8 ms·

8 for Windows 11? An OS that includes ads in the Start menu, made with React. I'm not even mentioning right-click, which has basically two views: you open it an

8 for Windows 11? An OS that includes ads in the Start menu, made with React. I'm not even mentioning right-click, which has basically two views: you open it and see some uselessly chosen tools, and you still need to open the old version (with the old design, breaking design consistency) to access actually useful things. Viva Windows XP!

zootboy 10mo ago
But this article is only grading the styling of the OS GUI elements, not the functionality (or lack thereof) of the OS itself.
- dijit 10mo ago
  Windows 11 is far from the best at that though. It doesn’t even look good. I know taste is subjective, but a better comparison is the contemporaries of the time or at least taking a step back to consider the entire aesthetic. If so, ironically, I think Vista should win.
  - mghackerlady 10mo ago
    one thing I think windows 11 does well is the icon design. The kinda glassy look they have is the perfect middle ground between the glossy hyperrealistic icons of yesteryear and the bland lifeless minimalist icons that became common after ios 7
  - CuriousRose 10mo ago
    Taste is objective. It is only subjective among the tasteless. The OS has a purpose to be efficient and pleasant - anything that interferes with either is not a matter of taste, but a matter of poor execution. Sure we have preferences, but truly beautiful things are hard to consider they are only so due to a matter of preference, and not objectivity.
- derleyici 10mo ago
  Fair point, but the article praises Windows 11 for "cohesion" while the right-click menu literally has two different visual styles, and many system apps still use old UI. Even judging purely on aesthetics, that's inconsistent.
  - reddalo 10mo ago
    On the surface, Explorer looks more modern on Windows 11. But when you use it, you can "feel" it's still based on old Win32 APIs with just a layer of paint on top.
    - nullpoint420 10mo ago
      IMO, in a good way. It has a nice feel compared to the new laggy context menus and selections
- eitland 10mo ago
  They actually do mention bloatware in Windows 11, so it is a bit confused.
cuber_messenger 10mo ago
IMHO the right-click menu these days seems to get better, at least I can find "Open with Code" or "Open in Terminal", etc. Except that I need the old menu to create a desktop shortcut occasionally.
- mcny 10mo ago
  I want to opt out though. I use 7 zip all the time and I don't want this menu that can't have 7 zip...
  - pathartl 10mo ago
    Just use NanaZip
- dessimus 10mo ago
  In my Windows 11 right-click menu, I can choose "Show More Options" at the bottom and then Send To > Desktop (create shortcut).
- z500 10mo ago
  The new context menu is so awful. There is zero reason in this day and age for a context menu to take multiple seconds to pop up. They didn't even really improve on it in any meaningful way.
cocoa19 10mo ago
With that move to React or whatever web based monstrosity it is, it lost a lot of the existing user experience crafted over the years. Not only OS pre-installed apps are much slower, but it broke shortcuts and common sense behaviors.
- speedgoose 10mo ago
  It’s not web but react native.
  - felixgallo 10mo ago
    Whatever product manager team decided to jump into React Native with both feet for the Windows experience needs to be ejected from the industry permanently. Think of how many thousands of human hours per day are now spent waiting on React Native jank, all in order to save the Windows developers from having to program in Windows using Microsoft products.
    - tracker1 10mo ago
      MS could/should have just made other XAML/MAUI options a better experience in general over the React Native thing... It might be different if they actually embrace web as a whole and at least gave a consistent UX, more like say WebOS or ChromeOS, but that's not what they're doing here. What MS really needs to do is create a really long checklist of all the UI defained configurations and options, along with a connected list of all the relevant API interfaces they connect to... then come up with a consistent, complete and competent component library to do a ground up re-implementation of all the things in a consistent way. This would, of course mean stabilizing the released version of windows to mostly bug fixes for a couple years while frantically generating and dog-fooding the new UX... starting with a re-revamped task manager, and launcher/file-picker. Just a bare desktop and a hotkey that opens task manager as the first and only UI elements then working out from there.
      - dajtxx 10mo ago
        It's a nice thought but think of the cost! You do have to wonder what the hell the people in charge of the Windows UI are thinking. They seem to have got it so badly wrong. But so has Apple in macos.
wlesieutre 10mo ago
When you hit print screen, it takes a screenshot, waits a blatantly visible number of frames while you type more letters or stuff keeps moving on screen, and then eventually rewinds time by overlaying the now outdated screenshot for you to select a target area Pressing escape can sometimes cancel out of this overlay (in case you bumped print screen by accident). But sometimes it doesn’t, because the full screen overlay in front of everything has managed to lose keyboard focus, and you need to click on it before it can respond to keyboard input. Godawful trash OS and I hate that I’m stuck working on it.
