[ocdtrekkie]

Not the parent, but personally, my only real pet peeve with PowerShell as an IT admin is that the right click start menu replaced cmd with PowerShell despite it still being drastically slower to load on many PCs. There's a setting to change it back, but if you are working on other computers all the time, that's not useful at all. This is my main peeve with the Settings panel as well: It's slower to get things done with, but the legacy panels have been intentionally made harder to reach[1] before performance parity has been reached.

My understanding is that improving PowerShell's start time is a big part of the next release of Windows 10, and that's great, but once that's done was the right time to put PowerShell as the default console on Windows, not before. 98% of why I open a prompt is to run "ping", and waiting for the prompt to actually show up in PS takes longer than a ping timeout. (Which is to say, if you need one takeaway from this post: Remember that no matter how cool you make PowerShell, most of us are only opening it to ping something, that's the most important experience to get right.)

Especially some of the decisions with the install screens for Windows 10 seem to highlight that people at Microsoft aren't aware how some subtle changes cause significant pain/delay for IT folks. Like with 1803 being forced to come up with security questions when creating the local account on a PC you're about to domain join.

[1]Example: Programs and Features from the legacy control panel no longer appears in search, even if you type it all the way out. Typing "appwiz.cpl" is the fastest way to see what's installed on a computer (and what versions) at a glance, but kinda a pro trick.

[blkhawk]

> Like with 1803 being forced to come up with security questions when creating the local account on a PC you're about to domain join.

Security Questions are a really bad anti feature that nonetheless is really persistent. I don't need 5 more random alphanumeric Passwords in case I forget that other random alphanumeric password I can barely remember. In most places online where they are used the rip open huge security holes should you actually set reasonable a answer to "Whats my Pet called?".

[ocdtrekkie]

Yeah, and it was introduced for local accounts in Windows 10 just in the last few months. Beyond the general irritation of it being a poor security system, making me do it for a user account that isn't personal to me is additionally quite silly: I told the installer I was going to domain join the PC.

I end up mashing the keyboard for each one to create hopefully suitably random answers that even I myself don't know. But it's still arguably an additional security hole that I have to simply hope Microsoft hasn't somehow stored in plaintext somewhere.

[rosege]

You could change the right click back to cmd by using a group policy to change the registry. E.g. https://blogs.msmvps.com/russel/2016/11/18/defaulting-to-pow...

[ocdtrekkie]

Also true, but there's a limit to how much nonsense you want to dump into GPOs. Most of what you throw in your Group Policy will inevitably end up sticking around for the next decade and a half long past its irrelevance, and regardless of whether you throw everything in one big GPO or have several dozen small GPOs, you will never remember where that stupid setting came from down the road.

So I'm hesitant to go overboard on custom registry entry pushes (as opposed to the standard templates) for things that only affect IT experience.