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I have to say that after switching to Windows 11, I don't hate it as much as I thought I would. I'm still a bit upset that they took away vertical taskbars from

I have to say that after switching to Windows 11, I don't hate it as much as I thought I would. I'm still a bit upset that they took away vertical taskbars from us, but some things like multi-GPU support is better than in Windows 10: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/what-is-ruining-dual-gpu-setups https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/what-is-ruining-dual-gpu-setups On the other hand, for whatever reason Windows 11 right now refuses to install updates (I think the logs complained about their own web view components being unavailable last I checked, which is wrong because they definitely are there), which is kind of embarrassing. With news of many games also performing better on Linux distros nowadays like https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/06/games-run-faster-on-steamos-than-windows-11-ars-testing-finds/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/06/games-run-faster-on-s... it feels like vendor lock (certain anti-cheat and software not running on anything else) and familiarity is increasingly what's keeping folks on the platform. While I've also seen my friends struggling to get an Arch install just right, it's nice to know that if I'm willing to say goodbye to some games (e.g. looking at https://www.protondb.com https://www.protondb.com) and software (I actually like the Windows version of SourceTree and tools like WinSCP and MobaXTerm and even Notepad++), then I could go back to using Linux Mint with Cinnamon as my daily driver again - pretty pleasant setup.

throwawaystress 1y ago
I’m so glad you mentioned the vertical taskbars being taken away. There’s a feedback item on Microsoft’s forums that’s years old now and they still haven’t addressed it. It seems so weird that they took away this functionality that they’d had implemented for years, seemingly for no reason.
princevegeta89 1y ago
Not sure man, I just want a version of Microsoft Windows without all the telemetry and the ads and the aggressive control Microsoft has on the system via updates. Time and again they keep changing the default browser, throwing ads into Start Menu, blocking specific applications (such as Chrome etc. Bad example because Chrome is an evil junkyard. Imagine them blocking Google Drive one day because they want you to use OneDrive). In general WSL is great but the entire Windows system feels so outdated and full of duplicate layers thrown upon each other with modern UIs on top of old APIs with the old UIs not even deleted and taken care of. The productivity and cleanliness of OS X keeps convincing me again and again to stick to the Macs as a platform - in my POV this is one of the few things Apple has gotten right (with Apple CPUs), after decades.
- mjevans 1y ago
  Now having used an OSX laptop at work, my main pain points are how _everything_ seems to be different for the sake of being different (keeping legacy Macintosh-isms). My main pain points: * Keyboard combinations, can't 'theme' them to just work like every other popular platform. * Docking stations + Multi-Monitors. TONS broken here. Worst of all is how there's no way to just FIX the dock to a single screen's bottom. Though if you pick Left or Right it'll stay there and not jump between screens. * Per task focus / lists / menus. I like the WM to fuse the taskbar to each 'parent' level task window, NOT a screen edge. Similarly, the WM shouldn't group window switching per task (which makes work among a group of tasks super tedious). PS: if there's a good way of fixing these on a corp-managed device please let me know. I've failed to find some obvious search result with ~15 years of web search history of others having the same pain points. With any 'solutions' now obsolete as internal component names / control schema completely renamed / redesigned over time, while seemingly not fixing any of the pain points.
  - princevegeta89 1y ago
    Make no mistake - it is not surprising to find UX issues on Macbooks. My main quirks that I hated and how I addressed them: Note that the items below are based on my personal opinion only: 1. Finder always seemed to suck ass - been the same for 10+ years lol. I use QSpace Pro as my full-time file explorer/manager. 2. Alt-Tab behavior also sucked for me -having to hold down controls and no thumbnail views....fixed with the AltTab app. 3. Can't control system volume when connected to an external monitor not made by Apple. Fixed with an app called SoundControl 4. Spotlight is lame and slow as hell - fixed with Alfred 5. No clipboard manager built-in - I use an app called Copy'Em Paste for this.
  - eviks 1y ago
    Karabiner Elements, keyboard maestro, better touch tool can help a lot in "theming" key combos (though KE might be limited on a locked down laptop)
