Yeah, this pissed me off. It’s almost never useful, but spanning the whole x-axis on an ultra wide does make less sense.
I hated icon stacking also because I had a wide monitor and didn’t want to have extra clicks.
Ironically, now I have so many things open, the stacking only makes sense when I get ~15 explorer windows open and they’re all displayed as a tall list
Well aside from that, which shouldn’t have been set by default imo, it has more bugs, ridiculous system requirements, requires a ms account even more than before and runs worse.
I guess however bad the versions before it might have been, they at least kind of had a point? 11 is just a shitty reskin to squeeze out those sweet licensing dollars. They didn’t even bother changing the version number in the older releases.
I switched mostly to Linux when windows 8 was released, but I don’t mind 11. It looks quite nice, the start menu is pretty good and normal again compared to the ugly full screen shitshow from windows 8 and the weird hybrid thing from windows 10 and most of that foreign mobile metro crap from windows 8 is gone again or reintegrated into the desktop.
I can appreciate what you’re saying, but it’s a terrible idea to force a tablet paradigm in non-touch screen scenarios. 8 would have been fine if you could choose your start bar. Don’t say this wasn’t possible, because there was third-party software to make that happen.
I never said it was impossible to keep the old style. Though I do refuse that the start page is only useful to touchscreens. I would have preferred a bit more options than just large or small squares, but it still was a nice way to keep shortcuts close at hand without having them on the desktop. Bringing the shortcut screen over top of everything is much more useful than keeping the shortcuts at the bottom, on the desktop.
Frankly, I found it ridiculous that the start page got so much hate while stuff like bing searches being forced into the local machine search gets no reaction.
Ever tried to use all the hidden features on the sides and corners? Absolute nightmare with a mouse, fairly reasonable with touch. The UX was very dependent on the hardware being used.
And I hate the bing search bar, too, don’t worry. Never used Cortana, occasionally use the search at the bottom of the screen, only select from installed apps or documents. I already know how to use a web browser, thanks, and they all let me choose my search engine, too.
I personally never had any issues with Vista. Even deferred win7 for 4-5 years until I got curious. Though I did have a system made for it, so that was part of it.
Vista was a nightmare unless you had OEM equipment that wasn’t just vista compatible, but MADE FOR VISTA. Your experience was an aberration, most people got ‘vista compatible’ PCs that were running vista but made with XP sp1 in mind. So you’d see these systems that had no hardware graphics acceleration beyond onboard anemic garbage trying to run menus with DOF blur and soft overlays just gagging, and god forbid you had to troubleshoot/support some software on some shit like this, it was a nightmare.
The rest of the people upgraded from XP to Vista themselves, and the smart ones went “OH FUCK NO” and went back in droves.
I don’t know if they reclassified it at some point, but back on those days 3.5 was titled “Windows for Workgroups” and 4.0 was the first to be known simply as “NT”.
Forget what I said, I recalled an old memory from childhood of a 3.5 upgrade box for people running Windows for Workgroups.
NT 4.0 is definitely what popularized that version prior to Windows 2000 and XP. Most people who just say “Windows NT” are thinking about 4.0.
I remember the early win 3.11 to win 95 days when it was still easier to exit to dos to install a lot of software because no one was writing windows interfaces for anything.
Now I’m wondering if I still have my Doom .WADs saved somewhere…
Replace NT in this list with ME and you have all the consumer versions. NT versions 3.5 and 4 were the business versions in parallel with 95, 98, and ME.
Win2k wasn’t consumer. It was the business offering at the same time as ME, which may be surprising to some. Xp was their successor, merging the business and personal lines.
Yeah, those were the days, back when more often than not a Windows upgrade was also an improvement. As much as I loved Win2k, WinXP was even better. Let’s not talk about Vista and while Win7 was nice, it wasn’t much of a UX improvement.
NT 3.1 came out before 95, and isn’t a single version (Windows 11 is still Windows NT). If you include NT as a version, you can’t include 2000, XP, or anything after.
NT (3.x & 4.0) and 2000 were also available as Workstation editions. They were concurrent with Windows 3.x, 95, 98 and ME (which did get missed on the above)
This is a myth. The Win32 API doesn’t even have a method that returns the string “Windows 95”! Windows version numbers are numbers, not strings. Windows 95 was actually 4.0. Windows 98 was 4.1, ME was 4.5, and XP was 5.0.
Actually it’s not entirely a myth - there was some Java library that did this - but it wasn’t widespread at all, and certainly not the documented approach to check the version.
Close but not exactly. Windows 5 was 2000, Windows 5.1 was Windows XP.
But it’s more confusing than that because of the two different lines: the MS-DOS based line which covered Windows 1.0 through ME, and the multi-user NT line for workstations and servers which adopted the same version numbers as the currently released MS-DOS line that was available at the same time. I.E. windows NT 3.1 used the windows 3.1 UI from the DOS line, but was New-Technology instead of DOS under the hood. NT4 used the DOS based win95 UI, and NT5 was Windows 2000 also with the familiar Windows 9x UI. Everything since XP has been exclusively NT under the hood.
Lmao they only considered 95 > 98 > ME to be minor version updates? They didn’t even deserve their own major version? Although it’s probably pretty accurate, I remember 98 basically just being a slightly updated 95. I never used ME so no idea with that. It’s still pretty funny though.
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