mccIn my opinion, Microsoft Windows is pretty bad at its job.
GeePawHill@mcc Do tell.
Erick@GeePawHill I just somehow got the machine in a state where I had no start bar, alt-tabbing showed the Windows 95 UI for alt tabbing instead of the Windows 10 one, I couldn't take screenshots, and when I tried to reboot the restarting… screen softlocked.
@mcc Wow. *Nice!*
@GeePawHill This happened in the middle of an important business meeting! My coworker was delayed in performing a task because I was unable to upload a file.
It was really very impressive!
@mcc "Winning!"
Hisham@mcc @GeePawHill the takeaway of this story is a whimsical thought that, somewhere deep inside modern Windows, all the original components of the Windows 95 UI are still in there somewhere, and will come back to life like Toy Story toys waking up, but if only you do the right konami-code-like incantation—which you accidentally just did, but only halfway through.
Ongion 🥚🐞@hisham_hm @mcc @GeePawHill fun thing to do on Windows 11: open the old Control Panel (NOT the Settings app), and then press Alt + Up
mhoye@hisham_hm @mcc @GeePawHill It's Windows 2000, and it's definitely all still in there. XP was reskinned 2K, Win10 (explorer, at least) is a reskinned XP and if you twist its arm hard enough one of Win11's failure modes is 'spontaneously turn back into Win2k.'
Ambient Sponge@mhoye @hisham_hm @mcc @GeePawHill That sounds more like a success than a failure to me turning into a less crap version.
Marsh Ray@retrosponge @mhoye @hisham_hm @mcc @GeePawHill My benchmark is the dialog box you use for configuring environment variables. My feeling is that hasn’t significantly changed since maybe ~NT4, it just gets buried one click deeper with every big redesign.
@marshray @mhoye @hisham_hm @mcc @GeePawHill That's the thing I noticed from Windows 10 to Windows 11. Everything takes more clicks to get to now for no discernible reason.
@retrosponge @mhoye @hisham_hm @mcc @GeePawHill Well, I occasionally use the Environment Variables dialog, particularly when setting up a new machine. But then I recognize myself as being in the lunatic fringe and I expect that interfaces for normal humans will be different from my preference.
(But I wouldn’t complain if someone wanted to share how to make a shortcut to open that thing)
Jernej Simončič �@marshray @retrosponge @mhoye @hisham_hm @mcc @GeePawHill The environment variables editor actually got a very nice upgrade at some point, at least for editing the PATH variable:
@jernej__s @retrosponge @mhoye @hisham_hm @mcc @GeePawHill Looks a lot like the one from Visual Studio!
demize@mcc I love when Windows softlocks at the most inopportune times
the most significant blog post I’ve ever written is the result of Windows softlocking at an inopportune time
Solarbird 
@mcc @GeePawHill somewhere, raymond chen found himself laughing for no apparent reason
@mcc @GeePawHill I very much prefer the Win95 Alt+Tab UI over the "modern" one (high contrast mode, so most window previews look very much the same, while the icons in modern switcher are tiny). Unfortunately they removed it completely in 24H2, so if Explorer isn't running (or if its switcher is disabled), Alt+Tab acts like Alt+Esc.