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When Windows 11 first arrived, it felt like a beta. Microsoft didn't address some of the longstanding usability quirks, and the design changes made the familiar desktop experience riddled with friction. To add insult to injury, Microsoft's growing obsession with AI brought a wave of features and their unwelcome background processes that no one asked for in the first place.
The list of reasons to leave Microsoft's ecosystem only grew from here. Broken updates, ads in the start menu, and an increasingly cluttered desktop pushed thousands of users towards the closest available Linux distribution. It would be a bit of an overstatement to say that PowerToys and its latest feature suite "fixed" Windows 11, but it very certainly made it a lot more usable than it was before. As a matter of fact, it fixed it just enough for me to put Zorin OS back on the shelf, at least for now. Here's what changed my mind.
Command Palette replaced the most dreaded Windows 11 feature
It's everything Windows Search should've been, but wasn't
Windows Search is unanimously deemed one of the most broken parts of the Windows 11 experience, for a variety of reasons. The first of which is the fact that it fails at the one task that it's designed for. Type an application name, and it will fetch you the closest match on Bing Search. Search for a file, and it would recommend something you can download from Microsoft Store instead.
So, naturally, the Command Palette became a must-have from the PowerToys suite when it came out. It's Windows Search's direct successor, and in many ways, everything Search should've been. It launches apps, runs system commands, finds your files, and browses the web, and it does so without routing you through a storefront or a search engine. The results are fast, contextually relevant, and dynamically refined as you type.
If that wasn't enough, then the extension ecosystem makes it even more impressive. You can have a Media Controls extension that lets you manage playback from any audio source, a Process Killer that terminates background processes, or even an LLM extension that connects directly to Ollama or ChatGPT, making it into an AI interface (only if you want it to be).
Windows could never solve the clipboard issue, but PowerToys did it thrice
I can extract, transform, and paste without opening another app
Some of the problems PowerToys has solved weren't even the ones I consciously realized I had been putting up with. They were simply a part of using Windows. Over time, countless little inconveniences that relate to an editorial workflow became a part of the routine, and I stopped questioning them altogether. I'd just accepted that some applications won't let me copy text, that screenshots of error messages had to be transcribed manually, and that moving content between PDFs, websites, and documents inevitably created a formatting mess.
Anyone who has compiled a literature review from a dozen different sources will know exactly what I mean. PDFs, web pages, scanned documents from your university lectures and the library and journal databases rarely play nice with one another, making an already cognitively demanding process even more arduous than it needs to be.
It wasn't until I discovered the trifecta of Text Extractor, Advanced Copy and Advanced Paste that I realized that formatting tools didn't necessarily have to feel like a compromise all the time. Text Extractor uses OCR to capture text as long as it appears on the screen, no matter where it came from. It could be locked PDFs, error dialogue boxes, images, legacy app interfaces, it doesn't matter. Advanced Paste, on the other hand, takes care of the destination problem. Clipboard content can be pasted again as plain text, Markdown, or through an LLM-generated summary. Advanced Copy extents the very same logic to file paths and metadata, which saves me from having to take a detour of navigating to a file just to copy its location. What's truly commendable, however, is the fact that this specific suite of formatting tools does not exist anywhere else natively, be it macOS or any other Linux distro. On Windows, it's free.
FancyZones brought tiling Window Managers to Windows
It wasn't missing, but it's so much better with PowerToys
My desk only has enough room for a desktop tower and my two monitors, which means every inch of screen real-estate matters. One display sits in landscape mode for work, while the other stays in portrait orientation for scrolling. It is hardly the most elaborate setup in the world, but it gets really chaotic when multiple applications begin competing for space.
As you may have already guessed, that's exactly why using FancyZones is a non-negotiable. Because I can assign custom zone layouts to each monitor independently, every application opens and stays exactly where I expect it to on both the screens. This means my browser tabs, Word documents and PDFs stay in landscape mode, meanwhile everything else such as Discord and chat applications go towards the landscape orientation.
Linux users have had the luxury of using window tiling managers for many years, and FancyZones is probably the closest Windows has come to delivering the same experience. The only notable distinction is that on Windows, I don't have to abandon my existing software ecosystem anymore, because PowerToys fixed the problem right in the nick of time.
PowerToys gave me many reasons to stick with Windows
The PowerToys suite isn't something you should sleep on if Windows 11 is your daily driver. The features it offers are compelling enough to begin with, but with every new update, it crosses another long-standing Windows annoyance off the list. The latest iteration at the time of writing is version 0.100, so if you haven't updated, you'd almost certainly be missing out on the Shortcut Guide, which is a feature I can't stop talking about. Although Windows 11 arrived in a far-from-perfect state, PowerToys has kept it competitive, and I do wonder how the OS would feel if every feature was designed with as much intention.
