I felt a great disturbance in the force as if thousands of pen-testers and grey hats cried out in agony as their go to means of breaking enterprise networks was lost.
The moment Microsoft rolls out a "turn NTLM back on" checkbox, the internet will be flooded with "how to fix printer not working on Windows 11" articles that will linger at least as long as the stupid "just disable SELinux if you run into any kind of error" articles are sticking around.
I still think there was a lot of missed opportunity in Windows 8's implementation of UWP and still wonder what might have happened had it been given more time to iterate and more time to showcase its good sides.
(Also, Fitt's Law suggests that what's good for the touch goose is great for the mouse gander. Carefully thought out "touch screen-first" interfaces can be amazingly friendly to mouse users. Desktop users have become obsessed with reducing things down to the FPS equivalent of a "headshot" target area and have forgotten what early 640x480 Windows was like when even 32x32 pixel targets were the relative size of a barn door and much friendlier to newcomers, tired eyes/arms, and anyone in some state of different ability.)
I used Windows 8 on a laptop and it sucked. Windows 8.1 made the OS usable but it took until Windows 10 until I stopped being annoyed at the random mix between Windows and Windows Mobile UI controls. I still dislike how obviously touch-targeted the Windows applications I'll only ever interact with using a mouse are.
UWP itself was a better model in many ways, but the way they implemented them as a screen filling thing that took away your task bar was a mistake. The design language, which seems to be "make everything flat, make buttons difficult to recognise rectangles, add whitespace wherever you can", is something I'll probably never get over. I use a 1080p screen at 1x scaling, maybe I'm supposed to buy a 4k screen to make UWP feel less bloated?
I think the Windows 7 had perfectly fine mouse targets. I think the design matters too: when I was looking at a fake Windows 7 theme, I saw a picture of the X button independent of the title bar, and it felt weirdly large. Only when I dragged it up to the top right did I notice that the button was much larger than I remembered it being.
The touch targets could've been bigger (the OS was still optimised for stylus based touch screens) but Windows 10's tablet mode shows how that could've been resolved. I'm not suggesting we go back to the tiny buttons featured in Windows 2000, but I'd like to trade some modern whitespace back in for information density.
There are certainly parts of windows desktop apps with absurdly small click targets (have you tried to resize a window recently?) That doesn't mean desktop users are in favor of those.
Desktop users generally favor much more information dense interfaces that you can't achieve in a touch interface because the touch targets would be too small.
Can you design an interface that's great for both? Sure, but it's really difficult.
She might be a little slow to print, she might only speak PCL 5, she might have an external usb jet direct adapter…but she prints every time and never jams.