Why is Windows 11 so annoying?
theverge.com
theverge.com
How on EARTH did people sign off on that? It's such an unbelievable usability issue.
Windows is an adequate operating system if one bothers to learn to use it properly.
Does having been a UX PM on Windows 11 on your resume actually help you or hinder you at this point?
Luckily there's a registry key to turn this crap off. I don't have it to hand right now but it's easy to find.
But yeah that doesn't excuse anything. Setting up a new windows now takes ages to decrap it.
That's useful to know - if I ever have to update my personal computer to 11. For my work computer, I've gotten used to using shift+right click to bypass the new (buggy, slow loading) right click menu and go straight to the old one
Once UI started with material design, hamburger, removing top menus, ribbons of icons, it has all been downhill.
They still care about the UI.
But Windows 7 was the last time our interests were aligned.
You have to picture it, no one stopped whoever did this.
Specifically, the older design allows shell extensions to register callbacks that must run — in some cases synchronously, on the UI thread — before a context menu displays.
In Windows 11, these "legacy" shell extension context menu callbacks need never run unless "Show more options" is chosen.
The "more options" menu duplicates items in the first because it's identical to the Windows 10 context menu (again, I assume, because compatibility).
What you describe actually makes it worse. The new menu takes over 2 seconds to open on my laptop. Enough to load a billion rows and perform calculations on them. It should to take 1 frame. I don't have any windows applications with context menus that even come close to being this slow.
If you cant change it the new menu should have the same look as the old one. If clicking "more options" duplicates the same functionality highlight the new options.
Have a configuration icon so that you can monitor how much people hate your new design.
Anyway, the new design is so bad they might as well put contextual advertisement in it.
reg.exe add "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32" /f /ve
That brings back the legacy right-click menu.
> There are some things that Windows does very well compared to macOS and Linux. All the games are there, for one thing, and Windows runs on all sorts of hardware without a lot of fiddling. You do not have to spend a thousand dollars minimum on a non-upgradable machine to use it. You also generally do not have to download a bunch of drivers or spend six hours in the command line hand-assembling the goddamn operating system.
But on Windows now it requires hunting through all kinds of really bad low-quality web pages to see if you can tweak some behavior that you are absolutely fed up & at the end of your rope with. Desperate to find some special registry setting you can fiddle with, or lately, use ViveTool/StagingTool to tweak incredibly opaque Feature IDs that might possible help. Windows has become the configuration nightmare that Linux was, and there's nothing remotely as comforting or capable as a command line there to help you scout shit out & try to improve things with; with Windows you're stranded & alone.
The author also clearly hasn't spent a lick of effort trying to install a vaguely modern end-user-centric distro in a decade. Nor are they aware that basically every game except Destiny 2 and Modern Warfare (and some others with particularly pernicious root-kitting anti-cheat software) runs great on Linux. My new years resolution was to stopping booting my desktop/gaming PC into Windows unless I need it, and it's been so lovely, games so near universally work, and things like playing a game while watching movie - where windows gives me 3 fps of movie - run butter smooth.
I think he was talking about the old Windows that he had.
That said, what this dude is complaining about can be turned off in the main settings panel. If people can't figure that out they have no business in Linux.
GUIs have limitations, decided by someone else. This is one reason I dislike them. The command line probably has its limits, too, but it's far more flexible than a GUI.
Mikhail Parakhin has accomplished more to destroy Microsoft's desk top OS monopoly than anyone else.
"Best of Breed" is Windows 7. It's been all downhill since there.
On the odd occasion that I must use Windows (and gets less and less each year) I use Windows 7 as a VirtualBox 'guest' on Linux.
If I didn't use HP software for multi-page scanning to PDF with my HP MFP, I wouldn't need Windows at all.
One had to write their own app, but it could take over start menu, explorer, and desktop. Is that still a thing? I made on (2003) it worked on Win2k and 98 IIRC.
Edit: the app has to have special entry points (not regular WinMain) and regedit a bunch to make it work.
Edit2: found this https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/18ipo7f/why_does...
Which points to https://cairoshell.com/
Awesome!
I used to run LiteStep, and I remember the one productivity feature it had over regular Windows was virtual desktops. Windows 10 natively supports those now, and I have mostly given up on all desktop eye candy things.
Is it me or has the quality of writing coming from the verge gone downhill in recent years? I remember they used to be awesome - but this statement alone made me uninterested in anything else the author had to say as it’s just factually incorrect.
Other than power user distros (arch, gentoo, etc) Linux has been one click install and ready to go just like windows for a decade (Ubuntu, fedora, etc) and provides a very good OOBE nowadays.
Also, once you remove “my laptop came with windows preinstalled” - yes you do spend time messing with drivers, a uniquely windows problem. If you’re lucky windows update will grab them all, but that’s still requiring user interaction. God forbid windows update doesn’t have it and you have to go hunting on the OEM’s website for it.
I wholeheartedly agree with their sentiment that windows has become a nuisance and I’d call it approaching unusable the more money Microsoft tries to extract from it, but the author/editor really should do research first before they try to write an eye catching sentence.
So my experience with Ubuntu and Fedora on a new Thinkpad T14s Gen 3 (AMD) laptop has been a mixed bag. Lenovo state that this is an Ubuntu supported notebook so everything should have been compatible with no tinkering but that was not my experience.
