Completely disagree on both counts. The desktop peek feature is gone which I used regularly to look at stats on my desktop widgets. Right clicking the taskbar has removed all the previous options and now only shows settings. I used that to open task manager with 2 clicks and it had a much larger surface area than just the start button. The non-optional grouping is just completely terrible. Not having an option to keep the taskbar on the edges is awful. The start menu has removed all grouping options and is now far less useful than it was. The new quick access bar doesn't show you the volume unless you hover over it

Explorer has completely made the right click useless that had a lot of utilities I used and now it takes 2 clicks to access them. The icons are fine but they removed all customisation like adding images to the icons which I used for improved readability

All this and it's not even consistent. The windows defender screen is still the old one. The eject disk menu is as old as windows 7. The improvements are inconsistent and as a result, extremely ugly to me. Also you can't even see seconds on the time. Basic crap like this is missing. Why...

Desktop peek is now a three finger swipe down and up on your trackpad.

I don't use Windows on a laptop

I know it's a little petty, however not being able to move the taskbar has zeroed out any interest I had in using Windows 11. I'm a huge fan of moving the taskbar/dock to the left vertical side of the screen, especially so on a 16:9 screen.

It isn't petty, it is indicative of an incompetent development team. We have been able to move the taskbar since Windows 95, but apparently whoever Microsoft hires to work on Windows UI these days can't figure it out. Lord knows what else those yahoos have fucked up.

Probably some "yagni" Scrum master/PO aggressivly cutting corners in the planning phase to save story points, but on the end adding work for removing the feuture from the old code.

I would bet more on a standard a 49" 5120x1440 monitor and they didn't even realize the need of that basic productive feature.

Yeah I do the same. Can't believe it's not possible in 11.

Someone will probably make a quick fix that returns tat functionality heh

I've recently embraced my petty little self dinking around with Manjaro Sway.

Changing a line in a config file to put the waybar anywhere I please, and storing that config file in a dotfiles repo so that the next time I need to set up a machine. Bliss.

If you are ok with manual changing a non-GUI config to change your GUI then technically the taskbar in Windows 11 is relocatable. It requires a Windows registry change.

If you do a lot via right click they nuked it, but you can add it back in. The fact that I can't right click the taskbar to open Task Manager without getting that horrible full screen "LOG OUT/SHUTDOWN/OPEN TASK MANAGER" thing is my biggest frustration. I'm opening the taskbar because I'm getting poor performance, don't make me take multiple steps to do it.

Not to mention I had no idea what the right click icons meant when I first starting using it, is that copy? Is that paste?

Does Ctrl+Shift+Esc still open task manager directly?

Yes.

You can right click on the start menu and get (most of?) the old menu

Same. Don’t get the hate for the new UI. It’s quite nice now that I’ve gotten used to it and given I often use 10 and 11 side by side I now quite prefer 11.