8 ms·

The real issue here is that W11 doesn't solve a problem or fix a need. Instead what it does do is makes unnecessary UI changes. File explorer right-click menu

The real issue here is that W11 doesn't solve a problem or fix a need. Instead what it does do is makes unnecessary UI changes. File explorer right-click menu change: check Advertisements for MS store/MS services in working areas of the UI: check Harder to create/use a 'local-only' account on non-enterprise versions of the OS: check Not that long ago, the `safe` option for businesses was to wait until ServicePack 2 for an OS was released before we installed it. MS would have better W11 adoption if they had just called it Windows10 SP2. I used W11 (because it came pre-installed on a laptop I bought) for 2 weeks. The right-click menu changes were infuriating. The 'Start' menu is still an abomination. I had more popups advertising MS services and pushing a MS Account then I ever saw on the popup-hell of the 90-00's internet. IMHO It would take using 'Start10' (is the new version called Start11?) to de-crapify W11 before I would want to use it, and since the upgrade is primarily cosmetic; then what's the point of upgrading?

dragontamer 4y ago
> The real issue here is that W11 doesn't solve a problem or fix a need Having a scheduler that actually works with 12th generation and 13th generation P+E cores coming out of Intel is a pretty important problem methinks. Especially if you're a user who wants to take advantage of the E-core's efficiency to increase battery lives on your laptop. > Instead what it does do is makes unnecessary UI changes. I do wonder why the Microsoft / Windows folk keep reinventing their UI. Literally reinventing it. We're on WinUI 3 now, from like Silverlight -> Windows 8 Metro -> Windows 10 UWP -> WinUI3 (I'm not sure where WinUI1 or 2 stand, but its probably somewhere in that Win10 UWP era). I get that Microsoft's business strategy keeps changing. But it has to be annoying for Windows developers to try to keep up with all that.
- skelpmargyar 4y ago
  How come they don't update the scheduler in Windows 10 to support Intel's processors? Also, from what I have read the biggest changes are UI based and some new features like DirectStorage which don't seem like they would require an entirely new operating system. Is there some backwards compatibility issue with the new features? And is there a complete changelist from Microsoft?
  - mike_hearn 4y ago
    A lot of people aren't aware of this but Win10 is in maintenance mode and has been for quite some time. Not only do they not backport new features but they also don't always backport important bug fixes either (except for security obviously). Win11 is probably an opt-in upgrade due to the UI changes. The idea of Win10 being the last version ever was nice, but if all upgrades happen automatically you can't make any serious UI changes because people hate stuff just suddenly changing on them when they don't expect it. Note that Apple never made any move as bold as removing versions, and they were able to continue making UI changes as a consequence in each version. People moan, the people who don't like it don't upgrade, and eventually have to pick between support or upgrading but they're never forced so the blowback is minimal. The idea of Win10 being the last version seems to have come from web apps which aren't visibly versioned. But the same problem crops up there, hence why big UI changes on sites like Gmail, Reddit etc have to fork the frontend codebase - sometimes for years.
  - soco 4y ago
    Oh my and if they would finally fix that darn printing spooler which hangs exactly in the same way since Windows 3.1 with undeletable jobs and can't find a printer to save its life when you hop wireless networks...
- hbn 4y ago
  > I do wonder why the Microsoft / Windows folk keep reinventing their UI. There's a trend in the general tech zeitgeist where people think anything older than a couple years is decaying old cruft and needs to be redone. Whether that's UI/UX, programming languages, architectures, etc. Any software shop that fancies itself as a cool, move-fast-and-break-things environment for hip young Silicon Valley-types needs to always be following the latest trends lest the stubborn organization and its red tape turn us into the next BlackBerry. I blame Google. After having enough products of theirs that I used and liked ripped away from me and replaced with something worse, and having to adapt to a new Android UI with every annual OS update (their favorite place to rearrange is the quick settings/notification shade - I don't know if a year went by where they didn't redesign it), I finally swore off using any new services they come out with, de-Googling where I can, and bought myself an iPhone. I won't say Apple is perfect for not doing stupid UI redesigns, but at least the texting app looks pretty much identical to what Steve Jobs demoed in 2007.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Except the people running the show seem to not have any clue about what Forms, WPF and MFC are capable of doing, while trying to sell WinUI 3.0, and not having an answer for those stuck in UWP for XBox and HoloLens. They have burned lots of good will from WinRT advocates with all those rewrites, I doubt most of us care, other than those with a sunken cost in WinRT.
