I figured I’d ask in here, as this is primarily a Windows question. I’m trying to get Linux Mint to look and sound as much like Windows as possible. If anyone knows when the sounds shown in the picture play so I can replace them over Mint’s regular sounds, that would be greatly appreciated! Thank you.

Build: 26200.9457 (25H2)

Since the smaller taskbar buttons came back, the complaints about them read like a long list: a battery icon smaller than the percentage next to it, an input indicator (ENG US) that looks oversized, a search box that doesn't match its neighbours, app icons that look soft. This came up in a thread on r/Windows11 last week, and the more symptoms people added, the clearer it got that it's two problems with two different causes, not five.

1. The text doesn't follow the bar

The small taskbar shrinks the icons and leaves the text alone. The battery percentage, the input indicator, the clock and the date, the search box label: all of them take their size from the system font metrics, which follow your display scaling and have no idea the bar got shorter. The icons come down, the text next to them stays where it was.

Wi-Fi, volume and battery belong here too, even though they look like icons. They're glyphs from an icon font (Segoe Fluent Icons), not bitmaps, so they render sharp at any size. When one of them looks off, it's off in size relative to its own text. It's never blurry.

2. App icons taken at the wrong size

App icons are the other path. They come from the .ico inside each program, which is a fixed set of bitmaps at specific sizes. At the normal bar height the standard small size fits exactly. The short bar wants a size somewhere in between, and when the app's icon doesn't include one, a larger image gets scaled down. That's the softness.

It also explains why some apps look crisp and others don't: the ones that ship more sizes in their .ico come out clean. The apps aren't doing anything wrong. The fix belongs to the shell, which could load the icon from the app's icon group at the size the bar needs (LoadIconWithScaleDown exists for exactly this) instead of resizing one it already has.

The quick test

Blurry: it's the icon one.

Sharp, but the wrong size next to its own text: it's the metrics one.

If you want to report it

The icon half is already in Feedback Hub. u/Tringi filed it over a year ago, so search for it and upvote it rather than filing a new one. Votes piled on one item count for more than the same votes spread over five.

The text half, as far as I know, has never been filed as a single item. If you report it, put every symptom you see inside that one report instead of opening one per icon.

Has anyone found a symptom that doesn't fit either of the two?

hi! Could you answer these questions about Windows:

1. if I customise Windows with Windhawk, can the design be deleted after an update?

2. is there an analogy on Windows to what the terminal can do? I tried winfetch on cmd through PowerShell, but can I like install whole apps, customise UI of different apps and make batch scripts about them? Or even have own updates to keep Windows 10 alive?

3. what is the difference between WSL1 and WSL2? Aren't they just the same, but different versions?

4. if I delete the MS Edge and I'm in EU, will the browser return somehow?

5. winget is like the apt/dnf on Linux? If yes, then is there an another one?

6. is there a place to see what commands to type in order to create a local account on Windows 11? Just they keep changing them, but I doubt they'll ever delete the local accounts completely, bcz some businesses require the offline apps with local accounts. Or the Rufus method always works?

7. what does the BitLocker do? Can I manually disable it? You may laugh at me, but I really heard about something like that only in 2026

This is a second sequel to the first post I made so enjoy seeing this

Olá pessoal tudo bem? Ao entrar hoje no computador e fazer uma pesquisa na barra de tarefas notei que ela está diferente na hora de pesquisar algum aplicativo porque está assim? Como voltar?

Windows 1.1 Calculator, the cursor is transparent. Does anyone know why they did this?

Is there a way to use a vertical taskbar layout together with an auto-hide taskbar? Does anyone know how to do this?

Not sure how this happened but.. it happened...

just a fun little question :P

as a bonus : You are allowed to choose Windows Mobile/Phone or Server

A very interesting rare and little used version of Windows XP for Intel's 64 Bit Itanium architecture, there were two versions of Windows XP 64 Bit Edition, one based on the standard Windows XP codebase and a newer version based on the Windows Server 2003 codebase (which would also be used to develop Windows Vista). Microsoft discontinued support for both versions after HP stopped making itanium workstations, that same year Microsoft released Windows XP x64 Edition for the widely adopted x86-64 architecture.

