Seriously, only go there for the facepalms.

Anyone who wants to try Linux but is scared of or reluctant about anything about the process at all: talk to me! There are multiple ways to try it with zero change to your system, like Oracle VirtualBox or a USB flash drive.

In the launch version of windows 11 and for over TWO YEARS it didn't even support drag&drop. It was working fine even on windows me

In every version of Windows up until now which has contained a taskbar and start menu, as far back as Windows 95. Not just Windows 10.

Sadly not true. Microsoft removed the Start button in a version of Windows before. It was in Windows 8 (and Windows Server 2012 for some godforsaken reason) with the cursed "metro" interface. MS did it for the same stupid reason they're citing here "tablet and touchscreen users". The uproar caused MS to release Windows 8.1 a year later where they returned the Start button.

The years of engineering salaries and test versions to dock a visual element at the top, instead of the bottom...

Microsoft applied a data-driven approach to find out which features to add now, which features to add later, and which to completely avoid.

Which is why if you dig deep enough into Settings you'll see WinXP Control Panel UI elements. You know, the elements that are actually useful for power users.

The data they have compiled from years of people using Win 10 and Msoft Edge.

Two data points: What their intern could do with React; what their intern couldn’t do with React.

Data can say whatever the hell you want if you lack scruples.

It's Microsoft, they have all the data. And quite frankly it doesn't surprise even a little bit, i doubt even 5% of people moved around the taskbar, people are just ready to hitch themselves to every bandwagon they see shitting on Microsoft.

Wouldn't it be cool if you could have AI on the desktop clock so you could ask it what time it was in different places in the world?

This really stuck with me. “Rewrote” implies feature parity. What they really did was replace the taskbar.

What's weird is that given certain odd scenarios (I can't recall it but there was a video by Enderman about it) you'll see the old windows 10 taskbar appear, exact styling and all. So the windows 11 taskbar is quite literally just a WebView plastered on top.

I'm one of the few who has had it at the top for as long as I can remember. It absolutely infuriated me to find out the feature had been removed.

This makes no sense to me what so ever. Why do any apps care about where the taskbar is? How's it any different when a window isn't maximised and the user resizes it? Either I'm seriously misunderstanding this or it's a completely made up excuse.

I'd rather they just say "we completely rewrote the taskbar, but we know that less than 0.01% of users move their taskbar so we didn't prioritize it".

To me the bigger issue with the taskbar is that you can't make it compact. Instead it has to be a big chunky mess.

They have to reflow any time the user resizes their windows.

The whole operating system is even named after that concept.

Yeah, sounds like bullshit. I don't even see why that particular concern would create more work on the OS's part.

If an application fits "wonderfully" into the space it's given, Windows did nothing but telling it the dimensions it needs to fill. And as you said those dimensions can vary wildly.

Yeah especially considering you can install 3rd party solutions to dock the taskbar to the left which work perfectly fine

when Linux desktop environments built by hobbyists

That might be a bit obsolete as a state of things. Like 15 years obsolete.

Plasma is everything I used to wish Windows' desktop could be, but isn't because of... honestly I have no idea what they're thinking over there. I am so glad I dumped that trainwreck. Love everything KDE <3

A word of caution: If you use bitlocker (copy your keys!), it can have hooks in the TPM/bios settings.

Disable bitlocker prior to attempting a live boot.

It will lock your disk if you don't prepare for it.

For reference:

https://www.linuxliteos.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=9145

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=430251

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/bitlocker-and-tpm-blocks-the-hard-disk-after-booting-from-usb-and-pressing-try-ubuntu/57833/17

Probably written by CowPilot

just MS things. changing things for no apparent reason to make it worse to use and also remove existing features that people actually liked

There was a while back some Windows developer externally lamenting how ass-backwards they were and as a result their NT kernel was woefully under-featured compared to other contemporary OSes...

Then I think they forced him to take it back and say 'um actually our kernel is actually super awesome, my mistake'.

Like half of open source is just devs trying to satisfy their very specific needs

Even if it will brick your system.

you can do whatever even it it doesn’t make sense to the majority of users.

If they could do math, they'd know that you should fit every decision for all users you can think about, not the majority. Because the majority is different for every dimension, and if you choose a different strategy, your end result won't be usable for anyone.

Yeah this doesn't make sense. Docked bars have worked fine since Windows 95. You could have the task bar on any side, and apps would handle it. You could have multiple docked bars too, as some third-party apps used to be dockable. For example, Winamp had a view that was a short bar stretching the entire width of the screen, stuck to the top of the screen. The windowing system handled it with no issues.

They keep re-implementing things.

Just the Start menu. You can see how 95 evolved into 98 evolved into ME, then they changed it for XP, and they never stopped making big pointless changes. In many cases, those big pointless changes have been lengthening the process of going from the bare desktop to the thing you need by adding pointless screens and dialogs. Or, like the Start menu, they just drastically redesigned it such that a user used to Win XP tries to use 7 and they just...stare at it because it's not what they were expecting. Windows 7's Start menu might even be objectively better, Microsoft's software engineers could very well produce good research documentation about UI design based on observing or polling users about what features they wanted and then they made the thing people seemed to want, but to people who got used to how it already worked the new thing was bad because it's different.

I could be convinced Windows 8.1 is a mental unwellness simulator. In Sierra's FMV horror game Phantasmagoria 2, the player character goes insane at work, and this is simulated by the paperwork he's working on flashing scarier words for a split second. You're reading this document and then near the bottom of the page an ordinary word like "recommended" turns to "murdered" for a few frames. Win 8.1's animated tiles reminded me of that. Plus the whole "The desktop and all normal Windows apps therein is itself just an app that can be run in split screen next to special phone-like single tasking apps which pretty much only we will develop for and we won't include desktop versions of so you have to deal with this." I hate Windows 8.1.

What's real fun is you can tell when they abandoned work on a project by which drastically different UI it's encrusted with. The modem dialer looks like Windows XP, the fax program looks like Vista, some things have the flat purple stank of 8, some things have the dark glass look of early 10.

For printers, go to DEVICES > let it load it all > more devices settings (towards bottom) - to open old school printer control panel. Major pain in the ass.

for power users? absolutely. but nobody who isn't tech savvy even knows what control panel is anymore.

It's the one drive cramming that really gets me, well also changing the right click context menu to hide cut and paste, wtf.

But seriously, not letting you move the Onedrive pin down the hotlinks sidebar out of the way? Extremely annoying.

I thought it was just me, it's so fucking "bulky" and slow on my work computer. Specs are fine on the laptop, windows 11 is just trash even without bringing up what it's lacking and difficult to navigate.

And I know my way around windows very well, I can do nearly all my tasks with just a keyboard, don't even need a mouse for the gui.

Oh man, I remember marveling at BeOS in the day and for a brief moment in time when SSDs first hit the scene you could have a credibly fast Windows boot.... Nowadays it's worse than ever despite super fast storage, fastest CPUs, and gobs of RAM...