8 ms·

That's interesting that it started reverting into Windows 10. It makes you wonder how the thing is built. Like rather than modifying the code, Windows 11 is li

by hbn 4y ago

That's interesting that it started reverting into Windows 10. It makes you wonder how the thing is built. Like rather than modifying the code, Windows 11 is like a service that run on top of 10 and modifies a few UI things near the end of the startup process. Was that just some kind of hack due to time constraints? Or is the Windows codebase really that much of a delicate ecosystem when it comes to not breaking legacy software so they couldn't even modify the taskbar or file explorer without wrecking something?

anoonmoose 4y ago
Recently, I was required to use a PC that had Windows 11 on it. I tried to set it up like the rest of my computers, which involves moving the task bar from the bottom of the screen to the side, which I've done for years in Windows. Yeah, W11 doesn't support that. If you do some digging you'll find MS claiming it's a large technical lift that they have no current plans to do. What does this mean with regards to your question? Not much. But that regression in functionality, in an area that every other OS I use supports and has supported for years, definitely suggests the thing is a hack. In my humble uninformed opinion.
- stagger87 4y ago
  They have since added the ability to do this.
  - mikebridgman 4y ago
    Do you have a link? It seems it still requires a 3rd party app.
  - TehCorwiz 4y ago
    The location of the Windows 11 taskbar cannot be set through any UI options. They do not officially support changing the location of the taskbar according to available documentation. The upgrade message inside Windows 10 explicitly calls out this deficiency along with other before continuing. There are registry hacks that change the location, but this is unsupported. Docs: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/how-to-use-the-taskbar-in-windows-0657a50f-0cc7-dbfd-ae6b-05020b195b07 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/how-to-use-the-t...
    - fbdab103 4y ago
      >registry hacks that change the location, but this is unsupported. I am imagining the dire warning next to this prompt. Don't rewire the position of the taskbar or your computer just might catch a virus.
    - userbinator 4y ago
      In other words, it seems they removed the UI to change it but left the underlying code alone, presumably because it's an easier change and they want to judge how much people would complain first (before, possibly, later re-enabling the UI to do it and praising themselves for how much better they've made things.)
  - anoonmoose 4y ago
    I just looked into this like...last week, and couldn't find anything, and if it's possible without third-party add-ons, I'd be extremely surprised. But I won't consider that to be the case until I see a link with instructions that work.
  - sacnoradhq 4y ago
    This is false.
- Falkon1313 4y ago
  Isn't it pretty well known that every other version of Windows is a badly-done flop? 98/2000 were great, ME wasn't, XP was great, Vista was awful, 7 was great, 8 was really awful, 10 is excellent, 11 is therefore almost certainly one to skip. I'm kind of surprised so many people are installing Windows 11, given the history (and the fact that it doesn't support common CPUs like the Intel i5). I'll just wait for W12.
  - conductr 4y ago
    Not sure if true, but it’s always felt like the flops were just a new GUI skin on top of the previous good OS. Mostly in weird ways because they end up trying to redesign some things they already got right.
  - goosedragons 4y ago
    Vista was pretty good on decent hardware especially after it's SP1. Most of the troubles came from OEMs putting it on hardware it should not have been on and MS allowing that. It's other source of troubles was changing up the driver model in big ways and companies like Nvidia not being ready in the beginning. I built my first PC after Windows 7 came out. However some peice of hardware in there caused W7 to blue screen after about 5 minutes use every time. Vista though was rock solid and I honestly ended up liking it's desktop more than W7, only thing I missed was window snapping. Windows 11 also supports i5s...It just doesn't support i5s from 6 years ago, nor i7s from then.
  - LeonenTheDK 4y ago
