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 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 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…
“When you think about having the taskbar on the right or the left, all of a sudden the reflow and the work that all of the apps have to do to be able to have a wonderful experience in those environments is just huge.”
This is such utter fucking nonsense. They already have to deal with the concept of a “client area” that encompasses variable-sized screens and (worse) the multiple-monitor situation. Movable task bar is trivial.
That’s quite an article to say they forgot about it after re-writing the task bar for no reason. It’s such a basic expected feature.
just MS things. changing things for no apparent reason to make it worse to use and also remove existing features that people actually liked
So, to cater to the maximum number of users at once, Microsoft applied a data-driven approach to find out which features to add now, which features to add later, and which to completely avoid.
I call bullshit, because nobody uses the “modern” devices and printers interface in windows 10, because it fucking sucks. Everyone goes to the control panel instead. In windows 11, you have to use the “modern” interface, and it drives me crazy, especially because the old, fully functional, and reliable one is still in the OS, but Microsoft decided to hide it/make it a PITA to get to.
for power users? absolutely. but nobody who isn’t tech savvy even knows what control panel is anymore.
Over the years I came to realize that tech savvy when it came to windows doesn’t actually mean anything. It just means you are able to fight through the bullshit and get things done with what you have.
For printers, go to DEVICES > let it load it all > more devices settings (towards bottom) - to open old school printer control panel. Major pain in the ass.
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.
The amount of bullshit is incredible. The DE sets the windows position. The DE tells the apps what’s the “usable” desktop area. It worked for decades. And now “you can’t imagine the amount of work”
Fuck you microsoft. Not that I care anymore. Even your excuses are pathetic.
There was a while back some Windows developer externally lamenting how ass-backwards they were and as a result their NT kernel was woefully under-featured compared to other contemporary OSes…
Then I think they forced him to take it back and say ‘um actually our kernel is actually super awesome, my mistake’.
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.
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.
Look at this video from 4 years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGHokrbjlz8
I updated even on the beta version and at the beginning I was like “well it’s a beta, surely they will fix it”… Then it launched with the broken taskbar and I thought “surely this will be patched in a week” - it took TWO YEARS
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
What does making sense have to do with MS-Windows?
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.
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.
Sadly not true. Microsoft removed the Start button in a version of Windows before
They didn’t say that every version of windows since then had a start button
First of all they only talked about the start menu, which was still part of 8, even if it was annoying and full-screen. And second they only said that every Windows version that had that allowed you to move the taskbar around. Not that every Windows version so far had it.
So many people at work are having frustrating issues with Windows now.
It takes so fucking long to start up. Sure, you get a desktop and can open a program, but it just keeps locking up repeatedly for a good 20 minutes while whatever bloatware is running in the background during startup.
They cram OneDrive down your throat and it has constant issues.
They put so much shit in your way, in the name of “productivity” it makes your actual productivity worse.
FUCK COPILOT.
It’s the one drive cramming that really gets me, well also changing the right click context menu to hide cut and paste, wtf.
But seriously, not letting you move the Onedrive pin down the hotlinks sidebar out of the way? Extremely annoying.
Kill it in the registry.
Oh man, I remember marveling at BeOS in the day and for a brief moment in time when SSDs first hit the scene you could have a credibly fast Windows boot… Nowadays it’s worse than ever despite super fast storage, fastest CPUs, and gobs of RAM…
I thought it was just me, it’s so fucking “bulky” and slow on my work computer. Specs are fine on the laptop, windows 11 is just trash even without bringing up what it’s lacking and difficult to navigate.
And I know my way around windows very well, I can do nearly all my tasks with just a keyboard, don’t even need a mouse for the gui.
building the taskbar from scratch meant that they had to cherry-pick things to put into the feature list first, and the ability to move the taskbar didn’t make the cut, for several reasons that Microsoft values.
Translation: Nobody really knows (or wants to take the blame), we probably just forgot to put on the feature list. Anyway, I’ll just use the usual vague weasel-words that don’t really mean anything.
"Window’s is built on many layers of shit and we dont know what will or won’t break things.
Also co pilot was really expensive"
Also, please use copilot… please
Just one more ai tool bro just one more.
Please bro its so good you gotta use them all to make it worth it.
Apps then need to constantly reflow their layouts, resize content, adjust snapping behavior, and handle edge cases across different screen sizes, DPI settings, and multi-monitor setups. Also, this reflow logic has to work perfectly for legacy Win32 apps, modern UWP apps, and everything in between.
You mean the apps that were already handling this for decades when windows wasn’t a vibe-coded and ad-infested vehicle for AI slop?
Simple solution is to switch to Linux. Ubuntu Cinnamon 24.04LTS had worked great for me so far.
If you absolutely can’t or won’t switch look at openshell https://open-shell.github.io/Open-Shell-Menu/
Because microsoft sucks at ux
That’s disappointing; I always thought the one thing they got right was the 98/XP interface that Cinnamon copied.
Just because they suck at it now doesn’t mean they always have
