Linux

[MrPopo]

I remember them letting them ungroup, but labels still were missing last time I experienced the vanilla UI. I might have to disable the fix and try out the vanilla UI to see (I have it on my Surface; it made a good guinea pig).

[Ziggy]

They decided to make the taskbar objectively worse by removing customization options like keeping window titles, instead of collapsing it to just the icon. You can fix it with third party modifications, but those break once in a while after a system update.

They added the ability to toggle on and off icon grouping and labels in the taskbar in an update about 12 months ago. Why it was absent from the start, who knows.

Did they add the ability to justify it left? Or are you stuck with it being centered?

[emwearz]

They decided to make the taskbar objectively worse by removing customization options like keeping window titles, instead of collapsing it to just the icon. You can fix it with third party modifications, but those break once in a while after a system update.

They added the ability to toggle on and off icon grouping and labels in the taskbar in an update about 12 months ago. Why it was absent from the start, who knows.

Did they add the ability to justify it left? Or are you stuck with it being centered?

Yeah, you have able to move the start icon to the left, with the taskbar starting directly after it for a couple years as well. You still can't move the taskbar itself to be on the left, right or top though.

[MrPopo]

I'm still annoyed that I can't have the slightly narrower bar of Win 10, but that's not a dealbreaker. What stands out more is the buttons with labels dynamically resize to a point based on the size of the title. This is most obvious with my Slack button, as depending on the channel I've seen it grow and shrink.

[opa]

Out of a curiously, what is it about Windows 11 that you dislike that is not present in Windows 10? They are fundamentally the same operating system, they even share the same kernal (v10.0). I could understand if things like core isolation turned you off, but it can be disabled in Windows 11.

You do you, just wondering.

Sure. No problem. I've just had a lot of little issues. Menus buried within menus. Settings not where I'm used to or where they should be. Not a fan of the UI or resource usage. Having to edit the registry just to have a sane context menu when you right-click is frustrating (have they fixed this by default yet?).

Just a lot of things that drive me batty. And, as the seemingly on-call, unpaid IT person for my family, I am dreading my parents buying a new computer in the near future.

RE: search bar - yeah, I had issues with that, too. At one point there was a switch to toggle off the web search results but the search quit working for me when I did that? Maybe they've fixed it by now.

[emwearz]

The right click drove me nuts until I changed it, why MS seemingly has the option to change these things via regedits, but doesnt just have a toggle blows my mind.

I think everyone, the world over, can agree that the Windows Search feature is utterly horrid and was in 10 as well. Having to disable and change search and indexing option in order to find locally installed files / programs before it does a Bing search is horrid.

Windows is starting to become a bit like Linux distros to me. I use the OS, but I seemingly forget that I had to do some configuring legwork to get it to the way that I enjoy using it. But to be fair I feel like I have always spent time setting up any version of Windows to my tastes, usually just making it as a similar to the older OS' as possible because of muscle memory.

[Ziggy]

As if setting up an OS just the way you like it wasn't tedious enough, having to reg edit some of those options just makes it so much more frustrating. In Windows past, it was easy enough to find what you were looking for in control panel and whatnot. All I can say is that I'm so thankful the search works as well as it does in SETTINGS for 10 and 11, because without it I would have so much trouble finding things. I never had that issue in 9x, XP or 7. But now it's impossible to find things in 10 and 11. It's so frustratingly hard sometimes to find things in settings that when I can't find it, I can't be sure if it's just me not being able to find it, or if it's a secret reg edit option, or simply that option doesn't exist.

For example, I hate that the lock screen has such a short timeout period before shutting off my monitor. I would constantly wake my computer from sleep or hibernate, but not log on fast enough before it shut my monitor back off. I think 1 minute was the default, IIRC. Why is there no option to change this in settings? You have to change it in the registry.

And yeah, the start menu search function in 10 can be a little annoying, but I fill like 11 just turned the annoying knob up on that one. It wasn't so bad on 10 that I felt a need to look into tweaking it, but it seems so frustratingly annoying in 11. Good to know that it's fixable with some tweaking though (until Microsoft changes something with an update).

I feel like I have to start keeping a cheat sheet for my OS preferences. For fresh installs, it use to just be that I would tweak things as I came across them. But with so many of them being reg edits, it's not like I can memorize them.

If I wasn't a gamer, this would be a completely different story. It might be easier to make a total switch to Linux in that case. For the few programs that I like to use that don't have native Linux ports or good alternatives, I'd be more incline to look for a solution like a virtual machine or something.

Regarding Windows 11, does anyone know how the upgrade from 10 works in terms of your key code? Like, I have a legit copy of 10 with a key and it's registered and all that. If I use the upgrade function from within the OS, do I get a new key? Or does my Windows 10 key become my 11 key? IIRC, I can download an ISO of 11 from Microsoft, should I ever need to reinstall. I'm just wondering if I ever did a clean install, how would I go about activating it at that point?

[MrPopo]

It does feel, at times, that companies are feeling like they have to justify why they have designers on staff. Slack recently made its UI worse, Polygon made its layout utter garbage, it just keeps happening over and over.

[Ziggy]

So apparently if you set the region to English (World) when installing 11, that'll stop it from putting all those damn bloatware shortcuts in the start menu for apps you don't want.

[opa]

Still fiddling around with my Orange Pi 800. Really just curious what I can run on it.

I did order a Libre Computer Le Potato. A pi clone (probably at or slightly above a Pi 3 in performance). I'm going to load it up with Batocera for a simple under-the-tv retro game box.