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Microsoft is blocking Windows Customization Tools (www.neowin.net)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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TLDR: StartAllBack, ExplorerPatcher and some other projects are being blocked on 24H2.

One more reason to switch to Linux

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[–] 177 points 2 years ago (7 children)

I really hate having the taskbar permanently affixed to the bottom of my screen. I've had it on the left side for decades now. They are really throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Someone at Microsoft "Customization is the enemy of progress!"

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  • [–] 60 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    I’m on 10 and been a top taskbar guy for years. Are you saying 11 forces you to have taskbar only on bottom?

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  • [–] 53 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Correct

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  • [–] 36 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Welp fuck. Guess I’ll start looking at Linux but every company I’ve worked for in the past 10 years is ALL Microsoft all the way

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Wine does a Lotta shit. I know I have an NTFS drive running on my debian-family machine.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I have no idea what you’re trying to say

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Basically, they like to drink wine.

    No. I'm kidding. WINE stands for WINE Is Not an Emulator, and it allows you to run Windows applications on a Linux machine. It's far from perfect, but it can be a lifesaver when switching from Windows to Linux. What user melpomenesclevage is trying to say, is that you can use WINE to significantly blunt the blow / daily usability learning curve when switching, to keep some of your familiar applications as is.

    Edit: here's their site https://www.winehq.org/ the also explain it much better than I.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

    How you explained it helped a lot. So it basically is a windows emulator but isn't for legal reasons? Lol

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago

    Haha no, it's technically not an emulator. Emulation means having a whole fake CPU that runs your software. Wine doesn't do that, instead it makes the windows exe run in Linux and provides an API so the calls your windows program makes run natively.

    Tldr emulation is slow, wine makes your programs run natively.

    I switched to Linux for gaming a year ago and I have been blown away by how good it is.

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  • [+] 53 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I have been missing the ability to split the quick launch and dock it since XP was the last time you could. I had a dedicated auto hiding bar on the right where I put shortcuts to all of my most used folders and applications. I have looked for solutions that brought that functionality back off and on, but never found anything.

    Most things are close, but not quite right, and/or very "bloated" (for what I want it to do, not necessarily for what it was designed to do). It's so dumb.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Just a slight correction, Vista was the last time you could split toolbars off of the taskbar like that, its taskbar was basically the same as XP still. The redesign in 7 was when we lost that ability.

    Will say the docked toolbars did look significantly worse in vista as they all got an wide aero border

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    Huh, thinking about it I'm not sure if I ever really ran Vista on my main desktop at home, so that would make sense. I think I went from my roided out XP x64 image to win 7 despite using Vista quite a bit when working on customer's PCs. Thanks for the correction, cheers.

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  • [–] 48 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Why? Why even fucking do this? What do they get? And why is their default ux so aggressively terrible?

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  • [–] 70 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)

    They want you to use the search instead of a functional interface. That's why they keep making the interface worse.

    It lets them spy on you through bing, allows them to fill the results with ads, and lets them hide system applications unless you know exactly how to find them.

    It's also them gearing up towards funneling the entire UX through copilot for largely the same reasons.

    The entire goal is to flip the operating system from the slave of the user to the master of the content.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Almost plausible, except their search doesn’t fucking work either. I have repeatedly had the experience of typing the exact name of a program I know I have installed only for it not to appear in the incremental results. Sometimes programs will appear if you type less than the full name but then disappear if you dare type all of it. Sometimes the only way for me to find programs I want is to use an alternative launcher like the one in PowerToys. The last time start menu search actually worked was Windows 8.1. I fucking hate it, and it has driven me to make the leap to Linux for my personal computer, I am loving it so far.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    That's.... Exactly what I was talking about. Master of the content.

    I am fully aware that the windows search hides things that you are actually searching for. Particularly if they are system preference apps, and it always goes to bing first regardless.

    Also, I bailed as well. I use windows for work and school, otherwise I'm on linux.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Hmmm, maybe Windows hired some of the GNOME developers

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (13 children)

    Gnome is nothing like Windows. I honestly can't think of a DE further away from how windows works than Gnome lol. It's KDE and Cinnamon that copied the tried and tested Windows UX paradigm, perhaps you have your DEs muddled...

    The whole ethos of Gnome is throwing out the Windows workflow and going with a completely reimagined one completely unshackled from traditional UX.

    Is this just one of those gnome=evilsuperbad comments

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago* (9 children)

    Not the person you replied to, but I think I get his meaning.

    Windows/MS obviously has strong opinion on how the desktop should look like and behave and they're shoveling it to the user hard. Gnome tends to do the same thing, although the UI/UX is completely different. Yet the similarity is in the forceful pushing said concept to the user whether user likes it or not.

    Sure there are plugins for gnome so you can customize it a lot after all, but it requires some tinkering and your regular not tech savvy user won't ever find a way to do so.

    //edit: not hating on gnome. I kind of like its concept and used it for some time, although I don't use it myself as my daily driver now.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago

    Same. Not being able to move the taskbar, alongside all the other downgrades to it and the start menu is what got me to check out Linux as a desktop OS for real, and not just out of curiosity. So far, I don't see going back.

    And I was even one of the few dozen people who loved Win8. At least there the points that got criticized were due to sweeping and bold changes. Win11 on the other hand feels like the same as 10 but with arbitrary features removed in the core part of the OS.

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