I really wish that UX designers would stop the insanity of over-simplify things into near-uselessness. People need to do real work in an operating system including organizing, sorting and arranging files. The basic functionality of the Windows OS "Detail" file view hasn't gained significant NEW functionality in nearly forever.<p>Rounding corners and harmonizing colors is nice but it's not what I care about. I wish they'd demonstrate their awesome design skills by working out a reasonably intuitive UX to do nested sorting. And do so without losing any existing functionality.<p>Another example is Firefox. Almost every UX change in the past two years has made the browser noticeably worse and requires serious users to hack CSS under the hood to fix. They keep taking things away and rearranging deck chairs while not adding obviously missing functionality like a non-right-click menu UX to manage sidebar lists.
The classic Win 95 bottom left Start button location has the advantage of being an 'infinite mouse target': rapidly flicking the mouse down-left always gets you there instantly because you can't overshoot the target, nor can you miss, neither to the left nor to the right. With the new centered placement you now must perform a slower aiming task.
Whenever I hear of a new UI design for software I use, I'm terrified. I
seriously can't remember a case when that was good news.<p>From Win95 to Gnome to KDE - they never became better. Just more colorful
and more resource hungry. The new Firefox is a total shitshow. Windows
8 was a disaster (and 10 didn't get much better). What is wrong with
having windows title bars which clearly show where the focus is? Why
does everything has to be white?<p>From Windows 11 I expect the worst and I'm sure I will still be
disappointed.
<a href="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22660401/windows11_2.png" rel="nofollow">https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22660401/w...</a><p>Oh boy does Explorer look like a mess. I see that I still can't edit the sidebar to contain the items I want.<p>And that help icon is still present. I wonder if anyone ever actually clicked that.
I was hoping for Windows 11 to finally have a consistent look, not have two settings, and merge the Win32 world and the UWP world… Alas, from the screenshots[0] it looks like the split continues :-(<p>[0]: <a href="https://twitter.com/goranmoomin/status/1404856884767592451" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/goranmoomin/status/1404856884767592451</a>
This is…disappointing.<p>As unpopular as it was, I like the Win8? start menu for letting me neatly lay out and categorize all my frequently used programs using my full screen real estate.<p>Now they’re turning it into a single app list that utilizes only 15% of my screen real estate, and is now fully redundant with my task bar in function and utility. A horizontal iPhone Home Screen sitting on my desktop.<p>I can’t fathom the reasoning behind this.
Rounded window borders has to be one of the dumbest decisions ever. When I maximize windows, I don't want awful groups of 5 or 6 pixels in every corner showing the colours from what was under it. Same when I snap windows next to each other. Honestly I have a pretty strong negative reaction to just this.
Well, this is Windows 8 all over again. A start menu that doesn't make any sense. Why did the separate out search from the start menu? Why get rid of the folders? It's gotta be organized somehow. File explorer now has way more whitespace (because touch).<p>If someone can get the designers to understand that Windows doesn't run primarily on touch devices, that would be great.
Maybe one day the designers will think of a way to automatically pin all your programs in a logical order. And what if you could access them by quickly and imprecisely moving your mouse to a corner, clicking only once and navigating through a tree of folders. Maybe programs could even specify subfolders if necessary. Perhaps it could be integrated with Explorer. Oh wait! I'm thinking of the Start Menu!<p>By the way, let's further destroy any remaining metaphors. The Start Menu shouldn't be connected to the Start button. There should be no indication whether clicking a button does something or surfaces more actions. And let's also force the user to assume the boundaries of a scroll page and make them scroll for no reason.<p>That's my rant, and here's an opinion of mine:<p>It's true some programmers don't care about UI but it's also true that some do. They are the ones most qualified to be designing these sorts of interfaces as there are typically parallels between abstractions in the code and abstractions in the UI. What I see over and over these days, at multiple companies, is a designer/etc. type gets involved, thinks about a concept in a very local context, and comes up with something that looks good there. If they don't trim the fat I'm convinced we're witnessing the death of Windows. But what will replace it?
When my Windows 10 computer goes to sleep from inactivity, it first removes the monitors from the hardware list, so all of my active windows end up back on the primary screen when I log back in.<p>I've looked a good bit and not really found a fix for this blatant usability issue (I think it's worse with DisplayPort?).<p>Dell has some app that will remember which screen stuff is on and move it back, but it doesn't work very well, and it's jarring, and so on.<p>I wish the people building systems and interfaces really used them.
