More info about it here: https://www.ghacks.net/2024/08/13/windows-11-start-menu-is-getting-a-new-layout-to-organize-your-apps/
I love how microsoft never learns their lessons.
Oh it’s good they have the “Messages” and “Calls” buttons right there for easy access since so many people message or call my desktop PC.
“The return of the Windows Phone”? 🤷♂️
I love how, as a Linux user, Windows never adds anything that makes me regret leaving.
Indeed, that is incredible.
I left Linux 13 years ago and to this day, I have never seen anything to temp me back. And in fairness, they have improved some things in that time
Exact same experience as cutting cable… Can’t even remember why I hesitated so long
How’s Linux doing in regards to Nvidia graphics cards these days? I was planning to switch to linux for my next build but wanted to keep my current GPU since its not that old and still solid.
The proprietary drivers got much better, they’re really usable without any noticeable issues. There’s also an effort to get solid open-source drivers, but these don’t work with older cards yet.
I recommend that you boot your distro of choice from USB and see if it works for you.
You might be surprised.
If it doesn’t work with one, try a different distribution.
I’ve used Linux with nvidia cards and didn’t have issues, but I am not very demanding.
Playing CP2077 and BG3 every day no problem, and running AI models like a champ.
Unless you’re living several years in the past, Nvidia drivers aren’t much of an issue anymore.
pretty great, i would avoid wayland though, there still seems to be nvidia problems there.
Personally I’ve been using a Nvidia card on Linux for 4 ish years now originally on a 970 which had a few problems but really only with Wayland, x was flawless now I have a 3070 which I haven’t had any issues on Wayland with the newer drivers and id say I taxed both fairly hard between gaming and blender
Works fine.
I’ve got a GTX 1080 Ti and after a couple hours of finagling on initial install of Linux Mint I haven’t had any trouble at all. Nvidia ships some proprietary drivers you can use instead of the unofficial open source ones and nvidia-driver-535 has been getting it done no problem.
Other GPU models I can’t speak for, as I don’t own them, and I see some history of folks having trouble with Nvidia. But I got mine done with barely a hitch.
The irony is, unlike the old days - actually AMD (ATI) is recommend for Linux now because the drivers are better.
This is in stark contrast to the fglrx days where that driver was an absolute abortion and NVIDIA was really the only usable one.
Not sure when you started your Linux journey but I avoided AMD for years based on that.
Now the tables have turned but I didn’t realize until after I purchased my NUC which has NVIDIA RTX graphics. So I guess I’m stuck on NVIDIA for the foreseeable future
I run fedora 40 on a desktop and laptop and it’s perfect. Installing the drivers through rpm fusion was dead easy, 3 commands in the terminal and done. Wayland is FINALLY there. Fractional scaling is there. Steam games launch fine. I only miss a handful of programs I can’t live without. Affinity software suite and a few games that use EAC are the only reason I keep a windows partition installed. After windows 11 bloatware and lag and intrusive ads and useless AI crap Linux is now home for me. Install and dual boot, you will find yourself more and more running in linux because it works great and privacy is nice.
Nvidia cards are supported with the proprietary drivers; the game I play (Stepmania, OutFox) historically was without artifacts on nvidia systems. Nowadays, Wayland is moving forward, and nvidia is just behind on supporting it compared to AMD. According to this thread below you should be fine as long as you use nvidia drivers from version 560+.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1d5kwpu/wayland_on_nvidia_do_they_play_well_together/
Ugh, fine Microsoft. I’ll finish my migration to Linux this weekend.
Welcome. We have cake and assorted treats.
I tried it but stopped once I realised there was no hdr support :(
There is HDR support. At least Plasma 6 supports it.
How do you know and learn this stuff? i dont even know what “plasma” is and why you need it.
“Just use linux” doesnt help in this scenario i use it for productivity for the past 5 years but i havent felt ive really learned shit.
How do you learn this stuff?
The same way you got your knowledge about Windows 🙂
But I dont know anything about windows drivers?
Plasma is the desktop environment developed by KDE. It’s for example desktop environment used by SteamOS 3.
As to how you learn this stuff: looking things up on the search engine of your choice helps. Not trying to be rude here, but you could have found all of that out yourself by searching for “plasma Linux”: https://lmddgtfy.net/?q=plasma linux
Also the arch wiki. There you can find all the info you could ever ask for.
" just use Linux" is a great piece of advice for most people because most people don’t care about the OS they use. They just use it. And they shouldn’t need to take a course to do so. Of course you are missing some things with this.
If you want more than you will need to go out and actively look for it
Sorry i didnt explain myself well and no dont worry youre not being rude.
My point wasn’t, “what is this i dont know please tell me” but more in line with “how do you guys keep on top of this information and know whats current”
Some games support it on windows but not Linux. The list is small. That said, windows HDR support is garbage ime. I don’t feel like there’s a good option that’s set and forget in any case.
Plasma/wayland integration is coming along but it’s not there yet for HDR in gaming.
I just said screw it and live without it. Forgot i cared after 20min.