- Mawr 1y ago
  https://ameliorated.io/ https://ameliorated.io/ ;)
throwaway48476 1y ago
An OS with electron components is just absurd. They laid off all the competent employees who knew how to write c++.
- vel0city 1y ago
  They've been using webview components since 1997.
  - dspillett 1y ago
    Slapping a webview component into a native app is a lot less heavy than a full election app. A lot heavier than not at all, of course, and webview felt heavy handed back then like election for OS components feels now, I feel a lesson has not been learned…
    - vel0city 1y ago
      Either way they're shipping an entire browser stack, and back in 1997 it was even heavier in comparison to available compute. But rose colored glasses two US to ignore that.
      - dspillett 1y ago
        IIRC the one set of browser parts was shared around between active desktop and other OS uses, where anything Electron based has its own instance of both chromium and node.
coderjames 1y ago
> I'm still a bit upset that they took away vertical taskbars from us After getting a new W11 laptop at work and discovering the removal of vertical taskbars (ridiculous on 16:9 monitors), that particular loss is specifically what keeps me from "upgrading" from W10. Windows Updates warns me that "certain features aren't available on Windows 11" without specifying which ones; finding that sane placement of my taskbar is one of them means I'm plenty willing to pay $30 for another year of security updates to get to keep W10.
discostrings 1y ago
Missing vertical taskbar is probably the most egregious omission, but it's not so much they took it away as it is they created versions of a number of Windows Explorer components in a higher-level technology without implementing half the features and shipping it with 50x the number of bugs. I at least weekly (and often daily) run into issues with taskbar icons overlapping one another, menus not coming up when clicked, the tray icons breaking, etc. Same story with navigating the file system--the new implementation has a multitude of issues, including getting into a state where clicking files to select them only works below a certain invisible horizontal line in the window, windows not refreshing when files have been added/removed, trying to rename a file you just copied being an exercise in frustration with the view refreshing and exiting the rename state 5 - 10 seconds after the copy, the address bar breaking in about a dozen different ways... it's really frustrating software that's a full few tiers down from the quality standard set by Windows 10 and previous versions. It's gotten slightly better since the initial Windows 11 release, but it still feels like pre-release quality software. I was hoping they'd get it up to release quality and add the important features back by the sunset of Windows 10, but it looks like Microsoft really doesn't care about the quality of the experience of using their UI. If it were only missing the vertical taskbar as a design decision that would be one thing, but instead it's the very obvious tip of an iceberg of lack of user focus, care, quality, resourcing, and skill. They don't add it back because they know in their current state they're not going to do it well, and the money's in dreaming up new ways of force-feeding trash "news" and promotions anyway, not in helping you get things done and providing a well-functioning tool and bicycle for the mind. What if someone put the taskbar on the left side of the screen, it interfered with them seeing the clickbait brainrot of the widgets "feature", and Microsoft didn't get its average $.0003 for each interaction?
- currysausage 1y ago
  One upside of this reimplementation is that we can now enjoy state-of-the-art Electron-level loading times when opening a new Explorer window. /s
- eviks 1y ago
  > in a higher-level technology without implementing half the features and shipping it with 50x the number of bugs. Ha, yeah, was amazed to see basic layout fails in such a core component! Web tech is eating the world, bringing all its sloppiness with it...
wintermutestwin 1y ago
>On the other hand, for whatever reason Windows 11 right now refuses to install updates (I think the logs complained about their own web view components being unavailable last I checked, which is wrong because they definitely are there), which is kind of embarrassing. Updates failing and the horrible troubleshooting process is the main reason I’d love to ditch their abortion of an OS. As it is, the most powerful computer of my many is just used for gaming.
mslansn 1y ago
You can use StartAllBack to get back the regular taskbar which can be used in vertical mode.
eviks 1y ago
> I'm still a bit upset that they took away vertical taskbars from us Have you tried this awesome mod app? https://windhawk.net/mods/taskbar-vertical https://windhawk.net/mods/taskbar-vertical

