I couldn't agree with many of the things stated in this article more. I really
disliked Windows 8. Windows 10 was what made me move to a Mac for my next personal computer acquisition (I'm still stuck with Windows at work), but at least it grew on me after a while. I mean, I'm still not a huge fan of it but many of the rough edges got ironed out and I've gotten used to many of its quirks. Windows 11 on the other hand -- it's just so aggressively terrible that I actively dread using it. Just simple things like changing the volume, or changing the power settings on a laptop have become excruciatingly slow or require much more effort than before. In so many places text has been removed for the sake of "cleanliness" -- like in File Explorer, the Ribbon is now just a set of largely indistinguishable buttons with no labels that I'll never use. The Explorer context menu has been reduced to mostly things I don't care about and a more indistinguishable buttons I'll never use while burying the context menu things I really want behind another mouse click. (Thankfully there's a magic registry key that restores the old-style context menus.)

It's easy to point out the consistency issues -- and yeah, they are really bad, and everywhere making Windows 11 feel like an early beta, not a full fledged release. More than anything even basic stuff that's worked well for years or decades has regressed to a point where so many things are barely functional or even recognizable anymore. It's like some designer had MacOS described to them verbally and decided to redesign Windows to look similar. Unfortunately, the latest versions of MacOS aren't all that awesome either when it comes to consistency or usability. In so many ways the design decisions in Windows 11 feel like solutions in search of problems -- they certainly don't make my experience using it any better -- all they do is make me appreciate Windows 10 more than ever (never thought I'd have that sentiment). I keep hoping Windows 11 will get better but even on the latest Insider builds I see very little in the way of improvements to things I really care about so it gives me little confidence.

The article brings up a some great points about how there's no "one" UI framework and the difficulties for developers to make their applications look consistent -- and this is totally true. There's so many different UI frameworks from Microsoft with different levels of maturity, abandonment, usefulness, usability, and use. I'm a big fan of WPF and I think it's one of the best desktop UI frameworks out there -- and sadly it's largely been left to rot which is a real shame and it doesn't support many of the newer aspects of Windows without a lot of hacks. UWP is simply awful -- I swore it off after using it for one project. WinUI and MAUI have huge problems of their own and still feel beta. It makes you wonder what are you supposed to use for new projects when you're stuck with either a great framework that seems dead , or a bunch of new ones that don't feel production ready. This nearly 20 year old blog post from Joel Spolsky is just as relevant and prescient as ever: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...