Introducing Windows 11

Related ongoing thread:<p><i>Microsoft announces Windows 11</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27618805" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27618805</a>

Apparently the Home edition will require a Microsoft account and an internet connection. [1] Can&#x27;t say I&#x27;m looking forward to this. All my Windows installations are with local accounts and I would like to keep it that way. Microsoft has already made it incredibly obnoxious to achieve this with the latest Windows 10 setups, where you have to make sure your computer is not connected to the internet to even unlock the fallback local account creation option. [2] A sad day indeed if this is no longer possible.<p>--<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;6&#x2F;24&#x2F;22548480&#x2F;windows-11-home-internet-connection-set-up" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;6&#x2F;24&#x2F;22548480&#x2F;windows-11-home-...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.howtogeek.com&#x2F;442609&#x2F;confirmed-windows-10-setup-now-prevents-local-account-creation&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.howtogeek.com&#x2F;442609&#x2F;confirmed-windows-10-setup-...</a>

&gt; Windows is more than just an operating system; it’s a fabric woven into our lives and in our work.<p>Folks, if you were thinking Windows 11 will bring less telemetry, you were wrong :-)

Do you think they finally finished the control panel transition? Window 10&#x27;s control panel thing feels like it was stopped halfway through development, so they left the old stuff in there but made it hard to access. Unfortunately most of the time when you need to change something it&#x27;s not on the new control panel so you have to dig for the old one instead.<p>When Windows 10 was first released I figured they would finish up the new control panel and deprecate the old one, but instead several years have passed with no progress whatsoever on the problem and it is still a pain point with Windows 10. Certainly it can&#x27;t be that hard to copy over the missing features? Did the control panel team quit en-masse in 2015?

I mean.. The taskbar seems like a Dock now. The interface seems very Apple Finder-esque now.<p>I feel like they&#x27;re just aligning with macOS now. Not that I&#x27;m complaining, the video and the interface all are sexy.

Rounded corners and touchscreens, is that windows 8&#x2F;vista again? What i want from windows is speed . More and more people are going to be using them to work from home, and not on a tablet or a laptop, but on a good old desktop pc, their sales are going up. What&#x27;s the rationale behind this kind of regression to terrible windows 8? Can i plz have snappier windows 7 with slightly cleaner look?<p>&gt; app developers can now bring their own commerce into our Store and keep 100% of the revenue – Microsoft takes nothing. App developers can still use our commerce with competitive revenue share of 85&#x2F;15<p>This is great. That&#x27;s how it s done

In the video, they&#x27;re spending the first 20 seconds filing down the corners of the logo, having a big reveal of the blue Windows logo with rounded corners. This leads into the rest of the feature reveal, all round things now. But in the &quot;end credits&quot;, the same blue Windows logo is back to its sharp cornered self again. Is this a subtle hint to the UI inconsistencies that are still to be expected after the major version bump, or is there another meaning?

So, yet another level of UI inconsistencies[1].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ntdotdev.wordpress.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;02&#x2F;06&#x2F;state-of-the-windows-how-many-layers-of-ui-inconsistencies-are-in-windows-10&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ntdotdev.wordpress.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;02&#x2F;06&#x2F;state-of-the-windo...</a>

&gt; Start utilizes the power of the cloud and Microsoft 365 to show you your recent files no matter what platform or device you were viewing them on earlier<p>Well, consider me scared.

Here&#x27;s a tool to check if your PC meets the hardware requirements[0].<p>However, it looks like many modern systems don&#x27;t have TPM 2.0 enabled in the BIOS, and will come back with &quot;This PC can&#x27;t run Windows 11&quot; (including mine - Asus Prime X470 Pro with Ryzen 2700X, 32GB RAM, 1.5TB storage, Radeon RX 5600 XT.)<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;download.microsoft.com&#x2F;download&#x2F;1&#x2F;d&#x2F;d&#x2F;1dd9969b-bc9a-41bc-8455-bc657c939b47&#x2F;WindowsPCHealthCheckSetup.msi" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;download.microsoft.com&#x2F;download&#x2F;1&#x2F;d&#x2F;d&#x2F;1dd9969b-bc9a-...</a>

Here they go again, messing with the start menu...<p>Hard to believe that they didn&#x27;t learn from Windows 8, but they didn&#x27;t.<p>Also: weren&#x27;t we told multiple times that there would be no successor to Windows 10? That all future versions of Windows would just be updates?

