I am still looking forward for the option to ungroup task bar buttons, preferably with titles. Again! Something that was there before, worked, and was useful. But some designer decided we don't need that, to the bin with it!
A real shame, because they showed with Windows 7 that they can redesign the OS UI without giving up features from earlier versions if they want to. Bugs like "the task bar is 20 pixels taller on my second screen" wouldn't have come up if they'd stuck to restyling their old code base.
I find Microsoft's modern designs very comparable to the GNOME designs, in that they're eager to remove common features to build an overarching operating system theme. I like GNOME's design, much more than Windows 11's, but I don't think taking directions from a heavily criticised DE is the right move.
I am a gnome2 person, KDE, win7, etc type UI, if I wanted a mac I would buy a mac.
There was a post on here a few months ago from a former MS engineer talking about how a large part of MS design team were all MAC users.
Enterprise is still king, and we here in Enterprise Ops are not happy. Microsoft needs to remember where its money comes from, and it is not jr webdevs
If you're afraid to or don't want to pay for software then you should probably use some variant of GNU/Linux instead.
I think his use of the term "pirate" was confusing.
I think the parent was assuming only legal options.
If that's not a constraint, then food, cars, etc. are also free.
Also, taking someone's car or food deprives them of them. Making a copy of Windows doesn't make it impossible for Microsoft to keep selling it.
I only use it to mean illegal copying.
Frankly this mindset is ludicrous to me and yet I see this with MacOS users too who happily pay for third party solutions to first-party breakage on stuff you already paid for. Somehow the more you spend the less customizable software is and the even more you have to spend to work around dumb choices.
I'm going against the mindset of not paying for software in general, no matter how useful it is to you.
For me personally, I'm more than happy to pay for software if it's clear the developer has _my_ interests in mind when building it (think IDEs, CAD software, even stuff like Office or the Adobe suite). I'm also OK with using software that's free and dealing with dark patterns (shareware, online tools) or bugs (open source stuff).
But paid software that somehow still tries to bilk me for even more money? (See all of the ads that have been built into Windows these days, or various Android phones and bloat) I will be more than happy to go out of my way to crack and get out of paying for it, for nothing but to spite developers of such things. You can't have your cake and eat it too!
total blunder imo but I think most people are just happy it's not as screwed up as whatever the hell Windows8 was
for me personally besides the common complaints just getting to the weather widget is now a huge microannoyance that drives me up the wall
Now they’ve gone and half-baked that design in new software and it’s less intuitive, eg clicking file menu item and a whole new screen appears.
Any other Windows UI even as far back as Windows 1 is better than the piece of hot, useless garbage that was Windows 8.
Flow A: hit a button, a menu with text input and pictures shows up
Flow B: hit a button, a full screen with text input and pictures shows up
A is perfect, and B is "practically unusable".
On a desktop computer. More than likely with (a) monitor(s) big enough to occupy an entire desk.
The Start Screen was fucking horrible all around, and its horribleness was proven with the immediate resurrection of the Start Menu and demise of the Start Screen in Windows 8.1.
Metro also met a similar demise because it forced a black-and-white, no delimiter UI upon desktop computers. Computers equipped with GPUs and monitors capable of rendering billions of colors with huge screen real estate.
Some of Metro's baggage is still with us, but I welcome Windows 11's slow move back towards a colorful Windows UI.
I recall when they did this to Visual Studio.
They completely removed all colors from all of the icons, making it impossible to pick out one from another and making once familiar icons by color a hunt-and-peck operation to find.
It was all just black and white. Then, due to feedback, they relented and put color back on all the icons.
It was madness.
The problem with Visual Studio was the sudden removal of color changed people's "muscle memory" on where certain items were on a complex toolbar or menu system. I have no idea who thought that was a good idea, but some design team decided they were going with it, and they did.
When everything suddenly went black and white, it was impossible to quickly distinguish one thing from the next.
They reverted the decision and suddenly all the colored icons came back and it was once again easier to quickly pick things out.
I mean, people freaked out when they changed just the VS Code icon:
https://visualstudiomagazine.com/blogs/data-driver/2017/10/v...
B can yield a minor mental context switch, with no good reason for doing so.
The most sold app in their crappy app store was a 20USD classic start menu.
Instead, probably because at that time they brought in people with no history in the Windows org to manage the Window org, we got a 10+ year decline of Windows that has accelerated in recent years.
And Win7 barely changed anything.
I have 3 16x9 monitors.
Why do I have to use 16*3 width of my screen for the taskbar when 1 vertical taskbar in 1 screen is enough?
There has been some usability turndowns for me in the past years, but two things keep me hooked: snap windows (built in) and powertoys (ms-made but requires an install). I can't imagine myself without these two anymore.
But after a week of Windows 11's "grouped" taskbar buttons I risked reinstalling explorer patcher and it worked fine.
What's the point of having a taskbar that only groups by app...This has been one of the major pain points of me using Mac OS and it is immensely sad that Windows 11 has also taken this approach. At least some Linux DEs still let me keep my app windows ungrouped...
Unluckily in Windows the taskbar became more essential than the dock in macOS for switching windows - on Mac I use the dock to start new instances or quitting the app (differing philosophy of window and app lifetime between mac and win), not much of a switching - and then they ruined this essential taskbar thing without good alternative on Windows (Ctrl + Tab is more like a complementary thing than alternative).
I almost always have many windows that would have thumbnails essentially indistinguishable from each other (think text editors, file managers, terminal prompts etc.)
So I use the task bar as almost like a system wide "tab" interface. Grouping stuff into the app icon is terrible because I can't easily tell if I have a window of the type I want already open. I don't click on the taskbar items to navigate, rather I use them to check what is already open so I can quickly keyboard switch to them.
The Win11 UI completely breaks this workflow so now I either need to do a linear search to flip through all windows, or pull up either the task view or hover menu above the app icon, and pray I can tell apart the huge grid of identical window thumbnails.
I have two browser profiles and no matter what I do they come up as separate tasks on the task bar.. I am not able to group them up.
I would also like to alt tab to them as a whole, then tab between the group windows instead.
Luckily win11 is just a game launcher for me these days, so I only manage to get so and so aggravated :D