Windows 12 Plans Reveal a Bold Redesign, Tighter Security, AI-Powered Features
hothardware.com
hothardware.com
As far as I'm concerned, whoever is running Windows has lost their minds. I have no idea why someone considers the wild garlic festival to be important enough to put directly on my desktop.
I'm not gaming much at the moment so the last reason to stay on Windows has gone. It's really just down to laziness which is keeping me on it.
And you learned a little something that you didn't know before. It cost you nothing. You got a little drawing of garlic in your search bar. That cost you nothing too.
I personally enjoy the little search bar illustrations and the rotating login screen background with the "did you know" style button. It's nice. Not everything has to be all serious all the time.
> To show the enjoyable garlic festival fact, a crucial component of the operating system's user interface must either actively poll for content or receive pushes automatically. Why would I want such a significant security risk?
If this is a "significant security risk" in your threat model for your gaming machine, I hope you're not multiplayer gaming, or using Steam.
The long version is that - while it is true that loading a small image is a strictly speaking unnecessary risk - it is such a small risk as to be negligible to most security postures. In particular, OP mentioned that they use Windows only for gaming, so we have to take into account that:
1. They probably use Steam, or another launcher. All such launchers download a bunch of stuff on startup - in particular, Steam loads like 8 pages of ads for new games on startup. As Steam sometimes/often requires admin privileges, this is at least as much of a risk as the garlic image.
2. They probably play multiplayer games, which semi-frequently have RCE exploits. I think it's also fair to say that they're also generally subjected to less-rigorous analysis than the Microsoft Windows kernel.
There's no reasonable security posture in the world that sees those two things as acceptable risks on one hand, but sees a small image in the taskbar as unacceptable on the other.
So, to argue that a small icon in the search bar represents "significant security risk" and that the people running Windows have "lost their minds" is hyperbolic at best. At worst, you're kind of just looking for things to not like. (Minor edit: I just noticed that it was two different users that said those things, but I think the point still stands)
Sure, it's not a necessary part of the operating system, but it's just a nice little thing that occasionally brightens my day, and costs me nothing when it doesn't. I don't think that's narrow-minded, is it?
Once you know "this is just a little curiosity button", it's easy enough to ignore if you're not into that.
(Today's is in reference to van Gogh's 170th birthday, which is a nice little "oh!" moment, but not one I clicked through to see more)
None of those clickable features in the Taskbar open your default browser, they all open Edge.
Even one stupid garlic ad is one too many.
Microsoft seems to have just abandoned the idea of a desktop operating system and is just assuming everything is a tablet or has a touch screen going forward.
It is an absolutely bonkers move for the company that built its Windows and Office empire off of the enterprise desktop.
For those losing count, Windows 8 introduced WinRT with three UI models (phone/tablet/desktop), Windows 8.1 introduced UAP and reduced the UI models to 2 (phone/tablet and desktop), Windows 10 introduced UWP and merged all UI models into a universal one (U in UWP).
.NET Native and C++/CX were introduced as a reboot of the Windows platform where COM takes again the center stage, as if .NET as such never happened and we got the evolution of VB 6 instead.
Due to lack of update, and multiple rewrites, they came up with WinUI 3.0 and WinAppSDK, which dropped .NET Native and C++/CX, .NET and C++/WinRT are still lacking versus the former in Visual Studio tooling for WinUI development, WinUI 3.0 is still years behind UWP features, many key people that used to be in the community calls have either left Microsoft, or moved into Azure.
Now they are rebooting it yet again? Good luck convincing those of us that had enough from this mismanagement.
Even if I wanted to update the UI components, Microsoft's documentation is such a mess from having multiple diverging UI paradigms, I can't figure it out.
I think it was just them wanting to push their stores and auth solutions and all this crappy overhead.
And yes, I still use Winforms for some internal tooling. I did my WPF tour as well...
There is not a single user in our whole company that uses touch on a Windows PC. Just give it up...
So I did gave up, my comments are more a heads up to make others aware how WinDev managed to kill the advocacy of the most passionate people regarding WinRT tooling.
In the paste decade, VS just got more and more bloated and lots of cosmetic works...
Applications that work and look good in Windows 11 are likely to look good in Windows 12. It doesn't look like a reboot at all and more in line with the regular changes that we have seen within Windows 10 between the larger updates.
I recall reading an article here on HN about how that was now a better developer experience for building UIs than writing native apps, with extra bonus that if you want to port, you can.
But Windows 10 and Windows 11 just made me trying hard to find excuses not to move on, exactly the opposite they probably have expected.
https://www.techradar.com/news/leaked-screenshot-could-be-an...
