Windows 11 has one specific limiting feature that drives me bonkers and it’s not being able to click the clock in the bottom right on a secondary monitor to pull up a calendar. Windows 10 has this, why remove it?
It’s a miniscule but good feature
It seems like they are going out of their way to remove good features. Like they removed the option to right click the taskbar and open task manager. They since added it back, but only because of user demand.
They have removed quick access to disabling the network, seeing and changing ip settings.
I can’t remember all the annoying issues, but there’s a lot.
I hate that it has become a general thing to ruin user experience and possibilities of customization. Google is doing the same with android.
The volume mixer is also only now coming back.
My biggest issue is that you can’t open new file explorer tabs in the same window. So before you know it, you have 10 different file browser windows open. It wasn’t a Windows 10 feature either but there was an extension called Qtabbar that allowed it. That doesn’t work on Windows 11. So I’ve been using free commander as a work around. It’s annoying though.
Seems like a lot of stuff like that though. At this point I only use windows to play games and I want to interact with the OS as little as possible, so I don’t understand why I would want an updated UI with more ads and Microsoft integrations when it does nothing to improve what I actually use it for.
Are you sure? Singing in with an online Microsoft account improves your experience*
*it allows us to collect data on you
Kind of forgot what an OS is… Should fade into the background (but how do you make money with that???)
At launch you couldn’t even have that clock on the second screen, they added it back partially in an update, non-clickable.
And win11 is filled with this sort of thing. It’s the worst update windows ever got, except maybe for winMe - which I don’t recall that well.
VISTA comes to mind when i was getting more into computers. I missed XP so bad. Then 7 came out and it was great!
half of what made 7 great was first added as an update on vista but people were already burned from it and unwilling to give vista another try.
From a technical perspective, they didn’t remove it or any of the other missing features from the taskbar since the win11 taskbar was built from scratch without any of the old code for 10. For whatever reason, that feature wasn’t prioritized in the new taskbar build so it wasn’t built yet, or they didn’t want to add it.
I still think their decision to not allow the new taskbar to be placed on the sides or top is really stupid though, as someone with a 32:9 monitor, I’d much rather use some of my horizontal space for taskbar rather than limited vertical space.
My minor but really irritating gripe is the unmovable taskbar (which I’m not sure if this has changed or not), I’ve been a top taskbar person since xp and it doesn’t make sense to me to remove a feature like that. Apparently there are Reg hacks or third party tools to do what I want but I really shouldn’t have to resort to that Imo.
I have tried a reg hack, which worked pretty well, but it kept resetting after every update. And changing the registries I did (don’t recall which I changed or if they still work.) also came with some annoying issues, like window preview still show on top of taskbar (so outside of your screen) among other thing.
I also preferred to have a smaller taskbar which is also no longer possible.
So I have given up and resorted to a bottom taskbar on autohide. But even that has some wonky interactions, with for example windows + tab, where there is a nice shade behind your different virtual desktops, but it stops at the original location of the taskbar.
The taskbar nailed immovable to the bottom is some impressively dumb bullshit. That limitation is so unnecessary and useless I can only chalk it up to brutal idiocy on the product managers side.
I didn’t even realize this. What in the backwards UI design is that?
This was linked as an answer in an Microsoft answers thread with this being the thread in question. Honestly I have no idea why it was removed, and I’m pretty simple with a top taskbar. I know a few people who use side taskbars pretty heavily.
I’m still waiting for the uncombined icons on taskbar
Small icons, show title, never combine.
Still waiting on the release that contains this.
YES PLEASE
I think they just released that…
I updated but don’t see it in my w11 taskbar options
Me neither
This is my biggest gripe with W11 as well. I used to use that all the time to check what day any given date is.
Am I missing something? Microsoft literally won’t let me upgrade because my fully functional processor is deemed to old for them. Of coarse the adoption rate is low if they start by excluding a good portion of their user base.
I don’t even understand why they make that distinction. I recently bought a used notebook with Windows 10 preinstalled that can’t be upgraded. But if you just boot up the Windows 11 ISO it works fine without issues from there.
