the code required to move the taskbar to the top or sides isn’t actually in Windows 11, because Microsoft created the new taskbar from the ground up
Funny, I run a script on my work computer that let’s me move it. I like it on the top.
It couldn’t be that hard to make new code that achieves the same thing with the new taskbar.
It’s hardly the only feature they broke. Another stupidly simple thing was On Win10 I can click on the time and pop open the calendar from any monitor. Windows 11 only the main monitor works. It’s annoying as fuck. Everyone involved with creating this half baked piece of shit and forcing it on Windows users should kill themselves.
I could perhaps have understood this calendar mess when they rolled out windows 11, but we’re one year later, come on.
Windows 11 came out in 2021, 4 years ago.
Right. All the more incomprehensible.
I got my computer in 2022 and switched to Linux this year so for a 3 year period I got to experience Windows 11 get worse in real time. Co-Pilot being built in is what completely broke me I think.
Harsh, but I think everyone at the entire company could and we’d be better off.
That OS is not even pretending to hide how sinister it’s being.
In a non capitalist hellhole, people would’ve quit before copying with writing any of it. They would’ve quit before they put Candy Crush on the Start menu.
Probably Microsoft: copilot, rewrite the taskbar
The taskbar: I’m only down here now
Because fuck you, that’s why.
- Microsoft
Saved you a click.
Anyone who wants to try Linux but is scared of or reluctant about anything about the process at all: talk to me! There are multiple ways to try it with zero change to your system, like Oracle VirtualBox or a USB flash drive.
Seriously, only go there for the facepalms.
In Windows 10, you could move it to the top, left, or right of the screen.
In every version of Windows up until now which has contained a taskbar and start menu, as far back as Windows 95. Not just Windows 10. Let’s not sell short the full extent idiocy on display, here.
“Pouring its engineering resources,” my ass.
In the launch version of windows 11 and for over TWO YEARS it didn’t even support drag&drop. It was working fine even on windows me
Drag and drop worked on windows 3.1. That was like the whole thing. “LOOK WHAT YOU CAN DO NOW!”
At this point, I’m fairly sure pissing people off is the point with Windows 11. It’s full of AI no one wants, refuses to officially run on most hardware that people already have, despite running just fine on that same hardware UNofficially, dropped support for drag and drop, doesn’t let you move the taskbar.
And thats not even to mention the fact that it monitors you, and reports back to HQ with screen grabs and usage activity.
Oh look, ZorinOS, just one singular distro, had 1.6 million downloads in the past 2 months.
Wait, is there any special thing that happened 2 months ago? Oh right. Windows 10 support ended, and microsoft told its userbase “fuck you, you can’t get support for windows 10, and this computer can’t update to windows 11. This computer is now trash!”
Suddenly all these youtube videos pop up “Is your PC unable to install windows 11? Try linux!”
And these videos don’t try to sway you to one distro or another. They point out a few big hitters like mint or ubuntu. I can’t imagine them specifically naming zorin, unless it’s a zorin centric video. But I’m talking about the flood of “try linux” videos that popped up in October.
And that 1.6 million is JUST zorin. That’s the runoff. I don’t have numbers, or sources, but gut instinct tells me that if Zorin had 1.6 million downloads, Mint must have had like 5 million minimum. Every video always reccomends Mint. It’s probably overtaken Ubuntu at some point as most used distro.
And all of this, every single bit of user loss has NOTHING to do with linux. Users are angrily switching. Not happily. They feel abandoned, and forced to switch.
If Microsoft either extended Windows 10 support, or allowed Windows 11 to be installed on reasonable hardware, this linux boom DOES NOT HAPPEN. This is Microsoft saying “Yeah bitch, money is tight! Go buy another computer, loser! You’ll do what we say, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us!”
That’s when users switched to linux. This is pure hubris from Microsoft. It would be interesting if somehow we could get a combined number of EVERY distros doenload numbers.
It also has a very poorly written UI interface that’s fucking infuriating. I was reverse engineering it to figure out why it’s so damn slow on HDDs, with explorer.exe rendering like shit, the Start menu crawling, and taskbar popups that make you want to smash your screen. They wrote really really fucking bad code compared to the Win7 days—basically just took the old MFC crap and slapped a XAML wrapper on it to make it look “nice.” What a fucking disaster.
I read some article or saw some video claiming that explorer was basically a react app now, which is why unlocking the screen takes 3.5 business days when you enter the correct password.
Uh, what? Can you clarify what you mean by “drag&drop”? Because dragging and dropping files or text around within or between application windows definitely worked even when Win 11 was new, so you’re probably talking about some specific instance, I assume?
