I have a lot of issues with the direction Microsoft is taking, but it all sounds like XP-era rant, with Microsoft writing “Mi™ro $oft.”

I think the sidecar in the start menu looks very useful. I will definitely try it when it actually comes out. It’s unfortunate that it’s on by default (I’m annoyed by that) but honestly this seems very useful. They had this My Phone app for a while, but it wasn’t fully integrated into the OS, something that was much better on Apple and Linux for a while.

For example, it would be good if they started using forward slashes in file paths, just like any other operating system and in any browser

Forward slash has worked since DOS 2.0. Backslashes are coded into almost every application, but as an end user you can use backslashes, and as a developer you can too.

It would be nice if the OS used UTF-8 instead of Latin1 just like every other OS and in every browser.

Which can! Settings > Time & language > Language & region > Administrative language settings > Change system language. Here you will find a setting to enable UTF-8. Be sure to report all crashes and display bugs in the software you use daily to the developers! Windows (Java, JavaScript, Python 2, and Swift

It would be nice if they made the UI a consistent environment.

And in my experience, they do it better in Windows 11 with the current settings screen than they do in Windows 7. I hear a lot of people are upset that the old controls they’re used to from XP are gone.

For example, they have not yet fully converted the Control Panel to the “new” UI despite the OS being released on October 5, 2021.

They don’t do this with XP, Vista, 7, 8(.1), and 10. 11 is the first version where almost everything I need can be found in one screen, in fact. There’s still a lot missing, but with every major update I see them moving more settings.

It would be nice if Windows updates were small in size and not so slow to install.

Although there are still big gains to be made, things are not as bad with updates as they were in the Vista era. I don’t notice that much these days. The last time I saw an update to macOS, I was completely satisfied with Windows. Gone are the days of staring at the loading bar for half an hour, updates now take five minutes every two weeks, and I can’t worry too much about that.

It would be nice if hard drives were addressed with names instead of random drive letters.

This is actually possible Since Windows 2000. Programs that do something with disks are completely obsessed with this, but it has been possible for decades.

It would be nice if applications could use one folder to store all their data instead of having it spread everywhere, Program Files, x86 Program Files, Local Roaming, My Documents, etc.

Which can! Then you have to use UWP apps from the Windows Store, which do it the same way Android does, with a sandbox. Be careful not to use a Win32 application, because it can (after much debate) run outside the protection zone.

Old Win32 applications actually have three places: Program Files for program files, %appdata%\local and/or %appdata%\roaming for local data, data you need to copy from network shares (usually doesn’t make any difference anymore in my opinion), and a Your Documents to open your files. Talk to app developers who don’t that they must adhere to the standards. The local and roaming stuff is very important because you don’t want to have to sync gigabytes of temporary Photoshop files when you switch workstations within a domain, and messing with that would be really stupid for Microsoft. For a home user, the difference doesn’t matter, because you don’t have the right to search those files anyway.

Maybe they can immediately remove the latest Internet Explorer components from Windows Explorer

Haha, if they wanted everyone to switch to macOS maybe. These things only exist because big, expensive apps from large, influential companies will explode. Microsoft wants IE to stop just as much as you do, but removing it won’t happen.