kind of, yes, but also kind of no.

> 98/2000 were great, ME wasn't, XP was great, Vista was awful, 7 was great, 8 was really awful, 10 is excellent, 11 is therefore almost certainly one to skip.

Actually, AFAICS under the top-layer gloss of the shell W2K, XP, Vista, and W7 were all pretty much NT4. As long as you set "Use Windows 2000 UI" or whatever the option may have been called in the Control Panel, you were golden...

Except that some UI-tweaking options were beginning to disappear from Vista or W7 onwards. You could still set your Window Border Width to 0 (in stead of the GUI control minimum of 1) in the Registry, for example -- but if you then changed some other UI element setting in the GUI control, the width got reset to 1, so you had to reapply your Registry hack after each change.

Not sure if it works in Windows 11 yet, but Classic Start Menu is a prerequisite of mine on all Windows PC's I use for any length of time.

That kind of comports with how the UI in windows has behaved from 98>XP>7>8>10. In 10, you get the windows 10 UI on most of your top-level interfaces, but once you dive into a sub-menu you get some legacy UI and if you dig down deep enough you get UI from what feels like windows 98.

Weirdly enough, that's one of the things that originally made me want to explore options outside windows.

The mobile ecosystem kept changing and taking you into new experiences (even before smartphones). Meanwhile, a Windows desktop never felt like something new. Just a layer of paint over the old creaky house.

I even remember a 'smartphone' of sorts I had before android was a thing, which run windows phone: They literally shoved the desktop version there, I remember not being able to click buttons even with a stylus because the ui was so small for the device. The most popular app was some weird dragon themed overlay that, lo and behold, gave it finger-sized buttons.

It's just some moldy old bits of UI, the actual Windows kernel itself has evolved substantially over the years.

That's the sad thing. The core of windows is pretty good. It's just the mismanagement and shell that's a shit show.

It wasn't "Windows Phone", it was Windows Mobile or Pocket PC 2000. All the releases of Windows Phone definitely didn't have a UI like the regular desktop version of Windows and only existed after the release of Android.

Yes, you’re right! Windows mobile, I totally forgot about the actual windows phone, that came later.

It is definitely a common mixup. Microsoft really dropped the ball on having a consistent product and a consistent name in their mobile play.

> Meanwhile, a Windows desktop never felt like something new.

Well. There was plenty of "new" UI enhancements over the years which I resisted as much as possible. Imagine a meme of Garth from Wayne's World, "We fear change..."

I always hated the more smooth and colorful Windows XP theme. Computers back then were resource constrained enough that you'd notice the fact that it wasn't "free". It wasn't until Windows 10 that I stopped trying to make the shell look as much like Win2k as possible. The extra UI eye candy on modern systems is as near as matters "free" now, as long as you have plenty of RAM.

Now I am just trying to make Windows 11 look as much like Windows 10 as possible.

> Now I am just trying to make Windows 11 look as much like Windows 10 as possible.

Same. Start11 goes a long way, but still lots of annoying stuff in W11.

The extra UI eye candy on modern systems is as near as matters "free" now, as long as you have plenty of RAM.

I'm not sure there's much "eye candy" in modern UI anymore, given the regression to completely flat, sometimes even borderless UI elements starting in Win8.

I mean. Win10 looks really goddamned fancy compared to Win2k. =)

No, W10 looks butt-ugly compared to W2K.

It's worse. There's some windows 3.1 hiding in the ODBC configuration...

https://imgur.com/XOmCyEG

Is this still there in Win 11 2022?

Just checked. It is.

I am not surprised - I feel like I was marveling over some similar ODBC dialog back in 2009.

An 'old' settings dialog in Windows is usually to support old drivers who still want/need to extend that dialog with driver specific options. You will probably still see it in the network settings too if you dig deep enough

Did you intentionally skip Vista?

Funny how I totally forgot that one existed. The only time I saw it in use was a friend's laptop. And it was laggy like hell and he soon installed XP.

Dare I say it, but Vista ran pretty well on the PC I bought that was eligible for the free 7 upgrade program.

It was pretty late in the game. I suppose 2 service packs and a couple of generations of hardware improvements helped.

Ye, maybe it was just too bloated for the machines at release time which wrecked its reputation.

And Windows Me.

Yeah, especially around Control Panel legacy stuff. It's so odd.

Windows is built like my old apartment was decorated. 20 layers of paint over the top of mouldy wallpaper.

The new (and IMHO horrible) context menu in Explorer is exactly that.