Granted I don’t know why someone would want this; I was genuinely surprised when I noticed installation without a Microsoft account isn’t supposed to be possible. Then you get that system that just feels sketchy to use, Teams in autostart, online services in your menus and all that. And that’s just the stuff you can see. It’s a total disaster in my opinion. But it went downhill ever after Windows 7 as far as I can tell.
My pet theory is that it’s to throw a bone to OEMs. They came out saying “oop, 7th-gen and older Intel chips won’t work, guess you’ll just need to buy a new PC!” until someone over there noticed that their still-for-sale (at the time the requirements went live), few-thousand-dollar PC (the Surface Studio 2) was a 7th-gen chip so they made eventually an exception just for that one. Because “reasons”.
It baffles the mind. I have a brand new system, newest generation 7600 Ryzen processor, AM5 motherboard, plenty of ram, decent graphics card.
“Your computer does not meet the minimum requirements for Windows 11”
It’s almost certainly bugged somehow, but I’ll take it as a compliment, I’ll never willingly install that OS regression anyways…
When Windows 11 first released this was due to TPM being disabled but I thought they had fixed the messaging now to say that
My boot drive is too small for 11 but has always been fine for 10, which is a blessing for me as I have loads of other drive space that isn’t being considered. An unexpected update would make me so sad.
Why would I upgrade to an OS that pushes ads on my login screen and start menu? Some software forces me to keep a windows machine around but I’m certainly in no hurry to upgrade from 10 to 11.
Because eventually you won’t have a choice. That’s how Microsoft works. Newer versions of Office come with slightly different file formats so people using older version have to upgrade. There’s no plugin for new format or just degradation of the document when opening. They outright refuse.
Microsoft pushed Windows7 in similar way. New version of DirectX supported only Win7 and not older versions, even though there’s no reason not to from a technical point of view. But new games supported new DirectX only and if you wanted to play better shell out those bucks.
In the end, biggest enemy to any paid software is not open source competitors, it’s previous versions of their own software for the very same reason you mentioned. Why would anyone upgrade if all they need is already there. Most people don’t need all the features of Office apart from different fonts and sizes, perhaps occasional table.
I’m still using Windows 7 in my home computer, for gaming no less, and only recently did some games come out that don’t support it and the only significant push to upgrade is the upcoming (end of year) end of Steam support for it, which is just going to make me use my Linux partition for games more.
Roughly only in the last 2 years have I started to have any inconveniences from having Windows 7 - basically the latest KiKad, for circuit design, doesn’t support it, so I kept using the previous version which has very rarelly has forced me to go find component and footpads which I would otherwise have already in the latest one.
The point being that if Windows 7 only started to get incovenient to use (both for gaming and professionally) well beyond not just Windows 8 having been launched but even Windows 10 having been launched, it’s reasonable to expect that Windows 10 will still be fine for use for many years.
Fortunately I don’t need gaming features on that machine, I only need to boot it to use things like Odin to flash a Samsung tablet or run crappy Nintendo Switch tools from gbatemp.
It’s very much a 4th or 5th string machine for me.
Disabled with a single click.
The fact it’s there at all is fucked. No thanks I’ll pass
And it’s not like ms has a habit of undoing those types of selections during updates, or just changing what way to disable them
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Let’s see. Its full of ads, spyware and the ui is a complete mess.
I can’t imagine why people a digging in there heals
Honestly, I think, like the article says, the hardware issue is the biggest hurdle. People use Facebook, after all, and it is full of ads and its UI is also a complete mess.
I am on Windows 11. The UI has been more consistent than 10 ever was and I am curious where the ads are.
The ‘news’ thing in the taskbar counts, I think. As does the recommended apps and preinstalled candy crush. It’s looking less and less like a professional tool nowadays.
You can hide the news button on the taskbar and I uninstalled all of those extra, pre-installed, bloat apps. My taskbar looks just as clean as it has for the past 20 years.
It should not be necessary to do that in the first place.
Tbf that’s all in the consumer editions.
Even a “pro” install on Windows 10 pre-configured via Rufus will try to install fucking Candy Crush. Professional software my ass.
