Windows 11: Why does Microsoft think they should change the START menu?

[SilverSolder]

[...]
The Start menu was so inefficient that most people I know (including myself) have gobs of icons plastered all over the desktop area for the most common applications and documents.

I've got the most common stuff pinned to the task bar, and somewhat less common as icons on the desktop, the rest is in the Start menu (some things are pinned in there as well).   It works for me, as long as Microsoft doesn't mess with it.

My main complaint about Microsoft is that they mess with it with every single release, so I have to waste time figuring out what's broken and how to make it work again.   I can't be bothered to do that, frankly, so I've stopped upgrading Windows since W7, and feel completely vindicated by what I've seen since...

I might upgrade to Windows 10, now that Microsoft has stopped messing with it -  it could be a good and stable platform for 5 or 10 years, with a bit of luck!

[AntiProtonBoy]

I've got the most common stuff pinned to the task bar,

It's pretty much what i do. Everything else, i use the search functionality, but even that is pretty badly implemented, as it comes up with null search results for obvious keywords.

[rsjsouza]

[...]
The Start menu was so inefficient that most people I know (including myself) have gobs of icons plastered all over the desktop area for the most common applications and documents.

I've got the most common stuff pinned to the task bar, and somewhat less common as icons on the desktop, the rest is in the Start menu (some things are pinned in there as well).   It works for me, as long as Microsoft doesn't mess with it.

I started pinning just a handful of very used applications such as browsers and Freecommander to the task bar back in Windows 7 (yay! Just like 1995's OS/2 and even earlier Solaris/Xorg) and the less commonly used things to the Start menu - a reasonable compromise IMO. They improved this in Windows 10 and I now can add more things to the side of the Start Menu. However, if they changed this in 11, its usefulness will be again relegated to 95-era (I haven't tried 11 and don't plan to)

The large amount of other application software that I use throughout the day (dev IDEs, CAD/CAE, documentation tools, etc) are on icons in the desktop as they are numerous.

[Bassman59]

Unpopular opinion time: I think the start menu sucks and it has always sucked. It's just a clutter of shortcuts to application executables, uninstall executables, nested folders, shortcuts to text files, help files, and whole lot of garbage, 90% of which the user never *ever* cares about. A really good model that Microsoft should emulate is Application pop-up panel in the dock under macOS, or if they really want to keep the start menu, then have a look at what Kubuntu does.

I agree with this unpopular opinion. The macOS Applications folder (actually folders, as each user can have one) works well and is obvious, and it can be docked as a shortcut. The notion of an application bundle is pretty great, too, as it hides all of necessary but messy support stuff. And you can create folders in the Applications folder if you want to keep some applications together, like Utilities and in my case Editors.

[Bassman59]

I've got the most common stuff pinned to the task bar,

It's pretty much what i do. Everything else, i use the search functionality, but even that is pretty badly implemented, as it comes up with null search results for obvious keywords.

On the Mac, <command-Space> brings up the Spotlight search, so do that and just start typing the name of the application, and there it is.

[AntiProtonBoy]

The notion of an application bundle is pretty great, too, as it hides all of necessary but messy support stuff.

Yeah 100 %. Bundles also make installation and uninstallation simple. Just copy and delete respectively, done. You don't need to use a special installer to fire hose random files all over the drive like in Windows, nor do you need a special uninstaller to pick up the random pieces - which never really works, because there is always garbage left behind. Windows is a complete shit show in that respect, still entrenched in  DOS legacy way of deploying applications.

[Zero999]

The notion of an application bundle is pretty great, too, as it hides all of necessary but messy support stuff.

Yeah 100 %. Bundles also make installation and uninstallation simple. Just copy and delete respectively, done. You don't need to use a special installer to fire hose random files all over the drive like in Windows, nor do you need a special uninstaller to pick up the random pieces - which never really works, because there is always garbage left behind. Windows is a complete shit show in that respect, still entrenched in  DOS legacy way of deploying applications.