  - StillBored 4y ago
    Its largely what happened to windows CE/etc too. They could have had a much larger part of the phone pie, but they literally would throw everything away every year or so and start over. Which is such an odd behavior from a company who's main product didn't win because it was the best, or most ubiquitous, but because they maintained a religious amount of backwards compatibility for 15+ years while steadily improving the product.
    - mike_hearn 4y ago
      That problem was noticed way back in 2004: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost... "There are two opposing forces inside Microsoft, which I will refer to, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as The Raymond Chen Camp and The MSDN Magazine Camp .... The Raymond Chen Camp believes in making things easy for developers by making it easy to write once and run anywhere (well, on any Windows box). The MSDN Magazine Camp believes in making things easy for developers by giving them really powerful chunks of code which they can leverage, if they are willing to pay the price of incredibly complicated deployment and installation headaches, not to mention the huge learning curve. The Raymond Chen camp is all about consolidation. Please, don’t make things any worse, let’s just keep making what we already have still work. The MSDN Magazine Camp needs to keep churning out new gigantic pieces of technology that nobody can keep up with ... Inside Microsoft, the MSDN Magazine Camp has won the battle." This telling of the situation is rather unfair on both sides, of course. The actual reason behind what happened is straightforward - Microsoft had to abandon Win32 because it was a terrible API even by the standards of its time that had no hope of keeping up with competitors, but their intended replacement (.NET) was too big of a leap and didn't manage to fully take over. They were trying to compete with Java and mostly managed that, but it was too far above the metal to replace Win32 in every context. In particular the Windows team rejected it as a way to build and ship Windows itself, leading to severely dysfunctional internal politics and dramas. Plus their whole strategy for the web was "try to kill it by making IE dominant and then defunding it, whilst pushing people back to the Windows API". They didn't try very hard to understand why devs were flocking to HTML despite its massive disadvantages compared to Win32. In fairness nor did Apple or Sun or anyone else, really. So: Win32 was dying, and was designed in such a way that incremental progress wasn't going to fix anything. The API itself was just too badly flawed. But they ceded the battle of ideas to Java and then couldn't find a way to incrementally port existing Win32 apps, because C# was too different to C++, and the various .NET C++ dialects just weren't a compelling story for games, the MS Office team, the Adobe suite etc. Roll forward a decade or so and we have a needle scratch moment - the Windows team finally decide that they need a proper replacement for Win32 that can actually be incrementally adopted. WinRT is their answer. It's sort of COM but evolved and with databases of metadata that allow the auto generation of high quality language bindings (including a standard C++ binding), along with a pile of new APIs, which can also be incrementally adopted inside Win32 apps. It's actually, dare I say it, not that bad. At least in terms of overall design. Unfortunately by the time they finally get this strategy right the world has long since forgotten about Windows programming, with experts in it confined mostly to the video games industry, the Chrome team, and random old farts like me who occasionally still need to write a Windows app for whatever reason. Currently for me that's about making distributing apps easy - Conveyor [1] uses a small custom app that mixes Win32 and WinRT in the same program, a small EXE that drives the download/install. And it uses the WinRT packaging scheme (MSIX) which is Linux-like and has a whole bunch of advantages over other installation mechanisms. Unfortunately for Microsoft whilst WinRT does get the foundations right, the implementations of the new APIs at the UI level (WinUI) aren't really being used by anyone outside the Windows team themselves, and it's a whole new UI toolkit written from scratch, not based on an evolved Win32 codebase. So a lot of little details are wrong. Try triple-clicking to select text in the Settings app for an example. I guess the core question is how things could have been different. The WinRT strategy could have worked or at least resulted in slower decline, if it had been started around the Win 2000 era and if .NET had been a properly integrated feature of Windows. In other words if they'd retained strong technical leadership over the platform as a whole. They'd still have lost out to the web and Linux though, because even now their platform doesn't really grok why web apps or Linux are popular. [1] https://conveyor.hydraulic.dev/ https://conveyor.hydraulic.dev/
- oblak 4y ago
