Explained: Why you can't move Windows 11 taskbar like Windows 10, according to Microsoft
https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/12/19/why-you-cant-move-windows-11-taskbar-like-windows-10/Open linkView original on lemmy.world478
Comments275https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/12/19/why-you-cant-move-windows-11-taskbar-like-windows-10/Open linkView original on lemmy.world
Saved you a click.
Seriously, only go there for the facepalms.
Anyone who wants to try Linux but is scared of or reluctant about anything about the process at all: talk to me! There are multiple ways to try it with zero change to your system, like Oracle VirtualBox or a USB flash drive.
In every version of Windows up until now which has contained a taskbar and start menu, as far back as Windows 95. Not just Windows 10. Let's not sell short the full extent idiocy on display, here.
"Pouring its engineering resources," my ass.
In the launch version of windows 11 and for over TWO YEARS it didn't even support drag&drop. It was working fine even on windows me
Drag and drop worked on windows 3.1. That was like the whole thing. "LOOK WHAT YOU CAN DO NOW!"
At this point, I'm fairly sure pissing people off is the point with Windows 11. It's full of AI no one wants, refuses to officially run on most hardware that people already have, despite running just fine on that same hardware UNofficially, dropped support for drag and drop, doesn't let you move the taskbar.
And thats not even to mention the fact that it monitors you, and reports back to HQ with screen grabs and usage activity.
Oh look, ZorinOS, just one singular distro, had 1.6 million downloads in the past 2 months.
Wait, is there any special thing that happened 2 months ago? Oh right. Windows 10 support ended, and microsoft told its userbase "fuck you, you can't get support for windows 10, and this computer can't update to windows 11. This computer is now trash!"
Suddenly all these youtube videos pop up "Is your PC unable to install windows 11? Try linux!"
And these videos don't try to sway you to one distro or another. They point out a few big hitters like mint or ubuntu. I can't imagine them specifically naming zorin, unless it's a zorin centric video. But I'm talking about the flood of "try linux" videos that popped up in October.
And that 1.6 million is JUST zorin. That's the runoff. I don't have numbers, or sources, but gut instinct tells me that if Zorin had 1.6 million downloads, Mint must have had like 5 million minimum. Every video always reccomends Mint. It's probably overtaken Ubuntu at some point as most used distro.
And all of this, every single bit of user loss has NOTHING to do with linux. Users are angrily switching. Not happily. They feel abandoned, and forced to switch.
If Microsoft either extended Windows 10 support, or allowed Windows 11 to be installed on reasonable hardware, this linux boom DOES NOT HAPPEN. This is Microsoft saying "Yeah bitch, money is tight! Go buy another computer, loser! You'll do what we say, and there's nothing you can do to stop us!"
That's when users switched to linux. This is pure hubris from Microsoft. It would be interesting if somehow we could get a combined number of EVERY distros doenload numbers.
It also has a very poorly written UI interface that's fucking infuriating. I was reverse engineering it to figure out why it's so damn slow on HDDs, with explorer.exe rendering like shit, the Start menu crawling, and taskbar popups that make you want to smash your screen. They wrote really really fucking bad code compared to the Win7 days—basically just took the old MFC crap and slapped a XAML wrapper on it to make it look "nice." What a fucking disaster.
I read some article or saw some video claiming that explorer was basically a react app now, which is why unlocking the screen takes 3.5 business days when you enter the correct password.
Uh, what? Can you clarify what you mean by "drag&drop"? Because dragging and dropping files or text around within or between application windows definitely worked even when Win 11 was new, so you're probably talking about some specific instance, I assume?
The taskbar on windows 11 for the first two years didn't support dragging and dropping on icons or opened applications. It was completely unusable
Ah, okay, gotcha. Yeah that's fair. Not something I've ever really used, so wasn't aware of that. Your comment read to me as if Windows as a whole just didn't support drag&drop.
Look at this video from 4 years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGHokrbjlz8
I updated even on the beta version and at the beginning I was like "well it's a beta, surely they will fix it"... Then it launched with the broken taskbar and I thought "surely this will be patched in a week" - it took TWO YEARS
Drag and drop is the entire bases for windows. How do you release a version without it?
And it kind of makes sense to have the taskbar at the right or left on a widescreen monitor as there is so much space there
What does making sense have to do with MS-Windows?
Windows 98 felt as if it was very sensible (when it didn't hang). Windows 2000 Server I still remember as the best one. XP was too bright in visual design, but homely.
The only two incarnations of Windows I found to be acceptable were NT4 and W2k. Anything later was mostly a step into the wrong direction.
Using XP was almost the same as using W2K, except uglier, but more sci-fi-feeling. IIRC.
But yes, I too remember W2K as the best one.