I haven't installed anything under Windows for awhile, but the last time I did, it was an .msi file, which I think stands for Microsoft Installer, a proprietary packaging system, which comes with Windows.

[rsjsouza]

Lately several utilities I use have been provided using simple .zip files, which I prefer. 

[HighVoltage]

I have just started to upgrade some PCs to Win10, since it is stable now.
Most of my PCs are still on Win7 and run perfectly.

It will probably be a few years, until I will have a look at Win11

[AntiProtonBoy]

I haven't installed anything under Windows for awhile, but the last time I did, it was an .msi file, which I think stands for Microsoft Installer, a proprietary packaging system, which comes with Windows.

MSI is basically the same as any other installer in terms of functionality, except it's endorsed by Microsoft, as you have hinted. It's the same backward concept of firehosing files all over the place, which uses a deployment tool.  And then you have to go through the control panel, or app options to uninstall the thing which uses a clean-up tool.

A macOS bundle, on the other hand, literally involves coping and pasting the bundle into the Application directory. Want to remove the bundle? Drag to Trash, done.

[Watth]

Yes, it's getting worse. Windows got so much better when they decided to make NT the base for Windows 2000 and next, after the "millenium" debacle.
But Windows 10 started to show disguised ads in the login menu, and kept obnoxiously pushing for users to switch to Edge.

[SilverSolder]

I haven't installed anything under Windows for awhile, but the last time I did, it was an .msi file, which I think stands for Microsoft Installer, a proprietary packaging system, which comes with Windows.

MSI is basically the same as any other installer in terms of functionality, except it's endorsed by Microsoft, as you have hinted. It's the same backward concept of firehosing files all over the place, which uses a deployment tool.  And then you have to go through the control panel, or app options to uninstall the thing which uses a clean-up tool.

A macOS bundle, on the other hand, literally involves coping and pasting the bundle into the Application directory. Want to remove the bundle? Drag to Trash, done.

Does macOS use a Registry in a similar way to Windows, or does it manage settings some other way?
 

[rsjsouza]

I haven't installed anything under Windows for awhile, but the last time I did, it was an .msi file, which I think stands for Microsoft Installer, a proprietary packaging system, which comes with Windows.

MSI is basically the same as any other installer in terms of functionality, except it's endorsed by Microsoft, as you have hinted. It's the same backward concept of firehosing files all over the place, which uses a deployment tool.  And then you have to go through the control panel, or app options to uninstall the thing which uses a clean-up tool.

A macOS bundle, on the other hand, literally involves coping and pasting the bundle into the Application directory. Want to remove the bundle? Drag to Trash, done.

One interesting criticism that we used to have with the Linux version of our software package was that it was the equivalent of a simple .zip file - apart from a specific udev rule, everything else was put in an arbitrary directory in the system. The more *nix savvy folks hated it, claiming heresy to the standard unix way of organizing files (/usr/bin, /etc, and so on), but we in support and several other customers loved it. Want to "uninstall"? rm -Rf to the directory and you are done.

[Bicurico]

It is a balance between required disk space, security permissions and comfort.

If each application is fully contained in its folder, it means that all relevant libraries need to be in that folder. If other applications use the same libraries, those will be repeatedly copied over.

Also, having all files in the same folder of the application means that temporary files have to be created there and as such these files need to have the permissions of the different users that access them. Also, imagine that two users share the same application folder: what if they setup different preferences?

This is one of the reasons you have "Current User" in the Registry, as well as, C:\Users\xxx\...

At the end it is a balance of how efficient you want to be in terms of not replicating the same files/folders over versus the commodity of uninstalling files.

With that said, don't think I am happy with Windows: install one Autodesk application and you will clutter the disk and the registry with thousands of files and entries. The only way to fully clean up your computer is actually to reinstall the whole operating system!

