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Comment by xunil2ycom | Hacker News Reader

All I want from Microsoft with respect to Windows 11 is the ability to put my task bar on the left side of my screen again.

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How about opening Explorer windows in less than a second (or at least 5)?

Or being able to customize the Explorer context menu. They were on the right track by pushing the old context menu into a separate second menu. But they should allow the user to select what shows in the primary menu instead of the seemingly random stuff that shows there.

There are a couple of alternatives to try. Scott Hanselman reviewed them here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDUQrC5YxT0

FilePlot is very quick.

Yeah my Amiga 500 from 1987 was faster at that lol

Ps I do absolutely hate the split of the context menu in two parts because many frequent operations have now become two clicks instead of one. Luckily it can be switched off at home but sadly not on my work laptop. I didn't imagine any power user would be happy with what change.

I think the idea of having a primary context menu that pushes less important stuff into the second menu was good and long needed. But it needs to be user customizable so you can control what you really want. Instead we have a primary menu with random stuff and a secondary menu with other random stuff. I don't know how they manage Windows these days but whoever does it, has no interest/competence in making things better.

Hmm fair enough, yes if I could pick the items it would make a lot more sense. Especially stuff like the send to submenu I would never use.

On the admin side it's gotten worse. Working in IT and having to support Windows 11 through Active Directory is a nightmare now. MS has removed almost all admin control in favor of user choice forcing us into workarounds and hacks to get most things working. It also seems evident they would like Active Directory to go away in favor of their cloud options which are horrible slow and clunky.

> having to support Windows 11 through Active Directory is a nightmare now. MS has removed almost all admin control in favor of user choice

What does that mean - group policy has many fewer policies? Why would Microsoft do that - it is only used in organizations with IT departments, and they definitely want to automate and lock down configuration.

From what I have seen they are just not creating any new policies really for group policy and they are mostly developing intune.

erh you can do this somehow,I did it to mine?

now what _I_ want, is to be able to resize the taskbar again.

also, I would prefer win11 didn't disable just about everything I had configured, particularly preview for file types. and - I dont know how they did it, but basic file explorer view feels much slower than win10,on the same machine. given that file explorer is basically all windows boils down to, i am not happy that they tske efforts to make it crappier. and given that win95 was able to show a file grid in 1995, I wonder how they are able to screw that up, 30 years later?

You are a dreamer.

I'd settle for having the real taskbar shown in Teams screen sharing instead of having the time rolled back to the time Teams started, or something.

When I dare I dream of proper renaming experience inside of a OneDrive folder, without overriding me while typing. But that must be too much for the developers nowadays, unbearable difficulty! Me the humble servant of MS might must shut up.

let's not even open the conversation on Teams. The fact that so many businesses (including my employer) run their fundamental activities on such a piece of shit BLOWS MY MIND. I'm sure there's some cool tech and lots of smart MS developers who are proud of contributions or features, but I don't think I'd put on my resume that I was focused on Teams. It's loathed by a lot of people and at best tolerated by the rest. Nobody would voluntarily inflict Teams on people they care about.

Does windows classic (open) shell not work on Windows 11? I use it all the time on 10 and have the task bar on the right side.

I want mine on the right. I don't understand how something that was possible in 10, isn't in 11.

Someone had the smart idea to re-write the taskbar and when they did, they did the modern take where they tried to strip every feature they didn't think was important enough to stop someone from buying the upgrade. Over the last 3 years a hand full of features have come back but even those re-implementations have been a poor replication at best.

I'd put a dollar on it being due to tracking mouse behavior — if they want to cheaply track clicks & movement for the sake of advertisers, their surveillance needs to be as low-powered as possible.

Windows has lost UI customization in every release since at least XP. RIP hotdog stand.

It's not a 100% solution, and paid (dirt cheap though), closed source, but as I also have my monitor in landscape mode, I use https://startallback.com

I’d like be able to uninstall Edge which, as of earlier today, isn’t possible without fairly focussed time consuming effort.

It hasn't been possible for ages. I haven't tried on 11 but on 10 you can switch your region to somewhere in the EU and that will allow you to delete the folders. I couldn't get the actual uninstaller to run, and I'm not sure if it will come back in the next update after the region has been switched back, but this is the only method I found that worked.

I use Explorer Patcher for this, works well enough (though I had to uninstall it to update windows then reinstall it)

Or top, I like my taskbar being on top

WindHawk mod can do this. Made by the same dev as Win7+ Taskbar Tweaker

Not sure if this is a joke or not, but you can right-click the taskbar, click taskbar settings, and under the "Taskbar behaviors" tab there's a "Taskbar alignment" drop down with options "Left" and "Center.

This does not move the taskbar. This aligns the icons on the taskbar, which stays at the bottom of the screen.

Their best bet is to use the relatively reputable ExplorerPatcher. However, using ExplorerPatcher requires fiddling with your antivirus settings and weakening your PC's security, so maybe trying to live with the new normal is better?

https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher

That controls whether the Start button, for opening the Start menu, is on the left of your taskbar like previous versions of Windows, or in the middle of your taskbar. The middle is the current default.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_11#/media/File:Windows...

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