Explained: Why you can't move Windows 11 taskbar like Windows 10, according to Microsoft

Seriously, only go there for the facepalms.

Anyone who wants to try Linux but is scared of or reluctant about anything about the process at all: talk to me! There are multiple ways to try it with zero change to your system, like Oracle VirtualBox or a USB flash drive.

In the launch version of windows 11 and for over TWO YEARS it didn't even support drag&drop. It was working fine even on windows me

And it kind of makes sense to have the taskbar at the right or left on a widescreen monitor as there is so much space there

In every version of Windows up until now which has contained a taskbar and start menu, as far back as Windows 95. Not just Windows 10.

Sadly not true. Microsoft removed the Start button in a version of Windows before. It was in Windows 8 (and Windows Server 2012 for some godforsaken reason) with the cursed "metro" interface. MS did it for the same stupid reason they're citing here "tablet and touchscreen users". The uproar caused MS to release Windows 8.1 a year later where they returned the Start button.

The years of engineering salaries and test versions to dock a visual element at the top, instead of the bottom...

I'm one of the few who has had it at the top for as long as I can remember. It absolutely infuriated me to find out the feature had been removed.

They asked chatgpt

Microsoft applied a data-driven approach to find out which features to add now, which features to add later, and which to completely avoid.

Which is why if you dig deep enough into Settings you'll see WinXP Control Panel UI elements. You know, the elements that are actually useful for power users.

The data they have compiled from years of people using Win 10 and Msoft Edge.

Two data points: What their intern could do with React; what their intern couldn’t do with React.

Data can say whatever the hell you want if you lack scruples.

It's Microsoft, they have all the data. And quite frankly it doesn't surprise even a little bit, i doubt even 5% of people moved around the taskbar, people are just ready to hitch themselves to every bandwagon they see shitting on Microsoft.

This really stuck with me. “Rewrote” implies feature parity. What they really did was replace the taskbar.

What's weird is that given certain odd scenarios (I can't recall it but there was a video by Enderman about it) you'll see the old windows 10 taskbar appear, exact styling and all. So the windows 11 taskbar is quite literally just a WebView plastered on top.

Wouldn't it be cool if you could have AI on the desktop clock so you could ask it what time it was in different places in the world?

"Window's is built on many layers of shit and we dont know what will or won't break things.

Also co pilot was really expensive"

This is written as if a taskbar were a complex piece of software. It has to display a window list, a start button, a few shortcuts and a tray, right?

Nothing is trivial, but they are a company that can buy some nation-states with their citizens as slaves. Surely they can buy that much labor.

This makes no sense to me what so ever. Why do any apps care about where the taskbar is? How's it any different when a window isn't maximised and the user resizes it? Either I'm seriously misunderstanding this or it's a completely made up excuse.

I'd rather they just say "we completely rewrote the taskbar, but we know that less than 0.01% of users move their taskbar so we didn't prioritize it".

To me the bigger issue with the taskbar is that you can't make it compact. Instead it has to be a big chunky mess.

They have to reflow any time the user resizes their windows.

The whole operating system is even named after that concept.

Yeah, sounds like bullshit. I don't even see why that particular concern would create more work on the OS's part.

If an application fits "wonderfully" into the space it's given, Windows did nothing but telling it the dimensions it needs to fill. And as you said those dimensions can vary wildly.

Yeah especially considering you can install 3rd party solutions to dock the taskbar to the left which work perfectly fine

when Linux desktop environments built by hobbyists

That might be a bit obsolete as a state of things. Like 15 years obsolete.

Yeah, KDE ftw

Linux is missing enterprise management tools. For all its horrible flaws, nothing like SCCM, In tune, group policy, and Active Directory (in the sense of managing group policy, not so much identity) exist for Linux. Fix that, even commercially, and you might see a real change.

Plasma is everything I used to wish Windows' desktop could be, but isn't because of... honestly I have no idea what they're thinking over there. I am so glad I dumped that trainwreck. Love everything KDE <3

Probably to add something terrible for the user but good for MS. Ad integration? Easier to spy?

I assume the code was just too old and convoluted to maintain properly. I'm a bad coder so I've definitely redone parts of my scripts from scratch rather than trying to refactor them.

Then again I'm not a small billion dollar indie company who's main focuses are spying on users and helping to commit genocide.

Exactly. Full rewrites nearly always end in failure.

They let their AI do it for them

Someone on Microsoft probably needed an excuse for their pay increase.

"I rebuilt/had the idea to rebuilt the taskbar" sounds a lot better to managers than "I maintained the taskbar".

There exist some horror stories about the code but I have no idea how to find them.

A word of caution: If you use bitlocker (copy your keys!), it can have hooks in the TPM/bios settings.

Disable bitlocker prior to attempting a live boot.

It will lock your disk if you don't prepare for it.