From the PoV of a kid visiting websites, reading books on the Web, playing forum RPGs and some video games, and downloading MP3s. And talking over ICQ.
From that PoV it was fast, clean and without distractions and I liked the icons, the sounds and the wallpapers.
I was just getting seriously into CAAD, VR and visualization when I switched from NT to 2k - and to Linux on my second machine. I had Blender (still proprietary of NaN, then) importing DXF files via network share and render them in the backgroud while I was working on the next drawing on my W2k machine. Nobody understood what the heck I was doing but the visualisations (and even an animation in real 3D - gasp!) were quite a killer back then...
Actually my understanding is that in Japan and other cultures, right hand side start menu has been the standard preference. It's amazing to me that that cultural preference even has been ignored.
Sadly not true. Microsoft removed the Start button in a version of Windows before. It was in Windows 8 (and Windows Server 2012 for some godforsaken reason) with the cursed "metro" interface. MS did it for the same stupid reason they're citing here "tablet and touchscreen users". The uproar caused MS to release Windows 8.1 a year later where they returned the Start button.
Windows 8 and metro were not so bad compared to what's happening now. They at least had a consistent picture in mind. I liked those things even if I wouldn't use them (moved firmly to Linux by then).
My own humble opinion is that Windows in all its parts (perhaps except NT and basic layers) is as a project too much legacy. Simply existed too long with backwards support for various versions of involved libraries, with MS carrying the burden of maintaining old versions (while applications developers could package them similarly to how they package patched versions). Many tools to do the same thing.
They should put all that on life support, installable separately, and make a clean set of libraries and tools that forms their new normal desktop installation. Preferably tabula rasa, no compromises.
A file manager, a configuration manager, a set of desktop widgets. It'll take them much less effort and time to just write a new set of tools.
A normal configuration manager supporting all that it should is the hardest thing. But it'll also be the killer feature, imagine one UI to configure everything in a Windows installation, it'd be as cool as YaST2 in OpenSUSE or drakconf. IIRC, their system configuration tools for Windows 98 were a bit more user-friendly than NT-inherited for 2000 and XP, and haven't (the old ones) improved much since then ; they can fix that.
That means dropping backwards compatibility for such a clean installation - well, who wants to run old applications, will run them in, sigh, that installable compatibility environment (might be cut down somehow).
I'm almost certain that'll be both cheaper and more popular among users than what they are doing.
They didn't say that every version of windows since then had a start button
First of all they only talked about the start menu, which was still part of 8, even if it was annoying and full-screen. And second they only said that every Windows version that had that allowed you to move the taskbar around. Not that every Windows version so far had it.
The also killed their UI performance previously when Vista first launched. Remember Aero?
The years of engineering salaries and test versions to dock a visual element at the top, instead of the bottom...
Maybe MS couldn't stuff enough ads into the old Start Menu requiring a re-write to allow for more ad space. /s
the reason is literally "because we decided not to implement it"
Saved you a click.
I'm one of the few who has had it at the top for as long as I can remember. It absolutely infuriated me to find out the feature had been removed.
Im more of a left-side guy, but i share your pain
WHAT DATA?!
They asked chatgpt
But, only after not getting an answer from Copilot.
Same thing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Two data points: What their intern could do with React; what their intern couldn’t do with React.
Data can say whatever the hell you want if you lack scruples.
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.
TLDR: We rewrote the taskbar and didn't bother implementing it.
This really stuck with me. “Rewrote” implies feature parity. What they really did was replace the taskbar.
What's weird is that given certain odd scenarios (I can't recall it but there was a video by Enderman about it) you'll see the old windows 10 taskbar appear, exact styling and all. So the windows 11 taskbar is quite literally just a WebView plastered on top.
Asking for things like AI integration everywhere?
Wouldn't it be cool if you could have AI on the desktop clock so you could ask it what time it was in different places in the world?
I was going to make a joke that they could also replace the taskbar search bar with an AI chat bar, but after reading the article, it turns out that they're planning on doing that for real:
Your best sarcastic self is prime Microsoft material.
This is madness. Madness? This is Wiiiiindoooows.
Why the hell ...
They could just make another application. With compact mode to have as a prompt in the corner of the screen, similar to DigiCam or Winamp or other such.
They could even eventually deprecate tools allowing to do the same things it provides.
I can even say that conversational user interfaces are not all idiocy - at some point I dreamed of them replacing all the bright buttons and icons we have.
People making this are not idiots.
But putting a conversational user interface everywhere people expect to have one prompt and a response, preferably with clear logic of that response, - it's just socially hostile behavior.