    It does indeed support common CPUs like the Intel i5 (and a bunch of others I forgot existed): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/minimum/supported/windows-11-supported-intel-processors https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/mi... But if you're referring to lack of official support for 9th gen and older CPUs, then it is indeed a pain in the butt. Plenty of valid computers losing official support because reasons is a travesty, but at least W10 is still getting updates for a while I guess? FWIW I have a PC with an i7-7700 and no TPM running W11 for the heck of it, and it runs fine, but it wasn't happy about it. This is just the TV PC, so nothing critical; I wouldn't do this on anything even remotely important.
- rkagerer 4y ago
  Not sure if it works in Windows 11 yet, but Classic Start Menu is a prerequisite of mine on all Windows PC's I use for any length of time.
TrevorJ 4y ago
That kind of comports with how the UI in windows has behaved from 98>XP>7>8>10. In 10, you get the windows 10 UI on most of your top-level interfaces, but once you dive into a sub-menu you get some legacy UI and if you dig down deep enough you get UI from what feels like windows 98.
- torben-friis 4y ago
  Weirdly enough, that's one of the things that originally made me want to explore options outside windows. The mobile ecosystem kept changing and taking you into new experiences (even before smartphones). Meanwhile, a Windows desktop never felt like something new. Just a layer of paint over the old creaky house. I even remember a 'smartphone' of sorts I had before android was a thing, which run windows phone: They literally shoved the desktop version there, I remember not being able to click buttons even with a stylus because the ui was so small for the device. The most popular app was some weird dragon themed overlay that, lo and behold, gave it finger-sized buttons.
  - TillE 4y ago
    It's just some moldy old bits of UI, the actual Windows kernel itself has evolved substantially over the years.
    - gumboza 4y ago
      That's the sad thing. The core of windows is pretty good. It's just the mismanagement and shell that's a shit show.
  - vel0city 4y ago
    It wasn't "Windows Phone", it was Windows Mobile or Pocket PC 2000. All the releases of Windows Phone definitely didn't have a UI like the regular desktop version of Windows and only existed after the release of Android.
    - torben-friis 4y ago
matchagaucho 4y ago
Turtles all the way down. Windows boots from some DOS and File I/O BIOS interrupts.
- microsoftdoes 4y ago
  Not true since the Win 9x days.
  - jesprenj 4y ago
    Was 2000 already NT and free of DOS?
    - Cockbrand 4y ago
      Yes, it was the direct successor of NT 4.0. Windows 2000 was still an OS aimed at the "professional" market, though. XP was the first consumer/mainstream oriented OS based on NT.
      - indigodaddy 4y ago
        I used Win2000 as my main desktop for about 3-4 years back in the day. Very stable.
        adra 4y ago
        I used win2k for like 10 years and continued to play games it as well. I was able to ride on the XP coat tails because between the two, there were only a handful of win32 APIs that were not implemented in 2000. I ended up having to patch a few DLLs to ignore these missing endpoints, but it meant I could use legitimately the best windows there ever was for a few more years. Eventually I "upgraded" to windows 7 to get reasonable driver support because manufacturers finally stopped shipping 2k compatible drivers.. what a sad day that was.
        agumonkey 4y ago
        PC Magazine had the weird idea of shipping a CD-ROM of the Beta release. Having an obsession to try anything I decided to replace win98 with this thing (I had no idea what NT was). It was so lean, fast and stable that I never used anything else until the day XP had some drivers that were absolutely necessary to use my desktop. 99% of low level crashes would just pop up a notification and nothing more, it was insane.
gumboza 4y ago
Windows is built like my old apartment was decorated. 20 layers of paint over the top of mouldy wallpaper.
puffoflogic 4y ago