You're right, OOBE with distros today is good. But in day to day usage there were three very annoying problems:
1. The display flickers due to AMD's variable refresh rate feature (doesn't happen on Windows) - fixing this required a custom kernel with VRR disabled
2. The speakers sounded very quiet and anemic due to the laptop shipping with Dolby Atmos tuning - fixing this in Linux required installing Windows (which supports Atmos), recording a special diff file in Windows Audacity with Atmos tuning on/off and then importing that into PulseAudio on Ubuntu to give it the same speaker tuning profile
3. The trackpad scroll speed was way too fast and Gnome annoyingly offers no way to customize this - the solution is to edit one of the libinput-config files
Granted the big stuff like Wifi, Bluetooth, GPU, printing and sleep all worked perfectly - even Steam + Proton worked out the box with games like Arkham Knight and Witcher running as well as Windows but little issues like those three above required a good few hours of tinkering in the command line and make things frustrating enough that I think The Verge author's point stands.
This is how I feel with everything these days. Default computer operating systems are the pits. A lot of it was paved with good intentions; enable better user workflows, increase visibility, provide better default apps, that sorta thing. But now everything is a service, on every platform you use!
Spending time on Linux, I get exposed to nothing. No live-tiles, no news notifications, nobody asking me to Try the New Safari. It's just... a computer. I feel the author's culture-shock every time I hear a Mac or Windows user try and rationalize their $99/year to-do list app to me. Is this really where computers are headed for us, and humanity at large?
macOS has defaults that can be for power users, but you can find them and change them. Windows is actively trying to subvert your will at every turn. Ads in the start menu/explorer, forced updates, forced logins in the OOBE… It’s abhorrent! And so many workarounds you find online are dead, because they’re actively subverting your will.
On Windows and MacOS, you are the frog no matter what you do. The water is at different temperatures, but they are both heating up pretty fast.
Still, at the current temperature, macbooks make for good workstations IMO. I sometimes miss Linux but just haven't found comparable hardware, efficiency and utility.
Also a relief to have USB-C displays and other hardware just work, no battery drain when idle, etc.
I'm sure it's a close call though compared to a good x64 laptop with Linux though, especially with x64 slowly approaching ARM in terms of power efficiency.
The latest debacle around macOS and JVM was not a good look though.
I feel their moat is shrinking.
> sudo spctl --master-disable
Please do not disable Gatekeeper because you want to open apps from a keyboard shortcut instead of right click and open.
I dont need any hand holding or babysitting thank you very much.
Same with the useless UAC warning dialogs on Windows.
Gatekeeper was only implemented to scare mainstream Apple users into using their pile of shit App Store. And developers needing to spend cash and “notarize” their apps.
You can see the same discussion happening now with the iOS 3rd party stores. As if every 3rd party app was a potentially filled tonthe brim with “viruses”
Same with UAC, I used to foolishly disable it completely but one day I opened a sketchy app in a moment of stupidity and it escalated to install a bunch of malware. I never would’ve given it admin, since it didn’t need it, but I’d turned off the dialog. The dialog definitely would’ve been a wake up call.
It’s not always babysitting to have your computer go “hey does this seem right?” Especially when it’s designed like gatekeeper to get out of your way the second time.
This is true for a lot of the new protections. SIP is a really good thing. I can modify the system if I really need to, but I want to know for sure when that’s happening.
brew install git
brew install emacs --cask
But I was stressed about some work stuff so I quickly moved on to pulling my project's repo and getting back to work. A week later, my project goes absolutely berserk with warnings and failures, which trace back to files / lines that shouldn't exist.
Turns out, I had dropped my repo into a directory managed by Windows OneDrive, and OneDrive had backed everything up and subsequently decided (for some reason I still haven't figured out) to start restoring and reverting deleted / changed files. My realization of this began with "What the fuck is a OneDrive?" tl;dr it's Microsoft trying to sneakily take over all your data / force you into its cloud services. I'd actually briefly spotted the name and turned it off, but it had taken that to mean "until tomorrow", of course.
Anyway, it's on me, right? I was distracted and lazy. Sometimes it takes a good old mugging to get back in the right defensive mindset.
Many of the things people don't like in Windows 10 and 11 can be switched off from the Settings app.
This is why it takes so long to hire a decent group of people. It takes hundreds of hours to weed out people that would rather complain than find a solution, which is most of you, as you can see in this example.
Then why is it posted here?
This is a marketing post, in a place where it doesn't belong, complaining about marketing being where it doesn't belong.
Apparently that's lost on at least a few regulars. Or more likely, they are upset that we don't want to see their garbage here too
I appreciate it being posted, because I don't run stock windows, yet I deal with supporting many windows users. It's not something they'll raise with me if it's not completely breaking their workflow, so it's nice to know what is the latest badness I should be disabling.
I'm sorry, but pretending that something is difficult for however many paragraphs he stuffed into these ads is simply not good journalism. Let's ignore that he's complaining about ads in Windows, while writing an ad page.
Here's one: https://www.howtogeek.com/742414/how-to-disable-the-widgets-...
https://www.howtogeek.com/742414/how-to-disable-the-widgets-...