I still don’t really see the information density problem. You can fully customize the OS scaling way more than you ever could with older OS versions. Again, things like windows task bar icons and tray icons are the exact same size as Windows 7. Yeah they’re bigger than Windows 95 but I only had 800x600 to work with in those days.
[–] troupo 1 day ago
[–] Grombobulous 18 hours ago
Do I need to see a list of every single application on my computer (utilitarian) or do I need to see the applications I use the most and added most recently (functional)?
The "list every application ever" paradigm predated search indexing. There was no alternative to an alphabetical list of every installed application. On a desktop/laptop computer, I spend entire days without using the Start Menu/macOS Dock/Application Launcher (KDE's "start menu") as an actual method to launch programs. I'm hitting Command/Alt + Space or the Windows key and typing in the first letter or two of the program I'm trying to launch.
Information density was also a necessity of the era, not a design preference. You and I might prefer information density as power user coders or what have you. Do my parents prefer information density? Nope!
I would agree with you more broadly that the Windows 11 Start Menu isn't really a great design but I can see what they were going for. The execution isn't there but I think the overall idea makes sense.
We can also have the rose tinted glasses about Windows 95 with the cascading menus but it was really clunky when your application list gets really long or you have a lot of nested folders. It was easy to accidentally misclick or lose your sub-folder.
E.g., in that screenshot you posted, if I hovered my mouse over "Kids Choice" and wanted to get to a program inside there, but then I accidentally moved my mouse over "Visio Home SE" and lost the "Kids Choice" submenu selection, then I have to bring my mouse back to find it again.
[–] troupo 16 hours ago
No. The comparison I'm making is non-functional design vs. functional design.
Modern "designers" wouldn't know functional design if it hit them in the face and couldn't design one if their life depended on it.
> Do I need to see a list of every single application on my computer (utilitarian) or do I need to see the applications I use the most and added most recently (functional)?
Again, you're completely missing the meat of my argument while focusing on superficial.
The meat is: why the hell our huge 5k monitors manage to show less information on screen than 600x400 14" monitors of 30 years ago?
Your answer is "but scaling". No, scaling doesn't solve the issue. At best in modern designs you will see 11 items instead of 10. Where there's space for 50.
I wasn't saying that Win95 start menu was perfect. I was saying: modern start menu manages to show less information, and more poorly[1], on an area that is 10x the size of the entire screen available to Win95. And that this issue is repeated through the entire design of the OS.
[1] not to say more slowly, but that is an additional can of worms
No, we didn't. And yet we didn't have to scroll through a settings list with 10 elements.
And no, information density isn't "make everything smaller". It's "use space on screen efficiently".
For example, "modern" startup menu shows fewer items on an area 10x larger than the entire screen available to win95. And no amount of scaling can fix that. And this permeates the entire OS: https://www.buildwindows.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/4-4.... vs https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HBTFbzlXwAA5OwD.jpg