This sort of thing has been a devolving disaster since the Settings App was included in Windows 8 as a partial replacement for the Control Panel. I'm not sure the current state of things, but as of the last time I used Windows, the sets of functionality remained only partially overlapping between the two different tools.

I’d be willing to bet that behind a change like this is a certain amount of data showing that the removed options weren’t used that frequently, and a stakeholder decision that this must mean that they should be demoted. And it’s data driven. Makes for a nice bullet point in a report. Most users don’t miss it, on stakeholders can tell themselves that those that you are a minority who don’t really matter for one reason or another.

And as technology moves from tool that provides value to be paid for to cultural experience to be farmed, aesthetic changes drive a sense of currency and progress more than utility -and take a greater place of focus (and we’re a long ways from a time with a respected UX class considering utility even if the larger teleology valued it).

Apps need to adhere to some new conditions to contribute items to the Win 11 context menu. The 7-zip creator has been unable or unwilling to make these changes[1].

There are other open source projects which do display in the context menu, such as TortoiseGit and Notepad++. In fact there is a fork of 7-zip called NanaZip which supports the Win 11 context menu.

[1] https://sourceforge.net/p/sevenzip/discussion/45797/thread/1...

Nice to mention that this new menu takes ages to appear, on my computer I can wait 5s until it is rendered and I can finally click on more options...

I actually don't mind this at all. These days the norm seems to be to drop features just because it's more convenient. I think this hybrid approach is not bad at all: the new menu is more aesthetically pleasing and consistent from a UX perspective, and if you really need something that is not there yet you can always use the old menu.

For all its faults I think it's strange to criticize Microsoft for maintaining backwards compatibility.

You can disable the new right click menu with one registry tweak: https://www.elevenforum.com/t/disable-show-more-options-cont...

God ! For a long time, the cut copy paste icons had no text !

I mean, c'mon MS, after so many years in the industry, surely you must know that having text below icons is how most users use the functions.

Heck, I am a seasoned developer, live and breathe computers and software. I too was confused at times with that.

Only recently did they add the text to the icons.

Also,

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/2287432/...

> except for the fact that it is aesthetically more "modern" to its detriment.

And also much, much slower.

The old context menu is nearly instant even when stuffed with extensions. When the new one is full of extensions, it takes full seconds to load the entire menu. You get a partial load, then the extensions pop in (and of course pushes elements down/up so now you misclick).

I don't even know how anyone could experience it in testing and allow it to go live in the state that its in. Its like no one even looked at it.

The only thing keeps Windows 11 usable for me are these two mods..

https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher

https://github.com/open-shell/open-shell-menu/

They bring back the context menu and the old task bar, as well as the old start menu. It's like I never left Windows 10.

And I've switched to Linux Mint for all my systems except my laptop, which still has some hardware limitations under Linux.

Apps not showing up in the new menu is because the app has not updated to support the new menu. I am seeing third party apps in my Windows 11 right click menu such as WinMerge.

It’s not even that. If you do it often enough sometimes the old (vastly more useful) menu shows up and sometimes it’s the new menu. There is no rhyme or reason.

> But it is a new coat of paint over the ones from 10 or before

It's not, which is the point. They're trying to get people off the old way of extending the shell. If they just wanted to reskin the right click menu to look "modern" they could have done that.

https://blogs.windows.com/blog/2021/07/19/extending-the-cont...

I had been Windows user since Windows3.1. More than 3 decades straight. After a few years of working with Linux, installed Debian on home PC about a year ago and couldn't be more happier since then.

> My computer feels fast again

A while back (Win XP?), I got frustrated with Windows and installed Linux on my dev machine instead. But I still had to run Windows, so I installed VMWare on Linux on that machine and ran Windows in a VM. For whatever reason, Windows was noticeably faster in the VM than running on bare metal. Super bizarre OS.

I was a Windows Insiders user for a long time... When I was bumped to Windows 11 it borked (didn't have tpm enabled) and had to do a full re-install... a few months later, I saw an ad in the start menu search results... that was it. I switched my primary drive over to my Linux install and largely haven't looked back.

Still on Windows for work, but would happily swap. I also use an M1 Air for my personal laptop, but that is probably my last Apple hardware.