The only real question is, will I still be able to get to the Network card configuration page that&#x27;s been the same for the last 15-20 years? I use it daily. They&#x27;ve just put it behind more and more &quot;nicce looking, but non-functional&quot; network management UIs,.

No mentions about privacy, more bundled in apps, more &quot;AI&quot;, more cloud connectivity. I don&#x27;t know what I even expected.

&gt; The web was born and grew up on Windows<p>I think CERN engineers while working on web and www protocol were using unix as windows was not even there yet.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;home.cern&#x2F;science&#x2F;computing&#x2F;birth-web" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;home.cern&#x2F;science&#x2F;computing&#x2F;birth-web</a>

&gt; <i>We’re also pumped to announce that we are bringing Android apps to Windows for the first time</i><p>This is super cool, but honestly I don&#x27;t see myself using any Android apps on Windows.

&gt; Windows 11 will be available through a free upgrade for eligible Windows 10 PCs and on new PCs beginning this holiday.<p>Wow!

This could be a deal breaker Minimum system requirements: Trusted Platform Module (TPM) version 2.0<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;windows&#x2F;windows-11" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;windows&#x2F;windows-11</a>

<i>At a time when the PC is playing a more central role in our lives</i><p>Oh, come on! That trend has peaked long ago, and you guys know it. And I type this using Windows 10, quite happily I might add, but unless you take a what&#x27;s-a-computer approach that lumps cell phones with desktop PCs and everything in between, that is a ridiculous (opening!) statement.

So much for Windows 10 being the last version of windows...[1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pcmag.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;windows-10-the-last-version-of-windows" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pcmag.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;windows-10-the-last-version-of-wi...</a>

Everyone jokes about it finally being &quot;the year of the linux desktop&quot;, but a few years ago that actually did happen to my circle. Between a mac for work and linux at home, I actually haven&#x27;t touched windows in a number of years at this point, and interestingly, neither have a reasonable number of the technical people I interact with.<p>Of the nontechnical people around me, many of them have transitioned to primarily use their phone or sometimes a tablet. The only people I know who still use windows adamantly are PC gamers, and they&#x27;re all still on windows 7.<p>Is windows still considered the default home computing environment? Since they&#x27;re totally out of mobile at this point, I wonder by what margin, and how long that will actually last. I suppose there is still the corporate world that isn&#x27;t all in on on apple, that may not change for some time.

Easy to thumb our noses at it, and this community is already on it in spades from the comments so far.<p>I&#x27;ll wait and see. I like Win10 much more than I thought I would. I rode Win7 into the sunset, only abandoning the ship about a week before they dropped security updates for it because I thought I&#x27;d dislike Win10 so much. I even ran Ubuntu as my desktop OS for about four months before switching back over to Microsoft and Win10.<p>I&#x27;ll wait and see this time.

&quot;The free upgrade will begin to roll out to eligible Windows 10 PCs this holiday and continuing into 2022.&quot;<p>This is a very un-American sounding sentence.

&gt; We’re also announcing a progressive change to our revenue share policies where app developers can now bring their own commerce into our Store and keep 100% of the revenue – Microsoft takes nothing.<p>Nicely done!

