Minor things that bother you

[bugo]

Congratulations on the change. If you've gotten used to it and are still interested in learning more about using it, and haven't run into anything that you can't do at all without Windows, that means you're probably in it for the long haul. It doesn't take too long before you get used to the relative "peace and quiet" of Linux, and the next time you have to use Windows you'll wonder how you ever put up with how intentionally annoying it is..

This isn't the first time I've used Linux. I installed Redhat in the early 2000s, but I didn't use it that much. I dual booted an old computer I had with Mint, and I used it quite a bit. There are things that Windows will do but it won't. I got Adobe Reader and an ancient version of iTunes working using Wine. I don't like everything about Debian, but in everyday use, it's not that much different from Windows.

[Scott5114]

Congratulations on the change. If you've gotten used to it and are still interested in learning more about using it, and haven't run into anything that you can't do at all without Windows, that means you're probably in it for the long haul. It doesn't take too long before you get used to the relative "peace and quiet" of Linux, and the next time you have to use Windows you'll wonder how you ever put up with how intentionally annoying it is..

This isn't the first time I've used Linux. I installed Redhat in the early 2000s, but I didn't use it that much. I dual booted an old computer I had with Mint, and I used it quite a bit. There are things that Windows will do but it won't. I got Adobe Reader and an ancient version of iTunes working using Wine. I don't like everything about Debian, but in everyday use, it's not that much different from Windows.

Having used it continuously since 2005, my experience has been there is almost always a way to do something that Windows will do, but you have to be willing to be flexible in the software you use. So for example, if you hadn't been able to get Adobe Reader to work in Wine, that wouldn't have meant Linux can't read PDFs, because Okular can read them just fine (and I would say even better than Adobe Reader because it ignores DRM restrictions and can view many other types of documents besides PDFs).

There are only two situations I can think of where Linux sometimes absolutely can't do something Windows can. One is when a device manufacturer is being an ass and not only won't release a Linux driver, but intentionally make it difficult for a third-party developer to do so. That can be avoided by doing a little bit of research before buying a device, and by buying devices that have been out for a while rather than bleeding-edge devices that haven't had time for someone to come up with a driver for them. The other situation is when you work in an industry that requires extremely niche software that also uses a proprietary file format no other program can export to. Wine can sometimes help with that but if it can't, I would just have to suck it up and change jobs.

[Scott5114]

Windows 11 ... taskbar ...

Nothing is more stupid than the fact you can no longer move the taskbar to the side of the screen.

I can think of something more stupid, but it will take a little bit to explain.

There's this thing in desktop computer UI design called Fitts's law. It says that the ease of clicking a target is the distance from the current position of cursor, multiplied by the size of the target. So if you want to make something easily accessible, you need to make it really big, or you need to make it really close. The right-click menu, for instance, is a way of making the most important things always be really close to the cursor. But you can't put everything on the right-click menu, so you have to resort to making some things big instead.

But obviously, there's limited screen space, so you can't make everything really big. But there's a hack to that. See, a cursor can't go off the edge of the screen. It doesn't matter how fast you throw the cursor at the edge of the screen, it will never go over it. That means if something is along the edge of the screen, you need no precision to select it. Therefore, for the purposes of Fitts' Law, it is infinitely big. And if you put a button in the corner of the screen, you have two edges to work with, meaning that the button infinitely big in two dimensions, meaning you are practically guaranteed to hit it any time you want to. So that means if you want to put a really important button somewhere, the absolute best place to put it is in the corner of the screen.

So now the stupid thing.

Windows 11 moved the Start button from the corner of the screen to the middle.