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hating Windows 11
Tuesday, March 25 2025
Again I awoke well before my alarm and proceeded to prepare for work. Knowing the things I would need, I gathered up provisions to ensure I would be able to make myself a cup of hot tea and listen to music. I got to work about 20 minutes before 7:00am, that is, 20 minutes early, and was the first one in the darkened software developer room.
At 8:00am, I attended a developers' meeting this morning where everything that was said sounded like mysterious jargon. I remember things being this way for a long time at SCA when I worked there, and it continued sounding that way for years, since there were large parts of the company business that I never learned much about.
Meanwhile, back at my desk, I continued to feel extremely frustrated by my work-issued laptop. Part of the problem was Windows 11, with its many changes that I found personally hostile. I do not like wasted screen space, and none of the methods to minimize this that were available in earlier versions of Windows were working. I was particularly upset about the taskbar, which took up much more vertical space than required and insisted on being present on all monitors, not just one (as was the case in the past). This means that if you stack any monitors vertically on a Windows 11 computer, there will definitely be an unnecessarily-wide taskbar streaking between them.
I researched extensively to find ways to fix (or at least make less horrible) my taskbars, and there were a number of promising candidates. But none of them worked; evidently Microsoft is asserting the new look like a tyrant, and dissidents are not to be tolerated. I should mention here that the other thing I was finding horrid about my laptop, that I had to keep entering administrator credentials any time I wanted to make even the most minor of changes to the computer, was paradoxically making me vulnerable to exploits. When one has to constantly enter credentials, one soon becomes numb to the process of approving things, and inevitably at some point I approved notifications from some nefarious actor. After that, I was bombarded with a steady stream of pop-up notifications, which apparently in Microsoft Edge can be full-color and at least look like they contain interactive elements (as well as links, not like I would ever click on them). These were engineered to be terrifying, all of them claiming that a scan had found multiple viruses. One even claimed that a Russian was busily accessing my computer via Remote Desktop. All I had to do was look in the configuration of Edge to see what site I'd given notification capabilities to, and once that was turned off, these obnoxious messages went away. The strategy of carpet-bombing with notifications must be lucrative, but if Chrome and Edge were developed by less sociopathic entities, links in notifications would be disabled or perhaps any entity sending notifications greater than a certain rate would be automatically silenced.
One other problem I had was the complete inability to place certain icons, that is, of apps that one downloads from the Microsoft store, such as the ones for Teams and the Snipping Tool, on the desktop. Putting icons on the desktop is a paradigm that goes all the way back to the very beginning of mass-market GUIs. Maybe it's frowned upon now (I don't know), but it's how lots of people, me included, are used to organizing our computer interfaces, since it allows us to quickly find applications based on spacial memory. This works so well that I always set up all my desktops on all my computers to have largely the same arrangement, with specific icons for specific applications in specific places, ready to be launched or to be launched by documents dragged to them. I've been working this way since 1989, and nobody is going to make me stop, especially not for some faddish new idea in how computer interfaces are supposed to work. So I need my icons on the desktop, and that includes icons of applications of all types. That icons from certain sources would somehow be handled differently and not be allowed on a desktop defies everything anyone knows about good interface design. It turned out that there was a way to put icons for apps bought in the Microsoft Store on the desktop, but it involved a circuitous hack involving the run dialog box and pasteing shell:appsfolder into that. Jesus, the whole fucking things feels like a kludgy mess. Whoever came up with this shit should be deeply embarrassed.
On the urging of one of the guys who had been part of my job interview, today I joined about four or five guys for lunch in an upstairs conference room. I had some leftover spaghetti, while most of the other guys looked to be eating salami sandwiches. The mix was an eclectic one, with one or two other developers and a couple blue collar guys from the factory floor, one of whom completely dominated the conversation, which was mostly about golf. It seemed I was the only one there not interested in that.
When I got home this afternoon, I immediately had to do some home IT work, as Gretchen's main computer Badger was no longer finding its boot drive. It turned out that some connection in its two chained adapters had gone bad, and all I had to do was take it apart and put it back together again to get things working again. But I was skeeved out enough by its failure to attempt to copy the drive's contents onto a replacement.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?250325 feedback
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