  > Especially if you're a user who wants to take advantage of the E-core's efficiency to increase battery lives on your laptop. It is my understanding that "e cores" in AL/PL are all about space, not power. Did I read the graphs wrong?
pjmlp 4y ago
It is basically what Windows 10X team got assigned to do after it got discontinued. Work laptop got upgraded to it, on my private one I am keeping Windows 10.
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>The real issue here is that W11 doesn't solve a problem or fix a need. That's not true. I'll try to exemplify some problems and improvements Windows 11 solved over 10: - App windows return to their place on their respective monitors between laptop dock-undock switches. On Windows 10, all windows get dumped to whichever monitor powers on first when you dock back the laptop. Though I haven't used Win 10 in a year so they could have pushed this fix there as well in the meantime. - WSL with WSLg comes enabled out of the box, making pulling stuff off github and running it in a native linux environment much quicker and easier out of the box, without all those hacky steps Windows 10 needed to get WSL. - Window tiling is massively enhanced with more tiling options, without the need for PowerToys like you do on Windows 10. - Screen capture and recording with OCR is now more polished and seamless out of the box. - Dark mode is way better than on Windows 10 with many more components of the UI capable of turning dark. On Windows 10 it was completely half assed with many UI elements staying white and blinding you. It's still not perfect though (right click on a file, show more options, click on properties and get blinded), but still overall much better than Win 10 as yes, it set the bar that low. - The quick toggle menu next to the clock is much more useful than on Win10, very similar to the one on the latest Gnome, with the most useful features available like switching power modes, switching Bluetooth/audio devices or toggling Night Light. - I can change speaker volume just by hovering the mouse cursor over the speaker icon next to the clock and flicking the mouse scroll wheel, just like in Gnome and KDE. Really love this one. - Start menu search is better and smarter than on Windows 10. I just hit the start/meta key and type the first 3 or so letters of an app and it nails it. It also indexes the latest files you accessed so you can type the first few letters of a file and it will bring it up. - The settings menu/app is now far more feature complete and lets you easily find and change a setting without having to dig out the old control panel like you might need on Windows 10. The control panel is still there hidden away, but I really never had to open it by now in almost a year. - Multi-finger trackpad gestures for workspace and window switching is better and more seamless - Win11 brings enhanced security features like core isolation - HDR support out of the box is far better, if you have one such monitor - Basic out of the box apps like screenshotting annotation I previously mentioned, image viewer/editor, video player/editor, are now fully featured and actually useful, meaning I can actually start using the OS after installation and get to work, without first going to download Chrome and then going to download third party PDF readers, video players and image viewers, etc. as was the typical post-installation ritual that plagued every previous Windows release to make it actually usable. It's finally a more cohesive and productive experience out of the box. I still download Notepad++ though, that's irreplaceable. Some of these things I mentioned here are part of relatively new updates though. A year ago Win 11 was very janky and lacking in features, kind of like they launched it too soon, before being properly finished, so I wouldn't have been so kind to it as I am now. But judging by the updates cadence and features they bring, they really seem committed to improve it slowly but surely. Currently it's basically a more polished Windows 10 that adds more features and fixes a lot of the jank Win 10 users had to live with, apart from one thing: The only annoying and unforgivable thing to me is that they're forcibly grouping all opened apps into taskbar icons without labels, a-la GNOME/MacOS. Just let me have my mess of apps with labels spreading across the entire taskbar Microsoft, I'm more productive that way, as my peripheral vision keeps track of which app is where even on a messy crowded taskbar. Don't try to think you know what's best for me and dumb things down for me just for the sake of superficial aesthetics. I paid for the entire taskbar, and damn-it, I wanna use it! Hope this helps.
jnxx 4y ago
> The real issue here is that W11 doesn't solve a problem or fix a need. How so? You could ask Richard Stallman whether he has any idea about why....
francispauli 4y ago
These changes are a pain but i have mostly achieved a copy of my Windows 10 setup which is much needed to stay productive! Getting the old right-click menu back is done through a registry setting. Reverting the taskbar back to Win10/2000 style for things like ungrouping of task bar items, items in multiple rows, items with titles and a quick launch area i use this: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher

