Microsoft seemed intent on removing settings and features that only a small segment of their telemetry showed enabled, probably because of some code cleanup efforts. This is despite their earlier attempt to convince everyone to use the weird 3D image editor instead of MS Paint.

A real shame, because they showed with Windows 7 that they can redesign the OS UI without giving up features from earlier versions if they want to. Bugs like "the task bar is 20 pixels taller on my second screen" wouldn't have come up if they'd stuck to restyling their old code base.

I find Microsoft's modern designs very comparable to the GNOME designs, in that they're eager to remove common features to build an overarching operating system theme. I like GNOME's design, much more than Windows 11's, but I don't think taking directions from a heavily criticised DE is the right move.

I dont like either, both take their lead from mac os, which I also do not like

I am a gnome2 person, KDE, win7, etc type UI, if I wanted a mac I would buy a mac.

There was a post on here a few months ago from a former MS engineer talking about how a large part of MS design team were all MAC users.

A lot of junior webdevs, iOS app devs and designers were buying Macs to run testing/staging envs, and they have a lot of leverages, so MS had to do what they did.

Outsized influence IMO.

Enterprise is still king, and we here in Enterprise Ops are not happy. Microsoft needs to remember where its money comes from, and it is not jr webdevs

One of the first things I installed recently on my first Win11 computer was StartAllBack[1]. It’s not perfect but the standard taskbar is so bad that I had to fix it somehow.

[1] https://www.startallback.com/

Costs money.

So does Windows itself.

If you're afraid to or don't want to pay for software then you should probably use some variant of GNU/Linux instead.

That's the whole argument. This should not need to be "fixed" by a third party tool, it should just be part of the system that was already paid for! (It was even included all the way up to 10 so clearly there was no technical reason to not have it anymore)

Frankly this mindset is ludicrous to me and yet I see this with MacOS users too who happily pay for third party solutions to first-party breakage on stuff you already paid for. Somehow the more you spend the less customizable software is and the even more you have to spend to work around dumb choices.

Of course not, it should not have been changed in such a way that required a third party utility. It's one of the reasons I'm still using Windows 10 and have taken steps to make sure my computers don't automatically "upgrade" to Windows 11.

I'm going against the mindset of not paying for software in general, no matter how useful it is to you.

I think the problem is the contract behind what you're getting for the software.

For me personally, I'm more than happy to pay for software if it's clear the developer has _my_ interests in mind when building it (think IDEs, CAD software, even stuff like Office or the Adobe suite). I'm also OK with using software that's free and dealing with dark patterns (shareware, online tools) or bugs (open source stuff).

But paid software that somehow still tries to bilk me for even more money? (See all of the ads that have been built into Windows these days, or various Android phones and bloat) I will be more than happy to go out of my way to crack and get out of paying for it, for nothing but to spite developers of such things. You can't have your cake and eat it too!

Windows is free (as in beer), if you can live with the minor nags, minor lack of customisation and watermarking.

> Windows doesn't cost money because I pirate it.

I think the parent was assuming only legal options.

If that's not a constraint, then food, cars, etc. are also free.

Where I live it's not illegal to pirate software for personal use.

Also, taking someone's car or food deprives them of them. Making a copy of Windows doesn't make it impossible for Microsoft to keep selling it.

I guess I was confused by the word "pirate".

I only use it to mean illegal copying.

Windows doesn't cost money because I pirate it. I could pirate this program as well but it's probably going to be harder to find a clean, recent version of it.

How dare people charge money as compensation for their time! Can't they just live off sunlight like everyone else?!?!

FWIW, @vasqc clarified in a sibling comment that his use case is legal in his country.

I think his use of the term "pirate" was confusing.

I don't care what the law says; the law says nothing about morality. If someone puts a piece of software on the internet and asks a reasonable price in return then you should just pay, and bypassing that is "piracy" and immoral. This isn't Microsoft Windows that you're forced to use due to their predatory (and illegal) business practices – which are mostly a thing of the past, but still has large effects today – by which Microsoft "earned" an ungodly sum of money.

I‘d pay a 100 times that amount to get a new Windows with consistent classic UI (e.g. Windows 2000 style).

the only reason i use it is to get vertical task bar. if MS added back the vertical taskbar option I'd be completely ok with win11 taskbar UI.

