So why did they make taskbar bottom only in the first place? Too difficult to implement? Branding? No room for ads when it's vertical?
Our commitment to Windows quality
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Re: Our commitment to Windows quality
#82To demonstrate the seriousness of their commitment to Windows quality, you can now move the taskbar to the left side of the screen. No no, it's not vaporware, they even included four screenshots. Everyone can rest assured now.
> you can now move the taskbar to the left side of the screen
Windows 11 is finally catching up to MATE desktop (which is maintained possibly by a single guy from their basement), what a time to be alive!
Re: Our commitment to Windows quality
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
"… by making them necessary entry points! Muahahaha!"
> "… by making them necessary entry points! Muahahaha!" Starting with Windows 11 26H2, the Start Menu will be removed and replaced with Copilot. In order to use a locally hosted app, an externally hosted LLM will need to be instructed to launch it. The reliability is phenomenal: our testing has shown it can launch the right app with 95% accuracy.
Users will also need to drink a Monster™ verification can every time they launch the start menu if they do not have a Premium AI PRO Ultra MAX account. Users may chose to skip verification process if they agree to the new EULA where it is stipulated that they must meet a weekly quota of Big Macs™ stamps. Failing that your Copilot™ Account will enter lock-down mode where a full document, body and facial scan must be "performed" to recover it.
Re: Our commitment to Windows quality
#84I am sus. Optimistic but sus. I am hoping for some combo of: - MS doing what they say here. (Uphill battle given the perverse incentives others have mentioned) My gut says Windows is going to be *worse* vs better, and I am willing to settle for stagnating... - Linux desktop makers taking UX, ABI/linking compatibility, and "just works" seriously. It's like you could take the good from both and discard the bad, but it…
It sure looks like a PR campaign to take the attention away from how bad the things are, and I need to see it to believe it. Also, why couldn't they make this announcement as they release the taskbar change. Taking away the most basic features and bringing a few back doesn't mean things are improving, it means things are getting petty. There is no reason for the start menu to take 2 seconds to show up on a computer w…
Yea concur. "Here's a patch and here are the notes" vs "Here are the notes for future efforts" would be more credible!
Re: Our commitment to Windows quality
#85I am sus. Optimistic but sus. I am hoping for some combo of: - MS doing what they say here. (Uphill battle given the perverse incentives others have mentioned) My gut says Windows is going to be *worse* vs better, and I am willing to settle for stagnating... - Linux desktop makers taking UX, ABI/linking compatibility, and "just works" seriously. It's like you could take the good from both and discard the bad, but it…
> Linux desktop makers taking UX, ABI/linking compatibility, and "just works" seriously. Would you settle for 2 out of 3? UX is improving, and things get more polished every year, but we've mostly settled on shoving things into some sort of package (container, flatpak, snap) alongside all its dependencies specifically so we don't have to actually stabilize any sort of ABI
Yep. Will take what I can get! Re the flatpacks, snaps, docker etc. Yea... I don't like those much more than the Apple/Google/MS app stores. They don't have the perverse incentives, but are still setting up friction points vs being able to just have an executable work, expect to work in 5-10 years, and work on diff distros. (This is something MS actually does right; possibly the best thing about Win)
I was coincidentally just updating old softare I wrote, and I just ripped out the snap, RPM and Debs because I can't be bothered to maintain all of them.
Re: Our commitment to Windows quality
#86This is good to hear, as someone who has used basically nothing but Windows since 2000. I haven't stepped off the Windows train yet. I use Linux at arm's length for my homelab's hypervisor and at work, but my daily driver is still Windows 10. I must be the only one to write something like this on HN, but I sincerely like Windows' technical fundamentals and architecture; its design is sensible and extensible. And very…
> I must be the only one to write something like this on HN, but I sincerely like Windows' technical fundamentals and architecture; its design is sensible and extensible. Nah, NT always had... mostly ... good guts. (The filesystem layer apparently made some really poor life choices, but otherwise.) As a die hard Unix guy, I've always been quite fond of NT's core tech. It's just made by a terrible company and shoved i…
> The filesystem layer apparently made some really poor life choices
NTFS is plenty fast, even for thousands of small files; it is the Windows Defender file system filter driver that slows things down. Specifically, it slows down CloseHandle[1].
> NT's core tech
I'm not just talking about NT. I think most of the user mode is great, too. Office blows the pants off most other 'office' suites. D3D is generally very forward-looking, and many extensions are released on D3D first, sometimes years before they're ported to Vulkan (ray-tracing, mesh shaders, descriptor heaps, etc). Windows has had a superb low-latency audio subsystem in WASAPI since Vista, which is something like a decade before Linux got Pipewire. There are many other examples of random cool stuff in Windows that Linux 'rediscovered independently' but Windows got there much earlier just because of the sheer install base and surface area.
[1]: https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2021/04/06/surprisingly-slow/
Re: Our commitment to Windows quality
#87[deleted]
Re: Our commitment to Windows quality
#88"...we are reducing unnecessary Copilot entry points, starting with apps like Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets and Notepad." Great!
Great? Maybe! But this doesn't say, "We are removing Copilot from apps."
My personal opinion is "Copilot is pretty good as a chatbot [1] but don't waste your time trying anything multimodal." So I don't mind it at all, in fact I like it enough that I installed the app on my phone. I've got no interest in having it rewrite stuff for me in Word or for LinkedIn though.
On the other hand, Microsoft is famous for killing something good (like OneNote) but spamming the UI with numerous entry points that will make you think "this is some piece of crap that Microsoft is spamming because nobody in their right mind would want it." That they are getting some self-awareness of this is a good sign.
[1] I'd say Google's AI Mode gives consistently better answers (like use "vite-ignore" instead of writing a Vite plugin that doesn't work) than copilot with the reservation that if Google seems to get uncomfortable about a conversation it will end the conversation with a ten pack of search results whereas Copilot tries to simulate a person with healthy boundaries (e.g. "I will help you write a romance story but I won't help you write a sex scene")
Re: Our commitment to Windows quality
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't congratulate yet until you see actual outcomes. The author of this commitment is the same person (Pavan Davuluri) spearheading move of Windows into an Agentic OS: https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-...
Absolutely nothing wrong with an "agentic OS", agentic UX is the future of personal computing. The ideal is that something intelligent understands what you want to do and gets it done. Unless you really think we've reached the pinnacle of user interface with repetitive clicking around and menus. The problem is with shoving AI down user's throats. Make it an option, not the only option.
I think something like this is the goal, and there's still a long way to go:
Re: Our commitment to Windows quality
#90> More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions: When did they get rid of that?
With Windows 11. In 10 and prior you could even move it to other monitors, just by dragging and dropping it. It's baffling they thought that functionality was a bug that people wanted 'fixed'.
Didn't MS rewrote whole panel again in W11? Surely they did that in W10 to re-implement Start menu they removed in W8