dragontamer 4y ago

> The real issue here is that W11 doesn't solve a problem or fix a need Having a scheduler that actually works with 12th generation and 13th generation P+E cores coming out of Intel is a pretty important problem methinks. Especially if you're a user who wants to take advantage of the E-core's efficiency to increase battery lives on your laptop. > Instead what it does do is makes unnecessary UI changes. I do wonder why the Microsoft / Windows folk keep reinventing their UI. Literally reinventing it. We're on WinUI 3 now, from like Silverlight -> Windows 8 Metro -> Windows 10 UWP -> WinUI3 (I'm not sure where WinUI1 or 2 stand, but its probably somewhere in that Win10 UWP era). I get that Microsoft's business strategy keeps changing. But it has to be annoying for Windows developers to try to keep up with all that.

skelpmargyar 4y ago
How come they don't update the scheduler in Windows 10 to support Intel's processors? Also, from what I have read the biggest changes are UI based and some new features like DirectStorage which don't seem like they would require an entirely new operating system. Is there some backwards compatibility issue with the new features? And is there a complete changelist from Microsoft?
- mike_hearn 4y ago
  A lot of people aren't aware of this but Win10 is in maintenance mode and has been for quite some time. Not only do they not backport new features but they also don't always backport important bug fixes either (except for security obviously). Win11 is probably an opt-in upgrade due to the UI changes. The idea of Win10 being the last version ever was nice, but if all upgrades happen automatically you can't make any serious UI changes because people hate stuff just suddenly changing on them when they don't expect it. Note that Apple never made any move as bold as removing versions, and they were able to continue making UI changes as a consequence in each version. People moan, the people who don't like it don't upgrade, and eventually have to pick between support or upgrading but they're never forced so the blowback is minimal. The idea of Win10 being the last version seems to have come from web apps which aren't visibly versioned. But the same problem crops up there, hence why big UI changes on sites like Gmail, Reddit etc have to fork the frontend codebase - sometimes for years.
- soco 4y ago
  Oh my and if they would finally fix that darn printing spooler which hangs exactly in the same way since Windows 3.1 with undeletable jobs and can't find a printer to save its life when you hop wireless networks...
hbn 4y ago
> I do wonder why the Microsoft / Windows folk keep reinventing their UI. There's a trend in the general tech zeitgeist where people think anything older than a couple years is decaying old cruft and needs to be redone. Whether that's UI/UX, programming languages, architectures, etc. Any software shop that fancies itself as a cool, move-fast-and-break-things environment for hip young Silicon Valley-types needs to always be following the latest trends lest the stubborn organization and its red tape turn us into the next BlackBerry. I blame Google. After having enough products of theirs that I used and liked ripped away from me and replaced with something worse, and having to adapt to a new Android UI with every annual OS update (their favorite place to rearrange is the quick settings/notification shade - I don't know if a year went by where they didn't redesign it), I finally swore off using any new services they come out with, de-Googling where I can, and bought myself an iPhone. I won't say Apple is perfect for not doing stupid UI redesigns, but at least the texting app looks pretty much identical to what Steve Jobs demoed in 2007.
pjmlp 4y ago
Except the people running the show seem to not have any clue about what Forms, WPF and MFC are capable of doing, while trying to sell WinUI 3.0, and not having an answer for those stuck in UWP for XBox and HoloLens. They have burned lots of good will from WinRT advocates with all those rewrites, I doubt most of us care, other than those with a sunken cost in WinRT.
- StillBored 4y ago
  Its largely what happened to windows CE/etc too. They could have had a much larger part of the phone pie, but they literally would throw everything away every year or so and start over. Which is such an odd behavior from a company who's main product didn't win because it was the best, or most ubiquitous, but because they maintained a religious amount of backwards compatibility for 15+ years while steadily improving the product.
  - mike_hearn 4y ago