I own an iMac and a Macbook Air (both purchased second hand for little money, just to get familiar with OSX and the Apple way). It is true that you remove a software by basically dragging it into the trashcan. But boy, there are many other things that freak me out on this operating system. To start with, it is really a closed environment. If you get an older iMac like I did, an "early 2009" one, you will find that there are many applications you can no longer install! Most software needs to be purchased (even if it is for free) from the App Store. Here you find only the lastest version which more than often is not suitable for your OSX version (for no particular technical reason, btw.). But you won't be able to download an older version, either! Unless you have purchased it, which you can't, because the new version is not compatible. This is to me a borderline scam... And yes, I hacked a newer FW onto my iMac, despite it being "officially" not supported. I even hacked Bootcamp to install Windows 10 and the relevant drivers, despite it being listed as not compatible. So much for the Mac...

Back on topic, I am now more familiar with Windows 11. The rounded borders look nice and more modern. It really seems more responsive and faster. But I don't understand why Microsoft has still not managed to migrate the Control Panel to the new Settings Menu. That is totally inconsistent.

Also, I totally dislike that Windows tries to hide stuff from the user. Why are folders localized (C:\Users is shown in Portugese Windows as C:\Utilizadores when using Windows Explorer, but on the DOS shell it is C:\Users?

Why are some folders hidden (like ProgramData or AppData?

Why are some .Net apps installed in some strange remote folder within AppData?

Why do folders generate some hidden config files?

Why does Windows constantly change my folder containing my music library (just mp3 files in folders) as "Music Folder" instead of "General Folder", hence changing the way the files are listed?

The list goes on...

When I support my students on their laptops, most don't have a clue on how the most basic things work on their Windows installation. File extensions of known file types are hidden, ZIP archives are treated by Windows directly as if they were folders (as a result software won't open projects, because they have not been extracted - only the single file where the user double clicked on it).

If I am able to list a ton of annoyances for every day use of Windows, how come that Microsoft is not able to list them? They surely have smarter people than myself working there!

So my guess is that i am just dumb and all these "annoyances" are required to somehow maximise their profit.

Regards,
Vitor

[SilverSolder]

[...]
 If other applications use the same libraries, those will be repeatedly copied over.
[...]

The idea of sharing libraries (other than basic OS libraries) comes from the bad old days when disk space was scarce and expensive.  It can cause a lot of problems...   and definitely causes a management issue.  Not worth the hassle now that disk space is cheap and plentiful.

So much simpler to keep multiple versions of the libraries in each app folder (so it is even clear which version they need/use).

Makes it easier to copy software from one computer to another too.  (I know, it's not what "they" want....  but who knows, maybe once they have everyone subscribing to cloud services "they" will release their greedy claws at the local OS level...    we live in hope! )

[rsjsouza]

Indeed it is a tradeoff, Bicurico. Unfortunately applications step on each other's toes all the time. Throw other runtime environments such as Java (still widely used by Eclipse and Netbeans) and you have a recipe for disaster to support and maintain.  I still recall years ago some IDEs could be installed on top of existing Eclipse installs - the amount of variables that went wrong were massive, causing frustration all around.

Also, I totally dislike that Windows tries to hide stuff from the user. Why are folders localized (C:\Users is shown in Portugese Windows as C:\Utilizadores when using Windows Explorer, but on the DOS shell it is C:\Users?

Hah, tell me about it. Throw in the Brazilian Portuguese version that calls C:\Usuários and C:\Usuários\Público (with the Unicode characters á and ú) and you got into real fun with traditional applications such as gmake and others.

[rsjsouza]

I own an iMac and a Macbook Air (both purchased second hand for little money, just to get familiar with OSX and the Apple way). It is true that you remove a software by basically dragging it into the trashcan. But boy, there are many other things that freak me out on this operating system. To start with, it is really a closed environment. If you get an older iMac like I did, an "early 2009" one, you will find that there are many applications you can no longer install! Most software needs to be purchased (even if it is for free) from the App Store. Here you find only the lastest version which more than often is not suitable for your OSX version (for no particular technical reason, btw.). But you won't be able to download an older version, either! Unless you have purchased it, which you can't, because the new version is not compatible. This is to me a borderline scam... And yes, I hacked a newer FW onto my iMac, despite it being "officially" not supported. I even hacked Bootcamp to install Windows 10 and the relevant drivers, despite it being listed as not compatible. So much for the Mac...