The taskbar on windows 11 for the first two years didn’t support dragging and dropping on icons or opened applications. It was completely unusable
Ah, okay, gotcha. Yeah that’s fair. Not something I’ve ever really used, so wasn’t aware of that. Your comment read to me as if Windows as a whole just didn’t support drag&drop.
Drag and drop is the entire bases for windows. How do you release a version without it?
In every version of Windows up until now which has contained a taskbar and start menu, as far back as Windows 95. Not just Windows 10.
Sadly not true. Microsoft removed the Start button in a version of Windows before. It was in Windows 8 (and Windows Server 2012 for some godforsaken reason) with the cursed “metro” interface. MS did it for the same stupid reason they’re citing here “tablet and touchscreen users”. The uproar caused MS to release Windows 8.1 a year later where they returned the Start button.
Windows 8 and metro were not so bad compared to what’s happening now. They at least had a consistent picture in mind. I liked those things even if I wouldn’t use them (moved firmly to Linux by then).
My own humble opinion is that Windows in all its parts (perhaps except NT and basic layers) is as a project too much legacy. Simply existed too long with backwards support for various versions of involved libraries, with MS carrying the burden of maintaining old versions (while applications developers could package them similarly to how they package patched versions). Many tools to do the same thing.
They should put all that on life support, installable separately, and make a clean set of libraries and tools that forms their new normal desktop installation. Preferably tabula rasa, no compromises.
A file manager, a configuration manager, a set of desktop widgets. It’ll take them much less effort and time to just write a new set of tools.
A normal configuration manager supporting all that it should is the hardest thing. But it’ll also be the killer feature, imagine one UI to configure everything in a Windows installation, it’d be as cool as YaST2 in OpenSUSE or drakconf. IIRC, their system configuration tools for Windows 98 were a bit more user-friendly than NT-inherited for 2000 and XP, and haven’t (the old ones) improved much since then ; they can fix that.
That means dropping backwards compatibility for such a clean installation - well, who wants to run old applications, will run them in, sigh, that installable compatibility environment (might be cut down somehow).
I’m almost certain that’ll be both cheaper and more popular among users than what they are doing.
And it kind of makes sense to have the taskbar at the right or left on a widescreen monitor as there is so much space there
Actually my understanding is that in Japan and other cultures, right hand side start menu has been the standard preference. It’s amazing to me that that cultural preference even has been ignored.
What does making sense have to do with MS-Windows?
Windows 98 felt as if it was very sensible (when it didn’t hang). Windows 2000 Server I still remember as the best one. XP was too bright in visual design, but homely.
The only two incarnations of Windows I found to be acceptable were NT4 and W2k. Anything later was mostly a step into the wrong direction.
Using XP was almost the same as using W2K, except uglier, but more sci-fi-feeling. IIRC.
But yes, I too remember W2K as the best one.
From the PoV of a kid visiting websites, reading books on the Web, playing forum RPGs and some video games, and downloading MP3s. And talking over ICQ.
From that PoV it was fast, clean and without distractions and I liked the icons, the sounds and the wallpapers.
I was just getting seriously into CAAD, VR and visualization when I switched from NT to 2k - and to Linux on my second machine. I had Blender (still proprietary of NaN, then) importing DXF files via network share and render them in the backgroud while I was working on the next drawing on my W2k machine. Nobody understood what the heck I was doing but the visualisations (and even an animation in real 3D - gasp!) were quite a killer back then…
So I’m forced to use windows at work like the majority of my industry.
The start bar is still a thorn in my side since we switched from 10 to 11.
Standard office set up is 2 x 1920x1200 monitors and a 1920x1080 laptop. Some just leave the laptop shut when docked.
I preferred having it on a stand and using the lap top screen real estate.
In windows 10 I could make a monitor the primary and have a start bar only on the laptop. Not being able to do that in windows 11 is fucking annoying. They also fucked up auto hide start bar, it’s always jumping up for bullshit I don’t care about and not hiding when it should. I gave in and accepted I can’t have those bottom few lines of screen real estate because they are Microsoft’s.
As an engineer I do sometimes get feelings of imposter syndrome. But then I look at what Microsoft did to the start bar in windows 11 and think well at least I didn’t do that.
the reason is literally “because we decided not to implement it”
Saved you a click.
I’m one of the few who has had it at the top for as long as I can remember. It absolutely infuriated me to find out the feature had been removed.
I honestly just want my old right mouse click back.
Easily sorted and the old right-click menu can be reinstated along with a whole loads of other tweaks -
“People find the right-click menu overwhelming, so we’ll reduce it from 23 options to 19 options. That’ll make it less confusing and won’t annoy the people who now need an extra click for basic functionality “
Its just a registry entry that you have to change.
It is a registry key that you can add to return it to normal. If you want I can find it for you!
You can move taskbar to any side in Windows 98 (or earlier), but this abomination can’t, that speaks volume. BTW older windows also had crazy granular theme customization, no more, that’s apparently nuclear science or smth.