There really is progress behind this! Or, more precisely, there is sanity, it's not all hype. Making a useful GUI requires learning something about ergonomics and human psychology and tests, most UI designers don't have a clue. And a conversational interface, like in old text quests or MUDs and with these AI chatbots, solves the problem. It doesn't require memorizing a thousand commands and interpreter syntax like a command shell.
Unless you make a UI with downsides of both and upsides of neither. Takes Microsoft to do this.
The people making it might not be idiots, but the people making the design decisions are
They NEEED to pump the copilot usage numbers to appease shareholders. It doesn't matter if all copilot uses are accidental and unwilling, cause it'll look great in the next quaterly report
Didn't they try something similar with Cortana, and were thoroughly rejected?
It's called a world clock
Who needs a world clock when AI can guess the time anywhere.
Or you could have a widget just showing it for a few timezones. FvwmButtons,
Exec exec date ...andSchedule Periodic ...in FVWM can do that.Does that even use a GPU?
It doesn't.
Imagine displaying a window list without GPU acceleration.
Translation: Nobody really knows (or wants to take the blame), we probably just forgot to put on the feature list. Anyway, I'll just use the usual vague weasel-words that don't really mean anything.
"Window's is built on many layers of shit and we dont know what will or won't break things.
Also co pilot was really expensive"
Also, please use copilot... please
Just one more ai tool bro just one more.
Please bro its so good you gotta use them all to make it worth it.
This is written as if a taskbar were a complex piece of software. It has to display a window list, a start button, a few shortcuts and a tray, right?
Nothing is trivial, but they are a company that can buy some nation-states with their citizens as slaves. Surely they can buy that much labor.
Google for stories about how it is configured or built. The old taskbar was endlessly complex.
Which would mean it should have been rewritten long before. =\
It was working fine in windows 95. Suddenly all programmers became incompetent and can't handle something like that?
This makes no sense to me what so ever. Why do any apps care about where the taskbar is? How's it any different when a window isn't maximised and the user resizes it? Either I'm seriously misunderstanding this or it's a completely made up excuse.
I'd rather they just say "we completely rewrote the taskbar, but we know that less than 0.01% of users move their taskbar so we didn't prioritize it".
To me the bigger issue with the taskbar is that you can't make it compact. Instead it has to be a big chunky mess.
This is such utter fucking nonsense. They already have to deal with the concept of a "client area" that encompasses variable-sized screens and (worse) the multiple-monitor situation. Movable task bar is trivial.
The bit about apps having to reflow seems nonsensical. They have to reflow any time the user resizes their windows.
I'm not accepting any excuses from MS about limited resources when Linux desktop environments built by hobbyists have the feature in question.
The whole operating system is even named after that concept.
Yeah, sounds like bullshit. I don't even see why that particular concern would create more work on the OS's part.
If an application fits "wonderfully" into the space it's given, Windows did nothing but telling it the dimensions it needs to fill. And as you said those dimensions can vary wildly.
Yeah especially considering you can install 3rd party solutions to dock the taskbar to the left which work perfectly fine
That might be a bit obsolete as a state of things. Like 15 years obsolete.
KDE has a bigger team now. Gnome doesn't have a Windows-style panel by default. I was thinking of projects like Xfce and LXDE.
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.
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
Finally someone know how IT works in the corporate world
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?
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.
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.
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
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".
They let their AI do it for them
But this was four years ago! Actually it was released four years ago. This decision was almost certainly made before there were widespread code assistance AIs.
There exist some horror stories about the code but I have no idea how to find them.
laughs in KDE
Plasma is everything I used to wish Windows' desktop could be, but isn't because of... honestly I have no idea what they're thinking over there. I am so glad I dumped that trainwreck. Love everything KDE <3
Please, consider trying out linux if you haven't: you can usually make a "live usb" and take it for a test drive without having to actually reinstall (if you don't like it, just take the usb stick out and reboot back to windows).
I would dearly love to never again have to hear about the latest bullshit Microsoft is foisting on people.
Do your part! Switch. Everything just works better over here.
A word of caution: If you use bitlocker (copy your keys!), it can have hooks in the TPM/bios settings.
Disable bitlocker prior to attempting a live boot.
It will lock your disk if you don't prepare for it.
For reference:
https://www.linuxliteos.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=9145
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=430251
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/bitlocker-and-tpm-blocks-the-hard-disk-after-booting-from-usb-and-pressing-try-ubuntu/57833/17
i love how in those threads people are just getting a blank blue screen they have to type the code into, with no indication at all
That’s quite an article to say they forgot about it after re-writing the task bar for no reason. It’s such a basic expected feature.
Probably written by CowPilot
just MS things. changing things for no apparent reason to make it worse to use and also remove existing features that people actually liked
I'd guess it's for the same reasons why we can't have a local account
I mean, they could just let their awesome Copilot vibe code it, couldn't they? Another reasons why I love being on Linux; you can do whatever even it it doesn't make sense to the majority of users.
