“Best I can do is a horse that reports crimes”
- Bethesda

Mark Gurman, who’s normally dead on the money when it comes to Apple, thinks they’re unlikely to keep up annual releases (though I should note the linked article suggests the new iPhone model schedule is unlikely to change for now).

Good list! We differ on some of them…

I take issue with the settings menu still relying on the old menus while having shuffled things around so I’m forced to look for settings

This is still an issue, but I feel it’s diminishing as they (annoyingly slowly) do move all of the functionality to the new app. It was much worse in Windows 10, I think.

I can say that the start menu is horrendously slow, it can take up to 5 seconds for it to load.

“Works on my machine” is a profoundly unhelpful answer for me to give, but I’m fortunate enough not to have experienced this. If you’re looking for a workaround and don’t mind a further Microsoft app, the launcher in Powertoys is pretty solid.

Sometimes keystrokes disappear in the start menu only to magically appear some time later.

God, I hate the search from the start menu - but I would say that it’s been profoundly broken since Windows 8 and is marginally better in Windows 11.

They made the right click menu worse and only changeable in regedit.

100% agreed. I do think Windows 10 and earlier had a growing issue with the context menus getting unwieldy (Visual Studio is a great demo of how this can get really out of hand) but the solution Windows 11 have brought is annoying more than useful. I suspect at one point I made the registry change and forgot about it, because I’m back to a big Win10-style list.

They made RDP credentials only saveable using CMD.

Agreed again. That said, you’re a masochist if you’re not using an RDP manager like mRemoteNG! I wish Microsoft had a decent RDP app that wasn’t tied into Azure.

They removed vertical taskbars.

I found vertical taskbars incompatible with hotdesking on desks with different monitor configurations, but I do agree this one sucks.

how to unfuck up windows 11 so it works how you expect it to.

I think “how you expect it to” goes to the core of my point - needing to adapt to change isn’t inherently bad. But I’m not pretending Windows 11 is a wholesale improvement, and I do concede many of your arguments.

Agree with all of those points, I just don’t love the reductive notion that every change is a bad change and nothing’s been for the better. In several ways it’s a better OS - but as you say, they are also getting more contemptuous of the end user with things like privacy, anticompetitivity, and ads.

At the risk of being unpopular, I think a lot of what people perceive as unintuitive or worse in terms of settings and OS features is just change. I’m on Enterprise Windows 11 at work and I wouldn’t willingly go back to Windows 10.

I think because it’s Enterprise I’m dodging a lot of the worst of it - ads, telemetry, surprise updates, etc - but the unified settings are better once you learn them, tabbed File Explorer is better, dark mode switching is way better - there’s plenty to like.

I want to see the rise of the Linux desktop as much as anyone, but implying Windows 11 is all bad isn’t that fair an assessment.

The EFF have a bit more general information about location data brokers. Well worth a read.

What the fuck?

Schmidt promises that these AI companies will make energy generation systems at least 15% more efficient or maybe even better, telling the audience that “that’s a lot of money for a utility.”

He’s not even trying to be subtle about it.

The whole article is just a description of these tweets: https://nitter.privacydev.net/Amina_io/status/1840759345354809414

Yeah, that was news to me, I wasn’t sure if it was just my client. I’m not complaining - but I’ve been half-expecting an automatic ban!

“Reclaim” is still the term we use for that, even though just “claim” or “seize” might be more fitting. See also

which some LGBT+ people use in an almost tongue-in-cheek way to refer to themselves and each other, as a way to invert and defang the hostility with which it is used by bigots.

Its functionality to integrate with whatever LLM you use - local or SAAS. I can’t say I’m excited about the feature, but I think it’s also a bit silly that people are angry about it (though I take the point about development priority).

It’s healthy for Firefox’s market share to keep feature parity with Edge and other browsers that have the same function but with a manufacturer-pushed service.

This is funny, but also, fuck Graham Linehan.

I’ve never seen a convincing source for this factoid. As best I can tell, “killer whale” was never “whale killer” in recorded written text.