PC Master Race

Who actually wants a smaller Taskbar? What we (as a former Windows user who uses Windows 11 at work) want(ed) is(was) a more functional Taskbar.

As a happy Mac user, I like how macOS (and some Linux distros, and some Windows shell replacements) do it, with the status bar (what Windows users call the system tray) in the top right corner, and the icons front and centre on the bottom. To be fair, I could take or leave the menu bar (what macOS has in the upper left), I think it's kinda dumb that menus don't follow windows, they're anchored to the top. It allows for some creative freedom in designing windows, but you never really see that happen, and the look only works when a window is maximised (or "zoomed" in Mac speak; I'll never not call it "maximised" though).

Another thing Windows does a little better than macOS is indicating which window is active on the Taskbar (vs the Dock on macOS. I love the Dock, I think it's great... and I use a hack that makes it act more like the Taskbar in a couple ways.

I think the Start Menu is a piece of shit that needs to die. Give Windows users a functional Dock (or Taskbar or whatever) and put a search icon on it. Move the applications and recents to Windows Explorer (the latter already exist there). Windows-only users, imagine, if you will, your Favourites now includes "Applications" and it's just a list of every application installed on your computer. And you can sort it into folders, it doesn't matter. Maybe you can even browse to %APPLICATIONS% and it's the same area. The Start Menu has been trash for a while, but if you think about it, if you look at how a more elegant OS has done it... it's kinda unnecessary. And the pro Mac users just use Spotlight (⌘+Space) and start typing to get apps, files, folders, settings, whatever. Windows doesn't have Spotlight but Everything is a free app that imitates it. Duck.ai says it cannot launch applications, which sucks. Spotlight absolutely can. When you have that, you can take everything off your Taskbar (Dock) that you don't use daily and just launch it by typing its first few letters. So much cleaner. Especially when you're old school and have the Taskbar set to always expand the text by the icon if it's active.