The upper one is Windows 8, just look how small W10 taskbar looks next to it.
How can I make it look like 8, basically to be the same size with icons and all?
I doubt you can. There might be some third party program out there but Windows 8 was savaged for its UI redesign (rightly so IMO, mobile shit on a desktop OS was nonsense and it did nothing to help their failed smartphone bid) so Microsoft dropped a lot of things for Windows 10 and moved to a point mid-way between 8 and 7.
What you could do is go to Display Settings (right click on desktop) > Scale (change the size of text, apps) and increase the slider though this will impact desktop icons (can be fixed with cntrl+mousewheel) but also menus, text, it might make every other element of Windows look unwieldy depending on how large you go. As it changes desktop icon sizes it may also result in your desktop icons shifting so highly recommend taking a screenshot if the order there is important so you can recover.
Windows 8 was the most underrated version of Windows and I am still looking for a way to emulate its Metro look and feel on Linux
Method 4. How to Make Taskbar Icons Bigger Via Registry Editor
For advanced users who are comfortable modifying the Windows Registry, this method provides another way to resize taskbar icons on Windows 10. Here’s how:
- Press Win + R on your keyboard to open the Run dialog box.
- Type “regedit” (without the quotes) and press Enter to open the Registry Editor.
- In the Registry Editor, navigate to the following location:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced
- Right-click on an empty space in the right-hand pane and select “New” > “DWORD (32-bit) Value”.
- Name the new value “TaskbarSi” (without the quotes) and press Enter.
- Double-click on the newly created “TaskbarSi” value and set its value data to a number between 1 and 64, representing the size of the icons (e.g., 32 for medium, 48 for large).
- Click “OK” to save the changes and close the Registry Editor.
- Sign out and sign back in to your Windows account for the changes to take effect.
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I don’t know if this provides the feature you are looking for: https://chrisandriessen.nl/taskbarx
Note, I believe the first method no longer works on Windows 11 after patch
KB5022913
. I see this for Windows 11: https://windhawk.net/mods/taskbar-icon-size I haven’t tried any of these methods myself.Use Linux with KDE plasma or Cinnamon as a desktop environment. Their defaults look very similar to windows 7 or 8. You can change the start button to look like Monokuma or the windows icon if you feel like it. The icon sizes are customizable in cinnamon and very customizable in KDE plasma.
I know this doesn’t help their issue regarding Windows, but my mind immediately defaulted into thinking about KDE’s taskbar customization and how easy and powerful it is. I provided some Windows solutions in my comment in this thread, but Microsoft devs tend to break things a lot. If some power user wants to go this far to customize their machine, switching to Linux just makes more sense at this point, but I know not everyone can easily migrate. I would suggest people get a second device or use a virtual machine to practice Linux on until they are more comfortable to use it as their main workstation. Then if they need to use Windows for some reason, they could run Windows in virtual machine. If they have the hardware for it, they can passthrough their gpu for gaming, rendering, etc.