Ubuntu at least has a very clear “what you need it for” question in its setup, and extended support for older versions for corps. Seems like companies may actually be better off on Linux these days unless you they’re using Adobe products.
You confuse what I meant. In a professional environment, the images should be customized via deployment toolkit. These things should not be in the image at all. But I’ll admit I haven’t looked at the windows 11 builds but I used to do windows 10 and earlier. Any bloatware et al is taken out before production deployments.
Too many features that I use daily as a Sysadmin are missing to consider w11 as anything more than a PITA currently.
At home my PC hardware is fully capable but my HDD will need a reformat, so I either rebuild my system from scratch (not gonna happen any time soon) or fork out for yet another HDD and transfer tools.
So it’s an imposed cost for little benefit and a whole mountain of inconvenience.
I literally disabled my TPM chip to prevent w11 force installing itself. Management forked out for a new fleet of w11 machines and staff are straight up refusing to move off older slower PC’s to avoid w11.
W11 needs a solid 12 months of re-adding existing features to be worth looking sideways at.
You must be on win7 or older.
Why? Your comment makes no sense.
Why would you need a new hdd?
I hate that I can’t have labels in the taskbar. Really slows down my workflow
Do you mean these taskbar labels?
Hooray!!!
I bought a new laptop that came with 11, I haven’t had any super annoying issues… Actually the preinstalled Samsung apps are more annoying than anything OS related… But to be fair, when I was setting it up, I looked into how to do it without connecting to a Microsoft account - it’s possible but takes a little work. I wonder if that is the difference…
My personal computer is a Windows 11 desktop and I performed a clean install when I got it. So now I don’t have any pre-installed apps from the manufacturer. I did use a Microsoft account to sign in, and then just removed or customized whatever I didn’t like
I mean… Full of Ads seems a bit exaggerating… And I have seen much worse UIs on Linux… The spyware part nothing to say, plenty of telemetry and other stuff so yeah…
Full of Ads seems a bit exaggerating…
One is enough. Especially considering it’s a paid product.
And I have seen much worse UIs on Linux…
This is like saying “Motorcycles are better, because I’ve seen some terrible car designs”
plenty of telemetry and other stuff so yeah…
So as long as many people do a thing, it makes it ok, ya?
Well both are operating systems just putting an example that I have seen plenty worse. And no it is not bad…yeah there is always something that could be better but come on if it was that terrible it wouldn’t be used by millions of people everyday without massive issues.
And for the last point to be clear I was agreeing on the spyware in case it wasn’t clear. I wasn’t saying that it was ok I was saying that yeah it’s true it has plenty so nothing to say on my part.
I get Tron back at Reddit and that cleans up my windows
To me an os should be something that just let’s me run programs of my choice and use my hardware to it’s fullest. Eg be as light as possible.
With windows it just wants to suck up all my hardware/battery by itself and puts up a fight anytime I want to install anything myself
Don’t know how many times now I’ve had to take defaults away from things like edge but yeah
Might want to look into Linux :-)
While I exclusively use Linux at home and I recommend it to everyone especially on desktop, they mentioned battery life and from my experience that isn’t its strong suit.
I really thought that comment was building up to something like “and that’s why I use Arch, btw” lol
As it’s kind of implied at this point I thought I’d leave it out for once ;-)
But yes I do use Arch, btw.
Ah, I was thinking of the original comment when I typed that but in hindsight I guess yours does work haha.
Gotta love good old Arch, someday soon I do hope to outnerd that regularly with “I use NixOS/Bazzite, btw”.
I’m not sure how secure it is, but Chris titus’s windows debloater works wonders for my windows install. Getting rid of edge and other MS clutter really cleans up the windows desktop in a way you wouldn’t think.
I actually have used that as well on most of my family’s computers also. It sure does beat messing with settings.
I think next time I have to reinstall windows I’ll attempt something like tinywin10.
I have a rig with Windows 10, and haven’t upgraded because… Microsoft arbitrarily say my CPU is unsupported, even though it meets all the criteria.
