I cracked up at the video where he says "the start is centered... it puts YOU at the center" like no, you're clearly just trying to copy MacOS.

I could see it being easier to hit for tablets when it's not in the corner, but I find the corner a good spot for things like that on a regular desktop.. Granted, I always use the windows key on my keyboard but the other corner button, the one that minimizing everything, I use all the time. Very easy to mindlessly drag your cursor to the corner IMO.

Some of the other design features I really enjoy, but I would love a unified and sensible control panel before anything else.

> and moved it for seemingly no reason

There is one good reason: some screens are getting really wide.

I swear nobody at Microsoft (and fewer people than I'd hoped on HN) actually talk to non-technical people that use their products.

If they'd just added the option to move it I'd have no qualms but they decided to make it default and I'd be willing to put money down that the overwhelming majority of Windows users do not have super widescreen displays.

> I swear nobody at Microsoft (and fewer people than I'd hoped on HN) actually talk to non-technical people that use their products.

>

> If they'd just added the option to move it I'd have no qualms [...]

I keep mentally blaming this on designers who want to be Steve Jobs (edit:)and Henry Ford and do daring leaps in design.

Edit: I've seen quotes like "if I asked people what they wanted they would say a faster horse" a few times. There's a time for that but most of the time it is time for boring (not really, I love much of it if I'm allowed to) work on getting things right: make it work in all major browsers, make sure tabs work, make sure it works fast etc.

why do you guys think you can't move the start button? of course you can. you can put it right back in the lower left corner on Win 11 if you want....

I swear people just GO OFF with half the story and assume they have the full story.

Right, which is more reason to move to vertical taskbars instead of filling far too many pixels with useless space. The specification note that 11 won't support vertical taskbars is infuriating as someone with an ultrawide. I don't need 1000s of pixels of unusable taskbar white space. Centering it is smart if I did want to waste all that space, but oof I do not want to waste that much space.

I just can't understand how there can be so much argument about the position of a task bar. Why can't Windows just allow people to do what they like with it? I know plenty of people who have their taskbar vertically, surely it can't be hard to have a taskbar that can go vertically, horizontally, to the edges out centred.

I will carry on using my dual bar layout on MATE because I didn't want to change to gnome 3 or unity.

Moving somewhat further off-topic, as a fan of vertical taskbars I also disliked Unity's take on it. In my own testing (going way back to Windows XP era), I found I much preferred right-hand side taskbar. As a left-to-right language user, when applications are full screened there are usually far more important application controls on the left hand side than the right. The obvious one being File menus on the immediate left edge, but that's not the only example. Unity tried to fix the File menu issue by doing the "merged global menu" thing similar to macOS, but it still didn't account for most of the rest of application stuff on the left hand edge.

But I also realizes that not everyone agrees with my "right-hand" taskbar preference. I agree that allowing customization is probably the best bet. It's odd to me that when one of the messages in the Windows 11 announcement was that they wanted it to be more personalizable that according to their notes they are removing an important personalization in taskbar placement. (Which has been supported to varying degrees of success all the way back to Windows 95 at this point.)

I swear by vertical taskbar usage. My right-most monitor has plenty of horizontal space, so my taskbar is about 250px wide, and I can read close to the full names of everything, plus I have plenty of room to see every single open window, WITHOUT combining multiple active windows of the same program. It's lovely.

I think it's ironic how often HN discusses various software development methodologies, release early-and-often, etc. But Microsoft slowly iterating on the Settings panel over time is seen as a bad thing.

If they're iterating on this at all it's at a glacial pace. The settings and control panel workflow has been broken since Windows 8.

They are iterating; the Settings panel gets more settings on every release. The first version on Windows 10 was incredibly sparse.

It's also fair to say that there is a novice/expert divide -- Microsoft wants the settings panel to be as simple as settings on a mobile phone. That's great. However, occasionally I need to revert and diagnose the Wifi driver on my cheap Chinese mini laptop and I need a more powerful UI than most average people are never going to need.

At this point, I can't think of a setting that my parents would need that isn't there.

The problem isn't that settings are missing, the problem is that there are related settings in multiple, entirely disconnected locations that interact in subtle ways.

I have 4 UIs on my windows machine where I can set things related to inactivity/power down states. That's unreasonable, and nobody was confused in windows XP when those were all in one place (with an "advanced Settings" fold).

But you really only need the settings app. If you are a power user and want to mess with the individual details you hit "Additional power settings" and get the old UI. But so what?

My point was Microsoft is doing exactly the right thing here -- iterating on an existing design and keeping old software around for those who need it. Everybody seems to want Microsoft to throw out everything and instantly redesign several decades worth of software and that is ridiculous. That's not the way anyone should develop software.

> nobody was confused in windows XP

I'm sure they were -- the new settings app is significantly less complicated.