Earlier this year, Microsoft openly acknowledged the sorry state of Windows 11, and made vague promises about possible improvements somewhere in the near future, but stayed away from making any concrete promises. Today, the company published a blog post with some more details, including some actual concrete, tangible changes it’s going to implement over the coming two months.
In coming builds, you’ll be able to move the taskbar to any side of the screen, instead of it being locked to the bottom, thereby reintroducing a feature present since Windows 95. They’re also scaling back their obsession with ramming “AI” in every corner of Windows, and will be removing Copilot integrations from Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets, and Notepad. Furthermore, and this is a big one among Windows users I’m sure, Windows Update will be placed under user control once again, allowing them to ignore updates, postpone them indefinitely, reboot without applying updates, and so on. These are the tangible improvements we’ll be able to point to and say the company kept their word, and they all feel like welcome changes.
There’s also a few promises that feel far more vague and less tangible, like the ever-present, long-running promise to “improve File Explorer”. I feel like Microsoft’s been promising to fix their horrible file manager for years now, without much to show for it, so I hope this time will be different. The company also wants to improve Widgets, the Windows Insider Program, and the Feedback Hub application. These all feel less tangible, and will be harder to quantify and benchmark.
Beyond these first round of improvements that we’re supposed to be seeing over the coming two months, Microsoft also promises to implement wider improvements across the board, with the usual suspects like better performance, quicker application launches, improved reliability, lower memory usage, and so on. They also promise to move more core Windows user interface components to WinUI 3, including the Start menu, which is currently written in React. Windows Search is another common pain point among Windows users, and here, Microsoft promises to improve its performance and clearly separate local from online results (but no word on making search exclusively local).
There’s some more details in the blog post, but overall, it sounds great. However, words without actions are about as meaningful as a White House statement on the war with Iran, so seeing is believing.
Talk is cheap. In actuality, it’s free.
Promises, promises, promises. I’ll believe it when I see it, though it’s refreshing to see a giant like Microsoft go so far as to admit “AI” in every single app down to the freaking text editor was a mistake. Maybe this will be a spark that wakes regular people up to the fact that “AI everywhere” was always going to be a gimmick and parlor trick designed to bleed them of their money and their common sense.
Unpopular opinion: The real problem with Windows isn’t so much the user experience (although that is also pretty miserable in Windows 11), it’s the mistaken belief that Windows can be effortlessly upgraded from one major version to another as if it’s frickin’ MacOS. No, it can’t. In fact, even those “mini-major” upgrades that Microsoft sends every 6 months can be pretty destabilising considering all the third-party OEM bloatware the average Windows PC ships with:
https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/03/18/2020255/new-windows-11-bug-breaks-samsung-pcs-blocking-access-to-c-drive
And don’t get me started about that one time my sister’s Asus Zenbook upgraded from Windows 10 to Windows 11 and lost the WiFi drivers (for those wondering, the solution was to send my sister the latest drivers via email, her downloading them on her phone, and copying them to the laptop via USB). And yes, that was with the stock Windows installation.
There is a reason Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer kept upgrades as an “at your own risk” process, aka something you had to actively seek out as a user. Because anything else is a recipe for disaster at the hands of novice users.
At this point, Microsoft has the following two choices:
– Heavily restrict its OEM licensing program, supporting only 20-30 fixed hardware configurations for new PCs and banning OEM bloatware completely
– Make money by selling Windows 10 ESUs ’till 2032
But of course, we know what will happen: They will try to have their cake and eat it too (please OEMs and compete with MacOS at the same time), and with the new Macbook Neo on store shelves, this will cost them.
Restricting hardware/driver variability is actually why they stuck to the TPM 2.0 requirement for Windows 11. It allowed them to drop every single legacy driver for hardware that would not work on newer TPM 2.0 bearing PCs.
Given how much hardware you can plug into a TPM 2.0 PC either directly to USB or PCIe, or indirectly via a parallel port or serial port card or a PCIe-to-PCI or even PCIe-to-ISA bridge board, I remain skeptical of that. (And via those, you gain access to not just Mini-PCIe and ExpressCard carrier boards, but also Mini-PCI, CardBus, and PCMCIA.)
You don’t even need a special case for those latter two options… just a modern gaming case with support for mounting the GPU parallel to the motherboard on a PCIe riser cable and possibly a little custom support-DIYing on the non-ports end of the card if the case doesn’t support cards as short/small as what you want to mount.
…not to mention how ALL of those options are made available if you don’t have a PCIe slot via Thunderbolt and an external PCIe enclosure.
The big compatibility break was when PCI-only (i.e. WinXP-era) motherboards phased out support for the kind of DMA that DOS games expect of ISA sound cards, rendering PCI-to-ISA bridge cards unable to provide that service to bare-metal DOS.
The problem isn’t so much legacy pre-Windows 10 hardware, it’s the variability of modern post-Windows 10 hardware. My sister’s Asus Zenbook was bought shortly before Windows 11 launched, so it had modern hardware. And yet, Windows 11 didn’t ship with the appropriate WiFi drivers. This is why, if Microsoft wants to seriously compete with MacOS, they should restrict new systems to 20-30 known fixed hardware configurations and bundle all the necessary drivers for those, like MacOS does. Basically, Microsoft should make sure that, for PCs bought after a certain date, all drivers are bundled into Windows 11, with no need to hunt for drivers or even download drivers from Windows Update.
So I’m reading Samsung altered the C: drive permissions/ownership, causing a severe problem later, and Microsoft gets the blame. I’ve seen similar happen on Linux, and know full well you wouldn’t get a custom patch to fix it. Just reinstall and pray it doesn’t break itself again requiring a time wasting reinstall.
