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Comment by Rohansi | Hacker News Reader

I don't really see why the UI is despised. Windows 8 was bad, 10 brought sanity mostly back, and 11 is in a good state now IMO.

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I feel the exact opposite.

7 was the peak. 8 was awful because it tried to be both a desktop OS and a tablet OS. 10 doubled-down on the flatness that I despise. 11 is simply trying to be MacOS, which is a massive bug, not a feature. I use Windows because it's not MacOS.

Personally, I use WindowBlinds on my Win10 PC to skin it to look like Win7. I love the grey taskbar with items that look like 3D buttons. Most of all, I much prefer that if I have 3 Firefox windows open, then I should have 3 Firefox items on my task bar. I should be able to switch windows in a single click.

When I'm eventually forced to downgrade to Windows 11, I'll have to buy the new WindowBlinds11 and Start11 to bring back the UX that I love.

Took a few years after Windows 11 was released, but FWIW you can now have a taskbar item for each window. It's in the Taskbar Settings -> Taskbar behaviors -> "Combine taskbar buttons and hide labels".

I also waited until that was an option, it was a total deal-breaker for me. But it's working quite nicely now.

> 11 is simply trying to be MacOS

Not even. You can position the "Dock" on the side of the screen in MacOS.

Win11 default to middle taskbar is not based on macOS, it's based on Chrome OS. Which is far more popular than macOS and a serious competitor to Windows and what kids are learning on these days.

In any case it can be changed to the default far left corner in settings easily.

11 is almost way more consistent in its UI. I'd even go as far as to say it's better than 7's.

> 11 is almost way more consistent in its UI. I'd even go as far as to say it's better than 7's.

Why my rectangle window has round corners ? Where is the scrollbar ? /s

I also chuckle every time I need to resize window by dragging an imaginary intersection of tangents to that rounded corner of some apps, that’s just hilarious.

They can pry my vertical taskbar from my cold dead hands

TIL you can't move it to the sides any more in Windows 11, wild. Just one more reason for me to stay on Windows 10 no matter the forced-obsolescence schedule.

Regarding missing features: Is anyone around here who has found an alternative to the original “quick launch toolbar”?

I mean the ‘real’ one which was introduced in Windows 95 - up to Windows 8 (IIRC), which could be separated from the Taskbar and be docked at any side of the desktop, horizontally or vertically, and could also be stacked in both directions.

Honestly I'm surprised MS hasn't done more with the great dockable interface UI tech they built for for Visual Studio a few decades ago, and also gradually adopted by Adobe Photoshop and every other productivity application. I don't know if MS invented it but they definitely mastered it well in oldschool VS.

Let me dock/add-to-tabbed-pane/split-dock-into-multiple-panes and have the autohide/pin toggle for any window attached to any any edge of the screen, and make the Taskbar and the Quicklaunch and the Start Button just another set of Pane Windows, just with enforcement that (where appropriate) they cannot be closed or otherwise removed from the active screens, with a redundant always-accessible explorer rclick-context entry just in case you've somehow completely lost them.

Then make "maximize" mean "join the central pane as a new tab".

I'm pretty old now; if I knew who made that decision and that they were coming to my country, I'd flip a coin on the risk of prison time for punching them unconscious.

If you're ever forced to use W11, ExplorerPatcher will let you rollback the taskbar to windows 10 and move it to the sides.

https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher

> 11 is almost way more consistent in its UI. I'd even go as far as to say it's better than 7's.

Yeah no. Enable full-width taskbar icons (like the Windows XP style wide ones) and notice how each one of them is of a different width. It's just terrible, it's almost like someone told an intern who's never used anything prior to Windows 7 to design it.

that's why there's still two completly different UI for managing settings? With some settings available in an UI done in the new, flat style and the old control panel that's still there?

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