Windows 11 update breaks PCs that dare sport a custom UI

I’m done with Windows. I’m tired of my computer being hostile to me. On Monday, I tried to take a screenshot and was instead presented with an advertisement to store my screenshots on OneDrive. My screenshot button stopped working after that until I did a reboot. It’s not the only thing that has just randomly broken, either. I often can’t even type into the start menu’s search box until I reboot.

The settings menu is a complete fucking joke with only half the settings being available in the new UI and needing to summon the Windows 7 menu to change things. And that’s assuming it can be edited in a menu instead of being an undocumented field inside the giant binary blob they call the Registry. I used to be able to adjust volume per-program by clicking the volume icon, but now it’s behind three or four menus in the system settings.

I spend far more time debugging random broken bullshit on my Windows PC at home than my Linux machine at the office. It’s driving me mad.

I got bit by this yesterday on one of my ThinkPads. I've been using Explorer Patcher just to be able to get back to a less tall taskbar. It's simply bonkers that in Windows 11 they removed the "small icons" option in the taskbar. I like my thin taskbar, thank you.

What happened was similar to what's described in the article: after starting up, the taskbar would appear and disappear in an infinite loop.

The immediate fix was to do a hard reset by holding down the power button. (I don't remember if I just had to do this once or multiple times.) On startup, Windows offered some recovery options, and in the advanced section was an option to uninstall the last quality update. Did that and it's up and running again.

One odd thing was that my other ThinkPad didn't have this problem. Perhaps I'd updated Explorer Patcher on that one before installing the Windows update?

I trigger murphy's law with the last win 10 update. Non of the applications had internet access but after rebooting Edge worked for about 5 min 30 seconds. The internet tab of settings crashed, the drivers required further installation (I tried every driver up to the newest one), the repair usb couldn't repair it, the restore point was unable to restore. etc etc nothing worked. It was a lot of fun honestly.

The Ethernet port on my Thinkpad workstation thunderbolt 3 dock simply stopped working after upgrading to Windows 11. From reading online its a known issue without any obvious fix. Killed the port so bad that it stopped working in Linux as well.

Well, at least that was until the dock had been unplugged from the power for a couple of weeks. The Ethernet port sprung back to life when I booted my laptop straight into Linux. I don't dare boot into Windows 11 again whilst docked.