- isaacdl 10mo ago
  I'm glad it's not just me struggling with the screenshot functionality. I've encountered the bugs you're describing, and recently, I've been encountering an incredibly frustrating one where hitting print screen just...doesn't do anything. The only way I've found to temporarily fix it is to manually open the Snipping Tool (via the Start menu) - then the print screen key starts working again for some indeterminate period of time.
  - vel0city 10mo ago
    Win+Shift+S. It launches the snipping tool. Its been a feature for over a decade.
    - dessimus 10mo ago
      Especially since it can open with selecting the area to screenshot and not have to manually crop it in Paint or be sending a 4K image to someone.
    - isaacdl 10mo ago
      FWIW, my print screen button does exactly the same thing, literally; it's opening the snipping tool in "select a region to screenshot" mode. This is a setting in Snipping Tool (called "Use the Print screen key to open Snipping Tool"). When I encounter this bug, Win-Shift-S behaves identically (i.e. doesn't work).
- 10mo ago
blackhaz 10mo ago
This is the most atrocious rating article I've stumbled upon in a while!
dangus 10mo ago
Does the end user care that the system is made with React? What is the tangible negative impact? My start menu doesn’t have ads, it really isn’t hard to manage that sort of thing. OneDrive is fully uninstalled, Copilot is fully uninstalled, I find my system to be quite clean. And if you don’t like the start menu, there are ways to replace the start menu entirely with something else. Good luck replacing entire major elements of the macOS UI. In contrast, Apple puts advertisements at the same urgency level as critical system updates in the settings. There’s no setting to disable them and they sometimes come back with a new version release, you just have to know the magic actions to get them dismissed. Haters dog on Windows 11 for various things but it really is the best version of the OS since 7. It has some of the best updates to traditional Windows tooling in years: tabs in notepad, git preinstalled, finally the settings pane is in a good place, brand new command line interface, and Microsoft has had a great habit of putting new features in separate apps that can be installed optionally. (E.g., you can’t uninstall Apple News on a Mac, but you can uninstall ClipChamp on Windows)
- pavon 10mo ago
  Windows 11 is much slower for me than Windows 7 or 10. A noticeable sub-second delay to bring up the start menu and respond to typing, about 3 seconds for file explorer to load, 5-20 seconds to start a screenshot. I wouldn't be surprised if antivirus is to partially to blame (only use Windows at work where it is required), but it is the same antivirus we used on Windows 10 and it wasn't this bad.
  - dangus 10mo ago
    “A noticeable sub-second delay” lol. I guess you never ran Windows 98 on a pentium 2 like I did. If I had a dime for every sub-second delay I experienced on that machine… Settings > Accessibility > Animation Effects > Off 5-10 seconds to start a screenshot, yeah man now you’re just lying. You sure you didn’t leave the delay timer on? Are we going to gloss over the fact that the screenshot interface in old windows versions basically didn’t exist? There was no keyboard shortcut to open snipping tool by default in Windows 7. You had to know to use your print screen key correctly and to paste the image into Paint, and there was no visual feedback. Of course that performed fast because there was no UI!
sunaookami 10mo ago
It's not made in React, only the "recommended" section is made with React Native which compiles to native XAML. No web technologies involved. And yes I will debunk this every time I see it :) .
- the_overseer 10mo ago
  It's slower. It's laggy. The taskbar and menus need to be native code of the highest optimization. Anything less than instantaneous means that PMs, managers, coders and everyone there should not have a job working on OSes if they can't get this simple idea through their thick skulls.
  - hbn 10mo ago
    I've shared this on HN before, but starting with Windows 11, they seemingly started making the new UI essentially a separate process that runs on top of the existing Windows 10 UI and just modifies it. I learned this from a video where a guy was seeing how much of the Program Files folder you can delete before Windows breaks, and at some point it reverts to the Windows 10 UI. https://youtu.be/BVIN_PJu2rs?t=565 https://youtu.be/BVIN_PJu2rs?t=565
    - the_overseer 10mo ago
      This is even more insane than I thought. Truly madness. Everybody involved with that should be fired and sent to the moon as an experiment on how long does the human body survive naked on both the dark side and the bright side of the moon. At least we will learn something from those experiments.... (it's a joke but the point stands. Those people shouldn't ever be allowed to touch computers.)
    - sunaookami 10mo ago
      They also don't run animations in a separate process since Windows 10 which means that under high load everything lags. In Windows 8.1 everything was buttery smooth thanks to DirectUI. macOS and iOS also run animations separately.
    - 10mo ago
bbzylstra 10mo ago
You can use winutil to replace the new start menu with the old one. I think the option is in "advanced tweaks". https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil

zootboy 10mo ago

But this article is only grading the styling of the OS GUI elements, not the functionality (or lack thereof) of the OS itself.

