Why is Windows 11 so annoying?

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/21/24063379/windows-11-ads-bing-edge-cruft

by stalfosknight • 2 years ago

48 86 2 years ago

talldayo2• 2 years ago

I am a frog who’s been out of the pot; I just jumped back in and got scalded

This is how I feel with everything these days. Default computer operating systems are the pits. A lot of it was paved with good intentions; enable better user workflows, increase visibility, provide better default apps, that sorta thing. But now everything is a service, on every platform you use!

Spending time on Linux, I get exposed to nothing. No live-tiles, no news notifications, nobody asking me to Try the New Safari. It's just... a computer. I feel the author's culture-shock every time I hear a Mac or Windows user try and rationalize their $99/year to-do list app to me. Is this really where computers are headed for us, and humanity at large?

s1gsegv2• 2 years ago

I wouldn’t lump macOS and Windows together for that, as someone who uses Linux and macOS regularly.

macOS has defaults that can be for power users, but you can find them and change them. Windows is actively trying to subvert your will at every turn. Ads in the start menu/explorer, forced updates, forced logins in the OOBE… It’s abhorrent! And so many workarounds you find online are dead, because they’re actively subverting your will.

talldayo2• 2 years ago

If I didn't need to open the terminal to disable basic nags on MacOS, I would be more inclined to agree. Modern MacOS post-Yosemite approaches Windows 8 levels of pointless service-oriented integrations.

On Windows and MacOS, you are the frog no matter what you do. The water is at different temperatures, but they are both heating up pretty fast.

trimethylpurine13• 2 years ago

You can turn all this shit off in the group policy editor. It takes less time than writing an article for The Verge.

hulitu• 2 years ago

You can't. Only some things.

daveoc643• 2 years ago

The source of complaint in the article (Widgets) can be switched off with Group Policy on Windows 11 Pro and above.

daveoc643• 2 years ago

I too am surprised at how people seem unable to find the readily accessible options to turn these features off.

Many of the things people don't like in Windows 10 and 11 can be switched off from the Settings app.

trimethylpurine13• 2 years ago

That you get down votes for providing solutions should tell you that this platform is sadly flooded with sensational journalism as opposed to the expected technically and scientifically inclined patrons that we'd prefer.

walterbell• 2 years ago

Anyone created a meta-policy called "Windows 10 UX" or even "Windows 7 UX"?

viraptor3• 2 years ago

Most people don't know about the group policy. Also, it's a constant battle - today you disable this thing, tomorrow they add something else in an update that you have to disable again. Or it may not even by possible to disable on the Home version.

trimethylpurine13• 2 years ago

Most people know about Google and can find how to turn it off, including in the Home edition.

ikidd• 2 years ago

this is not my first rodeo. I can turn off most of this junk. Most people will never bother or won’t know how or won’t realize that it’s optional. They’ll just learn to tune it out, mostly.

trimethylpurine13• 2 years ago

They'll learn to tune it out like the ads on the Verge?

I'm sorry, but pretending that something is difficult for however many paragraphs he stuffed into these ads is simply not good journalism. Let's ignore that he's complaining about ads in Windows, while writing an ad page.

ndegruchy• 2 years ago

Only if you have Windows Pro, for Home (and similar) users, gpedit is missing/unavailable.

trimethylpurine13• 2 years ago

The same registry keys exist in Home and you can find them with a very small amount of Google effort, even if you can't use the Group Policy editor.

BearOso• 2 years ago

There's guides online for using Microsoft's DISM tool to install the Group Policy stuff on Windows Home. There's also some surreptitious tools to change the edition of Windows, but that's more of a gray area.

arcastroe• 2 years ago

If you find time, could you link me to a how-to source?

trimethylpurine13• 2 years ago

It's the first result in every search engine I tried.

