deleted by creator
Pouring resources into it… Doesn’t almost every other os/distro have this option?
Forced to by governments.
Good question. Maybe they are required to by the Americans with Disabilities Act?
Microsoft applied a data-driven approach to find out which features to add now, which features to add later, and which to completely avoid.
WHAT DATA?!
Data can say whatever the hell you want if you lack scruples.
Two data points: What their intern could do with React; what their intern couldn’t do with React.
The data they have compiled from years of people using Win 10 and Msoft Edge.
If they were using that data, then they would have included features people actually use in 10. Or maybe they’re just doing the inverse of whatever the data suggests.
Or maybe you’re overestimating the amount of people who actually used that. Spending effort on something that less than maybe 1% of users actually use and that is not load bearing to any important workflows is hard to argue for when you’re a corp that is only concerned about its own bottom line. It’s a pretty rational business decision, even if you (and I) disagree with it.
It’s the data of what corners MS can cut to save more money than they lose when x number of users decide enough is enough.
Microsoft applied a data-driven approach to find out which features to add now, which features to add later, and which to completely avoid.
Which is why if you dig deep enough into Settings you’ll see WinXP Control Panel UI elements. You know, the elements that are actually useful for power users.
There’s a format dialog from NT still present in win 11
edit: it’s from 1994 according to the person who wrote it
The main one I use is the network adaptor settings, where you can enable/disable protocols and most importantly for me, where you can easily add multiple IP addresses on a network adaptor.
The Win 8+ network settings page is an absolute trainwreck. I particularly like how it doesn’t warn about conflicting IP addresses now and just silently accepts your given address and provides an auto-assigned 169.254 address instead if it sees even the smallest hint of another computer out there using the address you want to use.
Guaranteed fun and confusion trying to access/ping things until you finally check the status of the network adaptor and discover the auto assigned address, thanks Microsoft.
Not everyone wants to use dhcp, which is clearly their preferred direction, and there have been bugs where Cisco devices trigger that flip to auto assigned addresses even if things are fine.
Most of the old settings are at least easily reached if you can remember their names such as ncpa.cpl for the settings you mention but when you write “control printers” you get sent into the new Settings view now. Instead you gotta go to the control panel and change view from category to small or large icons to finally right click Devices and Printers and choose “open in a new window” to get there. If you left click it you get sent to the new Settings view.
It seems that every new release adds another layer of indirection (misdirection?) between you and the useful stuff you need to access. I use a third party utility to manage IP settings, and it’s one click from its menu to get to the network adapter page. It takes me about 5 minutes of angry clicking around in stock standard win11 before I get to the same place.
It’s Microsoft, they have all the data. And quite frankly it doesn’t surprise even a little bit, i doubt even 5% of people moved around the taskbar, people are just ready to hitch themselves to every bandwagon they see shitting on Microsoft.
In that case, based on the roughly 1.5 billion Windows users, that’ll only affect a mere 75 million users for a feature that’s been there since Windows 95.
The equation they are thinking of, though, is “will the cost of those who actually quit using Windows outweigh the cost of building and maintaining this feature.” Funnily enough the inability to move the taskbar is what finally pushed me to Linux full-time, but the overwhelming majority will complain and stick to Windows.
Tali Roth, the then product manager working on the core Windows user experience, including the Start menu, taskbar, and notifications, took up the question and talked about how building the taskbar from scratch meant that they had to cherry-pick things to put into the feature list first, and the ability to move the taskbar didn’t make the cut, for several reasons that Microsoft values.
WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!
If you have working code, why would you rewrite it from scratch? Refactor, sure. Overhaul, maybe. But why rewrite the whole thing?! You’re gaining nothing but unnecessary bugs.
I know all the joke answers. To justify a product manager’s salary, because Microsoft gonna Microsoft, whatever. I want to know the real reason. Why would you ever rewrite working code from scratch if you don’t have to?
Someone on Microsoft probably needed an excuse for their pay increase.
“I rebuilt/had the idea to rebuilt the taskbar” sounds a lot better to managers than “I maintained the taskbar”.
Probably to add something terrible for the user but good for MS. Ad integration? Easier to spy?
That’s fair, but even with that, it’s got to be easier to shove it into existing code. Especially if you’re trying to do it in a way that people don’t notice!
And actually, the Windows 10 start menu infamously had ads, too. So it can’t be that.
