r/Windows11

Windows just seem to love messing around with your settings once in a while, mostly on personalization settings. I have mine set for windows spotlight, and my color to change automatically. But once in a while it changes back to "picture" for the background option and very occassionally, to a solid color. And it chooses to be "black", thinking my windows has been deactivated.

Edit: This is a work laptop. This also happens on my gaming PC at home.

Instead of replacing it with arguably the worst mailing client in software industry, aka New Outlook..

Hi, I have never used reddit before so I hope not to mess this up.

I just created a petition on change.org to add country flag emojis to Windows (and every Microsoft product really). I just hate that this is not a thing and I saw a lot of people complaining about it online too, so I guess I thought "why not?". This might not change anything but i figured that taking a shot wouldn't hurt. Plus, never underestimate the power of the internet, right?

This is the link to the petition, sign it and share it, let's go viral! -->

Since the Windows Vista and 7 days, the option to set scaling less than 100% has been removed. For users like me who use 1080p displays larger than 20" the UI looks big. With Windows 11, do you all think it's a good time to bring it back?

Edit: Couldn't they handle the scaling like how browsers do it?

I'm talking about Windows 11 24H2 Can't microsoft just call it Windows 12? I mean, won't that be better for both their marketing stuff and my uncontrollable OCD? (there must be a new one every 3 years)

What program can I use to convert PDFs into image files? Like individual pages to JPG? I want it as high a resolution as possible and don't want to have to pay Adobe's ridiculous prices for a feature that should be in all PDF readers 🙄

I didn't really pay any attention to this little detail of windows apps before but when opening Edge or Firefox for example the application windows will be bright white for a second before the UI loads in. It was super noticeable after I bought the new Surface pro yesterday and was using the device in the dark with the screen brightness turned as low as possible.

I wish Windows would use a dark empty window before the UI loads if using the dark desktop theme.

Link to feedback hub

Hello

For decades we have had the progress bar in the green colored taskbar, maybe MS could use the accent color to replace that really not pretty green

Which would be much better aesthetically
Especially since W10, we can no longer change this color with themes

I think that one of the new features that should be added for the 24H2 release of Windows 11 is the ability to Pin app folders right onto the taskbar and the Desktop. I think this would be very useful to some users...

I'm dead serious about this! This has got to be the worst feature removal ever! Like, I tried making a virtual SD, it worked, and then the removal of the same needs the third party software nowadays? Get outta here. Anyone defending this is an idiot. It worked fine before, so why change it? It makes things unnecessarily difficult and unintuitive to use.

Also, what's up wtih the double right click feature? That makes things even more unintuitive. Bring back the old one.

Whoever at Microsoft thought those were good ideas? Need I remind you that it is soon required to use Windows 11 to receive updates?

Edit: See? People here are idiots defending it with proof of unnecessary complexity. You're giving me the advantage here. Not by numbers, but with proof.

[ Huge rant incoming. ]

So since windows 11, Notepad now has this very useful and intuitive new tabs feature.

Some very funny things to note:

• Clicking the big red X in the top right that screams "click me to close" doesn't close your tab.

• Just viewing a file creates a tab, that needs to be manually closed before closing the window.

• If you open a file you already opened, it will create a new tab every time. So for example if you have a password file and you just looked at the (same) file 27 times to remember a password, this will create 27 tabs.

• Each tab is a seperate copy of that file. It's really it's own instance, not just a reference or a history feature.

Here's what happened:

I do a lot of savegame editing/modding. If possible I almost always use notepad for this. It's not like I always know exactly what I am looking for and so often times it can be that I open 20 different files before I finally find what I am looking for. As said this will store 20 copies/tabs of these files in notepad.

Lately I was trying to do this for this game (ck3) that stores almost all the info for a savegame into these files. It's a management/strategy game so there's a ton of data stored into one single file. These files were thus really laggy and took an insane time to open. Like always I did some messing around and inspecting to get a feel for how the game works, what it stores and what was possible, all using notepad. By the time I was done I had like 60+ tabs just from opening some files. Even just closing notepad took a while by this point.

As said this was making it really laggy and it didn't seem like a good idea to store all these large tabs, so I decided to remove all the tabs in the hopes it wouldn't take ages to open a file anymore. Doing it one by one seemed too tedious so I just right-clicked on the tabs and selected "remove other tabs". This wasn't much of a help either since it would just do them one by one and prompt me to "save" or "don't save" every time. Like I said they were pretty large files that take like 5-10 mins to open and close. So it would be 5-10 mins wait, prompt, click, wait again, prompt. It would only move onto the next one after I made the choice... I have a pretty beefy pc so seeing it only use a fraction of the available resources, instead of doing them all at once, was pretty horrendous.

