Things You Cannot Do In Windows 11

The new windows follows apple’s design mindset very closely. The “we know better than you” attitude is everywhere in win11.

As an animator, I love to have the taskbar to the side of my screen to give me more vertical drawing space. Because of this I reverted back to windows 10 very quickly after 'upgrading'. Seems odd to remove so many features, it's how you alienate your users

I would argue that removing the ability to drag and drop is not a simplification, it's a complication. Dragging and dropping is, literally the most streamlined and simple action one can do, but somehow the designing decided making things fidgety and hiding everything in menus was the right call.

5:43 This right here is the biggest reason why I reverted back to Windows 10. Removing this option has absurdly killed my productivity. I HAVE to move back and forth between various programs. I could be editing a video and need to edit a graphic; those require two different programs. I could have to jump from a vector-editing program to a raster-based image editing program to a word processer. And in all cases, no matter what I'm doing, I very frequently have to jump to a web browser; I may need to do an image search to find a reference, check how to do something, or even just jump to an email because I have an important message. I always have multiple browser windows open to various pages I am actively using for my projects. But in Windows 11 THIS SIMPLE TASK TAKES LONGER. Especially when I try to work while I'm travelling so I'm only working on one screen on my Surface. I can no longer just click on the window I need to see; I have to click an icon, move up to a the new window, and then click the window I am looking for. Worse yet, even if that program has only one window, I STILL have to go through that same process instead of just clicking once. And then to add insult to injury, there's all this wasted space on my screen, a long taskbar filling up the bottom of my screen, but with nothing using that space. It's just empty space that COULD be used to show me my windows, but doesn't. That one extra click adds up. That extra looking for the right window adds up. And that frustration adds up. Windows 11 was literally wasting my time.

Windows 11 seems to have the same problems I had with android 12. It adds multiple steps to simple actions, and takes away a lot of visual and functional customisation for the sake of making everything look sleek.

There is a german Term called "Verschlimmbesserung". It consists of "verschlimmern" [verb, to make something worse than before] and "Verbesserung" [noun, the improvement of something] or "verbessern" [verb, to improve something]. The Term refers to things that in an effort to improve something actually made it worse than before. Usually because the entity implementing the change has little to no knowledge about the usecase of the thing they try to improve. Windows 11 is basically one whole "Verschlimmbesserung".

Totally agree with what you said. And I noticed that windows 11 does not allow classic shell to work for those of you who want to use an older interface. Personally I think the OS should separate out the interface as an optional choice. The operating system can run in the background, and then you choose how you want the interface to work for those of us who are advanced enough

I would like to mention that the 2 most annoying things in day to day use for me are the lack of a quick audio mixer and when you right click an item in file explorer it has a bunch of simplified options, completely ruining my workflow in file manager, it seriously takes me like 15% longer to do any task due to this

One you didn’t mention is that it’s impossible to view the time showing seconds. You only get hours and minutes. Even if you open the clock settings there are no seconds anywhere. I wouldn’t have thought this would be an issue until I couldn’t have it, but surprisingly often I want to know exactly how many seconds are left before a certain time. It seems like they are trying to give the Windows interface the simplicity of a tablet, but I think this is precisely the opposite of the right approach, because the very basic users are only using phones and tablets in the first place, it’s mainly power users and business users who are still using laptops and desktops, and they want more options, not less.

I'm very sad that Windows 11 has become so annoying to use for power users, I've been helping my family with their windows 11 laptop and it has been quite a frustrating experience for ME because I will have to get used to a whole lot of simplifications. I'd love to see the registry video

it's been over a year and still so many things are still a problem from this video. I'm feeling like I'll never be switching to windows 11 and instead waiting for the next version of windows assuming that's not missing features too.

Change for the sake of change is a plague upon humanity.

A video on "Windows 11 tricks" about tweaking things with the system registry would be much appreciated

As a software developer, Win11 gives me a feeling of a rushed product. That’s why the restrictions on the taskbar to prevent users from messing around and customising. But well.. I could be wrong and they might just prefer beautiful design over functionality

I agree with every one of these. There's one more, and that is the right-click context menu. They added some icons, but hid the textual items. OK, it's still there, but you have to first click "more..." . This seems to be a continuing trend. Some entity at Microsoft seems to think we need items categorized with more and more granularity. For some reason they've decided that it's more productive to have to guess which category a particular setting or option belongs in than to read through an alphabetized list. It continually seems to require more clicks and menus to get the place you previously could with one click.

What's also missing is that you could click on this tiny unreadable clock in the lower right to get a popup that showed a actually readable clock. Also after starting the computer you could just type in the password and hit enter, whereas now you first have to click one time extra for no reason so that the password box appeares and only then you can unlock the pc. Oh, and then there's the dumbed down right click for files and folders. You have to click "show more options" every time to finally see the options you want (very annoying). Also now everyone is forced to register with a microsoft account which is not acceptable if you want to run your PC anonymously or need it for a task for which you want it to not be connected to the internet.

One thing you didn't mention (about that taskbar again) was that if you have too many things pinned to the taskbar, instead of giving you arrows to be able to see all the different programs that are open, it just hides them with no way to access those programs unless you alt-tab to them. edit: they "fixed" this a month or two after my comment was posted, now there is an overflow menu. They still do not dynamically shrink or go into a second row like in windows 10, but if you have more than the space allows you get a " . . . " as your final icon and that displays the rest of the icons when you click it.

As a professional UX design consultant I've noticed UX is just more of a diversity of team checkbox over an actual impactful role within product development, and actually designing for the user has been met with a lot of resistance become more of a could have over a must have with this new scrum product mindset. Yes, it means the products MVP get finished and in customers hands quicker, but all it means is the longevity of a product and the trust of the customers is heavy damaged, all for the sake of ticking a checkbox and in a consultancies case getting paid.

6:02 the closest thing you can get to custom grouping is that if you have multiple screens, you can change it to group them on the taskbar only on the screen where they are open. It’s situational, but is at least a little bit helpful for organizing