Windows 11 review: An unnecessary replacement for Windows 10

Microsoft just doesn&#x27;t get it.<p>Windows is a fundamentally mediocre OS that is made great by means of its wide compatibility with software and hardware. It&#x27;s not sexy but it kind of works.<p>Then they figured we now live in a mobile&#x2F;touch world and went in that direction. But hardly anybody has a mobile Windows device, so it misses the target. To this day, store apps look like they&#x27;re made for phones.<p>Windows used to be a system where you had the feeling its yours. General purpose computing. Do whatever you want. Increasingly, it feels like some hybrid cloud OS, where gradually you give up user control.<p>Windows 8, a UI clusterfuck, introduced a new design language. That was 2012. Almost a decade later, and not even in Windows 11, is the UI consistent. It&#x27;s a facade. Why does it take a decade to skin a OS?<p>Windows 11 removes customization options whilst that is exactly what Windows is about.<p>Too many developers were switching to Mac, so now Linux is integrated. Not in itself a bad thing, don&#x27;t get me wrong.<p>It seems they&#x27;re running in every direction at once and just give up on each direction halfway through.

For kicks I installed Works 9.0 yesterday; on my bleeding edge beast of a gaming machine. _Holy hell_ is it fast _and capable_.<p>For comparison, I popped open the relevant Office 365 apps and every one of them was noticeably slower to load, and slower to function. Even text rendering of input seemed to have a bit of a delay.<p>I can only imagine a world where Windows 2000 simply kept receiving security and driver updates. <i>sigh</i>

I&#x27;m convinced that this is all a result of Microsoft being a rudderless ship. That and their unkillable telemetry telling them shit like &quot;n% of people spend x% more time in Settings than Control Panel&quot; so that means that Settings must be better. Right? Cool, let&#x27;s take 5 years to slowly destroy the control panel.<p>Many things I&#x27;ve read over the last few years about Microsoft is that it&#x27;s utterly disfunctional. It&#x27;s become so big that it&#x27;s impossible to achieve any kind of coherence. As another comment pointed out: they&#x27;ve had 10 years to make the UI all look the same and still haven&#x27;t achieved it! A single dev could have redesigned the whole thing in a couple of years at most so it can&#x27;t be a technical issue: it points to them either having incompetent management or just being too damn big to actually manage!<p>Now I&#x27;ve worked mainly for large corporates over the years and they&#x27;re never a single entity: they&#x27;re always made up of multiple internal entities whether officially or unofficially. And they all have their own goals so steering a company as a whole is not an easy task but Microsoft are a fucking mess and thanks to all this forced shit, Windows 10 will be the final version of Windows for me.<p>So what does that mean? It means that Linux has 4 years to get its act together before I switch to it permanently, come hell or high water. Coz right now, Linux is not a replacement for Windows for a great many people. Myself included. Even though I&#x27;ve tried multiple times with Fedora, Pop_OS and Ubuntu, shit always goes wrong. Always: dodgy sound issues, Nvidia drivers issues, scaling issues etc... stuff I don&#x27;t get with Windows! Ever.

I find it pretty crazy that as far as hardware requirements go apparently the minimum is a 7th generation intel chip. Unsurprisingly only slightly more than 40% of enterprise machines meet that requirement[1], this pretty much excludes any machine pre 2018, no? Very weird.<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;windows-11-half-of-enterprise-workstations-dont-meet-the-new-system-requirements-says-survey&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;windows-11-half-of-enterprise-...</a>

All I&#x27;m hoping for at this point is that they switch course on this ridiculous taskbar thing. I want a vertical task bar on the left side of my rightmost monitor, and I can&#x27;t actually imagine using a PC with anything else. Also, small taskbar buttons with text (my taskbar is about 250px wide so that I can read the names of all my multiple windows of each IDE&#x2F;text editor&#x2F;Firefox).<p>This is such a huge impact on day-to-day usage of the OS by users, why would they constrain it?

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” - Orwell.<p>That&#x27;s Windows since Windows 7.<p>Ads? &quot;Telemetry&quot;? A built-in browser? No.