Anyway I knew that the problem was the prompt to save so I stopped the process and just decided to save everything, so it wouldn't prompt me each time. I know I always save my files anyway and the ones that were not saved were these large test files that were causing the problem anyway. Notepad (like many apps) has this dot next to each file you have unsaved changes to. So naturally when I hit save all it would save were my unsaved changes right? right??
IT
SAVED
EVERYTHING
Every file I had ever opened even once with notepad was reverted to it's state when I last opened it!

This dot didn't mean anything. I am talking about game files, save files so many save files, logs from my programming that I inspected once with notepad but were edited after using code, all got overwritten by an older version/copy of itself. That's talking about the stuff I know off, who knows what damage I've done to all these dozen of files I've just opened and closed once. I have no clue what files they even are...

WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND EVEN MADE THIS STUFF? I mean sure if it was something like "Vim" or the command line I used to edit my files, then sure it would've been my fault. But this is the same thing that my grandma would use to edit her files. How can the simplest of apps be made to cause this much damage??

I know this is not a tech support subreddit and the focus is on the rant, but the following things would help a lot:

• Do these save operations get logged anywhere, so I can see what tasks notepad issued and the files affected?

• I've not shut down my pc yet, is there any way to restore to before this all happened or retrieve the changes?

During Brazilian Portuguese Windows installations, whenever the keyboard options are presented and you choose ABNT2 instead of ABNT, you'll end up getting both in the end, having to manually remove ABNT every f*cking time.

I don't know if it's indented or it's a longstanding bug, but it's just annoying. Please, kindly fix it.

Surely it would make sense that the icon for the ressource would have a waiting spinner itself instead of freezing the whole damn operating system ....

I absolutely hate that when i want to access my C or D drive that i have to wait for my Network drive to become ready...

This happens all over Windows Explorer.

I've been angry about this for about 25 years ever since i started working with network drives in Windows - though the same thing happened with CD and DVD drives.

The snipping tool has broken my file directory in some way. Deleting its default folder file path simply creates all of the folders to remake said file path. Moving the folder to a different folder gives me a error of saying that the screenshots folder already exists inside the path I am moving it to when there is no such folder in there.

Decades ago the Pro stood for Professional. The Pro version has some advantages tailored towards more professional as well as power users. Why not just make Windows Pro Windows, but without all the bloat professional and power users don't want?

• No ads for MS services

• No sponsored content

• No online account constraint

• AI stuff all optional and only install on demand

• Only basic telemetry like Windows version, crash reports etc.

Make Windows Home free, put in what you want, take 300€ for the Pro version and people stop complaining.

This is just my opinion from a developers point of view who is currently not using Windows because of the current philosophy they have.

Windows used to provide a relatively consistent experience that got out of your way and let you do your work. This is not the case today, as the remnants of generations of terrible half-baked ideas have turned the experience into an inconsistent, glitchy, and bloated mess. The current Windows out-of-the-box experience is objectively worse than MacOS, which is probably why Windows 11 remains unpopular while Macbooks are on the rise. MS, how about you focus on fixing these instead of introducing "AI" features nobody asked for?

These are just some of the basic glitchy / inconsistent things that severely degrade the current windows experience:

• Inconsistent UI, with many UI elements from Win32 / Metro / "Modern" / Web eras, often in the same app.

• Incomplete settings app that still needs elements from the old control panel

• Touchpad gestures that take up to one whole second to register

• Really laggy and low frame rate transition animations for things like showing all apps and switching virtual desktops

• What's up with the windows explorer address bar? They unnecessarily replaced the legacy one more than a year ago and the new one is full of bugs without any obvious new feature. For example, it randomly steals your focus and shows suggested addresses even when you click somewhere else. It sometimes clears itself when you click, preventing you from copying or editing the current address. And sometimes I paste an address and it flat out refuses to go to the corresponding folder. I could go on and on with this...

• Really bizarre default Onedrive behavior where it tries to upload all "My documents" without permission, which in a lot of cases results in it running out of space.

• Ads on the start menu, windows explorer, etc.

I think there should be more pressure on them to fix these basic things instead of adding questionable features that they will inevitably stop caring about in two years.

Went to change my date and time settings last night, and it turned into an archaeological expedition. Whenever I go even slightly below the surface, the whole Windows interface is a complete jumble. I think I'm going to have to look into mods to see if there's any way to bring some unity to this mess.

I have spent countless hours researching and being excited for the X Elite products for many months. However, I am disappointed. The main feature I was excited for was a tremendous battery life. However, there is not a single Copilot + PC device released with a big battery (99.6 Watt Hours) like the one in the 16 inch MacBook Pro's. I'd instantly buy up a device with excellent speakers, a haptic touchpad, an OLED touchscreen with Windows ARM on the X Elite.

Edit: this complaint isn't just about Microsoft. None of the vendors are releasing really top end products that have maxed out options. All the PC makers are putting the X Elite in small and not so premium devices. I was really looking forward to buying a really high end laptop that'd last me for like 8 years. I desperately want to retire my trusty Intel laptop that has helped me for 8 years, but it is a heat generator first and a laptop second.