Could be that refactoring the code for Windows 11 compatibility, and new features, would have been roughly equivalent in effort to rebuilding. If the code has been poked and probed for years already, still follows old patterns, and have devolved into a tightly coupled mess of scattered system dependancies… maybe it just becomes easier to justify rebuilding it as a way of clearing out technical debt?
The people responsible only had experience with React, so they rebuilt it using React.
Exactly. Full rewrites nearly always end in failure.
I’ve only ever had it work for me once or twice, and it was always near the very beginning of a project when I was only losing a few days or a week of working code at most. When I discover that I fundamentally misunderstood or misjudged a core assumption and everything needs to be reoriented. Never when I already had code in production.
Yeah, I meant rewrites of complete shipped products, so your exception fits
I assume the code was just too old and convoluted to maintain properly. I’m a bad coder so I’ve definitely redone parts of my scripts from scratch rather than trying to refactor them.
Then again I’m not a small billion dollar indie company who’s main focuses are spying on users and helping to commit genocide.
“We specifically made the product worse, because that saves us money we don’t need and gives us additional control over users’ computers, since so many are locked into our ecosystem.”
Seriously, read the article. That’s basically it!
I guess the AI writing windows 11 code keeps getting the taskbar wrong.
Jokes on them I decided to give macOS a shake when it was time for a new laptop.
People are fleeing into Linux & MacOS in droves. If this trend holds, Ms will lose majority in ~8 years.
I sourced a new desktop to install Linux and move my plex server once I get some new drives to put them in the proper format. I’ll be giving it to Microsoft from both ends ;)
Not gonna happen in some industry where you get zero application support for Linux or MacOS.
All in good time. Many industries are already moving to web, which is OS agnostic. And it’s easier than ever to recompile a native program for different OSes.
How can we make that 2?
Microsoft’s already on it.
Microsoft wants to use the Taskbar for advertising. They can’t do that if users can move it around or hide it.
No exaggeration, this was my breaking point for switching to linux exclusively.
It’s not even unreasonable. If this is the kind of incompetence guides something as simple as the task bar, I don’t want to think about how fucked the rest of the code is.
Same.
Just ask ai to do it?
Good explanation. They couldn’t checks notes be fucked
I can’t move the Windows 11 taskbar because I’ve been running Linux for over 20 years. Recommended fix!
Yeah, KDE ftw
Linux is missing enterprise management tools. For all its horrible flaws, nothing like SCCM, In tune, group policy, and Active Directory (in the sense of managing group policy, not so much identity) exist for Linux. Fix that, even commercially, and you might see a real change.
Finally someone know how IT works in the corporate world
No thanks! I’m more into abolishing capitalism than facitating it further. I’m looking forward to the end of all commercial enterprises and especially management! It should be as difficult and expensive as possible to establish hierarchical systems of digitally managing large corporations.
There’s plenty of enterprise management tools available - these tools all existed in the Linux world before their adoption to Windows.
There’s a bunch of different configuration management tools available:
Or you could go for an MDM (Mobile Device Management) solution:
These lists are not exhaustive.
The same tools that manage data centers full of servers can also be used to manage user devices.
I’m aware of these, but invariably when discussing with my intercompany peers it’s a hard no. When a company completely ditches MS it literally makes the news. The cost vs complexity formula must not make sense (also user retraining and interoperability problems are not solved here either).
I would love to break the stranglehold MS has on general corporate productivity computing but I also want to keep my job.
Sorry, it didn’t seem like you were aware of them from the post above. There are plenty of reasons to stay with Windows, Linux lacking enterprise management tools just isn’t one of them.
People don’t generally care which OS they use as long as they can get their job done. We had one sub-division entirely on an immutable Linux desktop, another media unit was all-in on Apple products. As you say though, they’re outliers - simple inertia will keep people with Windows for a long time to come, their dominant position ensures it.
The cost vs complexity argument isn’t a compelling one either - there’s a reason so little of the internet runs on Windows.
My Linux laptop at work is enrolled in Intune
deleted by creator
-50 social points, it will impact your 365 licenses on a monthly bases
My screen is wider than it is tall. I have more horizontal screen real estate than vertical, why are you forcing me to waste vertical space? I wanna move it to the left again…
New taskbar from ground up. And despite all the requests to bring the feature back, their reasoning amounts to “we’re too lazy”
Hey copilot, code me a new start menu that restores classic functionality.
Copilot: “I can’t do that, Dave.”
You’re absolutely right, the current start bar I coded is not fully featured…
Luckily, someone has got an actual solution. Check out WindHawk. I use it to run a vertical taskbar.