I siavled the TPM module so it’ll keep saying this. Can’t be forced into an upgrade if the cpu doesn’t seem to be supported
You also seem to have siavled your ability to spell
That I have
Autocorrect can’t save me always, but it’s pretty damn good
This is the thing with my CPU. It has TPM, it’s enabled, and the upgrade tool says that’s fine. The installer doesn’t make it clear what the issue is, it’s like: Congrats, your CPU satisfies these three bullet points, but no, you still can’t have Win 11.
Bypassing takes a click if you download the reg files (there’s an install version and an upgrade version)
Or more clicks if you have to do it manually
My CPU is from 2013 running win11 perfectly fine and fast
That sounds like a lot of work for what seems to be a worse or at least ‘meh’ experience.
It’s not a lot of work, but enough to be annoying and feel irritating. They treat us like they’re doing us a favor, when really they need us to use Windows 11 to enable their services to be profitable. It’s annoying when companies make us jump through hoops to take our money
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If you mean the speed is meh, I’m here to say that it’s exactly as fast as win10 for me which is as fast as a cluttered heavy Linux system
Which is still fast for my CPU even tho it’s 10yo
The comparisons in the article are boneheded.
According to Statcounter, the worldwide Windows version desktop market share puts Windows 10 at 71.64 percent, with Windows 11 trailing at 23.61 percent.
To put that in context, Windows 11 was launched two years ago today. Windows 10 was launched in 2015 and took two years to reach the same market share as the then-dominant player, Windows 7.
Comparing the numbers of the move from 7 to 10 to that from 10 to 11 ignores that whole shitshow with 8.0 and the correction of 8.1.
Of course it’s easier for 10 to dethrone 7 when there is the spoiler effect of 8 and 8.1!
The single biggest reason is that Microsoft significantly limited the hardware that can be used for W11 with the TPM and stringent hardware needs.
I actually disabled tpm in the bios so windows 11 wouldn’t be installed…
I enabled it on mine and I STILL cannot upgrade.
Not that I want to upgrade but I don’t understand the logic behind the requirements at all. I have a cheap and weak little travel notebook thats apparently elegible, meanwhile my desktop thats very modern and could probably run an atomic scale simulation of that notebook is apparently not suitable.
Pretty much any modern CPU has a TPM module built-in. Good chance you just need to go to the BIOS and enable it.
I would have upgraded a while ago if my hardware supported it. The kernel upgrades are pretty zippy.
2 years is plenty of time to see where linux support is. We should have a good idea by then of where gaming and streaming quality stand for the foreseeable future.
Most of my PCs will easily go to linux, the big question is whether to suck it up and upgrade my gaming rig to 11 or just switch everything to linux.
Switching to Linux is a pain, but its a pain once, staying on windows is the pain that keeps on giving
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Gaming is much better on Linux thanks to Steam, but having lots of problems with more recent games and their cursed launchers. I try and remember that Gen X had to figure all this stuff out with early versions of Windows and I should resurrect the same determination that got me through back then… but I’d be lying if I said it was easy.
I totally agree, I just cba. I have too much going on in my life to start from scratch like that again, and windows is just easy now. I hate the whole drm model, but like most people, I’ll live with it unless Linux finally becomes an easy, viable alternative that’s supported to the same degree as windows and feels just as easy to use.
I’m playing a heavily modded skyrim playthrough, 1 click button with wabbajack. There’s support for it but… Not much. I also play FFXIV, half support again. PoE works fineish and Bg3 works somewhat. League works? Not as straightforward when I last tried it. Modded D2 works somewhat but it needs to be configured. Last Epoch worked iirc but I haven’t checked, and their game needs heavy optimization so I’d hold my horses if what they do can be applied to Linux too. I haven’t tried dark souls but that shit lags on any Windows machine so it’s basically a 1 to 1 port lmao.
As you see, all of them are -ish experiences. It’s always googling issues, checking compatibility… I just want to game man.
Windows 11 is basically Windows 10 with a slightly nicer (in most respects) desktop. There aren’t a lot of compelling reasons to switch if what you have works well enough.
