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Comment by devinmcafee | Hacker News Reader

This appears to be a mirror of OSX with the floating taskbar at the bottom with center aligned app icons, this is exactly how OSX has the dock configured. Also the system info in the top right.

I wonder if the team over at Microsoft is trying to match the look and feel of OSX in order to shorten the gap between the two operating systems and reduce friction of switching between the two.

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Rather than copying macOS, phone UIs come to mind. Your bar at the top with info, dock at the bottom of the homescreen with shortcuts. It's felt like phones were taking over for a while. You could perhaps argue that iOS and Android UI design was influenced by older Mac OS versions originally, I guess.

My thoughts exactly. Scale the whole thing down and you have a tablet friendly UI forced upon desktop users. Yuck!

> This appears to be a mirror of OSX with the floating taskbar at the bottom with center aligned app icons,

It looks worse because for no reason at all they have a gap at the bottom. You can bet that it will be click-through, so you have to actually aim with your mouse instead of just bringing the mouse down tho the bottom.

Honestly this more reminds me of the floating panels in KDE Plasma: https://9to5linux.com/kde-plasma-5-25-beta-is-here-with-floa...

I think they just have no ideas of their own and cloning macOS is a reasonable default choice.

If I had to guess, I would say that the designers who have been in charge of Windows for years are twenty-something year olds who have never used Windows in their lives.

Since the Win11 taskbar "redesign" I'm also 100% convinced of that. They also don't use mouse and keyboard it seems (touchpad/touchscreen only).

That was also my guess given the massive flaws they never bothered to fix. Like search is unusable in windows. Clearly they are not consuming their own product.

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