I was a fan, user, then developer from the DOS days-pre Windows 3.0–to Windows 10 without a single gap.

When they threatened Windows 10 EOL last year (?), that’s when I took a day to do a clean install of Mint and port my games and LLM tinkering over.

Because I knew MS was doubling-down on the user-hostile experience.

I thought I’d miss Windows but Steam, Wine, and Radeon made it delightful.

Windows is now only on my company-issued laptop. I predict that will also go away, as Windows 11 has introduced backdoors to circumvent company controls and install their BS.

When things randomly break in my Linux install, I fire up Claude

The relation is tangential at best. Microsoft's management was a personification of corporate rot for a long while now, AI or no AI.

They view Windows as a straw to suck users into their higher value products through, and are seemingly unaware of what "UX" is, or how their decisions affect it. Which is how Windows 11 ended up being such a clusterfuck.

To add they want to rewrite Windows in Rust with AI, which I can only assume they hope will keep the software quality up but I doubt it

It's been a death by a thousand cuts over the years. The only reason I still had a Windows partition was to play specific games that couldn't run using Proton on Linux. The start menu's inability to be moved to the left side of the screen was the last straw for me. It sounds pedantic, but that's where I've had my start menu forever, and I'm not about to change yet another thing in my workflow.

At this point, if a game won't run under Proton because of an intrusive rootkit, I'd simply rather not play it.

Edit: I specifically mean the start bar vertically aligned on the left side of the screen, with the start button in the top-left corner, not at the bottom-left.

It’s been fine? Are you completely immune to attention grabbing features? I absolutely cannot use win11 as it comes on a stock lenovo. Maybe you got your hands on some corporate version with some of the standard settings off? But between the news feed and the advertising in the start menu I find stock installs to he maddening, and I loath needing to boot my win11 partition.

Give it a few undocumented updates that change your settings in the background, and come back to give us an update. Even my Win10 extended support is getting CoPilot shoved down the pipeline silently.

> I declined the OneDrive or backup sync or whatever it was and it’s gone.

It is? How? Mine comes back every 30 days and there is no "fuck off, I never want this" button.

> The centered start menu isn’t my favorite, but it’s not like it’s unusable.

You can move the start menu back to the left if you like.

https://www.amandasterner.com/post/how-to-move-your-windows-...

Is it Win11 Pro? I'm wondering if it's different than Win11 Home.

A friend of mine got a new PC as a present and it had Win11 on it. Found out it was Win11 Pro. I turned it on without it connected to my router, used the Shift+F10 trick to bypass OOBE and setup a local account, and ran a debloat script, and things seemed OK. The debloat script had removal commands for a lot of default apps and I think only the Xbox ones were on there. I believe Recall is not active. It has 16GB of RAM, 6 cores/12 threads, and Win11 didn't seem sluggish. I used a .reg file to disable the new context menu.

It was an upgrade from her old Surface Go 2 which came with Win10 on it, had only 8GB of RAM and was super sluggish after upgrading to 11 even after debloating. But this was Win11 Home since the original Win10 was Home edition too.

I keep hearing things like it's not possible to disable stuff in Win11 Home and I'm sure Win11 Home has more default apps and stuff enabled. I don't keep up with it. This is the only Win11 system here and other than my worklife I'm all Linux.

When I first installed Windows 11 about 2 years ago, I had a similar experience. One of the things I noticed quickly was that much of the preinstalled crap that comes with Windows 10 can be easily uninstalled from the Settings menu or Control Panel, no PowerShell tricks required. It felt like Windows 11 was actually less bloated than Windows 10 at the time.

But, going through the same process now I notice a lot more of the cracks. Windows 11 nags a lot more, whether it's about OneDrive or Copilot or whatever new thing Microsoft is trying to push. My same Windows 11 install from 2 years ago kept reinstalling and re-enabling the same crap I originally got rid of, and I feel like it's only getting worse.

In short I think Windows 11 was actually really good when it first launched, minus the UI quirks at the time. But, in classic Microsoft fashion, it was totally ruined and has woefully lost my trust as something I can depend on for even just basic computing.

I'm glad to hear you say this. Been using Windows 11 daily for a few years, and I don't really have huge issues with it.

