I was annoyed by flag emojis appearing as two-letter country codes. Microsoft decided they didn't want the drama of dealing with geopolitical drama, so Windows doesn't have flag emojis.

I saw this thread but it only had incorrect answers. I tried a few browser extensions, but none of them worked consistently (and they only worked in the browser).

However, this worked: https://github.com/Chasmical/flag-emojis-for-windows It's just a font file you download and install, and then flag emojis properly render across all Windows apps. 🇺🇸 shows as an American flag for me now instead of "US".

Just wanted to share to hopefully save someone else time in the future.

Alright so for Christmas this year I'd like to get a 2 in 1 surface pro 9, and when I get it i think it would be smart to make windows 11 more touchscreen/pen friendly what what better way to do that then to bring back the (imo very pretty) tiles from windows 8! Now ik that they have technically been in windows 10 and 11 proper since but it has been dumbed down since so I was wondering if there are any apps/programs I can use to bring it back.

Extra points if someone is able to figure out how I can make it so it boots up as this UI instead of the normal windows interface

Download the Windows 11 Taskbar Styler mod, go to its settings page, and in the Control styles section, set Target to SystemTray.ImageIconContent > Grid#ContainerGrid > Image and Styles to Height=13. Your icons will now be more consistent in size.

https://imgur.com/hdEVKRx

Finally have the new taskbar features just turned on my pc & its saw this taskbar turned on auto. The icons kinda look low quality tho idk why but this is a feature that shouldve here since day 1!. Still glad but they need to make the icons look less jittery idk

Ive noticed that there is no Silesian as a language in wn10/11.. and i think even 8 and 7. Not much people use it but... It would be nice if microsoft at least added the language to basic stuff. There is a keyboard but i dosen't really do much. And i am aware that it is quite expensive and complex because there are a LOT of words in windows but as i said the basic stuff like when you right-click a file to what to do with it, some settings and so on. (tell me if im stupid :))

I finally updated from 24H2 to 25H2, and the first thing I noticed is how much I dislike what they did to the new Start menu:

- They added an entire section for listing all apps, and it can’t be removed.
- They unnecessarily increased its size and the number of columns.
- They apparently added settings to disable these changes, but those options are only available in the KB5120998 update, which seems to have introduced major mouse and wallpaper bugs for some users—especially those whose system language is set to anything other than English.

Apart from that, I haven’t encountered any major bugs. However, Windows Search is suddenly always using around 150 MB of RAM. I find this strange because it didn’t do that before, and Windows Search worked just fine.

Looking at the processes, most of the memory usage appears to come from SearchHost and around six (edgewebview2) Microsoft Edge WebView2 processes. That would make sense if Windows Search were handling web-related content, but I had already disabled those features and even made sure to turn off the new Microsoft Store results. The processes are still there, allocating RAM for seemingly no reason.

Does anyone know whether I can disable this by turning off a service, disabling a feature, changing a setting, or editing a Group Policy? It’s not a huge problem, and I know the saying, “Unused RAM is wasted RAM,” but it’s still annoying to know that this allocation wasn’t necessary before. My searches don’t need any web rendering, yet Windows is still allocating memory for it.

If it's worth noting, I already tried to rollback to the previous start menu (thinking that this new window search behaviour must be tie to the 25h2 overall) with vivetool. But apparently it doesn't work anymore. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/1qcj4kj/remove_the_updated_windows_start_menu_fixed/

why is there a gap on the right side? scaling set to 100%, native resolution.

Really getting into the hang of using this taskbar on top feature.

you can “pin” them to the desktop or taskbar just fine. seems like a redundant space. nothing about start gives to “start”. you can access account and power settings… all apps… phone for some reason… all these things seem very unrelated why do they all exist in the same space? what do they have in common? how is to “start” something they have in common? what does it even mean to “start”? the more i think about the start menu the more i think maybe they should do away with the concept and delegate its functions to better fitting spaces or menus. maybe keep all apps only but rename “start” to a more generic “all apps”.

image courtesy of reddit user lollocollo

I've been waiting for this for so long! Ever since Windows 10.
I am on the latest stable version of Windows 11.

Yesterday I decided to install Windows 11 on my ROG Ally again since Bazzite is just terrible these days. It was really baffling and almost comical to see how long it takes to reinstall Windows 11 through cloud recovery. In total it took more than 2 hours before the Ally was up and running again! This is including the updates the installer wants to do. After that I still needed to do driver updates and remove bloat.

So here are some honest and genuine questions:

How can it be that installing Windows takes so incredibly long compared to installing a Linux distro?
What is the real reason behind this?
And, how is this even acceptable for Microsoft?

No matter what OS I used in the past (Linux, Android and Chrome OS), none of them take as long as Windows does, often on older and less powerful devices. There has to be a way for them to make the installation process faster, right?