Windows 11 tray bar links – And Microsoft keeps getting worse
People don’t know how to use computers, so among other things, they put links on the desktop. So you have a desktop full of icons, in some cases reaching half of the screen, zero organization, you almost don’t see the background, and most importantly, you have to minimize all windows to be able to use those links.
Those who know how to use a computer have links in the tray bar, a dock bar, or something like that.
Sometimes you get to use Windows because companies don’t care about developing for Linux. Why would you ever develop software for a free kernel and a perfectly capable free OS when you can develop software that gives money to Apple and Microsoft, right? Maybe because they in turn paid you a lot, and once clients are used to a software, they won’t ever change; gotta love these beautiful marketing dynamics. So you download it from the official source, install it, activate it with MASSGRAVE’s script, then run the various scripts to debloat it and disable the telemetry, etc.
Well, until Windows 10 you could enable links in the tray bar by just right-clicking with the mouse and turning them on. But of course, if you moved any link there, you would get a confirmation dialog because it assumes that is stuff downloaded from the internet or whatever and so, to fix that, you had to give in to Windows (non-)logic and first copy the links to the desktop, and then move them to the tray bar, but even if it says “Move to” you still had to press Shift for no reason whatsoever while dragging otherwise it would still simply copy and that would throw the confirmation crap once you tried to launch the thing. But… at least then you had your links and you were good to go.
Well, sure, maybe let’s not mention that reordering the links is a pain, and if you even manage to, sometimes when you log in again you get the old order back; let’s of course not mention that by clicking you can inadvertently move the link to the desktop…
But with Windows 11 you cannot have links anymore because surpassing any possible imagination and to confirm a long-standing tradition, Microsoft manages to make every new iteration of their OS worse than the previous one.
So now you have to use e.g. this[🡕] to get the Windows 10 tray bar back.
Then, however, the start menu will still show up in the center, which is inconsistent, so just right-click, and in the settings change it to “Left”.
That’s it. But… why can’t I get all the tray icons unhidden? Well, because this is Windows 11, not Windows 10, thus it’s a worse OS and it removes useful features. So now you have to run explorer shell:::{05d7b0f4-2121-4eff-bf6b-ed3f69b894d9} to get back the old settings menu (which is still there of course because under the hood Windows actually never changed since Windows XP) because that’s of course a very user-friendly way to change basic settings of your operating system.
Well, there you go. I can’t wait for Windows 12!