I developed windows during the Windows 10 timeframe. Although I left before windows 11 was conceived, it's painfully obvious that it is just a UI reskin on top of 10. This was preordained by certain organizational choices made during my time there; namely, that the "Shell" team responsible for the start menu, desktop, and other UI tidbits[0] was completely divorced from the rest of windows development, with their own business priorities and so on. This was the team responsible for Windows 8/.1, so as you can imagine they were somewhat sidelined during Windows 10 development. It appears they have their revenge, first and foremost from the promised-never-to-happen rebranding (whereby they jettisoned the Windows 10 brand which was an embarrassment for that team and that team only). That the result is only a reskinned 10 is the natural result because that is the only part of the product they have the authority or ability to change. The Shell team was trying to push this same new UI during my whole time at Msft, with at least three cancelled attempts that I was aware of even from an IC perspective. By the end the embarrassment was contagious. [0] Plus Edge, as part of the same vestigial business unit. This explains the central position of advertising in the reskin, because Edge in all of its forms was always meant to drive ad revenue. That is the distinct business priority I mentioned earlier, which sets this organization apart from Windows (NT,win32,etc.) development proper, which was shifted to Azure.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  > Windows (NT,win32,etc.) development proper, which was shifted to Azure. In what sense? From what I've seen, there's been virtually no development of Windows for Azure. Most of its features are simply being dropped on the floor and are being replaced wholesale by things that aren't that integrated.
ThatMedicIsASpy 4y ago
My Surface go 3 came with W11 looking like W10 (except the start menu/task bar). That confused me a lot (old right click, old settings). It came win W11 Home so I did a fresh W11 Pro installation (which for some reason accepts the built in key and is activated) and everything looked like W11.
easton 4y ago
It is a pretty big hack. I seem to recall in 11 (at least around RTM time, maybe not now) that if explorer.exe died then all the windows lost their rounded corners. There was definitely a dev build where if the start menu crashed (also explorer.exe I think) the windows 10 one would reappear, although that might’ve just been because during development they shipped both start menus.
Maursault 4y ago
> It makes you wonder how the thing is built. No one really knows, and Cutler won't say or doesn't know, himself.
WalterBright 4y ago
That's how Object Oriented Programming works. It's also how our brains work. Existing parts of the brain remain, they just get overridden here and there by new layers added on. Sometimes the original rat brain takes over. If you've ever gone into a blind rage, for example, that's the rat brain asserting itself.
ndiddy 4y ago
The Windows 11 GUI was originally meant for a version of Windows called "Windows 10X", which was intended for low-powered devices that would compete with Chromebooks (hence the simplified, touch-centric design of the UI). Windows 10X was supposed to be a "legacy-free" OS that only ran UWP programs natively. Rather than using GDI, Win32, Explorer, etc. it used a brand new UI stack built on DirectX. This means that it required a compatibility layer to run Win32 programs, which were isolated from the OS. In mid-2021, Microsoft announced that they were cancelling Windows 10X in favor of bringing some of its features to regular Windows. This is speculation but I would guess that MS didn't want to waste all of the design work that went into Windows 10X, so they ported the new UI over to Windows 10 and used the opportunity to bump up the OS minimum requirements and drop 32-bit support. This would explain why Windows 11 feels like a bunch of junk built on top of Windows 10.
userbinator 4y ago
The new (and IMHO horrible) context menu in Explorer is exactly that. You can even see the old one show up for a fraction of a second before the new one takes its place, and as further evidence, the trick to revert to the old one is to prevent the COM object of the new one from loading and replacing it: https://pureinfotech.com/bring-back-classic-context-menu-windows-11/ https://pureinfotech.com/bring-back-classic-context-menu-win... (For some inexplicable reason, many of the sites that show you how to revert it say the new one is an "improved experience". If it was, why would people be reading articles about how to revert it?)

