Windows 11 is Getting New Touch Gestures, Start Menu Folders (theverge.com) 46
Microsoft is bringing new touch gestures, Start menu folders, a redesigned Task Manager, and lots more improvements to Windows 11. From a report: A new build of Windows 11 is available to testers today, and it's full of new features that look like they will significantly improve the usability of Windows 11 overall. The new Start menu folders will allow Windows 11 users to customize the pinned section of the Start menu into folders. You drag an app on top of another to create a folder, and you can rearrange apps within folders and remove them. The ability to rename folders is coming in future test builds, but it's good to see more customization on the Start menu, given Windows 11 launched without many ways to tweak the menu design. If you've always been a fan of the gestures in Windows 8, Microsoft is bringing five new touch gestures to Windows 11 soon that will make using tablets a little easier. The first is the ability to swipe up on the taskbar to bring up the Start menu and swipe down to dismiss it again. You'll also be able to swipe between pinned, all apps, and recommended / more on the Start menu. [...] Last but not least, the Task Manager redesign in Windows 11 is now official. It includes a new command bar and a dark theme, alongside an efficiency mode that lets you limit apps from consuming system resources.
Who cares. (Score:2)
Bring out an under-the-hood updated version of Windows 2000 and stop spying on your users.
Re: (Score:2)
NTFS long file paths (Score:5, Insightful)
Can it handle 20-year-old NTFS long file paths ?
Thought not.
Time Microsoft hired some programmers to FIX THEIR SHIT.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Why should they? There's no incentive because they have no significant competition.
Re: (Score:2)
It's probably just not worth it. It's an issue that doesn't affect many people, and fixing it would be hard. Can't just increase the maximum length, every bit of code that interacts with the filesystem has to be tested too. Not just MS code, but third party apps that probably don't expect paths longer than 256 characters. It would likely need a compatibility feature, similar to the way when FAT32 got long filenames it also created 8.3 names for every file to support old apps that couldn't handle more.
Re: (Score:2)
There are multiple ways to bypass the path name length limit. You can use the long path prefix when passing a path to a lot of functions, and there's a manifest flag that you can set on an application that, in conjunction with a registry key or group policy setting, will allow the application to use long paths without doing anything special.
Re: (Score:2)
I just ran into that crap. Seems to get a decent filesystem on Windows you have to export one from a Linux file-server...
WinFS! (Score:2)
Bring back WinFS. ;P
Re: (Score:2)
You mean paths over 256 characters? I encountered that once and it took me a while to figure it out.
For reference if you end up with a path longer than 256 characters (Windows tried to stop you creating one but it can happen) you will have trouble deleting it. The secret is to use the old DOS 8.3 name and delete it from the command line. I don't know if Windows 11 still does it but Windows 7 created 8.3 names for everything.
next month they bring a free potato to the os (Score:1)
Updates to /. editors PC's to stop dupes? (Score:2)
As usual - already posted.
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
MSTGWTIDU (Score:3)
= More Sh$t To Go Wrong That I Don't Use.
I'll probably accidentally bump a key combination that will turn one of these newfangled features and it will create chaos and take lots of google-binging to solve.
Re: (Score:3)
We call it DuckDuckgo'ing. Read the news. Google is evil and Bing is dung.
I just hope Windows 12 is out (Score:4, Interesting)
It's Painfully obvious Win 11 is the new ME/Vista. e.g. a buggy release put out to ensure consumers don't get off the upgrade treadmill or (shock and horrors) lose brand recognition. ME had XP and Vista had Windows 7. And I managed to hold off until then. God willing I'll be able to keep doing that until I die or until gaming on Linux is as good as Windows
Google bought a Linux distro and renamed it Chrome (Ars has a story on it), it'll be funny if forcing people on Win 11 gave them a way into the home. Though you still want/need Word for writing resumes in a lot of cases. Not everybody'll take a PDF, and I'm not going to risk my resume getting it's formatting janked by using Open Office alone. I at least need to open it in Word and see what it looks like.
Re: (Score:2)
A lot of people are in a difficult position now. Windows 10 isn't getting much love anymore, and typically once the new version is out Microsoft stops putting any effort into patches for the old version and they come with significant performance penalties. Windows 7 went like that, the patches towards the end of its life slow it down a lot.
Because of the hardware requirements for 11, a lot of people can't upgrade. I have three machines here that can't run 11. What can you do though? If switching to Linux wa
Re: (Score:2)
I've never heard of a company not accepting resumes in PDF format, but I'm quite sure I wouldn't want to work there. Imagine what else may be out of the question... *shiver*
Still spying? Still TMP required? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes? Then I do not care one bit. That thing is not getting on my computers.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes? Then I do not care one bit. That thing is not getting on my computers.
They aren't going to get rid of TPM, the last 23+ years everyone has allowed the PC game industry to steal software on industrial level scales, if you bought mmo or steam anyting you already told valve and the tech community you're too stupid to be running a PC.