ExplorerPatcher [1] exists also

[1] https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher

I'm not sure why they rushed out the release, Windows 10 was and is fine and I don't think any customers were really interested in this new version/ui update/whatever

total blunder imo but I think most people are just happy it's not as screwed up as whatever the hell Windows8 was

for me personally besides the common complaints just getting to the weather widget is now a huge microannoyance that drives me up the wall

I am still baffled by the whole Windows 8 drama. All they did was they replaced a menu with another one. Everything else was the same or better. Supposed power users freaking out about something completely inconsequential. What the hell is wrong with people

Windows 8 with Metro and Start Screen was practically unusable, with the desktop in a /desktop computer/ relegated to third-rate citizen status.

Any other Windows UI even as far back as Windows 1 is better than the piece of hot, useless garbage that was Windows 8.

This is exactly the mindless vitriol I had in mind.

Flow A: hit a button, a menu with text input and pictures shows up

Flow B: hit a button, a full screen with text input and pictures shows up

A is perfect, and B is "practically unusable".

Note how one flow literally erases everything else on the screen, disrupting whatever it was you were doing and disorienting any lesser-skilled users.

On a desktop computer. More than likely with (a) monitor(s) big enough to occupy an entire desk.

The Start Screen was fucking horrible all around, and its horribleness was proven with the immediate resurrection of the Start Menu and demise of the Start Screen in Windows 8.1.

Metro also met a similar demise because it forced a black-and-white, no delimiter UI upon desktop computers. Computers equipped with GPUs and monitors capable of rendering billions of colors with huge screen real estate.

Some of Metro's baggage is still with us, but I welcome Windows 11's slow move back towards a colorful Windows UI.

> Metro also met a similar demise because it forced a black-and-white, no delimiter UI upon desktop computers.

I recall when they did this to Visual Studio.

They completely removed all colors from all of the icons, making it impossible to pick out one from another and making once familiar icons by color a hunt-and-peck operation to find.

It was all just black and white. Then, due to feedback, they relented and put color back on all the icons.

It was madness.

On black and white, first Mac's where like that and people had no issues...

I remember :)

The problem with Visual Studio was the sudden removal of color changed people's "muscle memory" on where certain items were on a complex toolbar or menu system. I have no idea who thought that was a good idea, but some design team decided they were going with it, and they did.

When everything suddenly went black and white, it was impossible to quickly distinguish one thing from the next.

They reverted the decision and suddenly all the colored icons came back and it was once again easier to quickly pick things out.

I mean, people freaked out when they changed just the VS Code icon:

https://visualstudiomagazine.com/blogs/data-driver/2017/10/v...

It was confusing and forced.

The most sold app in their crappy app store was a 20USD classic start menu.

A keeps the context of what you were doing on screen.

B can yield a minor mental context switch, with no good reason for doing so.

I liked Windows 8. And still use it on one computer. The PDF reader app that used Windows 8 design principles has one of the most intuitive interfaces, IMO.

Now they’ve gone and half-baked that design in new software and it’s less intuitive, eg clicking file menu item and a whole new screen appears.

Metro was wonderful on Windows Phone and tablets . Garbage on the desktop. All Microsoft had to do to suppress the outrage was give people back the start menu on desktops like Windows 7 and allow a setting to turn on tablet mode if auto detection didn't work.

Instead, probably because at that time they brought in people with no history in the Windows org to manage the Window org, we got a 10+ year decline of Windows that has accelerated in recent years.

Your timeline is off - SteveSi/Julie/etc. were brought in to lead the Win7 effort. Win8 was not a significant leadership change.

> SteveSi/Julie/etc. were brought in to lead the Win7 effort.

And Win7 barely changed anything.

Windows 7 was just Vista gussied up, they didn't have leeway to change it.

If you're willing to tweak your installation, you can revert to the Windows 10 taskbar using the free third-party ExplorerPatcher utility. It has an option to not combine taskbar items and a lot of other goodies.

Wasn't this corrupted by one of the Windows updates? Or was that the other product? Got the whole UI frozen or such. I read about third party apps that hack back features this way or the other but I am still hoping a bit that MS will get back their senses and not some - potentially fragile to underlying OS structure change - third party app is required to make things functional again. But I am around the breaking point actually. I use several insteance of the same app all the time and switching simply between those using the taskbar is just not working, bogus, unpredictable, not fulfilling the purpose. I cannot relly get used to it and starting to give up hope. The usability of Windows diminished a lot to me.

