I once accidentally bricked a windows install by replacing the system font with another font, while calling it the same. The system crashed on boot, and apparently the recovery menu also uses the same file, because it instantly crashed too. Had to do a complete reinstall of that one…
On the UI not being uniform, you may not have noticed, but it’s awful. They’ve fixed some stuff, but there was a point with win11 when 40% of the apps were light theme when you had dark theme. Even to this day, you have a complete mix of icons from different generations of windows in different menus (hell, there are still win95 icons in some places, and you can still set them up as folder icons). Some apps, despite rendering with the modern w11 style, clearly have the structure from decades ago (in fact, to this day, you can find menus from windows 3.11 in windows 11, and it also comes with the dialer app hidden in System32). Context menus are also another incredibly inconsistent thing, and for the longest time, win11 had 3 types of context menu styles that were used seemingly at random (some of the context menus also rendered in light mode even when the system-wide dark mode was enabled)
That sucks, yea I’ve broken windows by changes I’ve made as well, never to the extent that I’ve had to reinstall though, but I’ve definitely broke the boot system making changes or have had to uninstall updates for some changes. That being said, the recovery menu uses a whole separate image, usually on it’s own partition, so I’m surprised changing the font on your System was even able to break recovery, that’s impressive.
as for UI, I give a pass to anything that is marked as deprecated as those are decommissioned, but yea if you include the windows 7 interfaces that were never upgraded to the new unified UI design, I agree with you. That or if you include third party software, but I don’t feel that’s a fair comparison.
UX wise? I havent noticed any of that. The most I’ve noticed are that context menus are basically useless now as they remove or moved the pieces that I always used, so moreorless I just use keyboard shortcuts for everything when on windows. A common complaint I have on the new unified settings area is how much it doesn’t look like the older stuff. The menus lack features present in the old system, and if the settings do exist, they are in a different area. With control panel I used to be able to access my settings all in one spot. Now I can look for a specific setting and have to look in three different places for it.
I get the feeling Microsoft often starts modernization projects and abandons them halfway through. That’s why we still have the modern and the classic control panel. Even their web apps have this problem - there is an old version of the Exchange administration panel and a new one. And it’s been like that for a decade.
They’re just piling new junk on top of old junk and it shows.
I agree with this. they start a major overhaul and then never finish. the half baked integrated settings using the unified settings system was a perfect example, where they still haven’t got feature parity to the old systems.
I once accidentally bricked a windows install by replacing the system font with another font, while calling it the same. The system crashed on boot, and apparently the recovery menu also uses the same file, because it instantly crashed too. Had to do a complete reinstall of that one…
On the UI not being uniform, you may not have noticed, but it’s awful. They’ve fixed some stuff, but there was a point with win11 when 40% of the apps were light theme when you had dark theme. Even to this day, you have a complete mix of icons from different generations of windows in different menus (hell, there are still win95 icons in some places, and you can still set them up as folder icons). Some apps, despite rendering with the modern w11 style, clearly have the structure from decades ago (in fact, to this day, you can find menus from windows 3.11 in windows 11, and it also comes with the dialer app hidden in System32). Context menus are also another incredibly inconsistent thing, and for the longest time, win11 had 3 types of context menu styles that were used seemingly at random (some of the context menus also rendered in light mode even when the system-wide dark mode was enabled)
That sucks, yea I’ve broken windows by changes I’ve made as well, never to the extent that I’ve had to reinstall though, but I’ve definitely broke the boot system making changes or have had to uninstall updates for some changes. That being said, the recovery menu uses a whole separate image, usually on it’s own partition, so I’m surprised changing the font on your System was even able to break recovery, that’s impressive.
as for UI, I give a pass to anything that is marked as deprecated as those are decommissioned, but yea if you include the windows 7 interfaces that were never upgraded to the new unified UI design, I agree with you. That or if you include third party software, but I don’t feel that’s a fair comparison.
UX wise? I havent noticed any of that. The most I’ve noticed are that context menus are basically useless now as they remove or moved the pieces that I always used, so moreorless I just use keyboard shortcuts for everything when on windows. A common complaint I have on the new unified settings area is how much it doesn’t look like the older stuff. The menus lack features present in the old system, and if the settings do exist, they are in a different area. With control panel I used to be able to access my settings all in one spot. Now I can look for a specific setting and have to look in three different places for it.
I get the feeling Microsoft often starts modernization projects and abandons them halfway through. That’s why we still have the modern and the classic control panel. Even their web apps have this problem - there is an old version of the Exchange administration panel and a new one. And it’s been like that for a decade.
They’re just piling new junk on top of old junk and it shows.
I agree with this. they start a major overhaul and then never finish. the half baked integrated settings using the unified settings system was a perfect example, where they still haven’t got feature parity to the old systems.
I once found a dialog that default searched for a:/ in a windows 98 style popup. Pretty sure it was early windows 10