“You will own nothing and you’ll be happy”
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?
Simple regedit used to fix this, but then stuff started to not work quite right as it got updated, and now I don’t think that regedit works anymore.
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.
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.
Drag and drop is the entire bases for windows. How do you release a version without it?
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.
The years of engineering salaries and test versions to dock a visual element at the top, instead of the bottom…
Maybe MS couldn’t stuff enough ads into the old Start Menu requiring a re-write to allow for more ad space. /s
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.
The also killed their UI performance previously when Vista first launched. Remember Aero?
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.
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.
The data they have compiled from years of people using Win 10 and Msoft Edge.
If they were using that data, then they would have included features people actually use in 10. Or maybe they’re just doing the inverse of whatever the data suggests.
It’s the data of what corners MS can cut to save more money than they lose when x number of users decide enough is enough.
Or maybe you’re overestimating the amount of people who actually used that. Spending effort on something that less than maybe 1% of users actually use and that is not load bearing to any important workflows is hard to argue for when you’re a corp that is only concerned about its own bottom line. It’s a pretty rational business decision, even if you (and I) disagree with it.
Two data points: What their intern could do with React; what their intern couldn’t do with React.
Data can say whatever the hell you want if you lack scruples.
It’s Microsoft, they have all the data. And quite frankly it doesn’t surprise even a little bit, i doubt even 5% of people moved around the taskbar, people are just ready to hitch themselves to every bandwagon they see shitting on Microsoft.
In that case, based on the roughly 1.5 billion Windows users, that’ll only affect a mere 75 million users for a feature that’s been there since Windows 95.
The equation they are thinking of, though, is “will the cost of those who actually quit using Windows outweigh the cost of building and maintaining this feature.” Funnily enough the inability to move the taskbar is what finally pushed me to Linux full-time, but the overwhelming majority will complain and stick to Windows.
TLDR: We rewrote the taskbar and didn’t bother implementing it.
This really stuck with me. “Rewrote” implies feature parity. What they really did was replace the taskbar.
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.
Asking for things like AI integration everywhere?
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could have AI on the desktop clock so you could ask it what time it was in different places in the world?
I was going to make a joke that they could also replace the taskbar search bar with an AI chat bar, but after reading the article, it turns out that they’re planning on doing that for real:
Windows 11 taskbar is now being “upgraded” with AI-first features. Microsoft is working on the Ask Copilot bar, which may replace Windows Search in the taskbar.
Your best sarcastic self is prime Microsoft material.
Didn’t they try something similar with Cortana, and were thoroughly rejected?
It’s called a world clock
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.
“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.
I can’t move the Windows 11 taskbar because I’ve been running Linux for over 20 years. Recommended fix!
Yeah, KDE ftw
Linux is missing enterprise management tools. For all its horrible flaws, nothing like SCCM, In tune, group policy, and Active Directory (in the sense of managing group policy, not so much identity) exist for Linux. Fix that, even commercially, and you might see a real change.
No thanks! I’m more into abolishing capitalism than facitating it further. I’m looking forward to the end of all commercial enterprises and especially management! It should be as difficult and expensive as possible to establish hierarchical systems of digitally managing large corporations.
My Linux laptop at work is enrolled in Intune
Finally someone know how IT works in the corporate world
The bit about apps having to reflow seems nonsensical. They have to reflow any time the user resizes their windows.
I’m not accepting any excuses from MS about limited resources when Linux desktop environments built by hobbyists have the feature in question.
They have to reflow any time the user resizes their windows.
The whole operating system is even named after that concept.
Yeah especially considering you can install 3rd party solutions to dock the taskbar to the left which work perfectly fine
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
It was working fine in windows 95. Suddenly all programmers became incompetent and can’t handle something like that?
This makes no sense to me what so ever. Why do any apps care about where the taskbar is? How’s it any different when a window isn’t maximised and the user resizes it? Either I’m seriously misunderstanding this or it’s a completely made up excuse.
I’d rather they just say “we completely rewrote the taskbar, but we know that less than 0.01% of users move their taskbar so we didn’t prioritize it”.
To me the bigger issue with the taskbar is that you can’t make it compact. Instead it has to be a big chunky mess.
All programmers by microsoft. They cant code anymore
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.
Probably written by CowPilot
just MS things. changing things for no apparent reason to make it worse to use and also remove existing features that people actually liked
Please, consider trying out linux if you haven’t: you can usually make a “live usb” and take it for a test drive without having to actually reinstall (if you don’t like it, just take the usb stick out and reboot back to windows).
I would dearly love to never again have to hear about the latest bullshit Microsoft is foisting on people.
Do your part! Switch. Everything just works better over here.
A word of caution: If you use bitlocker (copy your keys!), it can have hooks in the TPM/bios settings.
Disable bitlocker prior to attempting a live boot.
It will lock your disk if you don’t prepare for it.
For reference:
https://www.linuxliteos.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=9145