For reference:

https://www.linuxliteos.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=9145

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=430251

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/bitlocker-and-tpm-blocks-the-hard-disk-after-booting-from-usb-and-pressing-try-ubuntu/57833/17

Probably written by CowPilot

just MS things. changing things for no apparent reason to make it worse to use and also remove existing features that people actually liked

Like half of open source is just devs trying to satisfy their very specific needs

I mean, they could just let their awesome Copilot vibe code it, couldn't they?

This is one of the best proofs that the AI industry is full of bullshit. If we can let the AI code everything now, where are our leaps in traditional, existing software?

Even if it will brick your system.

you can do whatever even it it doesn’t make sense to the majority of users.

If they could do math, they'd know that you should fit every decision for all users you can think about, not the majority. Because the majority is different for every dimension, and if you choose a different strategy, your end result won't be usable for anyone.

There was a while back some Windows developer externally lamenting how ass-backwards they were and as a result their NT kernel was woefully under-featured compared to other contemporary OSes...

Then I think they forced him to take it back and say 'um actually our kernel is actually super awesome, my mistake'.

Yeah this doesn't make sense. Docked bars have worked fine since Windows 95. You could have the task bar on any side, and apps would handle it. You could have multiple docked bars too, as some third-party apps used to be dockable. For example, Winamp had a view that was a short bar stretching the entire width of the screen, stuck to the top of the screen. The windowing system handled it with no issues.

-50 social points, it will impact your 365 licenses on a monthly bases

Four years ago, Recall wasn't a thing. Microsoft was caught as off-guard by the AI hype machine as the rest of us. So I doubt this was originally the reason.

Might be now, though.

This is such a weird take. Recall wasn’t even a glimmer in M$’s eye when this limitation was introduced. And it would take virtually nothing to add positions to the training, never mind the fact that they could just completely ignore the taskbar since the OS always knows where it is.

I think you're overinterpreting a bit. Actually the MS-droid doesn't really say anything. Just that the taskbar is not movable. Which was exactly the question.Typical evasion strategy.

It couldn't be that hard to make new code that achieves the same thing with the new taskbar.

They keep re-implementing things.

Just the Start menu. You can see how 95 evolved into 98 evolved into ME, then they changed it for XP, and they never stopped making big pointless changes. In many cases, those big pointless changes have been lengthening the process of going from the bare desktop to the thing you need by adding pointless screens and dialogs. Or, like the Start menu, they just drastically redesigned it such that a user used to Win XP tries to use 7 and they just...stare at it because it's not what they were expecting. Windows 7's Start menu might even be objectively better, Microsoft's software engineers could very well produce good research documentation about UI design based on observing or polling users about what features they wanted and then they made the thing people seemed to want, but to people who got used to how it already worked the new thing was bad because it's different.

I could be convinced Windows 8.1 is a mental unwellness simulator. In Sierra's FMV horror game Phantasmagoria 2, the player character goes insane at work, and this is simulated by the paperwork he's working on flashing scarier words for a split second. You're reading this document and then near the bottom of the page an ordinary word like "recommended" turns to "murdered" for a few frames. Win 8.1's animated tiles reminded me of that. Plus the whole "The desktop and all normal Windows apps therein is itself just an app that can be run in split screen next to special phone-like single tasking apps which pretty much only we will develop for and we won't include desktop versions of so you have to deal with this." I hate Windows 8.1.

What's real fun is you can tell when they abandoned work on a project by which drastically different UI it's encrusted with. The modem dialer looks like Windows XP, the fax program looks like Vista, some things have the flat purple stank of 8, some things have the dark glass look of early 10.

for power users? absolutely. but nobody who isn't tech savvy even knows what control panel is anymore.

For printers, go to DEVICES > let it load it all > more devices settings (towards bottom) - to open old school printer control panel. Major pain in the ass.

It's the one drive cramming that really gets me, well also changing the right click context menu to hide cut and paste, wtf.

But seriously, not letting you move the Onedrive pin down the hotlinks sidebar out of the way? Extremely annoying.

I thought it was just me, it's so fucking "bulky" and slow on my work computer. Specs are fine on the laptop, windows 11 is just trash even without bringing up what it's lacking and difficult to navigate.

And I know my way around windows very well, I can do nearly all my tasks with just a keyboard, don't even need a mouse for the gui.

Oh man, I remember marveling at BeOS in the day and for a brief moment in time when SSDs first hit the scene you could have a credibly fast Windows boot.... Nowadays it's worse than ever despite super fast storage, fastest CPUs, and gobs of RAM...

That's the start menu. They probably built the task bar with Electron.

Different design pressures. KDE knowing they put in the work to keep it versatile now, they will always have more options in the future.

Microsoft is basically admitting they have no future.

Can you have different taskbar setup depending on the number of monitors and have it change automatically when you connect/disconnect external monitors?

Put one taskbar on every side of the screen

I'm on linux because of Microsoft

It's never been done before, and can never be done after, obviously. Not a chance. Nope. It's not like it worked before, not like windows placement is not really the business of the taskbar app, not like it works with almost every other DE/OS, too.