Ah, I forgot about this. At first glance, it is quite an interesting operating system, but pretty darn far from the epitome of perfection that is advertised - when I used it for the first time, the amount of stupid keystroke combinations to do simple things such as Printscreen or scroll up/down and Home/end on a laptop keyboard were appalling. Regarding keeping compatibility over the long run, Apple pales in comparison to Windows/Linux. Their s***show of locking application software out of modern versions of their operating system with minimum warning (one year, tops) was shameful (the folks that had 32-bit Adobe suite purchased for top dollar were quite "happy"). Not to mention the signature certification enforced to all applications starting at a given version, which locked out everything prior. Ah, and the massive inconsistencies with their USB-CDC naming scheme that broke compatibility with our stuff - twice in a specific year...

[AntiProtonBoy]

Does macOS use a Registry in a similar way to Windows, or does it manage settings some other way?

macOS has an Application Support folder located somewhere in the user's home. Each app creates its own subfolder under Application Support and store their custom state, config, etc in there.

[gmb42]

[...]
 If other applications use the same libraries, those will be repeatedly copied over.
[...]

The idea of sharing libraries (other than basic OS libraries) comes from the bad old days when disk space was scarce and expensive.  It can cause a lot of problems...   and definitely causes a management issue.  Not worth the hassle now that disk space is cheap and plentiful.

So much simpler to keep multiple versions of the libraries in each app folder (so it is even clear which version they need/use).

Makes it easier to copy software from one computer to another too.  (I know, it's not what "they" want....  but who knows, maybe once they have everyone subscribing to cloud services "they" will release their greedy claws at the local OS level...    we live in hope! )

The downside of each app having their own copy of libraries is management of issues in those libraries, instead of patching\updating a single shared "system" copy, now each app needs to be updated.

In addition, in a multi-tasking OS having app specific versions means each (running) one has it's own image loaded consuming more RAM.

There's no simple answer to this issue, but to me ease of uninstall by simply deleting a directory comes somewhat nearer the bottom of the list.

[SilverSolder]

[...]
 If other applications use the same libraries, those will be repeatedly copied over.
[...]

The idea of sharing libraries (other than basic OS libraries) comes from the bad old days when disk space was scarce and expensive.  It can cause a lot of problems...   and definitely causes a management issue.  Not worth the hassle now that disk space is cheap and plentiful.

So much simpler to keep multiple versions of the libraries in each app folder (so it is even clear which version they need/use).

Makes it easier to copy software from one computer to another too.  (I know, it's not what "they" want....  but who knows, maybe once they have everyone subscribing to cloud services "they" will release their greedy claws at the local OS level...    we live in hope! )

The downside of each app having their own copy of libraries is management of issues in those libraries, instead of patching\updating a single shared "system" copy, now each app needs to be updated.

In addition, in a multi-tasking OS having app specific versions means each (running) one has it's own image loaded consuming more RAM.

There's no simple answer to this issue, but to me ease of uninstall by simply deleting a directory comes somewhat nearer the bottom of the list.

Libraries that belong to the OS should be shared (and updated in one place).   Libraries that do not belong to the OS, should not be shared!

If an OS library update breaks an application,
(1) Somebody has goofed!  This should not happen, in principle...
(2) the workaround is to place the old library in the application directory for its private consumption

I guess this is pretty much how Windows has always worked...   not sure about other OS.

[gmb42]

Windows has somewhat oscillated from shared to local copies then back to shared, mainly because of the issues of how to update the defective local copies of libs.