We already had infinity multiplayer with quake 2 in the 90's, when richard garriot dropped the ultima online bomb, that changed the direction of the entire software industry. As adobe, valve, microsoft, saw the public pay for the priveledge of steal
Start Menu Folders: new since 1995 (Score:3)
The games folder came with FreeCell, Hearts, Minesweeper and Solitaire.
https://4sysops.com/wp-content... [4sysops.com]
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I came to say the same, it's funny how they remove something and then claim "innovation" when they put it back.
Start menu folders have never been removed, they've always been there in the program list (except maybe on Windows 8, I never used that).
What's new is the style of visual groups that graphically show their content before you open them, like those on mobile home screens. (It's not entirely new either, more like a visual refresh; Windows 10 already has a similar feature).
Re: (Score:2)
It's sad how they released Windows 11 before it was even half way finished. The new start menu was in alpha state when it launched, didn't even support folders.
Most Microsoft stuff is crap for at least a year after launch, but Windows 11 is a new level of making your paying customers do the beta testing for you.
Re: (Score:2)
Finally, Windows 11 for Workgroups!
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
"Improve" (Score:2)
All I'm hearing is they deliberately implemented a giant slate of terrible, user-hostile measures and now want us to be grateful they're rolling 10% of them back. And renaming "coming to a future build". Why couldn't you always do it and how fucking hard is it to implement.
Meanwhile, I bet it still takes hours of extreme steps only nerds can follow to turn off the incredibly obnoxious spying, anti-features, and forced rebooting.
Not gonna lie (Score:1)
The new Start menu folders will allow Windows 11 users to customize the pinned section of the Start menu into folders.
That's the primary reason I'm still on 10. I use the folder/grouping feature quite a bit, especially for tasks I do rarely enough that I don't necessarily remember the names of all relevant programs (e.g. I have four different brands of SSDs, each with their own diagnostics and firmware update tool).
If 11 had actually launched with a feature I really wanted (e.g. support for Android apps), perhaps I would have decided to upgrade after all. As it stands, I found that a bit of a refreshed look isn't worth the
Every other Windows version is good (Score:2)
Every other Windows version has been good, going back to the Windows 95 days:
Windows 95: Good
Windows 98: Bad
Windows 2000: Good
Windows Me: Bad
Windows XP: Good
Windows Vista: Bad
Windows 7: Good
Windows 8 & 8.1: Bad
Windows 10: Good
Can we just skip Windows 11 and move onto 12 or whatever they call the next one?
Re: Every other Windows version is good (Score:4, Funny)
Pfft, idiot. Don't you know that Windows 10 is the last version of Windows and it will just get updates forever?
Re: (Score:2)
10 has only been good compared to 8. It's still Vista level garbage compared to 7 IMO.
Corporate-friendly (Score:3)
Yep, Windows 11 is MS jumping into the tablet/Chromebook technology again. They're improving the UI, not all the bloatware that makes Windows 11 slow and locked-down. For a long time, the advantage of MS Windows was its consistent yet highly customizable OS: It's why most games are on Windows. Replacing that with another advertising-based platform makes Linux the corporate-friendly choice.
Re: Corporate-friendly (Score:1, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
[Windows' customizability is] why most games are on Windows.
Bill Gates got all significant computer OEM's to preinstall MS-DOS. Therefore, everyone who bought a computer got MS-DOS. Therefore, MS-DOS was where all the users went. That gave Microsoft immense market power, which it used to squash any and all possible competitors. Since MS-DOS is what 99% of computer users ran, that's what most games were written for.
That same market power was wielded with Windows, and with the same results. The user interface had absolutely nothing to do with it. Market consolidation
Re: (Score:2)
A bit of back story, the point follows, I promise:
Both my 'not worthy of Windows 11'- desktops decided to crash on me in unison a while back. I still had a spare laptop that Windows 10 refused to run on anymore a year ago, so Linux (Pop!_OS) was installed on it and I used it mainly for having some background noise while working from home. A 6-year Pentium-class CPU and 4 GByte of RAM was perfectly capable of doing that.
The crash day comes and I decided to get a new laptop. A decent one would set me back abo
New & "improved" Start Menu and Task Manager (Score:3, Interesting)
I feel.. (Score:1)
My use case for the win (Score:1)
At the risk of sounding like I think everyone's use case is the same as mine ... OS UI tweaks are the most useless advancement. Doesn't everyone run just 4 or 5 application, most of which start automatically? Once I could pin things to the taskbar I stopped going into the Start menu for all but the most obscure things.
Feel free to re-arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, but I really couldn't care about 99.5% of the visible changes on Windows 11.
Does anyone?
Just more lipstick (Score:2)
on the Pig that is windows.
This time it is darker than before but underneath, it is still a pig.
Vertical taskbar on either side yet? (Score:1)