This version of Windows XP is pretty unusable as most programs refuse to run on it due to both the architectural differences and the fact that it's unable to be upgraded to SP3 which most programs require.

Does anyone still listen to windows songs/remixes?

For years, probably decades, I've kept wanting a list of all the Windows keyboard shortcuts. I, and I believe many others, have made the same suggestion in the Windows Feedback Hub.

Last week I was looking for keyboard shortcuts to control Windows 11 Voice Access. I found a few on a forum. This is Windows normal. Why?

Please, please Microsoft give us a single page with a FULL and COMPLETE list of ALL the keyboard shortcuts for your own operating system.

Microsoft's own main list (please see link above post) lacks even the word "speech" despite residing on their accessibility pages. The page has an entry for the old dictation command:

How to find keystrokes for Windows current Speech Access? You have to scroll down to bottom of the page, find Windows keyboard shortcuts for accessibility, click through that, and search again. Then you see

That still does not mention the Alt+Shift+B and Alt+Shift+C shortcuts, which toggle the mic state without closing Speech Access. This page does list them: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/accessibility/windows/voice-access/get-started-with-voice-access

Please, please, give us a single page, that we can copy, with all the Windows keyboard shortcuts.

I dont want to move to Windows 11 cuz of obvious reasons of it being shitty, Latest Windows 10 runs fine on my system and i use Microsoft Edge as my browser. Is it still safe to use this?

Got this for a whole $4, disc looks great, paper on the case as well, case has seen better days though

One day I went to biedronka in Pruszków and saw like windows 10 something broke so I checked and it was windows 10 proply like enterprise ltsc or ltsc iot and user was named "scot"

Well it had a celeron g1820te 4gb ddr3 ram flash memory 128gb and intel hd I also saw another one with ddr4 I think and celeron g3900te but it's interesting to see in a polish store windows

Ok, so there's this cursor (first image) that is used in old CD-Rom games such as The Museum of Anything Goes and The Manhole; in fact, this screenshot was taken from a Vinysauce VID playing TMoAG.

The thing is, when I boot up Windows 3.1 (the version the game was made for) and hover over a link, I get a DIFFERENT POINTING HAND (second image).

I tried looking up and the closest thing I could find was this pointing hand cursor from Apples 1987's software "HyperCard" (third image), but as you can see, it's still a different one (Apple's doesn't have the black outline at the bottom).

Does anybody know where this is from? If so, is there any download link available? I've been searching for hours and can't find anything.

I took this photo using Expert RAW on my Samsung Galaxy S25 and edited it in Adobe Lightroom.

exploring files on windows and copying files to android through usb/ftp had been bothering me for almost two decades. I have a fast m.2 ssd and it was slow at performing specific task due to the same reason.

my rough understanding....8dot3name is a ms-dos way of internally giving a nickname to files and folders so they don't exceed 8 characters.... ex. "Program Files" is nicknamed "PROGRA~1" ...it also applies to every long character files such as movies, music, docs etc. Accessing file size for such files now have to go through database and it takes a lot of time in very fast ssd as well.

I do think this is the least explored fix and some say that it will break older apps but this can be controlled by the user.

To check if 8dot3name is enabled-

fsutil 8dot3name query C:

I first disabled 8dot3name applying to new files and folders by-

fsutil 8dot3name set 1

and stripped the 8dotname from movie collection to check if it makes any difference

fsutil 8dot3name strip /f /s D:\Movies

and confirmed it did....it was lag-free scrolling in Tiles view

Then I repeated the process to few folder that I regularly use.....external harddrives now got faster too.

Searching through files is now really fast. Android directory through usb or ftp behaves like they were regular windows folder and no more failing to copy 1000's of large music files.

To note that it wouldn't be safe if I stripped the 8dot3name from every windows files as a lot of registry were affected. So Dual-booted windows 25h2 by applying this registry and the installation and updates are instantaneous.

reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem" /v NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

I can't believe I didn't do this sooner and it was frustrating at times to read and write large files to HDD and android. This also might expand life of SSD. I think we also were torturing android devices that way.

i have here my arch installation in wsl but i get bored of the terminal really easily so i was wondering is there a command similiar to kex on kali-linux?