One that seems a lot more core to “old style” Windows to me was the labyrinthine dialog tunnels one had to traverse to change some settings, which persisted through XP and didn’t really start getting better until Vista/7. Half the secret to being “good with computers” back then was just remembering which branch of the cave system you needed to take to toggle a particular checkbox.

For good or for bad, We got used to the labyrinthine dialog tunnels.

It's no different than building up the option flags in a bash or powershell one liner. It's the direct graphical translation even.

Probably written by somebody who used their computer to play D&D all day. You are in a maze of twisty passages, all the same...

That's Zork, not D&D.

Oops. I guess that shows to go, I don't play computer games...

11 is better but there's still a few of these tunnel vestiges that show up, like removing a driver from a hardware device or adding NTP servers.

Applications have to explicitly add themselves to the tray, while a button in the taskbar is provided by default (there's some conditions on window styles and such which I won't bother to go into here).

The Win11 taskbar is like having only a systray with 25 icons in it.

I do, but I'd say that was an okay design and that bloatware bundlers abused it. It was simple to use and made a lot of sense for your "always on" applications like AIM, but definitely didn't need to be occupied by an icon for your printer drivers.

that sounds more of a problem with all the random apps you install than being a "windows" issue. microsoft can take steps to mitigate it (eg. by making hiding system tray icons by default), but calling it a "poor UI choice" on their part doesn't make much sense. it's like blaming firefox for allowing sites with annoying banners and not having adblocker by default.

Am I supposed to practice driver minimalism to prevent a slew of tray icons from occupying my screen?

It is poor design by having that be the form of which quick access to settings is provided. The tray icon paradigm simply invites clutter.

> Am I supposed to practice driver minimalism to prevent a slew of tray icons from occupying my screen?

The taskbar icons are added by programs that are running. Disabling autorun for them prevents them from starting, and therefore the icons from showing up. I'd say 90% of the time disabling autorun for the companion program doesn't break any functionality.

I've got the opposite problem here. I like showing all the active icons (although I also try to keep them to a minimum) and Windows 11 removed the option to always show all. Now any time you install something with a new icon, you have to go to the taskbar settings again and manually allow it to show.

or having to press the start button in the taskbar to stop/turn off your computer!

How do you turn off the engine on modern cars with a "START" button in stead of an old-fashioned metal-key ignition lock?

I used to repeat that line too, 25 years ago when I was still on Windows 3.x, but it's gotten a little old since then.

those buttons usually have both "start" and "stop" text on them

I find it's about fifty-fifty, not sure which side it tends towards. But I'm talking from what I've seen in Internet pictures and YouTube videos; I've only ever owned cars with metal-only ignition keys, and last I bought one, the buttons hadn't yet filtered down to my price class, so I can't recall if I've even test-driven one.