Update last night updated Outlook's UI, now the top bar is taking up way too much vertical space that I had to configure ribbon to autohide to not have 20% of vertical space eaten up. Just adds on to start bar being stuck at bottom as opposed to the left where I liked it. No respect for vertical space

That's something I never understood. Why do designers always do that thing? Do they not use the products they design?

I believe it's because designers in large corporations feel the need to continuously justify their own employment and their salaries. So things change not because users request them, but because someone somewhere has to justify being a lead UI designer and their $$$ salary - and nonsense like moving the start menu to the middle ends up being "their thing" purely because they had the mental strength to push it through endless meetings and reviews and someone finally said fine ok we'll do this.

I see the same thing literally all the time with Google products, every revision of YouTube/Google photos/drive/android/Gmail just shuffles thing around without any obvious reasoning behind it, it's just "well, time for a new update, let's move things around again".

there is also a lot of bikeshedding around design at the management and executive level, and it is constant. ("Can we make it pop?", "It just doesn't feel right", "but the iPhone does it this way," etc.)

At least looking at people I've worked with in design, fighting your client constantly is not a good idea if you want to have a roof over your head. They'll just find someone willing to say yes.

It's become so annoying I dread weekly sync-ups now. It feels like an hour-long UI QA session.

The sad part is that those hothead UX designers could be earning their keep if they figured out a way to have some radical UI while maintaining concurrency with a historic UI that could be switched by the user.

Designers at the corporate level with the power of, say, Jony Ive at Apple are extremely rare.

From working with designers and in frontend, it is probably management or executive level keeping up with the Joneses.

This drives me absolutely nuts too. There is just too much pressure from various different job functions within companies to constantly change things even if it doesn't actually improve the customer's experience. People don't want to maintain old products, they want to work on something new. Compensation and promotions are dependent on shipping a fancy new product (looking at you Google). Management pressures people below them to change something even though they don't understand the customer's needs. I'm sure you could come up with a dozen more reasons.

This has gotten so much worse now that everything is a subscription web service and you can't continue using the product unless you accept whatever crappy redesign they have pushed out this time that took away the feature you liked using or the workflow you are used to.

So annoying because every monitor I have has more horizontal space than vertical.

I had to install windows to get access to some CAD programs, but comments like this really reinforce my decision to not use it as my main OS. There are so many things that are anti-user, and extremely difficult to modify. What are some of reasons to use windows, other than for niche applications that don't work under wine?

I have not had great luck with speech recognition on Linux, but I suspect that will be solved before there's a compelling reason to use Windows other than having no other choice due to niche applications.

If it wasn't for running AAA games natively, I would happily ditch windows. The day most AAA games come out on Metal API for mac, I'll gladly switch.

If it's only AAA games, you should be able to get by on Linux _quite_ well these days, if that strikes your fancy better than Windows.

I actually can't remember the last game I tried that didn't work. You may want to look up the compatability of the last few you played though just to make sure your genre(s) won't get a lot worse milage than what I play.

Genshin is a famous example these days, even though I don't play it.

Going on a tangent here, the decision for a consumer whether to adopt Win11 aside, it seems to me the whole raison d'être for Win11 rather than continuing to build on Win10 is exactly the additional requirements. They likely want laptops being sold running Win11 to have sane security capabilities for corporate use out of the box. Other that that there's no reason why they can't continue building on Win10.

> They likely want laptops being sold running Win11 to have sane security capabilities for corporate use out of the box

Corporate security has been fine for years: TPM 1.2 (if I remember the versions correctly) alongside bitlocker and sensible corporate policies render computers all but impervious to everything. However, this implies a competent IT division in your company... I've worked in plenty without them!

Social engineering or clicking a dodgy link/download is probably a bigger threat than someone hacking your computer and that can be mitigated to a huge extent by restricting access to only the things that the user needs, locking down apps, running with low privileges, auditing relevant things etc... again, competent IT division needed for this too.

Now, if your threat matrix includes nation-states then one could argue that any device is hackable.

My take is that hardware vendors saw the writing on the wall with the pandemic-buying about to ease-up and worked with Microsoft (or pressured them...) to help out. We're already seeing Chromebooks on the wane[0].

From my perspective (long-time Windows guy now on Fedora) I see nothing of value in Windows 11 that 10 didn't have already.

Edit: Forgot the answer I was gonna write :)

[0] - https://chromeunboxed.com/canalys-report-chromebook-sales-do...

What they want is to sneak Palladium in through the back door. The future of the x86 platform is a signed code path from power-on to application code. Even Linux thought leaders, like Lennart and Matthew Garrett, are on board with this idea. The problem is, as we learned with ActiveX, code signing cannot attest that code is safe, only that it came from a particular place. But then again, the goal of verifying where code comes from is not safety, it's control over who gets to run code on the platform. And who has that control? Who is the only CA recognized as authoritative by hardware OEMs for Secure Boot purposes?

Microsoft.

Remember, you run Linux on modern hardware only because Microsoft allows you to. Microsoft signed the Red Hat shim, and if you disabled Secure Boot, it's only because a Microsoft policy gave you the ability to disable it -- a policy they can later reverse.

> Remember, you run Linux on modern hardware only because Microsoft allows you to.

Factually wrong.

Any regular PC owner can run Linux on modern x86 hardware in at least three ways:

- Legacy BIOS MBR boot

- UEFI boot

- UEFI secure boot

Only the last one of those three options requires a signed shim, and only if you don’t enrol your own keys.

> Microsoft signed the Red Hat shim, and if you disabled Secure Boot, it's only because a Microsoft policy gave you the ability to disable it -- a policy they can later reverse.

This FUS has been repeated the last 10 years+ and it gets less convincing every year.

No OEM or PC vendor wants to limit their amount of potential in what is already a cut-margin business.

Taking away the ability to disable secure boot or taking away the legacy BIOS boot option will only cost them customers, and they literally have nothing to gain.

Microsoft could just not give discounts to computer suppliers that don't have UEFI secure boot on forced on.

I definitely recall Microsoft killing hardware manufacturers putting Linux on the machines that they sold by mandating that if they put Linux on any consumer desktop they would not get the OEM discount for a Windows licence for any computer they sold. It stopped new non Windows PC sales dead at the time IIRC. This was something like over a decade ago.

Too true. This is why I hate that both Debian and Ubuntu sign their packages. They're trying to control us, man! /s

Debian and Ubuntu's package managers want to attest that packages they install come from Debian/Ubuntu repositories, or from third-party repos the user trusts. Which is reasonable. You can install third-party software yourself, or compile your own binaries without signing anything, on those systems and they'll still run.

Operating systems with "signed binaries or GTFO" policies are not really protecting the user. Any protection the user receives is a secondary concern to the fact that the OS vendor wants to control what the user runs on the device.

Wrong, totally wrong! They want to finally be able to do a walled garden like what is done with osx.

So far, users did not use their shitty store because they had alternatives.

They have to keep up the streak of flubbing up every other release of Windows.

What's really frustrating, is it broke most games. Valorant straight out doesn't run, csgo crashes like crazy. It feels like a beta.