I’ve been playing around with Windows 11 from time to time since it first came out. I’ve not got into it in any great depth because my main Windows machine only supports Windows 10. It is, though, on my Surface, through no choice of my own.
Windows 11 has some pretty strict upgrade requirements, and, so far as I understand them, they make sense. As time passes, the bastards and wankers of this world find new ways to fuck up upright outstanding citizens / the victims of power abuse find some ways around their oppressors’ restrictions: whichever you prefer depends on your perspective. This war of interests continues, and I don’t want to get fucked up, nor do I want to be unwittingly used by one or other party to fuck up anyone else. Even if Microsoft are clearly on one side of the conflict, it’s in their interest not to let it get out of control, so they’ve introduced new security requirements to reduce the risk of Windows’ users being fucked up by the bastards/wankers/rebels. Thus Windows 11 introduces new security requirements, and I accept them.
So the major requirements stuff makes sense. I’m not going to comment on the underlying changes, I’ve not looked at them.
But I can, and will, comment on the user interface changes. There, Microsoft have made a bit of a pig’s ear of things.
The new version of Notepad has some nasty surprises. If I type a quantity of text, I simply can’t select a point on the last line of text entered. No matter where I click, the idiocy that is Windows 11 notepad puts the cursor at the very end of the file, usually on the next, empty, final, line. I really don’t understand the reason for this regression, nor do I understand why it was permitted to be introduced. I do think it’s a regression, actually, but given the poor quality of some of the new design features, I wouldn’t be too surprised if this idiocy is intentional.
Going back to the file explorer, the context menu is now a severe mess. First of all, I don’t like the icons, simply because I read text far faster than I read icons. This is because, unlike, it seems, many UI designers at Microsoft, I was taught to recognise and process symbols called “letters” and “words” when I was little. I was not taught to instantly recognise and process random sketches, no matter how good the sketches might be (and I will give the Windows people that, in context, they are very good indeed). Thus I read text far faster than I recognise symbols. It’s called being educated. Now, I thoroughly accept some people aren’t educated, some are illiterate, and I have a certain sympathy for those poor people who suffer from dyslexia and so cannot read easily, so I accept the existence of these symbols. What I do not like is that they cannot be discarded and replaced with text. That’s simply poor user interface design.
Another problem in the new context menus is a good idea gone wrong. I can understand why Microsoft want to offer a small context menu with rarely used options hidden, requiring an extra click to reveal the rare stuff. Unfortunately, for some bizarre reason, they’ve hidden commonly used options and made rarely used stuff permanent. This makes little sense. As a specific example, I install 7z, an archive manager, because it processes all kinds of archives, such as those found on Linux systems with WSL (a very good feature from Windows 10). 7z adds some very useful menu entries on archives which I use all the time. These entries are hidden. They should not be hidden, the pretty useless standard entries they replace should be hidden instead.
Here are some errors in the design of Windows Explorer that Windows introduced a long time ago what Windows 11 has not taken the opportunity to correct:
- The left hand pane is an utter mess, full of confusing crap. Windows 95 got it right, reflecting the physical layout only, and that should be easy for people to restore. I accept the physical layout confuses the computer illiterate, and I can see the point of confusing absolutely everyone instead, but I think that’s the wrong approach. If the Microsoft people won’t introduce an option to get rid of the crap, they should replace Explorer with Finder from the Mac, which gets it right most of the time.
- When going to a new directory, the layout in the right hand pane is always wrong. There is a feature in the options menu to set the default layout of this pane. This option has never worked, and continues to never work. Windows 3.1 got this right, and its behaviour should be restored. If that’s not possible, again, come up with a design inspired by macos Finder, which gets it right most of the time too.
- File Explorer’s sort by type was broken by Windows 95, and has never worked since then. Looking at a random directory now, apparently, according to Explorer’s sort by type, alphabetical order is ACZHMST. Despite the fact that the file explorer options dialogue makes the connection between file extension and file type explicit, the Windows UI designers simply don’t get it. They continue to confuse an invisible comment on a file with the file type. I’m surprised that, after 27 years, they’ve not learnt the difference, which suggests the design stinks of dogma, which is probably why these errors and misunderstandings are constantly repeated. Given the ease with which many people dismiss facts that show their belief for what it is, I’m not surprised.
The Start Menu is significantly worse than it used to me. I can understand why they wanted to make some design changes, the Windows 10 start menu was a compromise between Windows 8 and Windows 7, which worked but felt unfinished. However, what they have at the moment is a seriously backward step.
The Windows 11 start menu is obviously and bizarrely less usable than the Windows 10 start menu. Not only have most options being relegated to a secondary menu, that secondary menu point of entry is placed as far as possible from the start menu point of entry, and not immediately next to it as per Windows 10. I fear a Windows 11 designer had a brain fart when they came up with that, and they had sufficient power and sufficient ego to override all sensible, logical and rational criticism pointing out how f*cking stupid it is. I can see absolutely no good reason why All Apps is placed where it is. And why half the pane is reserved for advertising (“Recommended”) is both appalling and beyond me. That alone ensures I will not update any other Windows machine to Windows 11. I look forward to it being fixed.
The initial version of Visual Studio 2022 and Windows 11 didnn’t play nicely together. That was clearly a bug, and I hope it’s been fixed. Incidentally, designers of File Explorer, the designers of Visual Studio do get why it’s wrong to impose design errors on users: they still add silly features to layout and other stuff, and they still miss out some key design features (they’ve never got tabs right; all they need do is nick the tab stuff from a browser), but they usually add an option to allow their users to turn off their mistakes. I do hope, one day, the File Explorer designers get around to learning this kind of obvious stuff.
My bluetooth headphones aren’t the best, but I prefer them because they’re designed for people who are not audio tarts, in that they don’t flash their blue light at random strangers. Their connectivity has never been the best, which might be why they wear knickers and long skirts .... er, sorry, they’re reticent on the flashing front. Windows 11 cannot keep a connection up with them. I suspect this is a bug, although given the quality of some of the new features in Windows 11, I’m not so sure, and it’s damned annoying.
My next problem is this. I have a lot of apps I want to hand. In Windows 10, I put some in the task bar, and those used less often in the start menu. That doesn’t work in Windows 11 because the start menu has been castrated: it’s in a silly place (nowhere near the start button) and there’s a limit to the number of items that can appear there, a limit exaggerated by their inefficient, space wasting layout. There are secondary caches, but they’re too far away to be useful.
In earlier versions of Windows (I don’t know about Windows 10) one could double the size of the task bar to have two rows of icons. I have been unable to persuade the Windows 11 task bar to increase in height, so that’s not an option. On the Mac, you can group icons, but that’s not an option on Windows 11 either. The consequence is that the task bar is rapidly filled up, and it overflows by hiding the icons of running applications, which is stunningly silly. I wanted to respond to an application alert right now (Groove stopped playing an MP3, I have no idea why), and couldn’t find the damn thing because it was hidden. A running application’s icon should never be hidden, it should always be immediately to hand.
I don’t know whether the current Windows 11 Explorer / Start Menu / taskbar is an intermediate stage to something that might turn out to be good, or simply a collection of mistakes, but I do know it badly needs fixing. I am using a Surface, and, had I the choice, I would reinstall Windows 10, purely and simply because it’s far more usable than 11. But I can’t: the upgrade was forced on me, and I can’t undo it. That alone is a black mark on the Surface brand.
Overall, because of all of this, until Microsoft fix the taskbar/start menu design errors in Windows 11, I am not upgrading any of my other Windows machines, now nor in the future. Windows 11 isn’t as bad as Windows 8, but it’s still bad: avoid it.