by hbn 4y ago

anoonmoose 4y ago

Recently, I was required to use a PC that had Windows 11 on it. I tried to set it up like the rest of my computers, which involves moving the task bar from the bottom of the screen to the side, which I've done for years in Windows. Yeah, W11 doesn't support that. If you do some digging you'll find MS claiming it's a large technical lift that they have no current plans to do. What does this mean with regards to your question? Not much. But that regression in functionality, in an area that every other OS I use supports and has supported for years, definitely suggests the thing is a hack. In my humble uninformed opinion.

stagger87 4y ago
They have since added the ability to do this.
- mikebridgman 4y ago
  Do you have a link? It seems it still requires a 3rd party app.
- TehCorwiz 4y ago
  The location of the Windows 11 taskbar cannot be set through any UI options. They do not officially support changing the location of the taskbar according to available documentation. The upgrade message inside Windows 10 explicitly calls out this deficiency along with other before continuing. There are registry hacks that change the location, but this is unsupported. Docs: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/how-to-use-the-taskbar-in-windows-0657a50f-0cc7-dbfd-ae6b-05020b195b07 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/how-to-use-the-t...
  - fbdab103 4y ago
    >registry hacks that change the location, but this is unsupported. I am imagining the dire warning next to this prompt. Don't rewire the position of the taskbar or your computer just might catch a virus.
  - userbinator 4y ago
    In other words, it seems they removed the UI to change it but left the underlying code alone, presumably because it's an easier change and they want to judge how much people would complain first (before, possibly, later re-enabling the UI to do it and praising themselves for how much better they've made things.)
- anoonmoose 4y ago
  I just looked into this like...last week, and couldn't find anything, and if it's possible without third-party add-ons, I'd be extremely surprised. But I won't consider that to be the case until I see a link with instructions that work.
- sacnoradhq 4y ago
  This is false.
Falkon1313 4y ago
Isn't it pretty well known that every other version of Windows is a badly-done flop? 98/2000 were great, ME wasn't, XP was great, Vista was awful, 7 was great, 8 was really awful, 10 is excellent, 11 is therefore almost certainly one to skip. I'm kind of surprised so many people are installing Windows 11, given the history (and the fact that it doesn't support common CPUs like the Intel i5). I'll just wait for W12.
- conductr 4y ago
  Not sure if true, but it’s always felt like the flops were just a new GUI skin on top of the previous good OS. Mostly in weird ways because they end up trying to redesign some things they already got right.
- goosedragons 4y ago
  Vista was pretty good on decent hardware especially after it's SP1. Most of the troubles came from OEMs putting it on hardware it should not have been on and MS allowing that. It's other source of troubles was changing up the driver model in big ways and companies like Nvidia not being ready in the beginning. I built my first PC after Windows 7 came out. However some peice of hardware in there caused W7 to blue screen after about 5 minutes use every time. Vista though was rock solid and I honestly ended up liking it's desktop more than W7, only thing I missed was window snapping. Windows 11 also supports i5s...It just doesn't support i5s from 6 years ago, nor i7s from then.
- LeonenTheDK 4y ago
  It does indeed support common CPUs like the Intel i5 (and a bunch of others I forgot existed): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/minimum/supported/windows-11-supported-intel-processors https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/mi... But if you're referring to lack of official support for 9th gen and older CPUs, then it is indeed a pain in the butt. Plenty of valid computers losing official support because reasons is a travesty, but at least W10 is still getting updates for a while I guess? FWIW I have a PC with an i7-7700 and no TPM running W11 for the heck of it, and it runs fine, but it wasn't happy about it. This is just the TV PC, so nothing critical; I wouldn't do this on anything even remotely important.
rkagerer 4y ago
Not sure if it works in Windows 11 yet, but Classic Start Menu is a prerequisite of mine on all Windows PC's I use for any length of time.

TrevorJ 4y ago

That kind of comports with how the UI in windows has behaved from 98>XP>7>8>10. In 10, you get the windows 10 UI on most of your top-level interfaces, but once you dive into a sub-menu you get some legacy UI and if you dig down deep enough you get UI from what feels like windows 98.

torben-friis 4y ago
Weirdly enough, that's one of the things that originally made me want to explore options outside windows. The mobile ecosystem kept changing and taking you into new experiences (even before smartphones). Meanwhile, a Windows desktop never felt like something new. Just a layer of paint over the old creaky house. I even remember a 'smartphone' of sorts I had before android was a thing, which run windows phone: They literally shoved the desktop version there, I remember not being able to click buttons even with a stylus because the ui was so small for the device. The most popular app was some weird dragon themed overlay that, lo and behold, gave it finger-sized buttons.
- TillE 4y ago
  It's just some moldy old bits of UI, the actual Windows kernel itself has evolved substantially over the years.
  - gumboza 4y ago
    That's the sad thing. The core of windows is pretty good. It's just the mismanagement and shell that's a shit show.
- vel0city 4y ago
  It wasn't "Windows Phone", it was Windows Mobile or Pocket PC 2000. All the releases of Windows Phone definitely didn't have a UI like the regular desktop version of Windows and only existed after the release of Android.
  - torben-friis 4y ago

matchagaucho 4y ago

Turtles all the way down. Windows boots from some DOS and File I/O BIOS interrupts.

microsoftdoes 4y ago
Not true since the Win 9x days.
- jesprenj 4y ago
  Was 2000 already NT and free of DOS?
  - Cockbrand 4y ago
    Yes, it was the direct successor of NT 4.0. Windows 2000 was still an OS aimed at the "professional" market, though. XP was the first consumer/mainstream oriented OS based on NT.
    - indigodaddy 4y ago
      I used Win2000 as my main desktop for about 3-4 years back in the day. Very stable.
      - adra 4y ago
        I used win2k for like 10 years and continued to play games it as well. I was able to ride on the XP coat tails because between the two, there were only a handful of win32 APIs that were not implemented in 2000. I ended up having to patch a few DLLs to ignore these missing endpoints, but it meant I could use legitimately the best windows there ever was for a few more years. Eventually I "upgraded" to windows 7 to get reasonable driver support because manufacturers finally stopped shipping 2k compatible drivers.. what a sad day that was.
      - agumonkey 4y ago
        PC Magazine had the weird idea of shipping a CD-ROM of the Beta release. Having an obsession to try anything I decided to replace win98 with this thing (I had no idea what NT was). It was so lean, fast and stable that I never used anything else until the day XP had some drivers that were absolutely necessary to use my desktop. 99% of low level crashes would just pop up a notification and nothing more, it was insane.