dijit 10mo ago
Windows 11 is far from the best at that though. It doesn’t even look good. I know taste is subjective, but a better comparison is the contemporaries of the time or at least taking a step back to consider the entire aesthetic. If so, ironically, I think Vista should win.
- mghackerlady 10mo ago
  one thing I think windows 11 does well is the icon design. The kinda glassy look they have is the perfect middle ground between the glossy hyperrealistic icons of yesteryear and the bland lifeless minimalist icons that became common after ios 7
- CuriousRose 10mo ago
  Taste is objective. It is only subjective among the tasteless. The OS has a purpose to be efficient and pleasant - anything that interferes with either is not a matter of taste, but a matter of poor execution. Sure we have preferences, but truly beautiful things are hard to consider they are only so due to a matter of preference, and not objectivity.
derleyici 10mo ago
Fair point, but the article praises Windows 11 for "cohesion" while the right-click menu literally has two different visual styles, and many system apps still use old UI. Even judging purely on aesthetics, that's inconsistent.
- reddalo 10mo ago
  On the surface, Explorer looks more modern on Windows 11. But when you use it, you can "feel" it's still based on old Win32 APIs with just a layer of paint on top.
  - nullpoint420 10mo ago
    IMO, in a good way. It has a nice feel compared to the new laggy context menus and selections
eitland 10mo ago
They actually do mention bloatware in Windows 11, so it is a bit confused.

cuber_messenger 10mo ago

IMHO the right-click menu these days seems to get better, at least I can find "Open with Code" or "Open in Terminal", etc. Except that I need the old menu to create a desktop shortcut occasionally.

mcny 10mo ago
I want to opt out though. I use 7 zip all the time and I don't want this menu that can't have 7 zip...
- pathartl 10mo ago
  Just use NanaZip
dessimus 10mo ago
In my Windows 11 right-click menu, I can choose "Show More Options" at the bottom and then Send To > Desktop (create shortcut).
z500 10mo ago
The new context menu is so awful. There is zero reason in this day and age for a context menu to take multiple seconds to pop up. They didn't even really improve on it in any meaningful way.

cocoa19 10mo ago

With that move to React or whatever web based monstrosity it is, it lost a lot of the existing user experience crafted over the years. Not only OS pre-installed apps are much slower, but it broke shortcuts and common sense behaviors.

speedgoose 10mo ago
It’s not web but react native.
- felixgallo 10mo ago
  Whatever product manager team decided to jump into React Native with both feet for the Windows experience needs to be ejected from the industry permanently. Think of how many thousands of human hours per day are now spent waiting on React Native jank, all in order to save the Windows developers from having to program in Windows using Microsoft products.
  - tracker1 10mo ago
    MS could/should have just made other XAML/MAUI options a better experience in general over the React Native thing... It might be different if they actually embrace web as a whole and at least gave a consistent UX, more like say WebOS or ChromeOS, but that's not what they're doing here. What MS really needs to do is create a really long checklist of all the UI defained configurations and options, along with a connected list of all the relevant API interfaces they connect to... then come up with a consistent, complete and competent component library to do a ground up re-implementation of all the things in a consistent way. This would, of course mean stabilizing the released version of windows to mostly bug fixes for a couple years while frantically generating and dog-fooding the new UX... starting with a re-revamped task manager, and launcher/file-picker. Just a bare desktop and a hotkey that opens task manager as the first and only UI elements then working out from there.
    - dajtxx 10mo ago
      It's a nice thought but think of the cost! You do have to wonder what the hell the people in charge of the Windows UI are thinking. They seem to have got it so badly wrong. But so has Apple in macos.

wlesieutre 10mo ago

When you hit print screen, it takes a screenshot, waits a blatantly visible number of frames while you type more letters or stuff keeps moving on screen, and then eventually rewinds time by overlaying the now outdated screenshot for you to select a target area Pressing escape can sometimes cancel out of this overlay (in case you bumped print screen by accident). But sometimes it doesn’t, because the full screen overlay in front of everything has managed to lose keyboard focus, and you need to click on it before it can respond to keyboard input. Godawful trash OS and I hate that I’m stuck working on it.