I&#x27;m really happy about the new functionality for window management in Windows 11, particularly the grouped applications that you can maximize or minimize together. I also like that they&#x27;re emphasizing different workspaces for different tasks, as this is much how I work with MacOS&#x27; spaces. Similarly I&#x27;d think that people used to automatic tiling window managers in linux would be familiar and appreciate the advantages of this workflow. The added tiling features that go beyond what is already a pretty competent window manager is welcome. I&#x27;m assuming they are drawing a lot of that from their powertoys fancy zones [1] application. Hopefully the added docking features and how they treat windows really is as good as they are demoing.<p>I hope that there is some way to navigate to the individual workspaces by a keybind built into Windows, though. As it is in Windows 10, you can&#x27;t (as far as I know) bind an arbitrary hotkey to focus a specific workspace, you have to navigate them directionally which makes it much harder for me to use for what I use them for.<p>I also got the impression that changing themes like from light to dark mode is going to be a much better experience (one that&#x27;s intended to happen often) with smooth animations between them. Windows 10 currently does allow you to change from light to dark mode but there&#x27;s no way to automatically switch them by sunrise&#x2F;sunset like it exists in MacOS. Mojave also featured bad animations when it added dark mode to MacOS but today does it much more gracefully.<p>I&#x27;m extremely skeptical of any sort of improvement on their search&#x2F;launcher, which is hilariously bad when compared against spotlight&#x27;s index (which powers spotlight and many third party applications like alfred and launchbar) or even kde&#x27;s krunner or applications like rofi. If there is a meaningful change here it&#x27;d be the most exciting for me, though.<p>Overall I don&#x27;t know that it needs a numbered update or not, but one advantage of having big numbered releases is that it gives you an opportunity to highlight a lot of new features at once, rather than only hearing about them through enthusiast blogs who are carefully watching the rolling releases of Windows 10. Hopefully the features work as well as advertised.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;windows&#x2F;powertoys&#x2F;fancyzones" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;windows&#x2F;powertoys&#x2F;fancyzone...</a>

&gt; For creators and publishers, Widgets also opens new real estate within Windows to deliver personalized content.<p>This is nothing but very deep penetration in the user&#x27;s personal space.

And they still insist that touchscreens on computers are a practical thing and thus make everything huge.

I can’t wait to see if Control Panel is still around with those network interface dialogs (among many others) from nearly two decades ago.<p>The new dock or taskbar looks nicer, but something about the window styles, the shape, the icons and the fonts still looks as ugly as they are on Windows 10.

No 1st gen AMD Zen support:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;windows-hardware&#x2F;design&#x2F;minimum&#x2F;supported&#x2F;windows-11-supported-amd-processors" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;windows-hardware&#x2F;design&#x2F;min...</a><p>Zen+ supported.<p>I wonder why.

Windows nowadays feels like a carefully crafted piece of software built by brilliant engineering and UX teams that, just before release, gets crapped all over by ads teams with annoyances and dark patterns. It must be frustrating to work in the former.

What about removing all the old crud at some point? All this disorganized layering makes windows feel like a schizophrenic operating system. At some point they have to realize they have to start cleaning up the mess, right?

&quot;From the new Start button and taskbar to each sound, font and icon, everything was done intentionally to put you in control and bring a sense of calm and ease&quot;.<p>It is important to carefully polish icons to put users in control.

Disappointed that it is not going to look exactly like the renderings in the video, with the physically rendered glass panes and slight perspective. I think the processing power required would be negligible compared to any modern game. Instead, it is going to be flat design with some blur and more gradients.<p>Remember when people were excited about a new OS version, with a new cool design? Windows 95, Windows 2000, Windows XP?

I just want them to include a Windows license in my Microsoft 365 subscription and let me install it on my M1 (or Intel) Mac. I don’t understand why the business folks at MS haven’t noticed that opportunity.<p>Separately, I’d like to see a return to the concept of “Trusted Computing”. In the Windows XP&#x2F;Vista days, telemetry was opt-in (sometimes with a nudge). Office wouldn’t send my grammar telemetry to MS without letting me see it and remove items first. There was an option to just turn it all off.<p>I get why MS wants telemetry, but they would win a lot of good will by giving power users an easy way to opt out. I think relatively few would do it in practice and they’d lose some of the bad press.<p>Greater UI consistency would be nice as well but that isn’t exactly on brand for them, so not holding my breath.

All I want is a completely new, Unix like file system. Speed sucks in windows, bringing down my patience.