    That problem was noticed way back in 2004: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost... "There are two opposing forces inside Microsoft, which I will refer to, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as The Raymond Chen Camp and The MSDN Magazine Camp .... The Raymond Chen Camp believes in making things easy for developers by making it easy to write once and run anywhere (well, on any Windows box). The MSDN Magazine Camp believes in making things easy for developers by giving them really powerful chunks of code which they can leverage, if they are willing to pay the price of incredibly complicated deployment and installation headaches, not to mention the huge learning curve. The Raymond Chen camp is all about consolidation. Please, don’t make things any worse, let’s just keep making what we already have still work. The MSDN Magazine Camp needs to keep churning out new gigantic pieces of technology that nobody can keep up with ... Inside Microsoft, the MSDN Magazine Camp has won the battle." This telling of the situation is rather unfair on both sides, of course. The actual reason behind what happened is straightforward - Microsoft had to abandon Win32 because it was a terrible API even by the standards of its time that had no hope of keeping up with competitors, but their intended replacement (.NET) was too big of a leap and didn't manage to fully take over. They were trying to compete with Java and mostly managed that, but it was too far above the metal to replace Win32 in every context. In particular the Windows team rejected it as a way to build and ship Windows itself, leading to severely dysfunctional internal politics and dramas. Plus their whole strategy for the web was "try to kill it by making IE dominant and then defunding it, whilst pushing people back to the Windows API". They didn't try very hard to understand why devs were flocking to HTML despite its massive disadvantages compared to Win32. In fairness nor did Apple or Sun or anyone else, really. So: Win32 was dying, and was designed in such a way that incremental progress wasn't going to fix anything. The API itself was just too badly flawed. But they ceded the battle of ideas to Java and then couldn't find a way to incrementally port existing Win32 apps, because C# was too different to C++, and the various .NET C++ dialects just weren't a compelling story for games, the MS Office team, the Adobe suite etc. Roll forward a decade or so and we have a needle scratch moment - the Windows team finally decide that they need a proper replacement for Win32 that can actually be incrementally adopted. WinRT is their answer. It's sort of COM but evolved and with databases of metadata that allow the auto generation of high quality language bindings (including a standard C++ binding), along with a pile of new APIs, which can also be incrementally adopted inside Win32 apps. It's actually, dare I say it, not that bad. At least in terms of overall design. Unfortunately by the time they finally get this strategy right the world has long since forgotten about Windows programming, with experts in it confined mostly to the video games industry, the Chrome team, and random old farts like me who occasionally still need to write a Windows app for whatever reason. Currently for me that's about making distributing apps easy - Conveyor [1] uses a small custom app that mixes Win32 and WinRT in the same program, a small EXE that drives the download/install. And it uses the WinRT packaging scheme (MSIX) which is Linux-like and has a whole bunch of advantages over other installation mechanisms. Unfortunately for Microsoft whilst WinRT does get the foundations right, the implementations of the new APIs at the UI level (WinUI) aren't really being used by anyone outside the Windows team themselves, and it's a whole new UI toolkit written from scratch, not based on an evolved Win32 codebase. So a lot of little details are wrong. Try triple-clicking to select text in the Settings app for an example. I guess the core question is how things could have been different. The WinRT strategy could have worked or at least resulted in slower decline, if it had been started around the Win 2000 era and if .NET had been a properly integrated feature of Windows. In other words if they'd retained strong technical leadership over the platform as a whole. They'd still have lost out to the web and Linux though, because even now their platform doesn't really grok why web apps or Linux are popular. [1] https://conveyor.hydraulic.dev/ https://conveyor.hydraulic.dev/
oblak 4y ago
> Especially if you're a user who wants to take advantage of the E-core's efficiency to increase battery lives on your laptop. It is my understanding that "e cores" in AL/PL are all about space, not power. Did I read the graphs wrong?