Like half of open source is just devs trying to satisfy their very specific needs
This is one of the best proofs that the AI industry is full of bullshit. If we can let the AI code everything now, where are our leaps in traditional, existing software?
AI is very good at writing code but it's not good code.
Even if it will brick your system.
Every copy of Linux is personalised. Most are on the brink of collapse.
If they could do math, they'd know that you should fit every decision for all users you can think about, not the majority. Because the majority is different for every dimension, and if you choose a different strategy, your end result won't be usable for anyone.
The amount of bullshit is incredible. The DE sets the windows position. The DE tells the apps what's the "usable" desktop area. It worked for decades. And now "you can't imagine the amount of work"
Fuck you microsoft. Not that I care anymore. Even your excuses are pathetic.
There was a while back some Windows developer externally lamenting how ass-backwards they were and as a result their NT kernel was woefully under-featured compared to other contemporary OSes...
Then I think they forced him to take it back and say 'um actually our kernel is actually super awesome, my mistake'.
You mean the apps that were already handling this for decades when windows wasn't a vibe-coded and ad-infested vehicle for AI slop?
Yeah this doesn't make sense. Docked bars have worked fine since Windows 95. You could have the task bar on any side, and apps would handle it. You could have multiple docked bars too, as some third-party apps used to be dockable. For example, Winamp had a view that was a short bar stretching the entire width of the screen, stuck to the top of the screen. The windowing system handled it with no issues.
-50 social points, it will impact your 365 licenses on a monthly bases
Let’s be real, it’s because it makes it easier to train AIs on the Recall screenshots if it always has the taskbar in the same position as a reference context
Four years ago, Recall wasn't a thing. Microsoft was caught as off-guard by the AI hype machine as the rest of us. So I doubt this was originally the reason.
Might be now, though.
This is such a weird take. Recall wasn’t even a glimmer in M$’s eye when this limitation was introduced. And it would take virtually nothing to add positions to the training, never mind the fact that they could just completely ignore the taskbar since the OS always knows where it is.
Further the containers contain the info, so the position on the users' screen is rather irrelevant.
"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 think you're overinterpreting a bit. Actually the MS-droid doesn't really say anything. Just that the taskbar is not movable. Which was exactly the question.Typical evasion strategy.
he literally said it was not one of the features cherry picked to be reimplemented. So he did say, paraphrased, "because we couldn't be bothered"
So many people at work are having frustrating issues with Windows now.
It takes so fucking long to start up. Sure, you get a desktop and can open a program, but it just keeps locking up repeatedly for a good 20 minutes while whatever bloatware is running in the background during startup.
They cram OneDrive down your throat and it has constant issues.
They put so much shit in your way, in the name of "productivity" it makes your actual productivity worse.
FUCK COPILOT.
It's the one drive cramming that really gets me, well also changing the right click context menu to hide cut and paste, wtf.
But seriously, not letting you move the Onedrive pin down the hotlinks sidebar out of the way? Extremely annoying.
Kill it in the registry.
I thought it was just me, it's so fucking "bulky" and slow on my work computer. Specs are fine on the laptop, windows 11 is just trash even without bringing up what it's lacking and difficult to navigate.
And I know my way around windows very well, I can do nearly all my tasks with just a keyboard, don't even need a mouse for the gui.
Oh man, I remember marveling at BeOS in the day and for a brief moment in time when SSDs first hit the scene you could have a credibly fast Windows boot.... Nowadays it's worse than ever despite super fast storage, fastest CPUs, and gobs of RAM...
I call bullshit, because nobody uses the "modern" devices and printers interface in windows 10, because it fucking sucks. Everyone goes to the control panel instead. In windows 11, you have to use the "modern" interface, and it drives me crazy, especially because the old, fully functional, and reliable one is still in the OS, but Microsoft decided to hide it/make it a PITA to get to.
They keep re-implementing things.
Just the Start menu. You can see how 95 evolved into 98 evolved into ME, then they changed it for XP, and they never stopped making big pointless changes. In many cases, those big pointless changes have been lengthening the process of going from the bare desktop to the thing you need by adding pointless screens and dialogs. Or, like the Start menu, they just drastically redesigned it such that a user used to Win XP tries to use 7 and they just...stare at it because it's not what they were expecting. Windows 7's Start menu might even be objectively better, Microsoft's software engineers could very well produce good research documentation about UI design based on observing or polling users about what features they wanted and then they made the thing people seemed to want, but to people who got used to how it already worked the new thing was bad because it's different.