You can even see the old one show up for a fraction of a second before the new one takes its place, and as further evidence, the trick to revert to the old one is to prevent the COM object of the new one from loading and replacing it:

https://pureinfotech.com/bring-back-classic-context-menu-win...

(For some inexplicable reason, many of the sites that show you how to revert it say the new one is an "improved experience". If it was, why would people be reading articles about how to revert it?)

The Windows 11 GUI was originally meant for a version of Windows called "Windows 10X", which was intended for low-powered devices that would compete with Chromebooks (hence the simplified, touch-centric design of the UI). Windows 10X was supposed to be a "legacy-free" OS that only ran UWP programs natively. Rather than using GDI, Win32, Explorer, etc. it used a brand new UI stack built on DirectX. This means that it required a compatibility layer to run Win32 programs, which were isolated from the OS. In mid-2021, Microsoft announced that they were cancelling Windows 10X in favor of bringing some of its features to regular Windows.

This is speculation but I would guess that MS didn't want to waste all of the design work that went into Windows 10X, so they ported the new UI over to Windows 10 and used the opportunity to bump up the OS minimum requirements and drop 32-bit support. This would explain why Windows 11 feels like a bunch of junk built on top of Windows 10.

It is a pretty big hack. I seem to recall in 11 (at least around RTM time, maybe not now) that if explorer.exe died then all the windows lost their rounded corners. There was definitely a dev build where if the start menu crashed (also explorer.exe I think) the windows 10 one would reappear, although that might’ve just been because during development they shipped both start menus.

Turtles all the way down.

Windows boots from some DOS and File I/O BIOS interrupts.

Not true since the Win 9x days.

Was 2000 already NT and free of DOS?

Yes, it was the direct successor of NT 4.0. Windows 2000 was still an OS aimed at the "professional" market, though. XP was the first consumer/mainstream oriented OS based on NT.

I used Win2000 as my main desktop for about 3-4 years back in the day. Very stable.

I used win2k for like 10 years and continued to play games it as well. I was able to ride on the XP coat tails because between the two, there were only a handful of win32 APIs that were not implemented in 2000. I ended up having to patch a few DLLs to ignore these missing endpoints, but it meant I could use legitimately the best windows there ever was for a few more years. Eventually I "upgraded" to windows 7 to get reasonable driver support because manufacturers finally stopped shipping 2k compatible drivers.. what a sad day that was.

PC Magazine had the weird idea of shipping a CD-ROM of the Beta release. Having an obsession to try anything I decided to replace win98 with this thing (I had no idea what NT was).

It was so lean, fast and stable that I never used anything else until the day XP had some drivers that were absolutely necessary to use my desktop. 99% of low level crashes would just pop up a notification and nothing more, it was insane.

Windows 2000 was an NT release, but Windows Millenium Edition (Me) was the last generally released DOS-based desktop OS released by Microsoft. Windows Me was released after Windows 2000 by a few months.

Right, I meant to ask for Me, as it was after 9x and still DOS, or?

Maybe pre-UEFI, but the UEFI boot process is completely different.

MS-DOS has never been used in Windows NT and its descendant operation systems to support booting.

Prior to Windows Vista the real mode code in the MBR loads NTLDR[0] which switches to protected mode and runs osloader.exe to boot the kernel. Post-Vista this is handled by the BOOTMGR[1] bootloader.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTLDR

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booting_process_of_Windows_NT_...

Windows NT and the systems based on it are not based on MS-DOS, but use a virtual machine, NTVDM, to handle the DOS API.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_API

Games like Doom still run on Windows because of this DOS virtualization.

Indeed, which has nothing to do with booting.

No it doesn’t. UEFI boots into bootmgr.efi, which loads up winload, which loads either ntoskrnl or hyperv

That's only true of the lineage commonly known as "9x" that actually started at Windows/386 and ended with Windows Me. Those OSs are actually hypervisors that "hyperjack" MS-DOS when booted and then run DOS and the "user mode" of Windows in VMs. The NT line has always been distinct from that and is a traditional OS architecture.

That's how Object Oriented Programming works.

It's also how our brains work. Existing parts of the brain remain, they just get overridden here and there by new layers added on. Sometimes the original rat brain takes over. If you've ever gone into a blind rage, for example, that's the rat brain asserting itself.

My Surface go 3 came with W11 looking like W10 (except the start menu/task bar). That confused me a lot (old right click, old settings). It came win W11 Home so I did a fresh W11 Pro installation (which for some reason accepts the built in key and is activated) and everything looked like W11.

> It makes you wonder how the thing is built.

No one really knows, and Cutler won't say or doesn't know, himself.

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