pjmlp 4y ago

It is basically what Windows 10X team got assigned to do after it got discontinued. Work laptop got upgraded to it, on my private one I am keeping Windows 10.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago

>The real issue here is that W11 doesn't solve a problem or fix a need. That's not true. I'll try to exemplify some problems and improvements Windows 11 solved over 10: - App windows return to their place on their respective monitors between laptop dock-undock switches. On Windows 10, all windows get dumped to whichever monitor powers on first when you dock back the laptop. Though I haven't used Win 10 in a year so they could have pushed this fix there as well in the meantime. - WSL with WSLg comes enabled out of the box, making pulling stuff off github and running it in a native linux environment much quicker and easier out of the box, without all those hacky steps Windows 10 needed to get WSL. - Window tiling is massively enhanced with more tiling options, without the need for PowerToys like you do on Windows 10. - Screen capture and recording with OCR is now more polished and seamless out of the box. - Dark mode is way better than on Windows 10 with many more components of the UI capable of turning dark. On Windows 10 it was completely half assed with many UI elements staying white and blinding you. It's still not perfect though (right click on a file, show more options, click on properties and get blinded), but still overall much better than Win 10 as yes, it set the bar that low. - The quick toggle menu next to the clock is much more useful than on Win10, very similar to the one on the latest Gnome, with the most useful features available like switching power modes, switching Bluetooth/audio devices or toggling Night Light. - I can change speaker volume just by hovering the mouse cursor over the speaker icon next to the clock and flicking the mouse scroll wheel, just like in Gnome and KDE. Really love this one. - Start menu search is better and smarter than on Windows 10. I just hit the start/meta key and type the first 3 or so letters of an app and it nails it. It also indexes the latest files you accessed so you can type the first few letters of a file and it will bring it up. - The settings menu/app is now far more feature complete and lets you easily find and change a setting without having to dig out the old control panel like you might need on Windows 10. The control panel is still there hidden away, but I really never had to open it by now in almost a year. - Multi-finger trackpad gestures for workspace and window switching is better and more seamless - Win11 brings enhanced security features like core isolation - HDR support out of the box is far better, if you have one such monitor - Basic out of the box apps like screenshotting annotation I previously mentioned, image viewer/editor, video player/editor, are now fully featured and actually useful, meaning I can actually start using the OS after installation and get to work, without first going to download Chrome and then going to download third party PDF readers, video players and image viewers, etc. as was the typical post-installation ritual that plagued every previous Windows release to make it actually usable. It's finally a more cohesive and productive experience out of the box. I still download Notepad++ though, that's irreplaceable. Some of these things I mentioned here are part of relatively new updates though. A year ago Win 11 was very janky and lacking in features, kind of like they launched it too soon, before being properly finished, so I wouldn't have been so kind to it as I am now. But judging by the updates cadence and features they bring, they really seem committed to improve it slowly but surely. Currently it's basically a more polished Windows 10 that adds more features and fixes a lot of the jank Win 10 users had to live with, apart from one thing: The only annoying and unforgivable thing to me is that they're forcibly grouping all opened apps into taskbar icons without labels, a-la GNOME/MacOS. Just let me have my mess of apps with labels spreading across the entire taskbar Microsoft, I'm more productive that way, as my peripheral vision keeps track of which app is where even on a messy crowded taskbar. Don't try to think you know what's best for me and dumb things down for me just for the sake of superficial aesthetics. I paid for the entire taskbar, and damn-it, I wanna use it! Hope this helps.

jnxx 4y ago

> The real issue here is that W11 doesn't solve a problem or fix a need. How so? You could ask Richard Stallman whether he has any idea about why....

francispauli 4y ago

These changes are a pain but i have mostly achieved a copy of my Windows 10 setup which is much needed to stay productive! Getting the old right-click menu back is done through a registry setting. Reverting the taskbar back to Win10/2000 style for things like ungrouping of task bar items, items in multiple rows, items with titles and a quick launch area i use this: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher