I'm a fan of a lot of the user experience improvements being made in Windows over the last decade, such as Terminal, running Linux, Power Toys features, screenshots & recording, Paint finally getting layers, window management & more.
At the same time, I'm still not sure why we needed Windows 11 as the only good updates seem like they could have been done without it. All the visual changes have seemed to cause bugs & performance issues on relatively high powered PCs (64GB+ memory, m2 ssd drives, latest gen mid level GPU & CPU)
It seems the Windows ME, Vista, etc experiment continues to live on.
When executing a sequence of actions, not having to wait 100-300ms for the device to show some random animation before inputing the next action is a time saver and a removes the "why is my computer/phone wasting my time" feeling.
Human reaction time is around 200ms but in a sequence of actions, we don't need visual feedback to move to the next action; it's just muscle memory and we can reach pretty low delay between inputs if the OS and apps do not impede us.
Back to Windows, I'm quite sad that 24H2 removed support for the legacy app switcher (alt-tab). It was very low latency and operated well in many high-load situations. The new one works okay but is not as snappy and can take a bit of time to show up under load. Plus I prefer the old style (smaller box, no need for eye movement to check its content).
ExplorerPatcher makes it easy to configure in the settings menu, I'm not aware of any other projects that implement SWS: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
It's very fast and can be configured to set window thumbnail size/area
Yep. Sure. Going to let a Russian utility fuck with winlogon.exe. Excellent idea.
Increase contrast
Reduce transparency
Differentiate without color
Show toolbar button shapes
I like the retro and simple vibe compared to the new Liquid Glass controls.
Two different UIs meant that you had to learn them separately, you didn't have a slow ramp from one to the other, one familiar with one could get stuck on the other with no knowledge of how to get back, divided efforts between the two, etc.
Not quite what you are asking for, but closer to Win95 shipping with progman.exe which could allow someone to cosplay Win3.11 while running Win95.
I wonder if this will have the same issues?
This is just one Windhawk mod, submitted by a community member. There are hundreds others. Windhawk was created to simplify Windows customization and to make it more accessible, both for developers and users. For a more detailed introduction, check out the Windhawk release blog post:
throwaway270925•1h ago