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. It literally only exists on a single desktop environment and even then it’s practically beta. On my TV it just shows everyhing as green and purple when I enable HDR.
I love linux and want it to keep improving but man people need to stop circlejerking linux so much when it comes to people using windows when it suits their needs
It’s true that HDR support is virtually non-existent being limited to very recent KDE wayland with bleeding edge everything and AMD hardware. Basically .33 * 0.05 * 0.3 or like 1/2 of 1% of Linux users.
It’s also true that is a weird ass thing to chose a desktop OS for.
Unpopular opinion: HDR is overrated and causes more eye fatigue.
I guess it really is an unpopular opion. Lol. I have have eye fatigue issues with HDR too, though.
I also can’t watch 3D for more than 5 minutes without getting a migraine. I don’t know enough about how the display works to know why. Both feel like it is trying to fool my eyes and my brain doesn’t like it. Maybe my eyes/brain get fatigued trying to play along. Some types of HDR seem to bother me more than others. I can watch an HDR movie mostly fine.
Was this a call for help or…?
Depends on your desktop environment. HDR works just fine in KDE.
It takes some fiddling, but I’ve been using HDR on Linux since Plasma 6 came out. If you don’t have an AMD GPU it would probably be really difficult to set up though.
I use Wayland/Plasma6 with a 6800xt and it just works out of the box (OpenSuse TW)
Someone made a post about enabling HDR support on Linux a day or two ago. Times have changed, and you might want to look into it again.
(I don’t have HDR monitors, but it works on my OLED Steam Deck.)
The Steam Deck is an exception to the rule, unfortunately. Game mode runs using Gamescope as the compositor, which allows it to directly manage rendering surfaces and support HDR output.
Support for HDR under a regular DE is still either nonexistent or a work-in-progress last I checked.
Can’t miss what I’ve never had, suppose I’m lucky there - HDR might as well not exist (in my mind) until it does exist on GNU+Linux.
Why do they keep changing the thing? Linux mint Cinnamon desktop has kept the same look and I appreciate that.
New manager need to prove themselves -> can’t do that by small improvements -> dreams up major changes -> gets promoted -> repeat
Is my guess
^ this guy corporates
Also, new manager would be part owner in a UX design firm of “experts” that conveniently, via their expert advice, convince management that a major redesign is needed and their firm is the only one that can do it (since everyone knows you can’t get expert advice internally)
80% of the way through the project, the manager gets promoted and moves on, leaving a new manager with no vested interest in their predecessors project to try and clean up the steaming dumpster fire that is now 300x over budget
and why do they keep making it as actively shitty as they possibly can?
like, I get it, there was room for improvement back when it was just ‘good’. they filled all that room with crap.
the good things about crap, though? nitrogen, phosphorous.
Another shitty clone of the KDE launcher
the kde launcher is very nice
Indeed it is! And customizable
“Another shitty clone of the KDE launcher”, not “Another clone of the shitty KDE launcher” 😜
We’ve come full circle. KDE imitating Windows, and now Windows trying to catch up with KDE.
With more room for ads, I hope?!
"Why are you using Firefox? Didn’t you know edge is better?
Are you sure you don’t want to try edge?
I’ll fuckin murder you if you don’t launch edge right now. "
-windows these days.
i assume that’s what the sidebar is for
The sidebar looks like it’s dedicated to phone access?
it is, that was just me trying to be funny
My bad, I got whooshed
I’m really enjoying my Mint 22 experience, the only downside is that I have to switch to windows to play Once Human.
why? protondb says it works fine.
Yes, i saw that, I was troubleshooting it for a while and when I got it to run the performance was ass but today I tired again and basically the problem is that the game must absolutely not be run from an HDD. It’s running fine on linux now.
It looks like the little windows you’d use to organise your applications in Windows 3.1
they need to bring back a windows 2000 classic style start menu
Clearly they learned nothing from windows 8…
Looks like they’re going full speed ahead towards their mobile/tablet/TV/PC unishittification.
I believe they want you to seamlessly transfer stuff from device to device, regardless of which, where and why.
unishittification, that’s a new one.
I like it!
but why not use an iterface optimized for each device?
I mean, I know the answers, but I find all of them deeply insulting.
Hmm. Not a marketing person, but I’ll try to make an idea that sounds only slightly insulting.
Think of it like this. You’re working from home, a coworker is out in the field doing live research and your boss will be doing a presentation in front of the shareholders. The coworker in the field records data with their phone, sends it to your laptop, you arrange it for your boss, send it to their tablet and the boss just slides it over on the giant TV as they take the credit for your work.
Or a more personal example. You’re at home in the mood for a movie or a game on your budget smart TV, but you’re too lazy to do all the whatever to get it going. So instead just sync your phone, PC/Xbox and TV with a Microsoft/Xbox account and do everything remotely using your phone/tablet as a controller, from the comfort of your couch.
