Dex 🔞

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)

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.

(quote source: microsoft on windows 11 design principles )

the taskbar in any position, as long as it's on the bottom

the time in any alignment, as long as it's to the right

the new variable width font in any size, as long as it's the wrong one

i know we're nitpicking because of our flavour of neurospiciness
but also you can't have multiple reminders of things that used to be different and now can't be changed on screen at all times, and say you have a design principle about individual user choice!!

(but then again, perhaps it falls into the "yes/maybe later" model of user choice in dialogue boxes)

welp, work machine now has windows 11 (mandatory upgrade was tomorrow night but i thought it’d be better to at least have some control over the timer)

i think it’s still going out to grab additional updates because it’s running very slowly, but it makes an even worse impression when the widget pane i don’t want spends a while on the responsive web design placeholder
(turned off the widget pane after that)

and then task manager crashed when trying to see what was making it run slowly

and all my criticisms of this are still there (granted, this is 22H2, maybe newer versions have improved stuff but i doubt it).

a lot of my cheese has been moved.
the taskbar does not belong on the bottom of the screen - it’s wasted space on an ultrawide, and with how often i’m hopping on to servers, having the local one be on the side was an easy way to tell them apart.
i had the use full screen start option on in win10, and all those apps placed on a grid to spatially locate them? unceremoniously dumped into a folder.
not even alphabetized

oh, did you like having tab titles in task manager? too bad! all we have now is labels and hamburger menu. (i do not know if the hamburger menu choice persists. i’m going to be more irritated if it doesn’t)

and it still feels like a baby toy version from oversimplification
when i right click a file, i like nice clear unambiguous text rather than just an icon
right click the taskbar and there’s just taskbar settings/task manager

is it the worst version of windows i’ve ever used? no. i liked windows 8.0 more than most people but i’ve always got incredibly annoyed any time i need to RDP into a windows server 2012 (not R2) server because hot corners as the only way to interact with a server graphically are such a fundamentally bad idea that it’s incredible that happened

but i’m struggling to understand why anyone that considers themselves a power user would find this better