Based on some Mastodon posts from the other day, and some complaints on Cohost yesterday. Written while sleep deprived.
It has been about a month since our work machine was forcibly upgraded to Windows 11.
Some thoughts have mellowed; eventually, even our neurospicy brain gets used to some aspects of the cheese being moved.
Some have become more aggravating than I thought; it isn't just that the right click menu now makes use of mystery meat navigation, it's that the location of the icons to click on changes.
Snipping Tool is aggravatingly slow compared to how it used to be under Windows 10 - the CPU in work laptop might not be great, but it was good enough before.
Muscle memory is still struggling with the taskbar being forcibly locked to the bottom of the screen, when we've had it on the side since before we first bought an ultra-wide monitor.
Are all of these things fixable with shady patchers, registry tweaks, or other third party software? Yes - but work machine makes them a non-option (beyond maybe some tweaks in HKEY_CURRENT_USER). And all of these options require more maintenance if they were to be used on a personal machine. When Windows 11 first launched, there were registry tweaks to put the taskbar back on the side. Now there aren't. If you have one of the patchers installed, all it takes is one surprise update and suddenly your computer doesn't boot.
And this is an enterprise install - meaning that it's at least slightly protected from Microsoft's worst excesses, in terms of preinstalled Candy Crush, or displaying an ad popup for Bing when you launch Chrome, or now, random ads in the Start Menu. At least right now, there's an option to switch most Copilot things off (or at least hide them).
I do genuinely wonder where the breaking point is for most people - the point where learning something new is less frustrating than dealing with Microsoft's death by a thousand cuts. Because we would rather deal with the issues of something we've chosen than something new MS have imposed - at least outside of work; cases where we get to make that choice.
bringing this back for reasons
(also being fair, i'm worried that apple is going to do the same thing in a couple of weeks.
but right now, at least, i still have enough trust in apple that if i turn all that shit off, it will stay off and never nag about it until at least the next major OS update - while i do not extend that same trust to MS; see most recently their PC healthchecker app declaring your PC unhealthy if you aren't using bing)
