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2025 was a disaster for Windows 11

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Re: 2025 was a disaster for Windows 11

#151

Post by wwweston »

ksynwa wrote: post #142

For me the strange and unproductive direction Windows is going towards in encapsulated in the right-click menu in the file manager (Explorer). 11 has a shiny new menu that shows up when you right click. But it is a new coat of paint over the ones from 10 or before. Additional options from for example 7zip don't show up in it. You have to click "more options" at the bottom which them reveals the old menu. There is no…

I’d be willing to bet that behind a change like this is a certain amount of data showing that the removed options weren’t used that frequently, and a stakeholder decision that this must mean that they should be demoted. And it’s data driven. Makes for a nice bullet point in a report. Most users don’t miss it, on stakeholders can tell themselves that those that you are a minority who don’t really matter for one reason or another.

And as technology moves from tool that provides value to be paid for to cultural experience to be farmed, aesthetic changes drive a sense of currency and progress more than utility -and take a greater place of focus (and we’re a long ways from a time with a respected UX class considering utility even if the larger teleology valued it).

Re: 2025 was a disaster for Windows 11

#152

Post by butlike »

Aurornis wrote: post #117
milesvp wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s been fine? Are you completely immune to attention grabbing features? I absolutely cannot use win11 as it comes on a stock lenovo. Maybe you got your hands on some corporate version with some of the standard settings off? But between the news feed and the advertising in the start menu I find stock installs to he maddening, and I loath needing to boot my win11 partition.

I didn’t run any scripts or utilities. When I encountered something I didn’t like I just found the setting to turn it off. I prefer a clean system, but I’m not the kind of person who gets triggered into rage when the OS pops up a suggestion after fresh install or has something on by default. Spending some time customization the OS and desktop environment is part of the drill any time I do a clean install, whether it’…

You seem like a reasonable person. Good job.

Re: 2025 was a disaster for Windows 11

#153

Post by hamdingers »

autoexec wrote: post #87
Aurornis wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gone are the days of affordable graphics accelerators in the $300 to $500 range. Now it’s $1000 to $2000. What are you talking about? nVidia only has two models in the $1000 to $2000 range and they’re clearly premium parts. The $300 to $500 cards are actually fine for normal gaming unless you demand to play at 4K at high settings.

> The $300 to $500 cards are actually fine for normal gaming unless you demand to play at 4K at high settings. I don't think that wanting to play games at the native resolution of your screen without changing settings from their defaults in order to make the game look and perform much worse is a very unreasonable "demand". That used to be possible without spending as much money and it's also not unreasonable for peop…

Fair, but there are 2025 games that don't run even well on the 5090. This is the fault of game developers who think they're making the next Crysis, targeting some hypothetical future hardware instead of providing a great experience on today's midrange hardware.

Looking at the best looking games from today vs 10 years ago, they're so similar it's hard to see where that extra performance is even going.

So far waiting ~5 years to bother with them has been a working strategy for me.

Re: 2025 was a disaster for Windows 11

#154

Post by i80and »

ksynwa wrote: post #142

For me the strange and unproductive direction Windows is going towards in encapsulated in the right-click menu in the file manager (Explorer). 11 has a shiny new menu that shows up when you right click. But it is a new coat of paint over the ones from 10 or before. Additional options from for example 7zip don't show up in it. You have to click "more options" at the bottom which them reveals the old menu. There is no…

This sort of thing has been a devolving disaster since the Settings App was included in Windows 8 as a partial replacement for the Control Panel. I'm not sure the current state of things, but as of the last time I used Windows, the sets of functionality remained only partially overlapping between the two different tools.

Re: 2025 was a disaster for Windows 11

#155

Post by killjoywashere »

If you're using Windows, you're using a computer controlled by a corporation and your actions on that machine are not your own. Even if you walked into a store and bought it, your actions on that computer may not belong to your boss, but you're definitely working, directly, for Microsoft.

Any "feature" of Windows is there because one or more organizational leaders wanted it. Government, commercial, academic. Somewhere in between. But they pray every night for your more complete subjugation.

Re: 2025 was a disaster for Windows 11

#156

Post by butlike »

tavavex wrote: post #118
autoexec wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hate what they've done to notepad. The entire point of the program was that it was extremely basic. There's zero reason to use it now over something much better like notepad++

The absolutely insane addition of the Copilot button aside, new Notepad did have some improvements that I liked. Tabs are one, but another overlooked feature is that it now keeps track of its state and maintains all the unsaved files that are open in it, allowing me to use it as a momentary place to jot down things that I want to remember but that I don't want to save in a txt file. Basically, like more full-fledged…

So it's now like TextEdit.app running in plaintext mode. Plus one Copilot button evidently. Cool.

Everyone's hating on win11, but I'm getting more and more inclined to switch off osx day-by-day. Direct X and gaming is a powerful drug.

Re: 2025 was a disaster for Windows 11

#158

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

Glawen wrote: post #150
ksynwa wrote: post #142

For me the strange and unproductive direction Windows is going towards in encapsulated in the right-click menu in the file manager (Explorer). 11 has a shiny new menu that shows up when you right click. But it is a new coat of paint over the ones from 10 or before. Additional options from for example 7zip don't show up in it. You have to click "more options" at the bottom which them reveals the old menu. There is no…

Nice to mention that this new menu takes ages to appear, on my computer I can wait 5s until it is rendered and I can finally click on more options...

That's funny because I was about to speculate that maybe the customized 7-zip options were removed as part of an API change to speed up the menu by getting rid of shell extensions.

Whoopsy!

Re: 2025 was a disaster for Windows 11

#159

Post by tracker1 »

awesan wrote: post #29

I installed Linux (an arch-based distro) last month. There have been some minor issues but nothing worse than what I experienced regularly on Windows recently. My computer feels fast again and when things randomly break I can at least get to the root cause and fix it myself. I used to quite like Windows, but it has gotten worse every patch day for years now. The pain of learning a new system is not so bad and at leas…

I was a Windows Insiders user for a long time... When I was bumped to Windows 11 it borked (didn't have tpm enabled) and had to do a full re-install... a few months later, I saw an ad in the start menu search results... that was it. I switched my primary drive over to my Linux install and largely haven't looked back.

Still on Windows for work, but would happily swap. I also use an M1 Air for my personal laptop, but that is probably my last Apple hardware.

Re: 2025 was a disaster for Windows 11

#160

Post by drnick1 »

cheschire wrote: post #45
awesan wrote: post #29

I installed Linux (an arch-based distro) last month. There have been some minor issues but nothing worse than what I experienced regularly on Windows recently. My computer feels fast again and when things randomly break I can at least get to the root cause and fix it myself. I used to quite like Windows, but it has gotten worse every patch day for years now. The pain of learning a new system is not so bad and at leas…

When things randomly break in my Linux install, I fire up Claude

Not sure why people are downvoting this. LLMs have made Linux far more accessible than before.
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