Notably, Windows 10 could do the same thing without any visible issues. And that’s probably because Windows 10 was a much lighter OS than Windows 11.
There is nothing wrong with being lightweight.
Maybe, just maybe, making the startmenu in React is not the best idea.
"Microsoft applied a data-driven approach to find out which features to add now, which features to add later, and which to completely avoid.
Unfortunately, for the enthusiasts who had a left-aligned or vertical taskbar in Windows 10, you would have to settle for the fact that Microsoft’s data shows such users are really small when compared to the number of users who are asking for other newer features in the taskbar."
100% of the users that are smart enough to care about moving the task bar are also smart enough to turn off all optional telemetry. This sadly a part of why tech companies are making products for the dumbest people and pushing away power users.
I just find it hilarious that the top/right/left toolbar was possible in windows 95/98/ME
but its to much of a technical problem to do today.
I guess thats what you get with AI doing all your coding…
How tf do they get telemetry for features that haven’t been added yet.
Microsoft Recall
What this essentially means is that when the taskbar sits at the bottom, Windows and third-party apps know exactly how much horizontal space they have to work with.
Ah, so I assume they will remove support for any resolutions other than 1920x1080, since they need a consistent horizontal size, and that’s the most common.
More than that are they just ignoring windowing an application and resizing it to fit? You know, the namesake of their operating system?
Microsoft applied a data-driven approach to find out which features to add now, which features to add later, and which to completely avoid.
WHAT DATA?!
They asked chatgpt
But, only after not getting an answer from Copilot.
Microsoft applied a data-driven approach to find out which features to add now, which features to add later, and which to completely avoid.
Which is why if you dig deep enough into Settings you’ll see WinXP Control Panel UI elements. You know, the elements that are actually useful for power users.
There’s a format dialog from NT still present in win 11
edit: it’s from 1994 according to the person who wrote it
The main one I use is the network adaptor settings, where you can enable/disable protocols and most importantly for me, where you can easily add multiple IP addresses on a network adaptor.
The Win 8+ network settings page is an absolute trainwreck. I particularly like how it doesn’t warn about conflicting IP addresses now and just silently accepts your given address and provides an auto-assigned 169.254 address instead if it sees even the smallest hint of another computer out there using the address you want to use.
Guaranteed fun and confusion trying to access/ping things until you finally check the status of the network adaptor and discover the auto assigned address, thanks Microsoft.
Not everyone wants to use dhcp, which is clearly their preferred direction, and there have been bugs where Cisco devices trigger that flip to auto assigned addresses even if things are fine.
Most of the old settings are at least easily reached if you can remember their names such as ncpa.cpl for the settings you mention but when you write “control printers” you get sent into the new Settings view now. Instead you gotta go to the control panel and change view from category to small or large icons to finally right click Devices and Printers and choose “open in a new window” to get there. If you left click it you get sent to the new Settings view.
It seems that every new release adds another layer of indirection (misdirection?) between you and the useful stuff you need to access. I use a third party utility to manage IP settings, and it’s one click from its menu to get to the network adapter page. It takes me about 5 minutes of angry clicking around in stock standard win11 before I get to the same place.
What’s funny here is that in Microsoft’s Feedback Hub, the feedback related to “taskbar”, with the highest number of upvotes, is the one that asks the company to “Bring back the ability to move the taskbar to the top and sides if the screen on Windows 11”. We are not sure which data Microsoft used to get to such a conclusion…
The one they get from their
spywaretelemetry, probably.The data shows everyone uses their Windows 11 taskbar at the bottom of the screen. You can’t argue with that.
Skewed telemetry probably, as most users that are aware you can move the taskbar are also aware you can just disable the phone home crap and will therefore not show up in the statistics.
TLDR: We rewrote the taskbar and didn’t bother implementing it.
What’s weird is that given certain odd scenarios (I can’t recall it but there was a video by Enderman about it) you’ll see the old windows 10 taskbar appear, exact styling and all. So the windows 11 taskbar is quite literally just a WebView plastered on top.
This really stuck with me. “Rewrote” implies feature parity. What they really did was replace the taskbar.
Microsoft is doing great when it comes to supporting the rise of linux.
I’m on linux because of Microsoft
Kubuntu, proxmox and mint checking in here fu $msft
On linux since everything M$ has done from Win 2000 onwards and their mob style practices under piece of shit Ballmer.
Microsoft doesn’t have to compete very much. They’re not a monopoly, probably, but a strict definition. Apple exists. Linux exists and is better than the terminal hell the average person thinks about. But that’s not enough pressure to make microsoft actually try to appeal to customers. Most people are basically stuck.
We should break up all of these companies that are so big they can coast with shitty products for years.
