Desktop (24H2) (Archived)

The Windows 11 Desktop works much as it did in Windows 10, but it has been updated with new iconography--as with the Recycle Bin you can see below--and a new Themes feature that lets you combine your favorite desktop backgrounds, colors, sounds, and mouse cursors to provide a more personalized experience.

We look at the basics of the Windows 11 Desktop and its new visual design in What's New and Familiar in Windows 11. Here, we explore its new features and how you can work around some of its new limitations.
What's changed with the Desktop context menus?
When you right-click the Desktop or any of the icons on the Desktop, Windows 11 displays a context menu that provides options related to that specific object. For example, when you right-click the Recycle Bin, you see one menu item, "Empty the Recycle Bin" that only applies to that item, plus others that are common to various user interface elements.

When you right-click an icon for a folder, shortcut, app, or another file, you similarly see several items that apply to those objects.

This behavior should be familiar to most Windows 10 users. But aside from the obvious new visual style, there are other changes to these context menus in Windows 11 related to Microsoft's simplification efforts in this release: These menus tend to be much shorter than the similar context menus you saw in Windows 10 because there are now fewer options than before.

Let's take a closer look.
Make sense of the icons in the new context menus
In Windows 10, the Desktop context menus displayed standard menu items for commands like Cut, Copy, Paste, Rename, Share, and Delete appear alongside the other menu items. But in Windows 11, these commands have been changed to icons that all appear in a single row at the top (or bottom) of the context menu.

In previous Windows 11 versions, these icons lacked labels, making them indecipherable to many. But Microsoft rectified this mistake in Windows 11 version 24H2 by adding labels to the icon-based menu items. As before, you can hover the mouse cursor over each of these items to display a tooltip that provides its keyboard shortcut.

Confusingly, this row of icons can appear at the bottom of the context menu instead of the top. As it turns out, this purposeful: Windows 11 will always display these icons as close as possible to the mouse cursor, and if the item you're right-clicking is close to the bottom of the Desktop, the context menu that appears may have to display above the mouse cursor. And so the icons will be on the bottom.

Display the classic, Windows 10-style context menus
To further simplify the presentation of this context menu, Microsoft also removed some options that were available in the similar Windows 10 context menus. That can be problematic if you are used to using any of those options.

You can't easily configure Windows 11 to display the old Windows 10-style context menus by default. But you can at least access them on...