Advanced System Settings &gt; (Performance) Settings &gt; Adjust for Best Performance &gt; Apply and OK.

This Windows update is a car crash. Seems like another data grab by shoving Teams spyware down people throats. I like the dig at Google with Amazon Android (to which you need another account and another company sticking their greasy fingers into your data pie).<p>I just hope that this &quot;upgrade&quot; is optional and they will not start to age Windows 10 with updates designed to slow the operating system.<p>I was actually hoping that Windows 11 will become a window manager on top of a Linux with compatibility layer to run Windows 10 apps.<p>Oh well.

I know I’m a former microsoft employee so I’m a bit biased, but man the quality of these presentations are awesome. Panos is the best salesperson I’ve ever had the chance to meet.

The prominence of that Game Store in the Windows 11 press materials is, I guess, part of the motivation Valve has had for investing in Linux gaming.

My Primary concern with Windows 11 can be described as follows:<p>98<p>- ME<p>XP<p>- Vista<p>7<p>- 8<p>10<p>- 11<p>Has Microsoft broken the cycle? Time will tell.

Am I the only one who likes the padded, easy-to-read UI but just wishes MS would actually implement it across the OS? I don&#x27;t want MacOS infinitesimal icons nor windows xp aesthetics. I like what they&#x27;re doing, there is just a lot of variance left which is where e.g. apple does a good job.

I had a really hard time watching the presentation, regardless of the features presented. Panos Panay continously referred to Windows as &quot;the product&quot;, they presented years-old feature like multi-desktop, and the maybe biggest news, Android apps, was just mentioned as side info.

What I want is modern performant filesystem with checksumming for data&#x2F;metadata, zstd, ssd-optimized, perhaps cow&#x2F;snapshots. Basically I want btrfs.<p>ReFS was that promise but AFAIK it&#x27;s still not bootable, mirror required, no compression. In short, unusable for non-servers.

So, almost all the new “features” are about forcing Microsoft services onto users, really cool.

I had assumed&#x2F;hoped that the next version of windows would be built atop Linux.

So the desktop is in the start menu now? Are icons on the desktop deprecated?

I wonder what Sir Tim Berners-Lee would have to say about the Web being born on Windows. Both WorldWideWeb (the first Web browser) and CERN httpd (the first Web server) were developed on NeXTSTEP.

I like it and I&#x27;m excited to install it. I&#x27;ve been enjoying a lot this &quot;new&quot; Microsoft, including all the WSL that they brought.<p>New UI looks macOS-ish but looks fresh at the same time.

Built in Teams in Windows 11, sounds like new anti trust is coming.

Oh hell. I need to figure out how to do GPU passthrough for VMs for gaming so I can ditch it once and for all. I&#x27;m not putting up with more and more junk.

Is there anything Microsoft could do with the OS that would really matter? Corporate purchases account for what?, 80%?, 90%? of Windows sales? My prediction: This version will still have (nearly) weekly root-level 0-day patches, but companies will continue to eat it up with a fork and spoon, because it lets them do such things as dictate to their corporate laptop fleet how long the screensaver can run before it locks. And the relatively few people who choose to use the OS for gaming (or on their Surface) will find things to be happy about, and life will go on as usual.

if yellow journalism pays so much that microsoft is hell bent on shoving &quot;personalised news feed&quot; down peoples throats afer msn homepage on browsers and now on the desktop, why do news outlets beg for &quot;dont block ads, we need ad revenue or buy subscription&quot;? just take that from microsoft and be done with it

Does &quot;free upgrade for eligible PCs&quot; mean there won&#x27;t be a generally available free upgrade from Win10?

No text-based configuration or headless systems yet again. This truly is a non-developer-friendly OS.