Windows doesn't have the concept of a separate location of non-OS but common libraries that Linux has such as /usr/local/lib, instead such things seem to get dumped into %WINDIR%\System32 along with the OS libs.

I was thinking more about ubiquitous but non-system libraries such as log4j.  I'm not a fan of anything in the Java ecosystem but they seem to want each app to have it's own copies of such things, even extending to their own copy of the jvm in extreme cases.

[SiliconWizard]

The shared libraries model is inherently hard to deal with. At the OS level, the development is centralized, so compatibility can be enforced and ensured (so any library update shoud not break neither existing software, nor future software if written for an earlier version of the OS, something that, TBH, Windows has been rather good at.)

Now for any third-party library, the version and compatibility problem becomes almost intractable, so you need to fall back to "local" libraries to ensure compatibility.

This could be avoided for the most part if all library maintainers enforced the same policy of never breaking backward compatibility. Of course, that requires a lot of discipline, and will usually lead to inflated libraries over time. This is definitely not an easy problem. Unfortunately, it looks like the opposite stance is often taken, and that nobody cares much about compatibility between versions. So in the end, it's a huge mess.

But yeah, even though wasting resources is always bad per se, these days, sharing libraries just for the sake of saving storage space (and in some cases, RAM space, when libraries can be shared in memory, which is sometimes, but rarely the case) doesn't make a lot of sense. The real rationale should be compatibility: ensuring every application uses the same libraries at any given time, but as we can see, reality is almost the opposite of that, so shared libraries most often are useless pain. Except again for very "core" libraries, for the reason exposed above, and for which it's actually possible to control and enforce compatibility over time.

[Zero999]

[...]
 If other applications use the same libraries, those will be repeatedly copied over.
[...]

The idea of sharing libraries (other than basic OS libraries) comes from the bad old days when disk space was scarce and expensive.  It can cause a lot of problems...   and definitely causes a management issue.  Not worth the hassle now that disk space is cheap and plentiful.

So much simpler to keep multiple versions of the libraries in each app folder (so it is even clear which version they need/use).

Makes it easier to copy software from one computer to another too.  (I know, it's not what "they" want....  but who knows, maybe once they have everyone subscribing to cloud services "they" will release their greedy claws at the local OS level...    we live in hope! )

The downside of each app having their own copy of libraries is management of issues in those libraries, instead of patching\updating a single shared "system" copy, now each app needs to be updated.

In addition, in a multi-tasking OS having app specific versions means each (running) one has it's own image loaded consuming more RAM.

There's no simple answer to this issue, but to me ease of uninstall by simply deleting a directory comes somewhat nearer the bottom of the list.

Libraries that belong to the OS should be shared (and updated in one place).   Libraries that do not belong to the OS, should not be shared!

If an OS library update breaks an application,
(1) Somebody has goofed!  This should not happen, in principle...
(2) the workaround is to place the old library in the application directory for its private consumption

I guess this is pretty much how Windows has always worked...   not sure about other OS.

Who decides what's OS library and program library? One could say GTK 3 isn't an OS library, since it's possible to run Linux without it, but a good proportion of programs which most people need depend on it.

There are plenty of libraries on GNU/Linux, which were originally created for one program, yet now are used by many and are an essential part of most distributions.

[SilverSolder]

[...]
Who decides what's OS library and program library?
[...]

I would say if it's part of the distribution, it is an OS library...    so if e.g. Microsoft includes it and supports it, we are talking about an OS library.

No?

[JohanH]

I couldn't care less. Feels like I haven't used a start menu in years. Both in Linux and Windows I press the "Win" button and type the few first letters of the name of the application. It is found in a millisecond and started. Most used applications are pinned in the task bar (launcher/whatever), if I forgot their name. The desktop isn't visible ever, except for after startup. If your computer work consists of clicking the start menu all day long, you are doing something wrong. A good OS/desktop/window manager is almost invisible and stays out of the way while you work with the applications (unless you are the system administrator).