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Comment by anoonmoose | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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 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.

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).

They have since added the ability to do this.

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...

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.)

>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.

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.

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

This is false.

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.

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