No, not YOU, dear reader. Not any of the 3 humans and 1585 spammers who see these posts. No. Microsoft. Specifically the Microsoft Windows Development team. If they were standing in front of me right now, that is what I would ask them.
I saw a video once where a guy described his time studying in Finland. The Finnish are very blunt. He asked his teacher for help with his maths assignment. When he failed to answer a question, his teacher fixed him with a flat stare and asked him “Are you stupid?”
I can relate to the Finnish. Maybe not the saunas followed by dips into ice cold lakes and consumption of buckets of vodka… or maybe that’s just Kimi Räikkönen… but in the sense above I understand them.
In my previous Captain’s Blog I mentioned installing Windows 11 on my notebook. My apologies for not posting a follow-up sooner, but if I could fix the lead Windows developer with the same flat stare, I would ask the same question.
Performance wise? It works. It’s no better than Windows 10 as far as I can tell, it’s no worse. Performance wise, I emphasise.
But as with every Windows release Microsoft need to frack around with the Start menu, guided by the principle of “How can we maximise the annoyance of our users?” Start menu design reached its apotheosis in Windows 7. There, you could arrange things so that they were only 2 clicks away. It’s been downhill from there starting with the infuriating idiot tiles in Windows 8.
By the time Windows 10 (“The Last Windows Ever”, remember, except it wasn’t) rolled its bones into the marketplace, they grudgingly restored SOME level of customisation. You could arrange groups of tiles so that there was relatively quick access to most of your most important programs. Microsoft still insisted on idiot tiles rather than simple text and icons. That ensured that users can waste screen space, and be treated like 5 year olds who need the mental stimulation of big, colourful Fisher-Price like blocks. But hey, at least you could group related applications together for mostly quick-ish access.
And now we have Windows 11.
By default, the start menu is on the left hand side of a group of icons in the centre of the task bar. You know, just like a Mac. Because Macs are kewel, and all that. So what happens when you’re running more than half a dozen applications at a time? Think about it, because Microsoft clearly didn’t. For one thing, the location of your start menu will never be in the same place.
Oh, and the groupings that you had in Windows 10? Well, they’ve stamped their little feeties and said “No more! No more groupings for you plebs! We didn’t want you to have them when we came up with our almost universally loathed Windows 8 (because everyone else was wrong and we’re right), and now we’re taking them away again!”
Now you can only pin specific applications in a 6 by 3 arrangement, or click through to a button to show you all applications. You know, like you USED to get with a single click in Windows 10.
The Positive Bit
I don’t want my posts to be relentlessly negative, and I don’t want to complain about things without offering up SOME kind of solution.
So here’s the one for Windows 11.
As of now, you don’t HAVE to upgrade to it.
So don’t. There is nothing to gain in performance, while Microsoft will doubtless claim otherwise there does not seem to be any real improvement to security, the user interface is worse, because these days it’s ALWAYS worse in every Windows release. There will come a time when you’re doubtless forced to upgrade to “The Windows After The Last Windows Ever” as Microsoft starts to pull updates for Windows 10, but as of now that’s a ways off.
If you DO get stuck with this lemon, you can at least right click on the taskbar and select “Taskbar Settings”, go to the section “Taskbar Behaviours”, and change the Taskbar Alignment from “Centre” (yes, they do in fact spell it correctly for EN-AU) to “Left” so that your Start menu stops being a moving target.
And I will admit, that grid of 6*3 pinned applications? At least they aren’t tiles. They’re icons and text which returns to at least some modicum of efficiency in space usage.
Windows 11 – Just. Don’t. Bother.