I could be convinced Windows 8.1 is a mental unwellness simulator. In Sierra's FMV horror game Phantasmagoria 2, the player character goes insane at work, and this is simulated by the paperwork he's working on flashing scarier words for a split second. You're reading this document and then near the bottom of the page an ordinary word like "recommended" turns to "murdered" for a few frames. Win 8.1's animated tiles reminded me of that. Plus the whole "The desktop and all normal Windows apps therein is itself just an app that can be run in split screen next to special phone-like single tasking apps which pretty much only we will develop for and we won't include desktop versions of so you have to deal with this." I hate Windows 8.1.
What's real fun is you can tell when they abandoned work on a project by which drastically different UI it's encrusted with. The modem dialer looks like Windows XP, the fax program looks like Vista, some things have the flat purple stank of 8, some things have the dark glass look of early 10.
for power users? absolutely. but nobody who isn't tech savvy even knows what control panel is anymore.
Over the years I came to realize that tech savvy when it came to windows doesn't actually mean anything. It just means you are able to fight through the bullshit and get things done with what you have.
For printers, go to DEVICES > let it load it all > more devices settings (towards bottom) - to open old school printer control panel. Major pain in the ass.
Funny, I run a script on my work computer that let's me move it. I like it on the top.
It couldn't be that hard to make new code that achieves the same thing with the new taskbar.
It's hardly the only feature they broke. Another stupidly simple thing was On Win10 I can click on the time and pop open the calendar from any monitor. Windows 11 only the main monitor works. It's annoying as fuck. Everyone involved with creating this half baked piece of shit and forcing it on Windows users should kill themselves.
I could perhaps have understood this calendar mess when they rolled out windows 11, but we're one year later, come on.
Windows 11 came out in 2021, 4 years ago.
Right. All the more incomprehensible.
I got my computer in 2022 and switched to Linux this year so for a 3 year period I got to experience Windows 11 get worse in real time. Co-Pilot being built in is what completely broke me I think.
Harsh, but I think everyone at the entire company could and we'd be better off.
That OS is not even pretending to hide how sinister it's being.
In a non capitalist hellhole, people would've quit before copying with writing any of it. They would've quit before they put Candy Crush on the Start menu.
Probably Microsoft: copilot, rewrite the taskbar
The taskbar: I’m only down here now
My wife was given a new work computer. Windows 11 and not enough RAM. She has been finding a new reason to hate it nearly every day, starting with how every change made to windows has fucked up her workflow in some way.
Me just nodding in acknowledgement as my little Dell Inspiron 15 purs along on Mint with Cinnamon.
Meanwhile KDE:
Put the taskbar wherever you want it's even floating if there isn't a window nearby.
Different design pressures. KDE knowing they put in the work to keep it versatile now, they will always have more options in the future.
Microsoft is basically admitting they have no future.
Can you have different taskbar setup depending on the number of monitors and have it change automatically when you connect/disconnect external monitors?
Yes, my work laptop has this with a 1, 2 or 3 monitor setup. It adapts as it detects the screens.
Since Wayland. Therefore it could be a X11 mess.
I'm on X11 and I do it in Awesome WM with couple of lua scripts. I tried doing it with KDE on Wayland and it didn't have some of features Awesome has do I went back to X11.
Of course it does! Linux rules.
Yes! I'm not sure about it changing when you connect monitors (since I'm usually using desktop PCs), but you can have a different setup per monitor.
I have three monitors at work. My main monitor is configured to show all open apps in the taskbar, while the secondary monitors only show the apps opened on those monitors. You can totally change any of the configuration though... the layout, the position, the settings, or even just not have a taskbar on some monitors.
Yes. Furthermore, each taskbar is entirely separate from each other. That means I can have one on the left side of my main monitor, and another on the right side of my secondary monitor, and I can pin entirely different things to each one, because I use each monitor differently. And then I spent hours changing the exact colors and icons and all that, there's plenty of fun to be had
Put one taskbar on every side of the screen
Microsoft is doing great when it comes to supporting the rise of linux.
I'm on linux because of Microsoft
Kubuntu, proxmox and mint checking in here fu $msft
On linux since everything M$ has done from Win 2000 onwards and their mob style practices under piece of shit Ballmer.
They didn't just rewrite it, they rewrote it in
fecesReacthttps://winaero.com/windows-11-start-menu-revealed-as-resource-heavy-react-native-app-sparks-performance-concerns/
That's the start menu. They probably built the task bar with Electron.
This almost makes me want to move my panel in Plasma just because I can.
My Plasma Panel is on the top and I wouldn't want it anywhere else.
The whole explanation about screen size is telling.
The entire point of Windows being named Windows is that apps can run inside these resizable rectangles nicknamed windows.
Yet the rectangular taskbar is apparently impossible to handle...