- I've shut off the dumb, simplified right click menu. - StartAllBack solves my issues with the Start button and menu bar. - I've removed the weather, the ads, anything else dumb. - Other than that it's just... Windows. - EXCEPT I haven't had a screen of death... One time in years.

Been using Windows since 3.11, Mac OS since 6, and I just don't get the vitriol.

It would be interesting to see you compare notes with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46446021. You both seem to have similar uses for windows, but totally opposite experiences.

If you really must use Windows and Linux is not an option at all for some reason, use a debloating script to remove/disable (most of) the AI cruft and telemetry.

It's fine in the sense that certain people are content to browse the web without adblock, or be interrupted by an ad every 30s on YouTube.

For those of us with higher standards, it's not.

> I’m not a heavy user but I switch to the Windows PC at least once a day for a few hours of CAD, gaming, and one other engineering program that is Windows only.

Well yeah, maybe lead with that.

It seems like you don't actually need windows other than being a launcher for some very specific apps.

After long-term usage, my environment on MacOS (laptop issues mainly!!!) stutters and becomes less-usable. Perhaps Windows, or Linux, or JUST NO COMPUTER WHATSOEVER would be better?

MacOS is less for power users. On my Mac (macbook pro with Notch) I can no longer see menu-bar apps, since I have 11 icons up there which are not from Apple. The 12th / 13th are simply inaccessible. Added Tailscale this week .. Annnnnd it is not visible...sigh. Looking into purchasing "notch optimizer" apps, but am disgusted every time I restart searching for the right tool.

MacBook Pro is less for power users. The miniscule builtin RAM "because we use RAM so much more efficiently" is causing my machine to chug. I continue to feel pain, then search + find, and pound-down apps that use more RAM than I need at this moment.

It's like being a computer user in 1988. And I wish it were more like 2025. AAPL is ridiculously successful .. maximizing profits.

As someone who has been primarily Mac for most of my life, I started using a Windows machine fairly recently for work.

I'm tied down to the Windows eco-system (Teams, Outlook, etc).

I still haven't gotten use to the idea of every link in Microsoft apps opening in Edge regardless of your settings.

This might seem like a small thing, but the entire UX seems to be designed around benefiting Microsoft, not the user.

I think if Dassault et. al. released a version of their software for Linux or Mac OS then the only excuse I have left to boot Windows would be gone completely. Hell even if it worked somewhat reliably as a viewer on Valve's Proton I'd be happy.

Have you tried using OnShape? One of the reasons that I switched to OnShape recently is that I can run it on my MacBook. This makes switching between my mechanical design & app development workflows seamless. There are some things to get used to with the transition to a cloud system, but knowing what I know now I would make the same decision again.

At this point I'm using Windows almost exclusively for gaming (and it sounds like non Windows options have been getting better recently, so I may be able to step away from the Windows ecosystem entirely when that machine eventually dies).

Why don't laptop manufacturers deliver models with Linux?

I presume the problem is that users cause support costs?

Or that Linux and App updates cause costs?

Windows users have many support issues, however the users don't blame the laptop manufacturer?

I guess Chromebooks serve that market. And Google allow Linux installs on Chromebooks (helps attack Windows instalbase, but too little)

So basically rented mainframes like IBM did in the '60s but with ads?

I agree about free software but that only works as long as the hardware doesn't get too closed down. At some point even reverse engineering won't keep up with it. We need more free/libre hardware.

The PC as a growth segment was at an end, but that’s because Microsoft cornered the market.

It was good enough and they just needed to make security fixes and tweaks; and I still would have paid for it!

Yet, the leaders at Microsoft found a way to lose their marketshare.

tl;dr; it just needed to remain quiet, boring, but reliable to remain a cashcow.

I'm kind of glad I'm an old guy and got to live through the "golden age" of computing in the 70's, 80's and 90's. I get to check-out in the next 20-30 years or so, before things get really bad. The future really is looking ever more shitty year after year. Back in the 90's I had real hope for the future, but that has faded.

>Win7Pro

I have multiple systems set up, but my second-favorite is still my Win7Pro Core2Duo with 4GB RAM. It sits next to one of my typewriters, and still handles official/govt/tax forms quite well. It is my only machine that I allow access to Google services (it has its own with a very basic ruleset), all others being heavily PiHoled.