It never broke for me. I've been using since October. There has been a large update since, but the app repatched explorer flawlessly. I also use a lot of other funky stuff (system icon changers, theme patchers, etc gotta get that rice). I also remove a lot of stuff using SophiaApp.

There has been some usability turndowns for me in the past years, but two things keep me hooked: snap windows (built in) and powertoys (ms-made but requires an install). I can't imagine myself without these two anymore.

I like some of the features of AquaSnap, including more window-snapping options, better than the built-in snapping. It does have rather more features than its name implies, like "shake a window to toggle Always On Top" (this enabled one is enabled by default, with an adjustable threshold).

I was using explorer patcher when I did the update to 22H2 and it really screwed up my computer. After many tries I had to boot from a usb drive to get safemode to finally boot so I could uninstall explorer patcher.

But after a week of Windows 11's "grouped" taskbar buttons I risked reinstalling explorer patcher and it worked fine.

I miss the vertical task bar option. Vertical space is more valuable than horizontal with 16x9 higher aspect ratio.

Im not updating to windows 10+ until they bring it back.

I have 3 16x9 monitors.

Why do I have to use 16*3 width of my screen for the taskbar when 1 vertical taskbar in 1 screen is enough?

Yup, the sole reason I downgraded back to 10. So stupid to force me to loose seconds each time I use the taskbar. Aka all the time.

This! So much this!

What's the point of having a taskbar that only groups by app...This has been one of the major pain points of me using Mac OS and it is immensely sad that Windows 11 has also taken this approach. At least some Linux DEs still let me keep my app windows ungrouped...

this works: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher

I mean if I'm at the point of having to monkeypatch the explorer executable, I might as well not use Windows...

Luckily with macOS there is the way of expose (renamed) and hot corners that allows switching based on various logic by a swing of the mouse both lightning fast and visual (easy and quick to locate things and trace what is happening), very natural to me from the very first time I tried. (this allowed Mac + VM products like Parallels with coherence mode to work superior to any Windows practice in this reagard - better in handling multiple windows than Windows, hehe - having Win in a VM was my preferred way of working with Windows for a decade or so - only changed because of new job with different IT practices, and lately with the looong transition of Intel to ARM processors and the consequent difficulties with x64 Win systems and apps. All Windows window became a Mac window, switching between those very visually and quickly, superior to Windows way, even with the then working taskbar practices)

Unluckily in Windows the taskbar became more essential than the dock in macOS for switching windows - on Mac I use the dock to start new instances or quitting the app (differing philosophy of window and app lifetime between mac and win), not much of a switching - and then they ruined this essential taskbar thing without good alternative on Windows (Ctrl + Tab is more like a complementary thing than alternative).

Probably different use cases but I've never found tools that show the window contents to be useful over the window title.

I almost always have many windows that would have thumbnails essentially indistinguishable from each other (think text editors, file managers, terminal prompts etc.)

So I use the task bar as almost like a system wide "tab" interface. Grouping stuff into the app icon is terrible because I can't easily tell if I have a window of the type I want already open. I don't click on the taskbar items to navigate, rather I use them to check what is already open so I can quickly keyboard switch to them.

The Win11 UI completely breaks this workflow so now I either need to do a linear search to flip through all windows, or pull up either the task view or hover menu above the app icon, and pray I can tell apart the huge grid of identical window thumbnails.

Exactly, ungrouped taskbar is the next essential thing after properly working Alt+Tab.

Lmao, I am not able to group it!

I have two browser profiles and no matter what I do they come up as separate tasks on the task bar.. I am not able to group them up.

I would also like to alt tab to them as a whole, then tab between the group windows instead.

Luckily win11 is just a game launcher for me these days, so I only manage to get so and so aggravated :D

Win XP had this right-click on group in the bar and you could spread the windows evenly on the screen. It was really useful for Matlab plots but for some reason they removed it for Win 7.

There's a hope: its comeback appears to be under development.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33781752

Hooray!

I've been using StartAllBack for this after upgrading to Windows 11, and it's worked out pretty well.

Absolutely. I had to find something for this. And thankfully, some guy was annoyed enough to build this: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher