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Comment by thewebguyd | Hacker News Reader

> What's wrong with Win 11 exactly?

There's the obvious telemetry, MS account requirement for home editions, and other MS dark patterns for one.

But, Windows 11 performance is still crap compared to 10, and even 7. The right click menu in explorer is still high latency, and if you have a lot of extensions, you see "loading..." and it can take a good full second for all menu options to show up. Also, you still can't move the task bar, search is as garbage as ever (but honestly that's expected from Windows at this point).

Windows 11 does have some nice features, especially once combined with PowerToys. I still prefer the way Windows manages Windows compared to my mac which I need 3 third party apps at this point to make usable, and WSL2 is neat, windows has native SSH now, etc.

It could be a great OS if Microsoft could get their heads out of their rears and fix the performance issues, and stop with the advertising, telemetry and dark patterns.

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- Telemetry doesn’t affect end users in terms of functionality or performance, and every commercial OS has telemetry. People cite telemetry as a reason not to upgrade to 10/11 but even Windows 7 had telemetry. It isn’t even really that much of a privacy issue if you really dig in to what Microsoft collects and you’ve spent ten seconds in the privacy and security settings. People just like to complain.

- Right click menu latency is such a non-issue and that issue is specifically in file explorer and not other applications. I do think they need to make improvements to that experience like having the legacy right click behind the new one but it’s not a big deal day to day.

- Everyone likes to complain that you can’t move the taskbar. Can you move the menu bar on Mac? Can we not just accept that this is a design decision and move on?

- Is search garbage? Seems to work fine for me and seems identical to Mac and Linux quick searching functionality, and if I need something more powerful I just use Everything.

It actually is a pretty great OS, but like every OS it’s not perfect and never will be.

At the very least, telemetry should be opt-in, but yes I agree it's whatever, there's unfortunately no avoiding it any commercial software today. The dark patterns to lock out usage of local accounts though I take issue with. There's still workarounds for now, but how long will those workarounds exist for non enterprise users?

The right click menu though, I wouldn't call it a non-issue it's a pretty big regression. The legacy right-click menu loads instantaneously. The new one doesn't seem to do any caching either because it's consistently laggy even after an initial load. Is it still usable? Sure, but it's definitely annoying. It's not the only performance regression either.

> Can you move the menu bar on Mac? Can we not just accept that this is a design decision and move on?

Because it was an option in every single windows version up until now. And on macOS I can move the dock to any side of the screen I'd like. Hell, it will even dynamically move if I'm using multiple monitors and hover my mouse where it should be.

> It actually is a pretty great OS, but like every OS it’s not perfect and never will be.

I never said it wasn't. It's got plenty of features I like, use and appreciate. I wouldn't complain if I hated Windows, because I wouldn't care if that was the case. I'm one of the few on here that actually likes and uses Windows, so of course it's frustrating to see regressions.

I always move the taskbar to the right on any remotely wide setup that I have - including my 21:9 main. Had it at the top on my sp3. On my current portable (spectre 13.5) it's at the bottom, since I kind of have to use win11 due to the heterogeneous cpu arrangement (how "hard" could it be to port the scheduler to win10... yeah yeah we know), and while it annoys me when I dock it at work, the system (win11 pro, with MS account) absolutely does suck in a lot of other respects.

Right click latency in explorer is annoying.

Opening the settings "app" after first boot takes several seconds because who the hell knows - I personally blame it on moving everything to some thousand layers JS framework since I like being grumpy about that. This is a core part of the OS, FFS. Fairly certain that they have the talent to pull it off properly.

Search has been fine for me.

Language switching almost always breaks during updates - "ghost keyboard layouts" and such. Has been the case for a few years now.

General "we'll shove down whatever we feel like on you" BS.

Just let us pay for "ultimate" (a.k.a. end-user enterprise) and be rid of all the BS.

Getting WSA back (yes, I have the community version) and expanding on connected standby or however they call it now would've been neat, especially on a convertible, but it is what it is, I guess. WSL2 is also quite the improvement. Lots of other small little things like the task manager (not using procexp too often nowadays).

> Just let us pay for "ultimate" (a.k.a. end-user enterprise) and be rid of all the BS.

This would do it for me, and probably many others. People would still complain, but at least it'd be offered.

They can keep the home editions as the adware and copilot editions, just let us buy "Ultimate" without all that (or just leave it as opt-in/toggleable). If the new snapdragon X Elite 2 chips pan out like the early benchmarks show they do (almost on par with the M5 in the new iPad), and if Windows encourages more ARM adoption they could seriously have a legitimate macbook competitor finally.

But that would require MS to divert efforts away from "AI, AI, AI, AI!" so they won't do it.

you didn't address the MS account requirement, which is a huge deal breaker

I’ll admit it’s not the best, but “huge dealbreaker” seems dramatic.

1. It’s not even a requirement for business/enteprise customers.

2. It remains trivial for technical users to bypass.

3. Literal billions of iPhone and Android users live with a similar soft restriction. Like, yeah, you can skip making an account on those devices, but they’re damn near useless in practice without them.

people have unfortunately accepted that as part of using a phone, but trying to impose it on desktops is a very large change imo. it's part of the general trend of users not truly owning their devices.

Not really? I imagine most Mac users also have their Apple ID logged in for things like iCloud and the Mac App Store, even if they have a lot of manually installed apps.

It’s not really that crazy.

I totally agree that Microsoft shouldn’t explicitly force an account on you as iOS, Android, and macOS don’t do that, but at the same time it’s just not such a crazy idea.

Okay, I'm glad you're used to it, but why are you defending it?

> Can you move the menu bar on Mac? Can we not just accept that this is a design decision and move on?

Yes, you can put the Dock on any side of the screen, plus you can pin it to the beginning or end of the chosen side. Those options have been in there since 10-dot-0 even before there was official UI to control them. TinkerTool was popular for this: https://www.bresink.com/osx/0TinkerToolClassic/details.html

The dock is not the menu bar.

My comparison is more appropriate because the Dock and the Taskbar are both the thing that shows the list of running programs and open windows.

Your answer to the question started with yes. This was not appropriate.

Their comparison was bad because no one wanted to move the menu bar. Not because the menu bar and task bar have different functions.

Dock ≠ Menu Bar

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45464355

Microsoft added telemetry to Windows 7 after Windows 10. People maintain lists of updates to avoid even now.

Each person decides what is or is not a privacy issue. Or latency issue. Or usability issue.

What Microsoft extracts includes unique identifiers.

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