throwawaystress 1y ago

I’m so glad you mentioned the vertical taskbars being taken away. There’s a feedback item on Microsoft’s forums that’s years old now and they still haven’t addressed it. It seems so weird that they took away this functionality that they’d had implemented for years, seemingly for no reason.

princevegeta89 1y ago

Not sure man, I just want a version of Microsoft Windows without all the telemetry and the ads and the aggressive control Microsoft has on the system via updates. Time and again they keep changing the default browser, throwing ads into Start Menu, blocking specific applications (such as Chrome etc. Bad example because Chrome is an evil junkyard. Imagine them blocking Google Drive one day because they want you to use OneDrive). In general WSL is great but the entire Windows system feels so outdated and full of duplicate layers thrown upon each other with modern UIs on top of old APIs with the old UIs not even deleted and taken care of. The productivity and cleanliness of OS X keeps convincing me again and again to stick to the Macs as a platform - in my POV this is one of the few things Apple has gotten right (with Apple CPUs), after decades.

mjevans 1y ago
Now having used an OSX laptop at work, my main pain points are how _everything_ seems to be different for the sake of being different (keeping legacy Macintosh-isms). My main pain points: * Keyboard combinations, can't 'theme' them to just work like every other popular platform. * Docking stations + Multi-Monitors. TONS broken here. Worst of all is how there's no way to just FIX the dock to a single screen's bottom. Though if you pick Left or Right it'll stay there and not jump between screens. * Per task focus / lists / menus. I like the WM to fuse the taskbar to each 'parent' level task window, NOT a screen edge. Similarly, the WM shouldn't group window switching per task (which makes work among a group of tasks super tedious). PS: if there's a good way of fixing these on a corp-managed device please let me know. I've failed to find some obvious search result with ~15 years of web search history of others having the same pain points. With any 'solutions' now obsolete as internal component names / control schema completely renamed / redesigned over time, while seemingly not fixing any of the pain points.
- princevegeta89 1y ago
  Make no mistake - it is not surprising to find UX issues on Macbooks. My main quirks that I hated and how I addressed them: Note that the items below are based on my personal opinion only: 1. Finder always seemed to suck ass - been the same for 10+ years lol. I use QSpace Pro as my full-time file explorer/manager. 2. Alt-Tab behavior also sucked for me -having to hold down controls and no thumbnail views....fixed with the AltTab app. 3. Can't control system volume when connected to an external monitor not made by Apple. Fixed with an app called SoundControl 4. Spotlight is lame and slow as hell - fixed with Alfred 5. No clipboard manager built-in - I use an app called Copy'Em Paste for this.
- eviks 1y ago
  Karabiner Elements, keyboard maestro, better touch tool can help a lot in "theming" key combos (though KE might be limited on a locked down laptop)
Mawr 1y ago
https://ameliorated.io/ https://ameliorated.io/ ;)

throwaway48476 1y ago

An OS with electron components is just absurd. They laid off all the competent employees who knew how to write c++.

vel0city 1y ago
They've been using webview components since 1997.
- dspillett 1y ago
  Slapping a webview component into a native app is a lot less heavy than a full election app. A lot heavier than not at all, of course, and webview felt heavy handed back then like election for OS components feels now, I feel a lesson has not been learned…
  - vel0city 1y ago
    Either way they're shipping an entire browser stack, and back in 1997 it was even heavier in comparison to available compute. But rose colored glasses two US to ignore that.
    - dspillett 1y ago
      IIRC the one set of browser parts was shared around between active desktop and other OS uses, where anything Electron based has its own instance of both chromium and node.

coderjames 1y ago

> I'm still a bit upset that they took away vertical taskbars from us After getting a new W11 laptop at work and discovering the removal of vertical taskbars (ridiculous on 16:9 monitors), that particular loss is specifically what keeps me from "upgrading" from W10. Windows Updates warns me that "certain features aren't available on Windows 11" without specifying which ones; finding that sane placement of my taskbar is one of them means I'm plenty willing to pay $30 for another year of security updates to get to keep W10.

discostrings 1y ago

Missing vertical taskbar is probably the most egregious omission, but it's not so much they took it away as it is they created versions of a number of Windows Explorer components in a higher-level technology without implementing half the features and shipping it with 50x the number of bugs. I at least weekly (and often daily) run into issues with taskbar icons overlapping one another, menus not coming up when clicked, the tray icons breaking, etc. Same story with navigating the file system--the new implementation has a multitude of issues, including getting into a state where clicking files to select them only works below a certain invisible horizontal line in the window, windows not refreshing when files have been added/removed, trying to rename a file you just copied being an exercise in frustration with the view refreshing and exiting the rename state 5 - 10 seconds after the copy, the address bar breaking in about a dozen different ways... it's really frustrating software that's a full few tiers down from the quality standard set by Windows 10 and previous versions. It's gotten slightly better since the initial Windows 11 release, but it still feels like pre-release quality software. I was hoping they'd get it up to release quality and add the important features back by the sunset of Windows 10, but it looks like Microsoft really doesn't care about the quality of the experience of using their UI. If it were only missing the vertical taskbar as a design decision that would be one thing, but instead it's the very obvious tip of an iceberg of lack of user focus, care, quality, resourcing, and skill. They don't add it back because they know in their current state they're not going to do it well, and the money's in dreaming up new ways of force-feeding trash "news" and promotions anyway, not in helping you get things done and providing a well-functioning tool and bicycle for the mind. What if someone put the taskbar on the left side of the screen, it interfered with them seeing the clickbait brainrot of the widgets "feature", and Microsoft didn't get its average $.0003 for each interaction?

currysausage 1y ago
One upside of this reimplementation is that we can now enjoy state-of-the-art Electron-level loading times when opening a new Explorer window. /s
eviks 1y ago
> in a higher-level technology without implementing half the features and shipping it with 50x the number of bugs. Ha, yeah, was amazed to see basic layout fails in such a core component! Web tech is eating the world, bringing all its sloppiness with it...

wintermutestwin 1y ago

>On the other hand, for whatever reason Windows 11 right now refuses to install updates (I think the logs complained about their own web view components being unavailable last I checked, which is wrong because they definitely are there), which is kind of embarrassing. Updates failing and the horrible troubleshooting process is the main reason I’d love to ditch their abortion of an OS. As it is, the most powerful computer of my many is just used for gaming.

mslansn 1y ago

You can use StartAllBack to get back the regular taskbar which can be used in vertical mode.

eviks 1y ago

> I'm still a bit upset that they took away vertical taskbars from us Have you tried this awesome mod app? https://windhawk.net/mods/taskbar-vertical https://windhawk.net/mods/taskbar-vertical