Microsoft needs to go and redo the windows api at some point. Part of the reason why windows is such a terrible experience for developers is that it's so different from the posix-like apis available in macos and linux.<p>Maybe they should go all the way and make windows a layer on top of Linux.<p>I'd actually love if more OSes standardized around capability-based apis, like fuchsia.
The leaked build is here: <a href="https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=42706" rel="nofollow">https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=42706</a>
As a very happy user of Windows 10, this is... disappointing <i>at best</i>.<p>They'd said Windows 10 was going to be the <i>last version of Windows</i>; a "forever" Windows that would slowly evolve over time. So when I heard about Windows 11, I was a little excited, imaging some pretty big changes to the internals - not yet another <i>pointless</i> exercise of moving things around and changing the colours. How does <i>this</i> need to be a whole new version?!<p>I wanted to hear about <i>proper innovation</i>, like a new database-based file system that actually made it out of PoC, an increase in performance and reduction in size because of dropping decades old legacy stuff, some kind of magical performance boost for Hyper-V virtualisation, some kind of actual package management, maybe new improvements to WSL. Maybe even (<i>gasp</i>), Start-menu search that actually works.<p>I dunno, <i>something big</i>.<p>Instead, we get yet.another.boring.ui.tweaking. And another outing for Widgets - nobody wanted them before, but maybe <i>now</i> they might? Right?!<p>I can only hope there is some actual substance to Windows 11 that's going to be announced later. Because as of now, I see <i>nothing</i> even slightly compelling, and nothing that couldn't have shipped as an incremental upgrade. Given the big reveal is planned for the 24th of this month, I suspect any hope is futile though.
I'm disappointed by what I'm seeing. We were promised a push for low end devices with Sun Valley, and instead we're getting elements of Windows 10X with HTML views everywhere and eye candy (both meaning more resource consumption).<p>I just want a simple OS that includes the essentials and gets out of my way. Every "app" and feature (like the stupid weather in the taskbar thing they just launched) should be opt-in and turned off by default. Damn, I really miss the simplicity and usability of Windows 2000.
Apart from the awkward centered dock, the screenshots look amazing. Would gladly try B00merang's skin [0] in a GNOME install, once it becomes available.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/B00merang-Project" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/B00merang-Project</a>
This has been upgraded from "screenshots leak" to "he entire Windows 11 OS has appeared online". The reporter of the article has it running, and is sharing more details as they discover them.
Am I weird for missing the old Windows 3 program manager? It wasn't the best but it seemed more logical than the nonsense they're putting out now. Windows 95's UI was probably the best update they could muster. Anything beyond it has been more aesthetics naval gazing and less productivity boosting tools and features.
I pretty much hate the rounded corners thing, and I actually prefer Windows to Mac OS X and Linux these days. It is so unnecessary and yet creates UI problems for many applications that might want behavior incompatible with rounded corners, such as graphics applications that draw to a window. It also pretty much creates a border inside the window that you need to avoid.<p>I’m tired of things just getting changed by undisciplined designers. The other day, my Google Meet updated. I mentioned it and people asked how it was different. All I could say was I didn’t really know, it just looks different with different buttons, placement, and style. I needed to relearn where stuff was. What a pointless change.
There is a culture or recurring theme at Microsoft for at least the past 30 years. They copy design from macOS and made it worst.<p>The mix of Win32 and newer framework whatever it is called is still there.<p>And only just yesterday I was complaining [1] about PC ecosystem and Windows software. Needless to say it was controversial on HN with lots of upvote and downvote occurring.<p>How are the PC industry going to compete with Apple's ARM Mac once they drop down to iPad Air pricing level? And with the current state of Apple this is a very scary thought.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27512342" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27512342</a>
The window-snap layout menu is neat but I wonder why snapping features always seem to prefer screen halves/quarters. It is always more useful to me to have something like 1/3 or 2/3 and I think it should be there.<p>Also, there just isn’t anything attractive to me about the space-wasting layout of Ribbon in Explorer windows and I hope there are plans to fix it. (It’s still there in these screenshots.) It is easily one of the lowest content-to-chrome ratios I have seen.
I'm pretty much convinced now that Microsoft will be giving up on desktop soon and we'll just end up with a Microsoft Window Manager for Linux where they'll build some compatibility layer to run Windows apps on Linux. Some people will say it will never happen but it is clear to me that they can no longer build anything original and actual innovative at this point.
No thanks microsoft!
I`m happily using the same kind of interface for most of my IT life... win95, 98, xp, currently linux with LXDE. And i don't want your new startup sound.
And people say that operating system design is a dying discipline!<p>A chef who worked this way might “improve” bouillabaisse by adding ice cream to it.