It's never been done before, and can never be done after, obviously. Not a chance. Nope. It's not like it worked before, not like windows placement is not really the business of the taskbar app, not like it works with almost every other DE/OS, too.
Absolutely impossible. Microsoft, that apparently did not make windows up until now otherwise they'd know this explanation is pure bullshit, have absolutely no way, no resources, no knowledge on how to setup the available rectangular area on the screen for window placement. Nope.
If it takes so much effort to move the taskbar, why did it need to be fully rewritten in react native when everything worked before?
"Microsoft applied a data-driven approach to find out which features to add now, which features to add later, and which to completely avoid.
Unfortunately, for the enthusiasts who had a left-aligned or vertical taskbar in Windows 10, you would have to settle for the fact that Microsoft’s data shows such users are really small when compared to the number of users who are asking for other newer features in the taskbar."
100% of the users that are smart enough to care about moving the task bar are also smart enough to turn off all optional telemetry. This sadly a part of why tech companies are making products for the dumbest people and pushing away power users.
I just find it hilarious that the top/right/left toolbar was possible in windows 95/98/ME
but its to much of a technical problem to do today.
I guess thats what you get with AI doing all your coding..
If your thinking way is true, I am trully afraid of how many people used ai in win10...
How tf do they get telemetry for features that haven't been added yet.
Microsoft Recall
Windows 11 is a bloated disaster. I urge everyone to switch to Linux or one of the BSDs.
Also switch away from Microsoft Office and use LibreOffice.
Using BSDs is for Unix fetishists, honestly. I've been such. It's very pleasant to use FreeBSD on supported configuration, or OpenBSD on supported configuration and when you don't need anything impossible (like Wine).
But when you are a normal person who just wants to do normal things and live, Linux is more likely to be the thing, and Fedora will do.
In practice. In theory you might think you'd like GuixSD or NixOS, but in practice you won't spend the time on setting them up. Or Slackware, but it's even more bother. Or Arch, but it's too messy, stuff breaks and it's normal. You either want experience similar to BSDs or lack of bother similar to BSDs. For the former, there are plenty of distributions with ideology to spend days on setting up. For the latter, just install Fedora.
I'm using Void because that's what I installed the last time and forgot. But if I were choosing now, I'd probably, yes, just install Fedora.
And it's a shame they are slowly killing Windows. It could have been a nice desktop OS. There's some cultural similarity to Amiga that isn't felt under Unix-likes. And NT is interesting to read about.
I hope we'll have more pluralism in future. On the humus of today's tech.
My screen is 2160px tall and 3840 pixels wide. If it’s at the bottom, I waste nearly 1.8 times the number of pixels.
Microsoft’s excuse about app design and layout is straight bullshit because I can make application windows any size and ratio I want.
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.
Join team Linux!
Is this what hearing Vogon Poetry is like?
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...
It really seems like Windows really needs KDE to come back to the platform...
So I'm forced to use windows at work like the majority of my industry.
The start bar is still a thorn in my side since we switched from 10 to 11.
Standard office set up is 2 x 1920x1200 monitors and a 1920x1080 laptop. Some just leave the laptop shut when docked.
I preferred having it on a stand and using the lap top screen real estate.
In windows 10 I could make a monitor the primary and have a start bar only on the laptop. Not being able to do that in windows 11 is fucking annoying. They also fucked up auto hide start bar, it's always jumping up for bullshit I don't care about and not hiding when it should. I gave in and accepted I can't have those bottom few lines of screen real estate because they are Microsoft's.
As an engineer I do sometimes get feelings of imposter syndrome. But then I look at what Microsoft did to the start bar in windows 11 and think well at least I didn't do that.
Is the explanation, “Because Windows 11 is shitty”?
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.
How can we make that 2?
Microsoft's already on it.
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.
Why can't they just ask copilot to program that for them?
I honestly just want my old right mouse click back.
Easily sorted and the old right-click menu can be reinstated along with a whole loads of other tweaks -
https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
“People find the right-click menu overwhelming, so we’ll reduce it from 23 options to 19 options. That’ll make it less confusing and won’t annoy the people who now need an extra click for basic functionality “
Its just a registry entry that you have to change.
It is a registry key that you can add to return it to normal. If you want I can find it for you!
The one they get from their
spywaretelemetry, probably.The data shows everyone uses their Windows 11 taskbar at the bottom of the screen. You can't argue with that.
Skewed telemetry probably, as most users that are aware you can move the taskbar are also aware you can just disable the phone home crap and will therefore not show up in the statistics.
Most windows products get slightly shittier with each new release.
I miss the old days, when the opposite seemed true about every other major release, though the early bars were low so that was straight progress for 1.0 through 95.
Imagine letting your computer decide how you're gonna use it 😖
*letting a corporation decide how you're gonna use your computer
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...
For anyone interested, Google the app called WindHawk. It makes it extremely possible to push the taskbar up.
I’ve been using ExplorerPatcher to correct this and it works pretty well.
Yeah I'm using startallback and it just works.
Except for the notification bar, which shows up on the wrong screen, but i don't much care about that.
I guess the AI writing windows 11 code keeps getting the taskbar wrong.
Because microsoft sucks at ux
That's disappointing; I always thought the one thing they got right was the 98/XP interface that Cinnamon copied.
Just because they suck at it now doesn't mean they always have
They just don't want you to customise your computer in any way, huh.
Soon you'd be prevented from changing your wallpaper.
They'll only allow those generated using Copilot.
"Copilot, change the wallpaper to a DSC20260512.JPG."
"I'm sorry, you can only change the wallpaper to images generated by Copilot!"
"Ok, change the wallpaper to a picture of my Daughter Graduating."
"Sure! Here's a picture of a young woman graduating set to your wallpaper."
"That isn't my daughter, my daughter isn't a blonde white girl with massive tits, please change back to my previous wallpaper."
"Sure, here's a picture of a Scottish Glen."
"My last wallpaper was a photo I took of The Flying Scotsman, also that picture of a Scottish glen has an offensive stereotype of a Scottish Man fucking a sheep while drinking a bottle labeled 'Buckfast and Heroin'."
"Here is a picture of a Scottish Glen."
You can move taskbar to any side in Windows 98 (or earlier), but this abomination can't, that speaks volume. BTW older windows also had crazy granular theme customization, no more, that's apparently nuclear science or smth.
Notably, Windows 10 could do the same thing without any visible issues. And that’s probably because Windows 10 was a much lighter OS than Windows 11.
There is nothing wrong with being lightweight.
Maybe, just maybe, making the startmenu in React is not the best idea.
Simple solution is to switch to Linux. Ubuntu Cinnamon 24.04LTS had worked great for me so far.
If you absolutely can't or won't switch look at openshell https://open-shell.github.io/Open-Shell-Menu/
You also can't add folders as toolbars anymore.
But widgets!!!
/s
Install Linux Problem Solved.
This phrase should be made a bumper sticker. Or spraypainted anywhere.
Different issues and learning curve, but yes, fuck windows 11. Zorin FTW
Until you accidentally delete the taskbar panel.
Re-install Linux, problem solved.
Why would applications have to consider relayouting? Isn't that entirely in the hand of the Windows taskbar?
It shows the window groups, windows, pops over previews of windows or tabs in a consistent style, presumably owned by the taskbar itself. At no point do applications themselves control their positions or size in the taskbar or the taskbar popovers.
If the taskbar position changes then the screen dimensions available to applications change - windows may need to be moved and resized. The applications themselves handle that. Of course, they need to be able to do this anyway so it's not really an issue.
I didn't even think of full-screen applications having to relayout. It's not like every screen is the same size or dimension, either. I guess it could be what they were referring to.
https://www.stardock.com/products/start11/
Costs money but works with only minor quirks when switching between iGPU and dGPU.
just saying, if I have to install some sketchy software to restore functionality that has existed on the platform flawlessly for almost four decades then it's not a viable platform anymore.
I'm not defending Microsoft but to say that Stardock is sketchy has no base in reality.
oh I know stardock. they've been around in some way shape or form since windows 98.
my point is, I shouldn't have to install anything to restore functionality.
This is handy for home users, but at work I am stuck. Installing third party software is not allowed.
Microsoft UI "designers" need to be beaten with frozen braids of 3 foot long licorice ropes.
Microsoft wants to use the Taskbar for advertising. They can't do that if users can move it around or hide it.
Luckily, someone has got an actual solution. Check out WindHawk. I use it to run a vertical taskbar.
It is lost technology… only the powerful ancients could accomplish such.
Or those familiar with the dark arts.
Microsoft doesn't have to compete very much. They're not a monopoly, probably, but a strict definition. Apple exists. Linux exists and is better than the terminal hell the average person thinks about. But that's not enough pressure to make microsoft actually try to appeal to customers. Most people are basically stuck.
We should break up all of these companies that are so big they can coast with shitty products for years.
Ah, so I assume they will remove support for any resolutions other than 1920x1080, since they need a consistent horizontal size, and that's the most common.
More than that are they just ignoring windowing an application and resizing it to fit? You know, the namesake of their operating system?
Dont care, its where the task bar should go, and I should be able to configure it.
Windhawk and ExplorerPatcher will allow this while windows still resize correctly, so it's a mystery to me as to why MSFT won't do it.
Good explanation. They couldn’t checks notes be fucked
Is there no fix for this? I hate having the taskbar on my main monitor and ive been looking everywhere for a way to move it to another monitor. =/
wait, did they do away with the primary monitor designation?
isn't that like the only thing that makes a "primary monitor" special - the taskbar? why can't you just set another monitor as primary?
I don't use win11, if it's not obvious, lol
So i'm an idiot and you literally just solved my problem. I just set my other monitor as my main and the bar moved over lol. Thank you.
lmao I love when it's just a dumb little thing like that
you did make me realize that that may not be quite so obvious anymore, though, with how they constantly change menus and setting names around. how many other things that we've learned over years & years of using Windows are just different in future versions, or not possible any more. and how many of those things were ever obvious settings in the first place, rather than 'common knowledge' learned from years of familiarity
It's still there.
Display settings > select monitor, check box "main display"
Quote from Microsoft..."You will be happy in your work!". /s
"vibe coding"
Pouring resources into it... Doesn't almost every other os/distro have this option?
Good question. Maybe they are required to by the Americans with Disabilities Act?
Forced to by governments.
At least on a Mac we can choose bottom or left! Wild that Microsoft won't give Windows users the option.
Of course you could say Mac is dorky with its always on menu bar at the top, but I quite like it. Even on my laptop with a notch it's not terrible. And I like the status bar (right side of the menu bar).
And of course on Linux you can just have it any which way you want it.
I still generally prefer windowing on Windows 11 to macOS Tahoe. Since Sequoia (the last version) we've had basic windowing (and before that, free apps like Rectangle to shoehorn it in), but what Microsoft started with Aero Snap in Windows 7 has never been "the Mac way." I think the old Mac users prefer a controlled chaos on their desktop. I like a more elegant setup. I like how I have Windows set up at work. It doesn't quite work as well on Mac, to try to do the same thing, but I wouldn't trade my Mac for something like my work PC, even if it could play more games.
Menu bar at the top at least makes some sense - it's easier to mouse to it, since you can't go too far. Having menus per-window like Linux, or like Windows used to before big ugly ribbons became the thing, is easier to overshoot. (Which is why I always open my menu bars by pressing 'alt' with my left thumb, and then using the keyboard shortcuts that are helpfully underlined. Window likes to hide those from you now since they're 'ugly', and also makes you mouse over the pretty icons to get the tooltip that tells you what they are, which is just a PITA. Pretty != usable.)
Mac OS has had the menu at the top since before it was a multitasking OS. They had them there on the first Mac I ever used, a Mac Classic 2 back in 1991 or so, and it was probably like that before then too. It's not like they've been 'innovating' that particular feature and annoying their users.
To be clear, the Macintosh in 1984 had the menu bar. Amiga had it, too. Now, the dock — that came later. I remember System 7 or Mac OS 8 had a zip-tie pull-out thingy on the left (and Microsoft 2000 copied it). I think the actual Dock as we know it now came in OS X. And there were clones (e.g. AquaDock) until Apple started handing out C&Ds and lawsuits. I tried a couple (on Windows), none of them were great.
they will either go to windows 12 immediately after or trying to force win10 to 11 after the extended security updates end.
The taskbar items can't have a constant width. Your whole taskbar layout changes when you change a tab in Firefox. You have to open a set of programs from right to left, because any other order will change the positions of the items you want to click.
When not combining windows, in Windows 10 you could order them to your preference and usefulness. Now, you're stuck. Even when not combined, the items are combined in one block, and you can't order them within the block either.
Another thing blowing my mind is the complete lack of screen brightness support. World oot on a few Linux distros I found. My keyboard has the keys, let me dim my damn main screen with those instead of the finicky buttons on the screen
"You will own nothing and you'll be happy"
Honestly, at this point Microsoft should do what Apple did, and build a completely new OS on top of the BSD kernel.
Or just Linux. Why even bother with BSD?
Because they would (for some reason) never open their source code.
They only need to open source the kernel. They can build whatever proprietary stuff they want on top of the Linux kernel.
So Microsoft is hanging on the coat-tails of KDE, copying the enshitification from KDE3 to KDE4, 17 years later?
I watched a YouTube video by Dave Plummer about why you can't move the taskbar and it made more sense than whatever. this link is that I'm not clicking on
I was briefly a star at work when all of the terminals updated to Win 11. I was the only dude that knew how to move the start button back to the lower left corner.
Time to install Linux. I'm busy setting up family with Mint this holiday season to keep their rarely used devices alive.
Simple regedit used to fix this, but then stuff started to not work quite right as it got updated, and now I don't think that regedit works anymore.
When you buy a pc with mac os, you are usually stuck with it, at least for some time. When you buy a pc with windows, you can usually just uninstall it and install something else.
Just ask ai to do it?
IT department says no.
Doesn't change the fact that they are in charge of dictating the choice of OS.