Here's one: https://www.howtogeek.com/742414/how-to-disable-the-widgets-...

smusamashah• 2 years ago

Can you explain more how? Which policy at which path?

trimethylpurine13• 2 years ago

Sure. Here's a detailed step by step.

https://www.howtogeek.com/742414/how-to-disable-the-widgets-...

thegrim33• 2 years ago

I still can not believe that when I right click on a file, the option to rename the file is no longer in the right click menu. The menu that appears contains a couple dozen different options, none of which are to rename the file. Somehow they decided that renaming is so unimportant of an operation that they shoved it into a sub menu, under "More Options", which, when selected, causes a whole new set of actions to appear, one of which is rename. So it's now a multi-step process to get to the option to rename a file.

How on EARTH did people sign off on that? It's such an unbelievable usability issue.

daveoc643• 2 years ago

The common file actions like rename and copy are now shown as icons at the top or bottom of the context menu.

kcb• 2 years ago

I can never tell which icon is which.

trimethylpurine13• 2 years ago

It's directly in the right click menu. It's an icon that looks like a cursor. It looks like what happens when you rename a file. It's also in the More Options menu if you prefer extra steps. Doesn't sound like you do.

paul_funyun• 2 years ago

You click the filename twice to rename. More efficient than two clicks and a menu perusal.

tacker20004• 2 years ago

You could also hit F2, but thats not the point here. The point is that a command that is used a lot is buried in 2 layers of menus.

ThrowawayR2• 2 years ago

I find it ironic that people, like the parent poster, who are actually trying to be helpful and informative are being downvoted for it.

Windows is an adequate operating system if one bothers to learn to use it properly.

wumeow• 2 years ago

It’s still there in a little set of icons you have to memorize the meaning of and that will be changed two versions from now by the next PM who wants to juice up their resume.

Rinzler894• 2 years ago

by the next PM who wants to juice up their resume

Does having been a UX PM on Windows 11 on your resume actually help you or hinder you at this point?

wkat4242• 2 years ago

Like others said the rename is an icon now but some other much used options like compress folder are still hidden under more options.

Luckily there's a registry key to turn this crap off. I don't have it to hand right now but it's easy to find.

But yeah that doesn't excuse anything. Setting up a new windows now takes ages to decrap it.

SECProto• 2 years ago

Luckily there's a registry key to turn this crap off. I don't have it to hand right now but it's easy to find.

That's useful to know - if I ever have to update my personal computer to 11. For my work computer, I've gotten used to using shift+right click to bypass the new (buggy, slow loading) right click menu and go straight to the old one

AtlasBarfed• 2 years ago

Xp was the last time Microsoft cared about UI.

Once UI started with material design, hamburger, removing top menus, ribbons of icons, it has all been downhill.

CoastalCoder• 2 years ago

Xp was the last time Microsoft cared about UI.

They still care about the UI.

But Windows 7 was the last time our interests were aligned.

65102• 2 years ago

How could you have missed that the "more options" option brings up a context sub menu... or no wait... it brings up a different menu that has different spacing, no icons, a different font AND THE SAME OPTIONS! It appears to be the unchanged legacy menu.

You have to picture it, no one stopped whoever did this.

jasomill• 2 years ago

I assume the two-level design was the only way to speed up the context menu without breaking compatibility with some existing shell extensions.

Specifically, the older design allows shell extensions to register callbacks that must run — in some cases synchronously, on the UI thread — before a context menu displays.

In Windows 11, these "legacy" shell extension context menu callbacks need never run unless "Show more options" is chosen.

The "more options" menu duplicates items in the first because it's identical to the Windows 10 context menu (again, I assume, because compatibility).

369548684892826• 2 years ago

I've always hit F2 to rename stuff so hadn't noticed it wasn't in the menu any more, but I hate how the menu loads in now so you can't reliably click on anything until it's done its little dance and stopped shuffling things around.

telchior2• 2 years ago

This was wildly annoying. For anyone that has been procrastinating on fixing it, all you need to do is open the command line and enter:

reg.exe add "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32" /f /ve

That brings back the legacy right-click menu.

dullcrisp• 2 years ago

Memorized this command, thank you!

jauntywundrkind• 2 years ago

The author has a little whine fest to try to make windows sound great & Linux sound insane:

There are some things that Windows does very well compared to macOS and Linux. All the games are there, for one thing, and Windows runs on all sorts of hardware without a lot of fiddling. You do not have to spend a thousand dollars minimum on a non-upgradable machine to use it. You also generally do not have to download a bunch of drivers or spend six hours in the command line hand-assembling the goddamn operating system.