Windows 11 is also much better at collecting personal data with improved analytics and Microsoft spyware running under the hood. Not to mention it’s superiority at serving advertisements and embedding them in nearly every aspect of the UI.
It’s doubtful that Microsoft shareholders have meetings about how to improve the user experience of their OS. I think they are more concerned with extracting every penny they can designing the most efficient backend to harvest data and push ads, kinda like our friends at Alphabet, Microsoft is trying so desperately to emulate.
I have not seen a single ad …
Same… people say there are start menu ads… where? Literally never seen one.
Maybe the web results when searching in the start menu? This was previously a local only search and is now a severely degraded experience out of the box. I used reg keys to disable the web search feature long ago and return the prior functionality.
The new start menu sucked, and is one of the main reasons I won’t switch.
That’s why I said in most respects. The Windows 10 start menu is way more configurable. It doesn’t waste space for “recommended” apps either. In Win11 it is possible to reduce the space eaten up for recommendations but not hide it. The way pinned apps flow left to right and down is annoying too for spatial positioning. An update added icon groups which is something. I think the rest of the desktop, things like the control panel, task bar is a lot slicker in general though.
The Windows 10 start menu is way more configurable. It doesn’t waste space for “recommended” apps either.
It’s twice the size as it was in win7, and 100% of the extra space is used to display icons for apps that I don’t use, don’t want, and can’t be removed.
Windows 10 start menu can remove all the apps you don’t need. You can have an entire empty menu if you’d like. You can even hide the app list.
Not only that, you can even resize it to be half the size of Windows 7.
The fuck you on about?
The control panel being much easier to navigate versus all the changes they’re making in settings along with what they’re hiding behind powershell commands is another reason.
My pc isn’t compatible with Win11 (unsupported cpu) and since I’m poor, I’m not getting a new one anytime soon.
Besides, Win10 is great.
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If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Windows 10 isn’t even close to end of support.
If enterprise users haven’t moved over then individual users don’t need to.
I will move over before support finishes but make no mistake that’ll be because I’m forced to due to security reasons and not because I want to.
My windows 10 enterprise has been running flawlessly.
The usual “switch to Linux” spiel.
It’s easier than ever before, blah blah blah.
[Debian based distro] is a good option.
Beware of temporary pitfalls such as Adobe and arrogant game devs decided not to tick the EAC/Battleye for Proton compatibility box, etc.
Tbh, it’s really getting tiring to tell people to try Linux to only get hit with a tsunami of out of date straw man arguments featuring issues that haven’t be relevant in almost a decade.
I doubt I’ll switch any time soon, I use Linux for work and have a dislike for how small issues turn into hours of troubleshooting, but anyway, not the point. I think something that deters a lot of people are the really vocal people who shove it down others throats and treat people who don’t want to switch like idiots.
We all have our reasons, I’ll keep using Win10 until it becomes too much of a security risk and then reevaluate my options. For now I enjoy having shit that just works, for example, I use Cura, it hasn’t had a working Linux release in years, there’s a lot of deterrents for the layperson or those who have to troubleshoot and struggle to get shit working for a job and couldn’t be arsed to do it in their personal time.
All valid.
I personally believe that if work mandates electronic material for your job or project, then they should provide the equipment. However, if this is not possible, then getting equipment that is specialized for your work is a more prudent solution that you can free your daily driver from.
After all, we shouldn’t be married to our work. It should be an investment in our skills and abilities.
This you may hate me for but I use windows on both my work laptop and my personal PC, makes it easier to RDP onto my laptop and use all my screens when I’m at home. WSL is handy and for everything else I go the cattle route and just spin up an EC2 Instance. That is something I appreciate about Linux, when you write a working script, that shit just works and rarely breaks, so making ephemeral environments is trivial and super handy.
Made the switch, yet its still easier for me to remote onto a windows machine to still use autodesk than learn any free alternatives ( freeCAD :l ), and a WiFi driver took me 2 days to find. However my workplace for some unbenownst reason has 11 Pro (instead of enterprise) on some of our machines, which Ill notice popups for office360 and kinda cringe at, hoping the customer never does
Do have to push prusaSlicer, I used Cura for so long but just experimenting found more satisfaction for the slic3r solver, especially for bridges and overhangs
I’ve been walking a friend through starting to print stuff and he uses Arch, so is in turn using Prusa. I find there’s a bunch of settings that are either obfuscated behind one master setting or stuff that’s just plain missing. I’m not going to deny that the slicer itself may be better but I need more options.
