That first line suggests it’s another layer of veneer over 25 years of turds. Gee the settings app looks nice but there’s still five different control panel implementations linked to it and some settings aren’t even available yet.

Microsoft: please just finish your shit before changing it again.

Well maybe this hot new OS will finally let it's users make files named "PRN" or "CON"

https://www.howtogeek.com/fyi/windows-10-still-wont-let-you-...

Or allow you to scroll the contents of windows that aren't currently selected.

Win10 has added this actually. It was a great feature for me coming from Win7.

It's not clear where the reporter got the "redesigned start menu" idea from. Reads like it's just their personal guess.

I'm also not clear on why the Win10 start menu got so much hate. I delete all the tiles and it then seems not much different than prior start menus.

They likely were aware of this leak [1], but didn't want to name it specifically (or had their own sources).

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/15/22535123/microsoft-window...

Ah, that's more interesting than the linked story. Thanks for sharing.

Mac style centered dock. LoL.

Well, the first problem with the Start menu is there are two of them.

But for example, a user wants to look up or change something to do with the configuration. How do they go about choosing which of these to try on the right-click Start menu: System, Device Manager, Computer Management, Settings.

Press the Windows key and then start typing what you're looking for.

I'm weary of suggesting that to those I provide tech support for anymore.

For me, on my current PC, typing up to "Visu" leads to "Visual Studio 2019", but adding one more character to "Visua" leads to "Visual Studio Code", which is what I wanted in the first place most of the time. No clue what the heuristics here are, but it's not predictable to me.

More troubling: "Che" leads to Microsoft's "Check for Updates", which is pretty much what I always want, but "Chec" leads to Java's "Check for Updates", which I kinda never want.

I can no longer predict to someone I'm guiding over the phone what typing something into the start menu will do. Even for me, I'll be typing something, and finish off a few keystrokes by muscles memory before hitting enter only to have it decide I really meant something else before I notice. And I suspect whatever heuristic uses the misfire as further ammunition to get things even more wrong in the future.

I understand and have dealt with this myself. I have to type "phot" before "Adobe Photoshop 2021" even appears as an option. But if you don't know where to find Bluetooth settings, for example, typing "bluetooth" will get you there.

Not to diminish your complaint, but try typing "Code". Works for me.

In the author's defense, when a new major release of Windows is announced, assuming that this time it might happen without yet another not asked for start menu reshuffle would be quite the dark horse bet.

You can't have a folder structure like in Xp (and 7?). Or decide where stuff should be and in what order. Also MS push crappy game adds there as shortcuts which look like they are allready installed.

Sounds like "a new OS" just means a few Windows user interface tweaks.

To be fair, some major changes are not directly user-visible. For example, Microsoft created a new programming language (called "P") to rewrite the USB stack in Windows 8 or 8.1 that allegedly made that part more secure/reliable.

EDIT: I suppose there is a certain pressure to mess with the UI, so non-technical people will "see" the difference. Some changes have been genuine improvements, IMHO, like AeroSnap or the search field in the start menu, others have been disastrous (cough Windows 8 cough).

> the search field in the start menu

That's one of the worst offender. It opens a separate windows instead of searching in the menu itself, and returns a lot of crap (including web queries, wtf) except what it supposed to do: searching in installed applications. That can be done, at the expense of an additional click. Very poor UX by mixing concerns that belongs to different applications (Explorer and the browser).

As far as I recall, it did not do that in Windows 7. I have not used Windows 10 that much.

> P") to rewrite the USB stack in Windows 8 or 8.1 that allegedly made that part more secure/reliable.

I wonder if that's why even on a gaming desktop USBs default to "turn off power to preserve battery" which made my keyboard stutter, and I had to turn off this setting from Device Manager.

Not likely. Forced updates are an "engagement mechanic."

Only thing missing is for them to start signing system files with a short-lived certificate, to force people to run updates every couple weeks.

Yes, I'm still bitter about my Windows Insider experience. On the one hand, it's kind of my fault - I signed up for testing the beta release. On the other hand, holy shit. I dual-boot, and I didn't log into Windows for some ~3 months, during which my Insider build expired. After that, when I finally did try booting to Windows, I was greeted with a completely bricked, unrecoverable system: core DLLs had expired certificates, and _nothing_ would start, as code signing checks failed.

(This was a Windows 10 upgraded from Windows 8, and it was past the free upgrade period, so I ended up buying a new Windows 10 license. So in the end, they've managed to make money off me with this.)

This was one of the reasons I hated my work IPhone.

Sooooooo many updates.

Apologists will say it's fir new features and security, but it was just an annoyance. I don't even notice if my pixel gets updated.