But on Windows now it requires hunting through all kinds of really bad low-quality web pages to see if you can tweak some behavior that you are absolutely fed up & at the end of your rope with. Desperate to find some special registry setting you can fiddle with, or lately, use ViveTool/StagingTool to tweak incredibly opaque Feature IDs that might possible help. Windows has become the configuration nightmare that Linux was, and there's nothing remotely as comforting or capable as a command line there to help you scout shit out & try to improve things with; with Windows you're stranded & alone.

The author also clearly hasn't spent a lick of effort trying to install a vaguely modern end-user-centric distro in a decade. Nor are they aware that basically every game except Destiny 2 and Modern Warfare (and some others with particularly pernicious root-kitting anti-cheat software) runs great on Linux. My new years resolution was to stopping booting my desktop/gaming PC into Windows unless I need it, and it's been so lovely, games so near universally work, and things like playing a game while watching movie - where windows gives me 3 fps of movie - run butter smooth.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 years ago

Perhaps it has been added but back in the day Windows had no GUI option to batch rename files either.

GUIs have limitations, decided by someone else. This is one reason I dislike them. The command line probably has its limits, too, but it's far more flexible than a GUI.

dvfjsdhgfv• 2 years ago

For that reason I use F2 exclusively (second most used shortcut in Explorer after Ctrl+Shift+N for New Folder. I hate the delay needed to click, read the menu and find the right option.

htk• 2 years ago

Windows 11 is a jungle of dark patterns, and I find it really disrespectful to the user as well as low class and desperate.

Gibbon1• 2 years ago

At work we're using Windows 11, one drive, and teams and the experience is just trash.

Mikhail Parakhin has accomplished more to destroy Microsoft's desk top OS monopoly than anyone else.

theandrewbailey• 2 years ago

I'll probably upgrade my desktop with the next generation AMD CPUs, and I somewhat dread having to choose between Windows 10 (which will probably not be supported on this newer hardware), or Debian, because I sure as hell won't be using Windows 11.

ajkjk• 2 years ago

What is going on with this title

FroshKiller2• 2 years ago

It's what we call a minced oath. "Got dang" is an inoffensive substitute for "goddamn."

ugjka• 2 years ago

I guess a couple years down the road we'll need even more inoffensive words for these ones we've created. It is similar to people on social media using word seggs instead of sex because god forbid the algoritm gets a stroke

thiht• 2 years ago

What’s offensive about goddamn? "Damn" is not even vulgar, is it?

djbusby• 2 years ago

Back in the day it was possible to replace "explorer.exe" as the shell.

One had to write their own app, but it could take over start menu, explorer, and desktop. Is that still a thing? I made on (2003) it worked on Win2k and 98 IIRC.

Edit: the app has to have special entry points (not regular WinMain) and regedit a bunch to make it work.

Edit2: found this https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/18ipo7f/why_does...

Which points to https://cairoshell.com/

Awesome!

omoikane• 2 years ago

I used to run LiteStep, and I remember the one productivity feature it had over regular Windows was virtual desktops. Windows 10 natively supports those now, and I have mostly given up on all desktop eye candy things.

telchior2• 2 years ago

I recently "upgraded" to Windows 11, which began with going into Add/Remove Programs and removing everything I could, then going into settings and turning off all the Windows options I spotted. A method that, as far as I could remember, worked pretty well in Windows 10.

But I was stressed about some work stuff so I quickly moved on to pulling my project's repo and getting back to work. A week later, my project goes absolutely berserk with warnings and failures, which trace back to files / lines that shouldn't exist.