isaacdl 10mo ago
I'm glad it's not just me struggling with the screenshot functionality. I've encountered the bugs you're describing, and recently, I've been encountering an incredibly frustrating one where hitting print screen just...doesn't do anything. The only way I've found to temporarily fix it is to manually open the Snipping Tool (via the Start menu) - then the print screen key starts working again for some indeterminate period of time.
- vel0city 10mo ago
  Win+Shift+S. It launches the snipping tool. Its been a feature for over a decade.
  - dessimus 10mo ago
    Especially since it can open with selecting the area to screenshot and not have to manually crop it in Paint or be sending a 4K image to someone.
  - isaacdl 10mo ago
    FWIW, my print screen button does exactly the same thing, literally; it's opening the snipping tool in "select a region to screenshot" mode. This is a setting in Snipping Tool (called "Use the Print screen key to open Snipping Tool"). When I encounter this bug, Win-Shift-S behaves identically (i.e. doesn't work).
10mo ago

blackhaz 10mo ago

This is the most atrocious rating article I've stumbled upon in a while!

dangus 10mo ago

Does the end user care that the system is made with React? What is the tangible negative impact? My start menu doesn’t have ads, it really isn’t hard to manage that sort of thing. OneDrive is fully uninstalled, Copilot is fully uninstalled, I find my system to be quite clean. And if you don’t like the start menu, there are ways to replace the start menu entirely with something else. Good luck replacing entire major elements of the macOS UI. In contrast, Apple puts advertisements at the same urgency level as critical system updates in the settings. There’s no setting to disable them and they sometimes come back with a new version release, you just have to know the magic actions to get them dismissed. Haters dog on Windows 11 for various things but it really is the best version of the OS since 7. It has some of the best updates to traditional Windows tooling in years: tabs in notepad, git preinstalled, finally the settings pane is in a good place, brand new command line interface, and Microsoft has had a great habit of putting new features in separate apps that can be installed optionally. (E.g., you can’t uninstall Apple News on a Mac, but you can uninstall ClipChamp on Windows)

pavon 10mo ago
Windows 11 is much slower for me than Windows 7 or 10. A noticeable sub-second delay to bring up the start menu and respond to typing, about 3 seconds for file explorer to load, 5-20 seconds to start a screenshot. I wouldn't be surprised if antivirus is to partially to blame (only use Windows at work where it is required), but it is the same antivirus we used on Windows 10 and it wasn't this bad.
- dangus 10mo ago
  “A noticeable sub-second delay” lol. I guess you never ran Windows 98 on a pentium 2 like I did. If I had a dime for every sub-second delay I experienced on that machine… Settings > Accessibility > Animation Effects > Off 5-10 seconds to start a screenshot, yeah man now you’re just lying. You sure you didn’t leave the delay timer on? Are we going to gloss over the fact that the screenshot interface in old windows versions basically didn’t exist? There was no keyboard shortcut to open snipping tool by default in Windows 7. You had to know to use your print screen key correctly and to paste the image into Paint, and there was no visual feedback. Of course that performed fast because there was no UI!

sunaookami 10mo ago

It's not made in React, only the "recommended" section is made with React Native which compiles to native XAML. No web technologies involved. And yes I will debunk this every time I see it :) .

the_overseer 10mo ago
It's slower. It's laggy. The taskbar and menus need to be native code of the highest optimization. Anything less than instantaneous means that PMs, managers, coders and everyone there should not have a job working on OSes if they can't get this simple idea through their thick skulls.
- hbn 10mo ago
  I've shared this on HN before, but starting with Windows 11, they seemingly started making the new UI essentially a separate process that runs on top of the existing Windows 10 UI and just modifies it. I learned this from a video where a guy was seeing how much of the Program Files folder you can delete before Windows breaks, and at some point it reverts to the Windows 10 UI. https://youtu.be/BVIN_PJu2rs?t=565 https://youtu.be/BVIN_PJu2rs?t=565
  - the_overseer 10mo ago
    This is even more insane than I thought. Truly madness. Everybody involved with that should be fired and sent to the moon as an experiment on how long does the human body survive naked on both the dark side and the bright side of the moon. At least we will learn something from those experiments.... (it's a joke but the point stands. Those people shouldn't ever be allowed to touch computers.)
  - sunaookami 10mo ago
    They also don't run animations in a separate process since Windows 10 which means that under high load everything lags. In Windows 8.1 everything was buttery smooth thanks to DirectUI. macOS and iOS also run animations separately.
  - 10mo ago

bbzylstra 10mo ago

You can use winutil to replace the new start menu with the old one. I think the option is in "advanced tweaks". https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil