Fully 1/2 of these are fixes for things they have broken in the past 20 years... The dark mode support might actually be at the level of windows 3.1 now.
You're moving the goalposts. He claimed Win 11 brings no fixes over Win 10, and I proved him wrong, not what features Microsoft removed over the years and brough back with Win 11. And what's wrong with them bringing back older features? You're making it sound like that's a bad thing.
The point was that Win 11 is far more polished and feature compete than Windows 10, yet people somehow gloss over this and pretend that Win 10 is somehow better (it's not, it's really janky and backwards in comparison, just look at the settings menu and dark mode implementation). Win 11 really fixes many of Windows 10's shortcomings and jank.
The point is with the half dozen things they fixed, they broke another hundred things. From the broken in a different way control panel, to the lack of functional grouping in the start menu, it just keeps going. Its the same thing they did with win10, and why its not running on any of my personal hardware either.
> From the broken in a different way control panel
Broken how? Are you talking about the settings menu or the control panel? You can do everything from the settings menu now, why would you try digging up the control panel? Unless maybe you're a sys-admin maybe trying to do some corporate stuff.
>the lack of functional grouping in the start menu
Thee start menu grouping works fine for me. Have you actually used the latest release of Win 11, or are you commenting based on stuff you read on the internet?
>they broke another hundred things
Can you please name the 100 broken things? You named just two things which either aren't broken but more like you either haven't used or don't like how they are. But that's not the definition of broken.
I have a win11 tablet, and a couple work test machines. None of them can group icons by functional usage, or if they do, its not obvious. If they have added it since I tried to do it some months ago, and simply didn't provide any visual hinting that it was possible in a newer version when I upgraded it. Then that itself is a failure. Just because I rant about how I don't allow it on personal devices doesn't mean I don't lay hands on it, on a regular basis.
The first couple hits when i google it, remain links to 3rd party software enabling the function.
and no answers. If it takes me half an hour to figure out how to do something that every single version of windows since windows 2.0 could do, then... fail.
another edit: and to reply to some of the things you added after the fact. Type control panel into the search button on win11 pro/etc and notice all the stuff that remains there because it doesn't have similar functionality in the new control panel. Pretty frequently I find myself in that control panel because what I want to change can't be changed from the new control panel.
>None of them can group icons by functional usage,
I really have no idea what this means as that's never my workflow, but it could be a valid complaint. I just hit the start/meta key, type the 2-3 letters of my desired app/file, then hit enter.
>Type control panel into the search button on win11 pro/etc and notice all the stuff that remains there because it doesn't have similar functionality in the new control panel.
Like what? I consider myself a relative power user and haven't needed to touch the old control panel at all, at least for cases that cover 99% of windows use-cases, as for power user uses cases that aren't covered by the new settings menu, I usually go directly to the registry editor.
Just because you find control panel results in the start menu search, doesn't mean you can't do those things in the new settings menu.
>Pretty frequently I find myself in that control panel because what I want to change can't be changed from the new control panel.
>None of them can group icons by functional usage,
>> I really have no idea what this means as that's never my workflow, but it could be a valid complaint. I just hit the start/meta key, type the 2-3 letters of my desired app/file, then hit enter.
Right, its fine for you, and I'm happy for you because your workflow doesn't involve having a machine with 100's of applications installed that you can't remember the name of because you use them once every couple years. For example I have a cdripping application installed its categorized under "media->rippers". If I type "ripper" into my application search box (this is win7) my cdripping app doesn't show up, if I type CD in, it doesn't either. Because its called "audiograbber" and its quite nice, and quite old too, because its from a time when people ripped CD's by the car load. It still works fantastically, and once in a while I click the "used cd" option in amazon and buy one for $2 because they are cheaper than the .mp3s. And for some reason I can't ever remember its name (rather I mentally think of a couple of its competitors).
Listing everything alphabetically or showing a giant pile of icons doesn't work for me. Which is funny because I can drive a unix machine from the command line all day, but even then I still reach for the KDE start menu sometimes.
And I'm sure your happy with the task bar too, which I find helplessly useless because I've been putting my windows task bar across the left hand side of my screen with textual descriptions for 25+ years. That allows all the terminal windows/etc to stack up and have their machine/menu descriptions visible on the left 1" or so of my screen when I hit the windows key or mouse over there. I don't have to mouse around or alt tab for days to go through the 100's of firefox and putty windows I accumulate over the space of a couple weeks.
Similarly I think MS devs should have mouse free weeks where they are forced to navigate the OS using only the keyboard, since that is the primary input device of a _desktop_ os. If I want a tablet OS I will get a android/ios tablet instead of a 1/2 functional windows one. At least on those I can categorize my games separate from my CAD/EE apps, and my media production tool set.
That same desktop has what works out to ~7K x 5K worth of screen real estate, and don't get me started how broken windows is now with that kind of space.
So, while I think integrating tablet and desktop UI's is a reasonably good idea, what has happened is that MS no longer has a desktop OS. Its a bad version of 2010 era iOS. The UI isn't scalable or usable for heavyweight desktop use, its largely a toy, not ideal for large scale server deployments, not a good tablet OS, and now its not a good desktop OS either. For all the shit windows 8 got, the idea of having a "desktop->tablet" switch wasn't all that bad compared with what we have now.
None of the constant MS churn was a problem, when the old options were buried under some menu item, or in a registry hack, or sitting on the disk somewhere (progman anyone?, that thing shipped for what 15 years after it was deprecated, and still probably runs on 32-bit windows). The problems started when MS decided they were going to wholesale rip things out without regard for how people were using the OS, and then fail to provide a replacement.