Turns out, I had dropped my repo into a directory managed by Windows OneDrive, and OneDrive had backed everything up and subsequently decided (for some reason I still haven't figured out) to start restoring and reverting deleted / changed files. My realization of this began with "What the fuck is a OneDrive?" tl;dr it's Microsoft trying to sneakily take over all your data / force you into its cloud services. I'd actually briefly spotted the name and turned it off, but it had taken that to mean "until tomorrow", of course.

Anyway, it's on me, right? I was distracted and lazy. Sometimes it takes a good old mugging to get back in the right defensive mindset.

Rinzler894• 2 years ago

That's why us old timers still put our work in C:\git or C:\work out of habit, like in the DOS days, never in the likes of My Documents as those folders end up being used by a lot of other apps.

rodface• 2 years ago

Indeed, I pretty much treat userspace as C:\temp, considering how much it gets messed with. Anything that requires consistent behavior needs to live in the root.

simonblack• 2 years ago

I keep saying it:

"Best of Breed" is Windows 7. It's been all downhill since there.

On the odd occasion that I must use Windows (and gets less and less each year) I use Windows 7 as a VirtualBox 'guest' on Linux.

If I didn't use HP software for multi-page scanning to PDF with my HP MFP, I wouldn't need Windows at all.

pikseladam• 2 years ago

Despite your aversion to the situation, it's functional. Individuals unfamiliar with Y Combinator are increasingly interacting with Microsoft offerings, which in turn boosts Microsoft's financial gains. Consequently, their sales are thriving—you may dislike this reality, yet their marketing proves more effective. tiktok generation folks, get used to it.

multimoon• 2 years ago

“ You also generally do not have to download a bunch of drivers or spend six hours in the command line hand-assembling the goddamn operating system.”

Is it me or has the quality of writing coming from the verge gone downhill in recent years? I remember they used to be awesome - but this statement alone made me uninterested in anything else the author had to say as it’s just factually incorrect.

Other than power user distros (arch, gentoo, etc) Linux has been one click install and ready to go just like windows for a decade (Ubuntu, fedora, etc) and provides a very good OOBE nowadays.

Also, once you remove “my laptop came with windows preinstalled” - yes you do spend time messing with drivers, a uniquely windows problem. If you’re lucky windows update will grab them all, but that’s still requiring user interaction. God forbid windows update doesn’t have it and you have to go hunting on the OEM’s website for it.

I wholeheartedly agree with their sentiment that windows has become a nuisance and I’d call it approaching unusable the more money Microsoft tries to extract from it, but the author/editor really should do research first before they try to write an eye catching sentence.

leonroy• 2 years ago

Other than power user distros (arch, gentoo, etc) Linux has been one click install and ready to go just like windows for a decade (Ubuntu, fedora, etc) and provides a very good OOBE nowadays.

So my experience with Ubuntu and Fedora on a new Thinkpad T14s Gen 3 (AMD) laptop has been a mixed bag. Lenovo state that this is an Ubuntu supported notebook so everything should have been compatible with no tinkering but that was not my experience.

You're right, OOBE with distros today is good. But in day to day usage there were three very annoying problems:

1. The display flickers due to AMD's variable refresh rate feature (doesn't happen on Windows) - fixing this required a custom kernel with VRR disabled

2. The speakers sounded very quiet and anemic due to the laptop shipping with Dolby Atmos tuning - fixing this in Linux required installing Windows (which supports Atmos), recording a special diff file in Windows Audacity with Atmos tuning on/off and then importing that into PulseAudio on Ubuntu to give it the same speaker tuning profile

3. The trackpad scroll speed was way too fast and Gnome annoyingly offers no way to customize this - the solution is to edit one of the libinput-config files

Granted the big stuff like Wifi, Bluetooth, GPU, printing and sleep all worked perfectly - even Steam + Proton worked out the box with games like Arkham Knight and Witcher running as well as Windows but little issues like those three above required a good few hours of tinkering in the command line and make things frustrating enough that I think The Verge author's point stands.

Why is Windows 11 so annoying?

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