That is the part that upsets me the most - there are no viable alternatives. Linux I can get by with, but it's a huge compromise on all fronts except the terminal experience. Windows is obviously out of the question completely.
For laptops, I've decided to go back to Windows after 15 years of using Macs; I replaced my 2013 MacBook Air with a Microsoft Surface Pro 7 running Windows 10. I'm happy with the purchase; the Surface Pro 7 is an excellent tablet, and Windows Subsystem for Linux has made using Windows more pleasant for me since I spend a lot of time in the terminal. For desktops, as of this moment I'm still using a 2013 Mac Pro as my daily driver, running Mojave. Eventually I would like to replace this with a Ryzen 7 or Ryzen 9 build that will probably run FreeBSD.
I'm keeping my eye on the Hello desktop (https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/) for FreeBSD, which appears to have the goal of providing a desktop environment that is heavily influenced by pre-Yosemite Mac OS X's Aqua interface. If this desktop gains traction, then hopefully there will be applications written that are conformant to Hello's UI guidelines, which are based on pre-Yosemite's Apple Human Interface Guidelines.
I lament the state of personal computing these days, and I wish there were more investment in desktop computing; I talk more about it here (http://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2020/10/where-did-perso...). If I were independently wealthy, then I'd work on this.
Hello desktop looks good indeed, though a but too early for me too. Right now I use KDE on FreeBSD. It's a bit too 'Windowsy' but Gnome is far too much 'new Apple', taking away user choice, so it's not an option for me.
I don't think these people will be fond of the sweeping changes made in Win11's UI that are dedicated to touch interfaces/tablets, and to the big new feature of running Android apps "natively" on Windows, along with an Android app store.
The ability to run Linux software is also mostly irrelevant, as MacOS/Darwin has largely been able to run those same programs natively since the beginning. It's never needed a POSIX compatibility layer -- it was built to support that functionality from day 1. e.g. Apple didn't need to build a compatibility shim to tunnel Wayland/X11 applications because Quartz was designed from the start to support that use case.
Windows 11 is a much better compromise of usability on both, and I like the idea of panes, it is sorta kinda heading towards a tiling window system which really appeals to me.
And the android thing and Amazon's involvement. Yeah a lot written about this and I don't agree with it either. But you don't have to use it.
Basically Windows 11 presents the opportunity to unify all the kernel and related OS infrastructure to pretend the road started with Windows 8 never happened.
The COM improvements done in WinRT, are ported into Win32 land, .NET Native goes away replaced by .NET 6 AOT, app sandoxing gets replaced by MSIX sandoxing, .....
Thus pretending that all those improvements happened as if Windows 11 suceeded Windows 7, and a couple of years from now, the UWP branch will be dropped from Windows SCM.
But this sounds like a good thing to me overall. I was never a fan of UWP as most of the apps were too tablet focused. The same issue I have with Mac Catalyst apps. Too dumbed down and basic. I know it's not technically necessary to do so, but these unified platforms seem to stimulate that kind of app. I was also very happy to see that live tiles are going away (It always takes some time for me to rid the start menu of them).
If Microsoft would adopt a more privacy friendly stance e.g. no telemetry or MS accounts required at all, I'd actually consider using it again for more purposes privately.
UWP dropped from WinUI roadmap and desktop focus,
https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/blob/main/doc...
While Project Reunion gets renamed into Windows App SDK
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/06/24/what-w...
C++/WinRT also does COM anyway,
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/cpp-and-winrt-a...
All Language/WinRT SDKs become /windows,
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/05/06/announ...
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/01/21/making...
Microsoft Game Development Kit makes it clear that for AAA titles, the Win32 + GDK model is the future, while WinRT APIs are being deprecated, and only community support is planned for UWP, not from Microft XBox teams.
https://github.com/microsoft/GDK
So one just needs to read between the lines, combine it with years of experience with previous technology reboots from Microsoft, and it is relatively clear where they are heading with Windows 11.
Naturaly when playing futurology games there is always a possibility of being wrong.
WSL isn't that great either. I've tried to make it so that I can SSH into my WSL instance from other machines - doesn't work. Windows seems to always assign a random IP address to the WSL instance, so I can't actually forward SSH traffic to it. Well, I can but it stops working after I shut down the WSL instance.
It's nice for playing games but I don't see the appeal in any other part of the system. Setting up GPG and Git on a Windows machine is also so much worse than on other operating systems.