TIL those exist (genuinely).
I’ve never met anyone who likes windows, just people who put up with it for work/gaming and people who doesn’t care about the whole thing enough to move from the default (which is totally understandable).
He was also really good at Microsoft Word, unironically - he made extensive use of custom styling and could format an assignment paper in like 30 seconds. He was super useful in group projects.
I used to laugh at the LaTeX masochists in college spending 15 minutes just to put a picture where they wanted the picture to be. They had to add like four 1-character modifiers to the "insert image" command, each of which meant "yes, really here", "no, don't move it to the next page" and "nono, really really here".
MS Word is properly great if you only use the custom style rules (basically CSS classes) at the paragraph level, and never directly apply styling (basically inline styles) except for super basic stuff like making a word italic. Has great referencing tools etc, fantastic formula editor and so on. And, well, you can use ultra modern human-machine interaction technology such as a mouse to choose where a picture goes and how big it is.
(They might've enshittified it since; the last paper I wrote was in 2010 and Word was pretty damn decent back then)
I'm pretty much still on the same setup now, Win11 plus touchscreen. You'll pry my touchscreen out of my cold dead hands. How will I rage-close a "try chrome" popup without a touch screen? You ever try to rage click something with a touchpad? Total non starter.
MS word also has character styles (like a CSS style on a <span>). IMO you should use instead of bold or italic.
(There are three more types of styles: linked, table and List. See https://office-watch.com/2022/word-five-types-styles/)
That said, for work I've switched to Linux full-time years ago. Native containers are a killer feature for me, and the different UX and driver/dependency/repository issues aren't significant enough to make me want to go back to virtualization in Windows.
But I rarely use Windows. I used to like it but for me XP was so ugly and bloated I switched to Linux and OS X full-time. I've never looked back.
I just play occasionally to keep my skills vaguely current. Sometimes I need to work with it.
Windows 11 is awful. Bloated, full of ads and nags, forcibly keeps your stuff in the crappy MS cloud drive for which there's no Linux GUI client.
You can't even put the taskbar on the left edge where it belongs.
Worse than Vista or Win ME or even Win 8.x.
I moved all my emergency Windows partitions to Win10 IoT LTSC. Quite unbloated, proper local accounts, no Store, no Onedrive, no Modern apps at all. It's what Win10 should have been.
And it's getting updates until 2032.
So, Windhawk looks fun but I don't need it.
- Slick Window Arrangement (better window snapping): https://windhawk.net/mods/slick-window-arrangement
- Better file sizes in Explorer details: https://windhawk.net/mods/explorer-details-better-file-sizes
If it's not for some specific games or programs, I don't see a single reason to still use Windows in 2026.
Yeah, just as I can "choose" to root my Android phone. I can do that, yes, but the result will be that Netflix, banking apps and most games refuse to even start.
A long time ago, I used "7+ Taskbar Tweaker" that added a lot of nice things to Windows 7, like reordering the tasks in the taskbar. Now I'm remembering that the best feature was to ungroup the windows of the same task, that was super nice to edit two documents in Word
It used a lot of magic, probably overwriting dll calls in the kernel of Windows. It looks like it only partially support Windows 11 https://ramensoftware.com/7-taskbar-tweaker
There is a difference between grouping and combining, and 7TT provided many more options.
Way to make me feel old! I'm still using it!
> …to Windows 7
Aah that's better.
The tool still works on 10 btw, and offers some options not available otherwise - eg properly narrow taskbar when vertical (about small icon width wide).
To give an example: I use AutoHotkey, it's a scripting language for Windows that allows you to do a bunch of things. You can customize the keyboard, mouse, you can create menus and toolboxes, you can target specific applications inside. It's a fantastic tool. But it isn't available for Linux for obvious reasons; Linux is much more fragmented. You need like 3 or 5 different programs to achieve the same result in some cases, depending on your given script.
In other words: debloating Windows and customizing it is considerably easier than installing Linux. Let alone some really good software you end up finding along the way: Everything, which is an amazing search program that allows you to create custom categories and the like. EmEditor, which is really good software to open and visualize really large text files, like it can open a 4GB txt with no problems.
About the last sentence:
>If customisability is important
People value both things: customisability but also they value their time (of not having to come up with a new workflow), they value the programs and workflow they already learned to use through the years, and so on and so forth.
Back in the day you could use nLite and the like to replace W98's shell with the Windows 95 one, but keeping the compatibility. On GNU/Linux and BSD, you could use FVWM instead of bloated environments, or Fluxbox, IceWM... and still run things fast.
With current Windows tons of components are interleaved.
Why is this not possible.
You can also add shortcuts to folders in the taskbar and use Win+Digit to open them.
davydm•2h ago
It's a corporate operating system, not a user operating system. If you want to customise your desktop experience and have a stable time of it - this is not your platform, sorry. There is really only one platform for customisation: linux. Because distros and software there have been _designed_ around user choice.
Hacks are cool, but inevitably open up vulnerability pathways, not to mention issues with stability and being able to receive security patches, rolled into windows update. It's fine if it's just a personal pc you can reload at any point, but it's pointless for a machine that you require to keep functioning (eg a work machine, or, my personal machine, which does stuff like organise media on a regular basis).
aleph_minus_one•1h ago
At least older versions of Windows were quite modifiable: not as radical as on GNU/Linux, but there were a lot of possibilities.
Rather with the arrival of smartphones and rising popularity of macOS (which all were rather about "enjoying" a prescribed user experience), Microsoft did a U-turn and started applying this (anti-(?))pattern to Windows, too.
hrmtst93837•34m ago