It’s Microsoft NSYNC, baby! And that’s why everything has to be tailored to fit your lovely, greasy fingers. Comfortable comfort. You know you want it!
okay but that’s all back-end. I actually have an example like this!
okay, so, if im playing an old DRM’d game I have on my desktop, and want to switch to my steam deck, I can do that.
but the interface that works on my steam deck (controller with touch pad, but no keyboard) is maddening to use on my desktop. I know, because I tried it once-steam calls it ‘big picture mode’ and it feels like being crippled when I use it on a computer with a full keyboard and mouse.
but I pick up the deck, and it’s nice. it functions, its interface is pretty close to perfect. and if I tried to use either of those on my phone, i would take a train up to washington and fucking beat a valve employee to death with it.
what you’re talking about is back end interoperability. totally unrelated, and I agree it’s good! also, doesn’t really exist anywhere near as much as it should, but that’s sort of a different problem. see, each of those platforms has different affordances and design conventions. now, you can run compatibility and seamless use, so the video just appears where you want it. I actually have a slightly janky (but best I’ve found) version of that set up on my LAN.
but I would like to be able to click around and take a broader view of the incoming shit on my desktop with multiple 4k monitors. i absolutely need gesture support on my tablet, and on my phone I need gesture support, plus ABSOLUTELY DO NOT have space to display multiple things at once.
I don’t need hamburger menus on my fucking desktop. I got space, and my cursor is precise enough the 90s/00’s are the best we’ve done with UX in that space (because we stopped trying as soon as the iphone dropped). having ONLY ONE THING displayed at once on my desktop is fucking annoying. I have 7680 horizontal pixels over a few feet of space on my desktop, no one thing takes up that much fucking space, nor should it, and I like the ability to click and drag shit from different apps and move shit around and do all that good crap. it’s great! and on my phone or tablet, that doesn’t really work. I should be able to click and drag to my tablet, if I want to set that up (my tablet is air gapped because that’s easier than degoogling and I mostly read+music on it) but my tablet needs a totally different interface, and anything that DOES work for my tablet, where im only ever really doing one thing I need to look at at once, is going to be frustrating as hell on my desktop.
Thanks for the in-depth reply and for correcting me.
And you’re right to be dissatisfied, but the tech savvy might not be the intended audience. The burger crowd might be instead. They outnumber the tech crowd by the billion. It’s just more profitable.
they outnumber the ‘tech crowd’ because we use technology to infantilize outselves, of which this is a prime example.
It’s bad for us, but it makes them money, so they are incentivised to not care.
They want to be as sleek as apple but it comes off as an old man trying to be hip
And maybe I’m using it wrong, but it just…doesn’t work. I use spotlight search on my MacBook to find programs and things and it just finds them. It’s fast enough to be faster than me opening things off the dock.
I try to use the search on my wife’s Win11 computer and half the time it sends me to a website for a program she already has installed.
Like if you want to imitate, even badly, the imitation should at least be functional.
There’s a reason they made PowerToys Run. It’s miles ahead of the default Windows search experience.
feels to me that people who work on other parts of the OS are getting fed up with the default shell experience to such an extent that they have to build their own skunkwoks solutions
It was actually a third party open source project originally lol
TIL!
There’s a registry key to make it not search online
It still doesn’t work very well tho
Apple hasn’t innovated in decades… It’s anything but sleek if we’re talking about macs.
I genuinely in 2024 I don’t see why would anyone want to use any Microsoft product. They (alongside with Google) present themselves as malicious companies that only care about user data and providing user notorious ads.
unfortunately they are like the only two competitive corporate email providers. all the business tools integrate with gmail or outlook and almost never anything else. shit is annoying af
Ugh, I just had to get an organization outlook and they’ve been screwing with backend server protocol support, which kills most third-party apps. For E-MAIL! Nothing about this need a new standard!
bunch of fucking interface designers so deep into their shit that they’re forcing everyone to chase the UX meta and play ranked competitive UI when 90% of everyone is just trying to be casuals and play what they’re accustomed to so they can unwind at the end of the day
“yes well you see moving every interface element on your computer to a totally new location results in a 0.0001% improvement in the average user’s workflow, therefore: bite the pillow, changes are coming, we’re the experts you dumb schlubs!”
When was it ever about improving it for the end user? From the picture, it’s absolutely terrible. You have what, four folders taking up the whole menu? Yeah, Windows XP had a more efficient workflow than that.
When was it ever about improving it for the end user?
back in the day when it was about building the best interface you could to last the product lifespan, maybe.
that’s not profitable for the designers tho - chasing the current design meta is their version of planned obsolescence for interfaces. “oh that interface looks old so it doesn’t work anymore” - statements dreamed up by the deranged and greedy.
I actually liked how the start menu works in Win10, with the rearrangeable/resizable tiles you can put wherever and categorize however you want. That was closer to what’s pictured here, but this is still worse.
How do I get that back?
(…I actually liked Windows 8’s Start Screen as well. I understand this puts me in the minority. Everything else about the Win8 UI was a five alarm dumpster fire, but I liked having a big colorful full screen app launcher that could be arranged in any way you wanted.)
How do I get that back?
you can change the kde (linux) launcher to look like that