You’re sh***ing me. I knew modern Windows was bloat, but I never thought they’d gone that bloat.
Based on some old imageboard insider leaks that is SIGNIFICANTLY better than what they had before in terms of software architecture.
What they had before wasn’t a sad knock-off of macos. It was something useful.
It was probably vibe coded with CoPilot too.
It’s almost poetic that while Microsoft is busy promising to move the Start menu to WinUI 3, the bedrock of the OS still carries these weird “legacy ghosts” from the XP era.
The “File Explorer improvements” promise is a classic recurring theme, but while they focus on the surface, I’ve been obsessing over a tiny, persistent 1px alignment error in the native ListView control. If you enable gridlines in a detailed view, you’ll notice the header dividers and the vertical lines never quite line up—it’s visible in Explorer++ and even the native File Explorer if you look closely enough.
It’s one of those things that, once seen, cannot be unseen. It’s been ignored for decades, so I decided to take a crack at it myself. By subclassing the ListView to intercept scroll messages and forcing a coordinate correction (and admittedly using a bit of AI assistance to nail the logic for the Win32 messages), I finally got them to align perfectly.
It’s fascinating that a trillion-dollar company treats these minor visual “glitches” as invisible, yet they affect the overall feel of the UI’s polish. For any fellow “pixel-perfect” enthusiasts or developers who want to see the technical breakdown and the FreeBASIC fix, I’ve documented it here:
https://freebasic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=33574
Too little, too late, Microsl..oft. It appears 4 years have passed since I gave up on Windows:
> zfs get creation gee1/fedora
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
gee1/fedora creation Tue Feb 22 11:22 2022 –
I was Windows insider and directly felt Windows 11 quality going down to the ground. So I just installed Fedora GNOME, adopted it’s workflow and have never been more productive and happier with my PC life 🙂
Now instead of supporting Windows for friends and family, I am slowly converting them to Linux.
How’s Fedora on ZFS? The only Fedora-like I’ve done ZFS on is uCore and that’s not root-on-ZFS.
Some wordpress security plugin does not allow me to post proper reply. Oh well…
Lol it seems you cannot use word “de-le-te” in your comments. funny and sad…
I work a lot with ZFS, so it is quite natural to me. The only downside is you have to be careful when you upgrade Fedora versions. And it’s always nice to be able to create snapshot in 1s before running weekly package upgrades.
I’ve made myself custom Fedora ZFS kernels repo, and at this point in time I think I could just simply use GUI to upgrade to next release. Haven’t tried it yet though, I always do single reboot upgrade via terminal. It is cool to have previous Fedora version and new Fedora version side by side for some weeks until I finally discard the old OS clone.
Another option to consider is what I use to boot my Kubuntu, ZFSBootMenu.
Yes, you don’t do Linux ZFS-on-root without ZFSBootMenu. That’s how you boot your different OS’es from separate ZFS datasets.
ZFSBootMenu is one of the best things to happen for ZFS on Linux IMO. Big thanks to its developers.
Trusting Microsoft with ANYTHING is like trusting a pedophile around kids. I don’t trust them at all. They SHOULD have been split up into multiple companies in the 1990s and yet here they are pulling the same on [bleep] asking people to trust them. WHY should we trust them? We literally have ZERO examples from Microsoft as to why we should. Which is why I don’t use their products.
The entire ‘Our commitment to Windows quality’ screed including the title (commitment to what kind of vague quality?) is written in ‘Slmy Market Speak’ which is pretty disappointing for someone claiming to be an Engineer, and even begins with the poster child performative “I want to speak to you directly…”, which should warn everyone that outright lies are coming or something more significant is being concealed — and the author knows it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSHCdalj3Fo
So, bad news with what might be good: this little ditty, like hundreds before it — are on careful reading far more revealing about the company, its capabilities (or lack there of), intentions, vague and disingenuous nature, and how stupid they think their audience is…
Intellege Quid Agitur…
MS has been laying off QA teams for years. I doubt that there is any quality to speak of at this moment. MS knows that users don’t have a choice but become their QA and report these bugs themselves via “Feedback Hub” or telemetry.
” More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions: Repositioning the taskbar is one of the top asks we’ve heard from you. We are REintroducing the ability to reposition it to the top or sides of your screen, making it easier to personalize your workspace.”
Reintroducing, FTFY.
Looking forward to the reintroduction of something close to what NT 4.0 had.
I JUST WANT TO SEE WINDOW NAMES ON THE EFFING TASKBAR. IS IT SO DIFFICULT? JUST BUY STARTALLBACK IF YOU NEED TO. It should cost one thousandth of what MS bleeds on openai on any given month.
cevvalkoala,
I also find it’s gotten a lot more difficult to multitask on modern windows compared to in the past. The new desktops are designed to look cleaner, and I concede old desktops were cluttered, however they were much better at providing important context. Don’t put form over function, some of these changes have been so regressive to productivity and I hate it.
I was in business meetings last week and even there in the meeting it was evident that people are struggling with windows 11. It gets in the way of workflow and is a drag on productivity.
Oh, and I just remembered….
After clownstrike, they promised to half ALL EFFORTS and focus 100% on security.
ha.
This is the kind of message that gets dropped as spam when I moderate my blog, because it’s a bunch of “contributes nothing new” filler, plus a URL.
I’ll say it again. This site would benefit from a “flag/report comment” button.
If you are on Mastodon you can report these to Thom there, he’s pretty quick to respond and take them down: @[email protected]
Thanks. I’ll try to remember that.