I don&#x27;t understand why Microsoft&#x27;s developer products (like VS Code and Github) are really great, but their consumer products just suck.

I feel like local accounts on windows is just like local vaults on 1Password.<p>They kind of support it but will keep annoying and bullying the hell out of you to move to the cloud for “your own benefit”. Until you either leave or submit to their will.

Every giant tech company seems to do this to some extent. I call it &#x27;genetic drift&#x27; as it&#x27;s akin to that phenomenon in nature. When a company gets so big that it will keep existing and being profitable no matter what decisions they make, then, they make random decisions, there&#x27;s no selection pressure anymore.

With all of these new features Microsoft continues to try to usher in the year of the Linux desktop.

from the article &gt; Local “offline” accounts require Windows 11 Pro.<p>and <i>still</i> no tabbed Windows Explorer.<p>zero interest in this I see no benefit.

Overall I do really like the new UI, but the lack of taskbar customizability does indeed suck (I used to have it at the top, but now that I&#x27;m forced to have it at the bottom I&#x27;ve set it to auto-hide). The Settings menu on the other hand is leaps and bounds better than the absolute garbage that is the Windows 10 Settings menu (except for the default app mess but hopefully they&#x27;ll improve that).

&quot;While Windows 11 tolerates local offline accounts, expect to see numerous little passive-aggressive nags here and there to “change to a Microsoft [or “online”] account.”<p>I hate that with Windows 10. Give me a break M$.

&gt; Offline accounts are now a &quot;pro&quot; feature.<p>&gt; Switching default browsers is now more difficult.<p>&gt; Taskbar is now shoved to the center. Why? No reason other than to be aesthetically differentiable from Windows 10.<p>Remember when things used to get better between versions? I do.

My plan is to stick to windows 10 until full nvidia support for wayland arrive. Hopefully, 5 years is enough as things started to get better lately.

Microsoft, Apple, And Google are perfectly timed right now for a competitor take over. They have been for a couple years.<p>Microsoft’s constant privacy violations with Windows 10 telemetry, their user hostile subscription pricing model on everything, horrible security vulnerabilities (and hostile bug bounty programs).<p>Apple’s pricing, security holes, (and hostile bug bounties program), and anti-developer activities, alignment with China, running the company like a CFO owns it.<p>Google’s complete corruption on account take downs, horrible search results (yes, I want that keyword I typed in to be included!), and privacy violations.<p>Why hasn’t all the money being thrown around the last handful of years been used to unseat these companies?

I have the Insider Beta or whatever enabled and the update I installed last night seemed to cause some kind of severe memory leak. Chrome kept freezing up and was generally unresponsive. Something related to the taskbar or OS kept restarting, which I assume was because of an out-of-memory issue.<p>I am wondering if it&#x27;s a bug or if somehow my Omen laptop doesn&#x27;t meet the requirements and they just sent me the update anyway. But as it is I think I absolutely have to revert to a previous version.

Why is Microsoft so bad at software for microcomputers? They are truly a testament to the power of compatibility and enterprise sales.

The best OS and UI upgrade is the one you&#x27;re already comfortable using.

I have been running Windows 11 on a second machine since the preview came out. It is an old Dell Latitude from 2011 or so. A 3rd generation Intel i5 CPU, 8GB RAM and a Samsung 250GB SATA SSD. It runs Windows 11 very well. It ran Windows 10 very well just for reference.<p>I have no complaints about the stability of Windows. Windows 10 had always been very stable and reliable and Windows 11 continues that. At least during the previews.<p>There are some nice new features such as the new &#x27;windows snapping&#x27; UI when you hover over the maximise button however this hardly seems worthwhile of revving Windows up from 10 to 11.<p>There are also a lot of frustrating changes. Take for example the new context menus. For many years people have made fun of the inconsistencies in Windows context menus. It isn&#x27;t a big deal in reality but it became a bit of a meme that Microsoft were incapable of solving it.<p>So is this <i>solved</i> in Windows 11? No. If anything it is <i>worse</i> because rather than solving the inconsistencies they hide it behind <i>yet another</i> context menu design.<p>For example if you right click on a zip file because you want to access 7-Zip or WinRAR&#x27;s context menu options you no longer get them. You get this new context menu with a &quot;show more options&quot; item at the bottom. Select this and <i>then</i> you get the <i>old</i> context menu that contains the application extended options for 7-Zip, etc.<p>On the surface it <i>looks</i> cleaned up but in reality they just made it worse by covering it up and adding another step to the users workflow.<p>They did some work on a new Settings app which is nice but again many options just throw you back into old properties windows for advanced settings such as some keyboard and mouse options, etc. Sure not a big deal as you hardly ever need to go there but that is true of most settings so why bother at all.<p>I hate this &quot;let&#x27;s improve 60% of things but leave that old 40% as it is because it&#x27;s just too much work now&quot; attitude Microsoft has had with regards to consistency since the release of Windows XP.<p>By far the worst aspect is the removal of so many customisation options. The new taskbar is trash. As is the new Start Menu. Sure you can left justify the icons but you can&#x27;t do much else with the taskbar&#x2F;dock. Use multiple monitors? Sorry you can only see the date and time on your main monitor for some reason. Want to put the taskbar on the left side of your screen rather than along the bottom? No sorry that is no longer supported.<p>Want to drag and drop a file onto an app icon? Hah! No sorry that 25+ year long UX doesn&#x27;t work with the new taskbar.<p>Overall Windows 11 certainly feels like a step backwards for Windows as a whole. It seems Microsoft just don&#x27;t know what they want from Windows so just slap a new coat of paint on it and call it new while they struggle to see where it fits moving forward.<p>To me it isn&#x27;t backwards compatibility or native (Win32 eek!) applications that keep business on Windows but remote management. Windows may be kinda crappy from a UX perspective but it is stable and easier to manage on scale than anything else out there, in a business setting anyway. For education Chromebook&#x27;s and iPad&#x27;s work great due to the hub and spoke nature of schools and IT management, which is why we have seen those devices eat away at Microsoft&#x27;s market there.<p>I feel the fact that Windows 11 will release next week with little interest shows how it doesn&#x27;t <i>really</i> matter anymore. I suspect Apple&#x27;s October update to macOS with the release of Monterey will receive just as much, if not more, press and praise and that happens every year like clock work.<p>Anyway I think I have written enough. I hadn&#x27;t planned on this mini-essay when I opened this thread so I guess congratulations and thanks if you made it this far on a Saturday evening.

Windows has been on the wrong path since Win 7.<p>I keep a 10-year-old ultrabook with Win 7 for the very rare occasions that I need to run some form of Windows app.

Win 10 LTSB (the only good version of windows atm anyway) will be supported for a good few more years. Presumably by its EOL there will be a decent win 11 LTSB available to switch to.<p>I have to use Windows for my job (game dev) . I dont understand how anyone can stomach non LTSB windows. Also, just go ahead and pirate it! MS have given us no other choice.

The problem is that the money Microsoft makes from telemetry and shunting ads in the star menu FAR outweighs any financial pressure on them to make a decent OS. If that source of income was somehow shunted then they would actually go back to making something functional.

It&#x27;s not possible to disable the antivirus on Windows 11. It always resurrects itself. It&#x27;s annoying AF. I&#x27;m staying with Windows 10 because Windows 11 takes away user control over the OS.

Netflix on Linux at 1080p really needs to happen ASAP so that I can ditch windows.<p>Gaming is rapidly improving and browser run fine on nix…so literally just stupid drm left. Most people don’t really use much else these days.

&quot;Windows 11 comes with tight Teams integration.&quot;<p>Coooooooolsies

&quot;Windows 10 will be the last Windows, a continuously updated OS that you can rely on&quot;<p>&quot;Uhh, turns out we can&#x27;t make <i>that much</i> money off of it&quot;<p>&quot;Windows 11 is the most exciting Windows OS yet!&quot;

A Windows 11 review without any comparison macOS?

Windows users are quite slow to realize that their operating system is a weapon, and the users are the target.