Absolutely impossible. Microsoft, that apparently did not make windows up until now otherwise they'd know this explanation is pure bullshit, have absolutely no way, no resources, no knowledge on how to setup the available rectangular area on the screen for window placement. Nope.

My Plasma Panel is on the top and I wouldn't want it anywhere else.

I just find it hilarious that the top/right/left toolbar was possible in windows 95/98/ME

but its to much of a technical problem to do today.

I guess thats what you get with AI doing all your coding..

If your thinking way is true, I am trully afraid of how many people used ai in win10...

How tf do they get telemetry for features that haven't been added yet.

Using BSDs is for Unix fetishists, honestly. I've been such. It's very pleasant to use FreeBSD on supported configuration, or OpenBSD on supported configuration and when you don't need anything impossible (like Wine).

But when you are a normal person who just wants to do normal things and live, Linux is more likely to be the thing, and Fedora will do.

In practice. In theory you might think you'd like GuixSD or NixOS, but in practice you won't spend the time on setting them up. Or Slackware, but it's even more bother. Or Arch, but it's too messy, stuff breaks and it's normal. You either want experience similar to BSDs or lack of bother similar to BSDs. For the former, there are plenty of distributions with ideology to spend days on setting up. For the latter, just install Fedora.

I'm using Void because that's what I installed the last time and forgot. But if I were choosing now, I'd probably, yes, just install Fedora.

And it's a shame they are slowly killing Windows. It could have been a nice desktop OS. There's some cultural similarity to Amiga that isn't felt under Unix-likes. And NT is interesting to read about.

I hope we'll have more pluralism in future. On the humus of today's tech.

It's not even unreasonable. If this is the kind of incompetence guides something as simple as the task bar, I don't want to think about how fucked the rest of the code is.

Same.

Hey copilot, code me a new start menu that restores classic functionality.

Copilot: “I can’t do that, Dave.”

People are fleeing into Linux & MacOS in droves. If this trend holds, Ms will lose majority in ~8 years.

Easily sorted and the old right-click menu can be reinstated along with a whole loads of other tweaks -

https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat

“People find the right-click menu overwhelming, so we’ll reduce it from 23 options to 19 options. That’ll make it less confusing and won’t annoy the people who now need an extra click for basic functionality “

Its just a registry entry that you have to change.

It is a registry key that you can add to return it to normal. If you want I can find it for you!

The data shows everyone uses their Windows 11 taskbar at the bottom of the screen. You can't argue with that.

Skewed telemetry probably, as most users that are aware you can move the taskbar are also aware you can just disable the phone home crap and will therefore not show up in the statistics.

I miss the old days, when the opposite seemed true about every other major release, though the early bars were low so that was straight progress for 1.0 through 95.

*letting a corporation decide how you're gonna use your computer

Yeah I'm using startallback and it just works.
Except for the notification bar, which shows up on the wrong screen, but i don't much care about that.

That's disappointing; I always thought the one thing they got right was the 98/XP interface that Cinnamon copied.

But widgets!!!

/s

They'll only allow those generated using Copilot.

Different issues and learning curve, but yes, fuck windows 11. Zorin FTW

Until you accidentally delete the taskbar panel.

If the taskbar position changes then the screen dimensions available to applications change - windows may need to be moved and resized. The applications themselves handle that. Of course, they need to be able to do this anyway so it's not really an issue.

just saying, if I have to install some sketchy software to restore functionality that has existed on the platform flawlessly for almost four decades then it's not a viable platform anymore.

This is handy for home users, but at work I am stuck. Installing third party software is not allowed.

More than that are they just ignoring windowing an application and resizing it to fit? You know, the namesake of their operating system?

wait, did they do away with the primary monitor designation?

isn't that like the only thing that makes a "primary monitor" special - the taskbar? why can't you just set another monitor as primary?

I don't use win11, if it's not obvious, lol

Display settings > select monitor, check box "main display"

Pouring resources into it... Doesn't almost every other os/distro have this option?

Good question. Maybe they are required to by the Americans with Disabilities Act?

Forced to by governments.

Menu bar at the top at least makes some sense - it's easier to mouse to it, since you can't go too far. Having menus per-window like Linux, or like Windows used to before big ugly ribbons became the thing, is easier to overshoot. (Which is why I always open my menu bars by pressing 'alt' with my left thumb, and then using the keyboard shortcuts that are helpfully underlined. Window likes to hide those from you now since they're 'ugly', and also makes you mouse over the pretty icons to get the tooltip that tells you what they are, which is just a PITA. Pretty != usable.)

Mac OS has had the menu at the top since before it was a multitasking OS. They had them there on the first Mac I ever used, a Mac Classic 2 back in 1991 or so, and it was probably like that before then too. It's not like they've been 'innovating' that particular feature and annoying their users.

Or just Linux. Why even bother with BSD?

IT department says no.