Could 11 solve some of my Windows gripes? (experienced on Win 10 Pro and LTSC, not on a domain so no group policy applied) Unfortunately I doubt it:<p>For me, window focus handling has gotten noticeably worse in the past couple of years. A window will pop up, I&#x27;ll start typing, the keypresses won&#x27;t go into the window, then I&#x27;ll hit alt+tab twice to switch away and then back, and then the keypresses will magically start landing. Anybody else notice this?<p>The lack of a proper inode-based filesystem means I&#x27;m frequently having to terminate processes during builds because something is holding open a file that needs to be replaced. It&#x27;s 2021. Linux and MacOS don&#x27;t have this problem, when will this finally get solved?<p>My laptop sometimes turns into a jet engine because one of many aggressive background processes goes nuts for a short period. Which one varies -- it could be Compatibility Telemetry (tried turning it off, didn&#x27;t stay off), Superfetch, search indexing, etc. Especially frustrating when I&#x27;m on battery.<p>Suspend doesn&#x27;t always stay suspended. Too many times I&#x27;ve pulled a hot laptop out of a backpack. I&#x27;ve tried all the Internet-suggested fixes to no avail, so I had to give up on suspend.<p>The start menu at some point became non-deterministic, so I can&#x27;t use muscle memory to open things without looking. For example when I hit the start menu and type &quot;bash&quot;, half the time &quot;Git Bash&quot; is the highlighted option, half the time it&#x27;s WSL&#x27;s bash.<p>The start menu has been corrupted by Cortana. Sometimes figuratively, where it doesn&#x27;t immediately respond to keypresses because it&#x27;s apparently trying to load something and finally stutters open. Sometimes literally, where text search stops working for local apps and the only fix is to reinstall Windows. (Tried all of the internet-suggested fixes, tried an experienced Windows IT guy, etc.)<p>The installer&#x27;s lack of flexibility and compatibility is horrible. Not a problem if you only ever get Windows on a new PC, but for those of us who re&#x2F;install things, it&#x27;s horrible. Even Debian&#x27;s text installer is more flexible and reliable than what MS gives us. Now when I install Windows on a dual boot system I keep Linux on a separate device and remove the Linux device before installing Windows, just so Windows won&#x27;t put its EFI config on the wrong drive (yep, that happened).<p>Don&#x27;t get me started on the user hostile telemetry, how awful the event viewer is when you&#x27;re trying to figure out what&#x27;s going wrong, rebooting despite me telling it not to, the unwanted game installs (on Pro!) just so the App Store group can claim some success story, etc. And I&#x27;ve got more but it&#x27;s almost too easy...

Hope W11 brings back the installation option &quot;Compact&quot;. Personally just want the base OS.

I wonder if they&#x27;ll finally make it possible for more than one instance of Settings to be open.

Any mention of Windows 11 for ARM?

MS Teams client built in and the ability to run Android apps via the App Store.

Haven&#x27;t been able to find the release schedule, when will MS deliver it?

There was a 10?

do you guys anticipate an uptick in Linux&#x2F;BSD&#x2F;Mac adoption?

&gt;Why Microsoft is calling Windows 10 &#x27;the last version of Windows&#x27; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;5&#x2F;7&#x2F;8568473&#x2F;windows-10-last-version-of-windows" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;5&#x2F;7&#x2F;8568473&#x2F;windows-10-last-ve...</a><p>There you see again what Microsoft&#x27;s statements are worth.

Omg they put the start button in the middle I hate it I hate it

“The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don&#x27;t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don&#x27;t think of original ideas, and they don&#x27;t bring much culture into their products.”<p>Steve Jobs Triumph of the Nerds (1996)

The main thing that would be of interest to me:<p>- Have they replaced&#x2F;improved the NT kernel [1]?<p>- Have they replaced the ancient registry? [2]<p>The answer to either was not to be found. I&#x27;ll bet windows 11 will still be a backwards-compatible mess if the answer to either is `no`.<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.zorinaq.com&#x2F;i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-we-are-slower-than-other-oper&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.zorinaq.com&#x2F;i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-w...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rwmj.wordpress.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;02&#x2F;18&#x2F;why-the-windows-registry-sucks-technically&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rwmj.wordpress.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;02&#x2F;18&#x2F;why-the-windows-regist...</a>