gumboza 4y ago

Windows is built like my old apartment was decorated. 20 layers of paint over the top of mouldy wallpaper.

puffoflogic 4y ago

I developed windows during the Windows 10 timeframe. Although I left before windows 11 was conceived, it's painfully obvious that it is just a UI reskin on top of 10. This was preordained by certain organizational choices made during my time there; namely, that the "Shell" team responsible for the start menu, desktop, and other UI tidbits[0] was completely divorced from the rest of windows development, with their own business priorities and so on. This was the team responsible for Windows 8/.1, so as you can imagine they were somewhat sidelined during Windows 10 development. It appears they have their revenge, first and foremost from the promised-never-to-happen rebranding (whereby they jettisoned the Windows 10 brand which was an embarrassment for that team and that team only). That the result is only a reskinned 10 is the natural result because that is the only part of the product they have the authority or ability to change. The Shell team was trying to push this same new UI during my whole time at Msft, with at least three cancelled attempts that I was aware of even from an IC perspective. By the end the embarrassment was contagious. [0] Plus Edge, as part of the same vestigial business unit. This explains the central position of advertising in the reskin, because Edge in all of its forms was always meant to drive ad revenue. That is the distinct business priority I mentioned earlier, which sets this organization apart from Windows (NT,win32,etc.) development proper, which was shifted to Azure.

jiggawatts 4y ago
> Windows (NT,win32,etc.) development proper, which was shifted to Azure. In what sense? From what I've seen, there's been virtually no development of Windows for Azure. Most of its features are simply being dropped on the floor and are being replaced wholesale by things that aren't that integrated.

ThatMedicIsASpy 4y ago

My Surface go 3 came with W11 looking like W10 (except the start menu/task bar). That confused me a lot (old right click, old settings). It came win W11 Home so I did a fresh W11 Pro installation (which for some reason accepts the built in key and is activated) and everything looked like W11.

easton 4y ago

It is a pretty big hack. I seem to recall in 11 (at least around RTM time, maybe not now) that if explorer.exe died then all the windows lost their rounded corners. There was definitely a dev build where if the start menu crashed (also explorer.exe I think) the windows 10 one would reappear, although that might’ve just been because during development they shipped both start menus.

Maursault 4y ago

> It makes you wonder how the thing is built. No one really knows, and Cutler won't say or doesn't know, himself.

WalterBright 4y ago

That's how Object Oriented Programming works. It's also how our brains work. Existing parts of the brain remain, they just get overridden here and there by new layers added on. Sometimes the original rat brain takes over. If you've ever gone into a blind rage, for example, that's the rat brain asserting itself.

ndiddy 4y ago

The Windows 11 GUI was originally meant for a version of Windows called "Windows 10X", which was intended for low-powered devices that would compete with Chromebooks (hence the simplified, touch-centric design of the UI). Windows 10X was supposed to be a "legacy-free" OS that only ran UWP programs natively. Rather than using GDI, Win32, Explorer, etc. it used a brand new UI stack built on DirectX. This means that it required a compatibility layer to run Win32 programs, which were isolated from the OS. In mid-2021, Microsoft announced that they were cancelling Windows 10X in favor of bringing some of its features to regular Windows. This is speculation but I would guess that MS didn't want to waste all of the design work that went into Windows 10X, so they ported the new UI over to Windows 10 and used the opportunity to bump up the OS minimum requirements and drop 32-bit support. This would explain why Windows 11 feels like a bunch of junk built on top of Windows 10.

userbinator 4y ago

The new (and IMHO horrible) context menu in Explorer is exactly that. You can even see the old one show up for a fraction of a second before the new one takes its place, and as further evidence, the trick to revert to the old one is to prevent the COM object of the new one from loading and replacing it: https://pureinfotech.com/bring-back-classic-context-menu-windows-11/ https://pureinfotech.com/bring-back-classic-context-menu-win... (For some inexplicable reason, many of the sites that show you how to revert it say the new one is an "improved experience". If it was, why would people be reading articles about how to revert it?)