But this year I did finally convert an older dual core Xeon into a Linux-only box, which runs local Ollama quite well for predating ChatGPT by several years.

Lastly, I sold all of my MSFT over this past year. I had only bought in, late 2022, because I had high-hopes for their integration of AI assistants... boy did they fumble that...

>walking away from iOS on the iPhone

Have you considered walking entirely away from smart phones? I don't even carry a cell phone, anymore (it is heavenly), but voice/text-only flip phones could be a sobering life experience for you.

I wish you luck!

Tangent: Containerizing one's digital life feels smart - isolating apps and data from exploitation and unhelpful constraints of the underlying systems seems to be more and more necessary. E.g. can't launch my video-conferencing camera on Windows because the camera provider has a conflict with my recent OS updates. I do not want to pay money / attention / energy into the lagging software maintenance of a collection of finger-pointing ("not my fault") companies.

So, if I could bundle up the dependencies, and re-learn my own ability to trust (not "digital trust", genuine trust!), then that would be the future I'd potentially enjoy, using computers.

Sony Playstation, Microsoft Xbox, .. these consoles achieve long term stability for their games because they put effort into making THAT possible. Old games do NOT need updates to run on newer Playstation/Xbox OS updates because the old games can rely upon their APIs working the way they did when the game originally shipped.

Sailing the seas of "my PC supplier wanted to release AI Copilot Online Storage Face Prettifier app 2028 and it broke my camera" is kinda an inhumane way to live.

I've been running Steam on both linux and windows. This year I was 85% Linux.

Linux ages like WINE, Windows ages like milk.

The incentives for improving Linux are driven only in part by commercial interests, and those interests are not completely centralized. Windows' fate is entirely in the hands of the current Microsoft leadership, and they seem hellbent on extracting maximum value from their users while ignoring the suffering their "Continuous Innovation" creates.

It's almost as if they want everyone to start looking for the exits, and thankfully Linux is finally at the point in its maturity on desktop to start attracting power users who have no prior experience.

I don't think 2026 is the year of the Linux desktop, but it does feel like we're at the start of a big shake-up in the industry. Once we start seeing the hockey stick pattern in the adoption rates I would expect that more money and developer time will follow to help smooth out the areas where the transition is still difficult, like professional software.

It's a meaningful change in behavior though.

Compared to us nerds, people aren't leaving Windows "to fight the evil Empire and join the rightful FOSS fight" or whatever pretentious bullshit de jour.

They're leaving for the same reason most people stopped buying Roombas or Sonos Soundbars: New versions kinda suck, they have become expensive (if they have to buy a new device if they can't upgrade to Windows 11) and Knockoffs (Sure, linux isn't a knockoff but bear with me) or alternatives like macOS are good enough.

If your laptop is just a big window into Notion, Clickup, Jira, Slack or your web mail client, your OS has become entirely disposable.

> I could also write the same article about this website, how it was so full of bloat and ads that nobody wants I could barely get it to scroll, and it eventually crashed before getting to the end of TFA due to general resource exhaustion on mobile.

I found it ironic that after reading an article about all the stuff in Windows 11 that no one asked for, the site hijacked my back button to show me more articles I might want to read.

If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically try to clamber out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, it will float there quite placidly. As the water gradually heats up, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor, exactly like one of us in a hot bath, and before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

Come on bro, the journalism game isn't about being right, it's about getting people to read the same rehydrated story every month for their entire life.

The drug is the dream of replacing their serfs (you) with robots. They feel like what passes for AI is sooo close, and they're willing to destroy everything and anything to make their dream reality, but I think they're going to be disappointed. Until they face reality we're all going to increasingly suffer.

The C-suites are there to please the shareholders more than the customers. The shareholders hear how much AI companies are supposedly making and believe money is being left on the table lest their co-owned companies invest in AI too. The C-suites then go after AI as none of them wants to be told they haven't done anything to profit off it.

My youtube ads that I get are all fear about AI "You have to do this or you'll be out of a job!" and so on.

It's madness.

To be fair to Nvidia, they're only selling the pickaxes in this gold craze. It's smart for them to focus on the market that pays the most. When the AI bubble pops, they'll still be in a great position and they'll be able to return to gaming.

