And pretty much everything about Windows 11 & Office 365 proves it.

StartAllBack to the rescue, looking at my vertical taskbar :)

(free trial, then USD 4.99 if you like it)

Unfortunately not if you have corporate virus/malware scanners. Both startallback and explorerpatcher throw up all kinds of alerts. Which might be false positives, but it's not something you can argue with the security people.

Windhawk is what you need, it is free and can do so much more.

Winhawk is very dangerous and greatly depends on trusting random Internet developers.

If you let users move it to the top, they will start asking why it doesn't work like on their friend's Mac.

When the users I supported were on. Windows 10, I do not recall a single one wanting the news widget or extended search widget. They were very pleased when I told them how to get rid of them.

The default settings of the news widget are a Windows enforced ADHD. Accidentally drag your mouse too far to the bottom right and page after page of useless and often outdated trivia and listicles takes over.

... plus Windows enforced fake news.

I don't know who curates the "news sources" for the News widget, but I have never observed any incarnation of the News widget which contained reputable news.

It is tabloid at best, fake news slingers at worst.

So, your choice is on the spectrum between plague and cholera.

A friend just shared her first experience of W11 with me. She calls it schizophrenic. 'If it were a horse we'd describe it as hot: "hey I have an idea... ooh whats this over here?" '

"The vision," Parakhin writes on X (formerly Twitter), "was to create symmetric panes: you have notification/system controls/etc. pane on the right, Weather/Widgets/News pane on the left. That pushed start menu into the center position."

And there we have the moron.

I do not want Weather, Widgets or News pane

Thus, once I have successfully gotten rid of this useless bloat, I have an unused left half of the taskbar, while the right half is filling up with stuff that actually does something. Stuff will then have to be reduced in sice because there is no space.

The colored crayon department in Microsoft should stop eating all the crayons.

"I do not want Weather, Widgets or News pane"

My wife loves 'em. Uses them all the time.

Have you considered divorce?

No one gave a crap about the Internet Explorer 4 "Channel Bar" either. Or the stupid widgets they tried in Vista.

Exactly, it's not like they haven't tried this before. Every time they've tried adding widgets, they've crashed and burned because the vast majority of people don't want them. But this is Microsoft - never let the users get in the way of screwing things up eh!

Start menu, app quicklaunch icons including show desktop, large space for open windows which is empty if no windows are open, some icons (mainly volume and network), clock.

I think XP set me up this way and its stuck and now that is how I WANT to interface with my PC. Please just let me use "my" computer in a way that makes sense to me.

please

That is one thing.

The borked start menue is the other. No groups, no fixed positions for icons. When I have more than one Windows Terminal Server with certain programs running there and the same programs being installed locally as well it is really helpful if I can just open the bloody start menue and choose the icon from the group under which it was sorted in. No, I do not want bloody folders in the quick start pane. It adds another click.

And this is from a company that had the really nice phone OS, where things you wanted to do regulalry were accessible as quickly as possible. Too bad they pissed off the developers so much that apps were just not happening. Most of what I needed was available on Win8.1 - local transportation app included. Though nowadays since many things are essentially web applications the gap could be closed.

Here's a list of things you did recently.

Yes... and now I want to do something else.

I liked the Windows XP/7 program launcher on the start button where things stayed where they were.

Microsoft wants people to pay for Microsoft AI, Spyware and Ads.

Even if Windows 11 was free I would not use it.

As a paid product? No thank you.

Wait until they move Windows under the 365 banner.

Then, it will be a moot point about the task bar customisation when we won't be able to depend on being able to get to the taskbar 24x7x365

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has configured all devices with GPOs / Intune to left-align the start menu and remove widgets...

Ah yes the Weather/Widgets/News crap. The second thing I disable after the useless search box.

> "The vision," Parakhin writes on X (formerly Twitter), "was to create symmetric panes: you have notification/system controls/etc. pane on the right, Weather/Widgets/News pane on the left. That pushed start menu into the center position."

I would restate this as: "we took 25 years of your experience with our product and set light to in the car park to further our agenda to further monetise the thing you already paid for"

And then they, of course, did what they could to stop us configuring it back to how we like it. :-(

So just make it - bring up a menu? What more needs to be done to a menu than to have it - be a menu.

Could add fluff, like make it reflect the directory structure in a "special" folder (or vice versa, depending upon how you want to think of of it, with right-click actions on the menu to mirror folder actions) so you can easily move items to the place you want, rename them, edit the properties etc etc. Maybe have *some* "magic" entries which show some more programmatic entries, like one which shows most-recently-used items, one for a search bar, ... BUT you get to choose which ones are present.

Most importantly, if - when - you have decided what goes where (grouped in submenus that make sense to you) things stay where they are put!

I have a Windows 11 laptop that I bought since nothing but newer Windows (maybe Mac) could access our latest provincial health care website. Luckily I don't have to use it much. Oh, now I have to use Teams occasionally.

Let me know when Windows can again run like I've run for decades: Monitor is in portrait mode, tool/task/whatever bar is on the right, since I'm righthanded, and I've put a regular menu set up top, then time and data transfer widgets, then a separator bar, then launchers for xterm, Firefox, my icons for "stop my rarely used spinny disk", "run "sleep 10; xset dpms force off" ", then some timewaster icons, another separator bar, and just the expandible widget that shows all my windows. Oh, and arrow widgets at top and bottom to hide the whole thing as desired.

Everybody gets used to different things; its been around for decades to allow them to do their own things. Keep that capability! Sheesh!

Optimized for Microsoft, not for the user. That's about the sum of it.

They got it right in 1995 when they aped the RISC OS taskbar. They didn't need to change it after that.

But they did ... to force the user to see what *they* wanted the user to see. Internet Explorer, Bing Search, Cortana (which is really Clippy), Copilot (which is really Cortana), OneDrive, more OneDrive, ads, ads, ads, ads, and more OneDrive.

They got it right, once, and have been ruining it ever since.

"Locking the taskbar to the bottom feels like a step backward in user control."

Or the sort of thing that the Gnome devs would think was a good idea.

(Hint) It's not and generally gets people's backs up.

And far from just visual things... the global hotkeys have all been eaten up by crap tie-ins and become notkeys

With a "Windows 2000, but adjusted to dark" theme. The only thing I miss is grouping of the same tasks, i.e. explorer or outlook tasks. But I rather have that pre-vista-non-grouping, which I got used to now, than a horizontal task bar. For work machines taskbar left, for home machines on the right.

As for the start menu: Meh, the default one is "good enough" before doing anything which collides with [1]RetroBar.

[1] https://github.com/dremin/RetroBar