Explained: Why you can't move Windows 11 taskbar like Windows 10, according to Microsoft
Windows 11 can't move the taskbar, and four years later, Microsoft still has no plans to bring it back. Here's why, according to Microsoft.
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In Windows 10, you could move it to the top, left, or right of the screen.
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 removed, 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.
Drag and drop is the entire bases for windows. How do you release a version without it?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
The also killed their UI performance previously when Vista first launched. Remember Aero?
Sadly not true. Microsoft removed the Start button in a version of Windows before
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 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