Hum. Windows has been ridden with bugs forever. I don’t see how this is connected to Microsoft abandoning windows in favor of AI.

Windows code base is just too heavy to maintain. They need to break compatibility with older products like MacOS often does, so that Windows can be manageable again… but that goes against Microsoft philosophy it seems.

> Nvidia abandons the gaming market

Citation? I've been hearing this from Gamer's Nexus for decades, but Nvidia seems to be fine RAM shortage notwithstanding.

I moved my server and 6 VMs running on it to Linux Mint this year, in response to Microsoft enshitifying Windows 11. It was a pretty easy move, and practically all software I needed has a Linux version. Plex, Agent DVR (security cams), and the LSI-Megaraid admin software for my RAIDs all runs on Linux. Moving the RAID was the easiest part, I just moved the LSI card from the Windows system to the Linux system and drives just showed up instantly. Of course they are formatted as NTFS, and it would be better for Linux if they were formatted as something else, but I'm working on moving ~35TB of stuff off to a backup server so I can reformat those RAID drives, then move all the data back.

The last VM I need to move to Linux is a somewhat complex Windows 10 IIS webserver setup that is still running on a Windows VM. I have to figure out a bunch of stuff to make that move to Linux happen, but I will do that soon enough.

Microsoft can fuck off, I'm done with them after 30 years. They have made it clear I am not their target audience anymore, and I won't recommend their products to anyone anymore.

Well they have official extended update options, so it's still officially supported?

How would rebuilding Windows on top of Linux help anything? Nobody is complaining about the NT kernel and none of the Linux DEs are clearly superior to the Windows userland, they all have at least as many bugs and warts.

I can't help but think that Steam Machine/SteamOS/Linux gaming in general is severely bottlenecked by anti-cheat. Nearly all serious multiplayer games require Windows specific anti-cheat.

Maybe there's a critical mass of Linux users that will force AC support. Maybe new cheating paradigms (DMA) will obsolete local AC. I suppose one of those could happen in the next 10 years.

Because there aren't so many great alternatives.

There's MacOS, which requires expensive dongles (an Apple computer), and has some of its own systemic issues.

And there's Linux, in different subtly incompatible distros, with its own share of problems, and a non-starter if you need and/or want to use many proprietary staples, from the Creative Suite to video, music, and business apps...

For personal use - because I play games that only run on windows(and it's my main social interaction every week so "just play other games" is not a viable option)

For work - because Visual Studio is the best IDE if you're a C++ programmer and if your toolchains only work on windows(so anything to do with PS5/Xbox/Switch development).

Microsoft Office, Paint.NET, Adobe products.

Linux usage is clearly increasing, so that answers your question.

You've got nothing to lose by trying but time. Time spent learning something new is certainly better than time spent trying to regain control of your OS and workflow after another mandatory "improvement".

Sadly debloating doesn't fix the numerous bugs and it's a cat-and-mouse game with every major update.

It is baffling how sluggish windows explorer has become, same with the start menu...

Even worse that there are no end-user settings to turn down what makes both suck... you have to run hacks, tweak registry keys in order to have it working ~normally~

    > "As Forbes reports, a whopping 1 billion PCs are still running Windows 10 - despite half of them technically being eligible for an upgrade. During PC maker Dell's November quarterly earnings call, the company's COO, Jeff Clarke, admitted that "we have about 500 million of them capable of running Windows 11 that haven't been upgraded," referring to all PCs, and not just Dell machines."

    > In other words, those who own a whopping third of the estimated 1.5 billion PCs worldwide are outright refusing to upgrade, indicating Microsoft is seriously struggling to woo them. That’s likely due to a number of reasons, from simple frustrations over a tweaked and unfamiliar interface to the need to run software that isn’t Windows 11 compatible — and annoying ads.

> However, all my games and software that work on Windows won't necessarily work on linux

Unless you specifically know what won't work: there's a solid chance that your games and software will work just fine on Linux.

Yeah, I think it's just a matter of what you know. I recently got a Mac for work and the UI is horrid and I have no idea how people put up with it, it's like designed by people who never actually had to use it afterwards. But clearly it works for people so I strongly suspect it's just the personal bias here.