If it's real, it looks similar to iPadOS. Even with the less than successful endeavors of WinRT and Windows Phone (Phone was actually pretty cool), I feel Microsoft has never truly lost their desire to converge on a single desktop environment for desktop and mobile.
We see this at Apple too though - there's a lot of dismay over macOS converging with iOS and iPadOS in recent releases. What are the key reasons for it? More unified codebase? Just to make everything look the same?
I will always see desktops and mobile as separate tools that should have separate UIs, so these kinds of changes bum me out.
It also is unnecessarily using space that I'd rather have for apps (not everyone has a high resolution monitor) and to my eye looks rather ugly.
Definitely agree with you on the criticism of centered icons too, the position of items is now dynamic depending on how many icons are open which as you say is bad for muscle memory.
There should be user studies being continuously done to converge on the best UI. A/B test the hell out of it and make it a science. Instead I get the feeling that it's ad-hoc with designers wanting to both leave a mark and copy macOS.
Honestly, that looks like GNOME with screen-wide dock thingy, which is hilarious.
>We see this at Apple too though - there's a lot of dismay over macOS converging with iOS and iPadOS in recent releases. What are the key reasons for it? More unified codebase? Just to make everything look the same?
Yeah, all the desktop makers lost their minds in pursuit of the most overrated metric of our age, 'efficiency', and all of them made terrible API design decisions as a result; SwiftUI is still starkly impoverished relative to AppKit, etc.
And this sums up my attitude to Windows now.
XP : Good | Vista : Bad | 7 : Good | 8 : Bad | 10 : Good | 11 : Bad | 12 : Good??
Maybe even made it such at a license is for 5 years and you'll need to renew at the end of the period if you want updates.
With something like an OS I do not want bold redesigns every other year.
A bold "about the same design" would be very nice.
Haha, just like Win 98: Most secure Windows ever. And in the mean time the only security it offers is against the user. Ransomware runs just fine.
I seem to be lucky enough to dodging whole disk being wiped by an update, but still I experienced more than enough nuisances. The most significant ones were UI changes. Those were just changes to change without any obvious benefits but broke lots, lots of things. Put all those small little annoying bugs, I noticed those core utilities once rock solid started to corrupt.
For Windows 10, once I had to manually set the IP address as I had to change some settings on one of my routers in bridge mode, it turned out all 3 UIs (traditional GUI, new metro UI and command line) were broken. Eventually I had to combine two of them to get the job done. Also, the disk management utilities were broken too while I was trying to clean wipe one of my boot thumb drives for something else, which forced me to do it in Linux.
For Windows 11, it's even worse. It first silently updated one of my computers to it, I did not like those huge buttons in the task bar, so changed the registry but the alignment was wrong, so I rolled it back. Soon I bought a new surface pro for my kid which came with 11. It looked okay but less than one week later, a update was installed, and the external monitor started to blink. So I uninstalled the update, but the whole system was screwed up, so I had to downgrade to Windows 10. A couple of months later, I bought another laptop came with 11 too. It was okay until yesterday after another update. Edge was slowed down so much that can take 30s just to switch to another tab. Tried all different settings, uninstalled the update, none worked. I virtually figured out why just minutes ago. So all the URL screening sh*ts which were previously turned off now back on. Once I turned off those, it finally returned normal.
Probably it's time for me to ditch Windows once and for all after over two decades.
The pipes and stream automation, previously reserved to linux devs, could now become a normal user experience, encapsulated by prompts and gui application pipes. But thats not were they want to go. So others will. Once any other OS starts to have that (linux or macos) productivity there will skyrocket, and its the end of days for windows.
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2015/03/02/a-firs...
The difference now is that .NET Native and C++/CX are gone, and WinUI 3.0 / WinAppSDK, still aren't at feature parity level, lack a designer, form validation, maps, and plenty of other stuff.
They burned most of the bridges with hardcore UWP advocates (like myself), so who do they expect will care for Windows 12 besides WinDev themselves?
"Let's change everything around, that way we can tout it as 'different and new' even though it's still the same old crap under the bonnet."
Coincidentally I just tried again today and the scanning story on Ubuntu has improved a bit . Setup is still a bitch but once it's there it's almost as productive as scanning on windows.
I am not saying Linux is a gaming OS. But you can passtrough your grafics card to a VM so there is literally no reason to run native Windows for gaming for years now.
Except windows is the thing you like, I don't judge.
How reliable/trivial/performant is that, conceding that's its possible, e.g. will I get equal results running Cyberpunk 2077 on a 4090 at 4K with RT as on Windows?
// sorry for the lack of text, I really have no words... I say this as someone who genuinely likes Win 11. Win12 is shaping up to be a huge wtf, if any of it is true.