Im actually curious what those would be, I’ve been mostly “vanilla” printing, tweaking speed and the likes, only recently tried ironing. And I would hate to be missing out on a cool feature and not even know it lol
Nah, nothing cool or interesting unfortunately, it’s things like extrusion widths (AFAIK there’s just an extrusion multiplier in Prusa)
I mainly use it to get badass supports and rafts that leave the bottom of the print looking good. The trick is, on the top layers of the support material, have the lines less than a mm apart, then under extrude it dramatically, this leaves a really brittle but quite solid layer that doesn’t tend to stick to the print very well but gives good support.
I’ll see if I can find the screenshot I took of all my support settings if you’re interested.
I almost forgot.
Prusa hides some of these settings…
This gives some kickass supports. The settings for the z distance needs to be adjusted according to your layer height. Also, this is an old screenshot, I now use tree supports, but all the support interface settings is what actually counts.
And that would explain a lot of the behaviors I could’ve probably tweaked with cura… thanks!
Also people seem to completely ignore the amount of re-learning I’d need to do to switch. I’m not really a power user of Windows, but part of the reason it runs pretty smoothly for me is that I have a decade plus of knowledge of common failure points. You sort of get an intuition about things after awhile that I don’t have on a different OS. Little issues the might result in a couple of days of troubleshooting are just solved immediately because I have hunches on what the issue is.
Meanwhile I’m struggling on my steamdeck to deal with minor problems because I’m very unfamiliar with the setup. It’s not insurmountable, but it’s a barrier to entry that I’m not willing to undertake just yet.
Hallucinations aside, if you use it with skepticism, ChatGPT can be great at walking you through stuff and helping you understand why things work the way they do. I’m using it like a teacher to get better at Python and it’s great.
Does ChatGPT still require giving your phone number to sign up? Because I noped out when it asked me for that shit.
No idea, I signed up when all the OpenAI services were in beta.
I just use Google one click sign in, no phone number required.
Wait cura is that out of date on Linux? I’ve been using superslicer since cura was kinda confusing to me but I’m surprised it’s lagging behind with the Linux builds
I have no idea what they’re talking about. The Windows and Linux versions have been released in step and work perfectly fine on Linux.
I think they may have just released a working Linux version in the last few weeks but I haven’t really looked into it,was just something I heard.
Thank you for doing this work. I tried Ubuntu dual booted in 2011 and loved it but gave it up when windows re-wrote the boot. I finally got a linux machine when I got a second PC. I think laptops and phones are the best bolster to linux - you can troubleshoot on a second screen instead of getting soft-locked while doing a base install to a mission critical computer.
Move to UEFI had a unintended benefit to us Linux users since boot is handled by the BIOS based on records on UEFI partition.
I said it before, and I say it again. Once I am forced to switch to win 11, I’m not doing so. I’m simply switching to Linux.
Windows has been on a downward spiral and I don’t see that improving anytime soon
I only use windows for gaming, linux for everything else and have been for many years. I upgraded from windows 10 to windows 11 and had zero issues. It actually is starting to look better as well.
That said, more and more games run just fine on Linux now so I probably won’t need a dualboot system anymore at some point.
I’ve been using Linux full time for about a decade. Gaming, video editing, everything.
I was forced back onto Windows when I started a new job. I genuinely tried to give it a chance. I ended up triggering a company-wide policy change to allow Linux and Mac employee systems. I’m back on Linux with a sigh of relief.
That time was when I was forced to switch from Windows 7. I switched to Linux, found that I can do there most things I usually do on a computer anyways, and never looked back. It reached to the point that someone had to give me an entire SDD with a windows installation just to coax me to use Windows 10. I rarely touch it nowadays, and every time I do, I end up being frustrated with it.
