Windows 11 available on October 5 | Hacker News Reader

Windows 11 available on October 5

blogs.windows.com

125 pointsWalterSobchak307 comments

There's a fine line that PR has to toe in order to make a product sound supernaturally good but without it sounding like obvious hyperbole. This is a great example of PR failing to toe that line:

> The new design and sounds are modern, fresh, clean and beautiful, bringing you a sense of calm and ease.

The default desktop theme brings me a sense of calm and ease...?

> Snap Layouts, Snap Groups and Desktops provide an even more powerful way to multitask and optimize your screen real estate.

So you've added some features to the way I drag windows about a screen?

> Widgets, a new personalized feed powered by AI, provides a faster way to access the information you care about, and with Microsoft Edge’s world class performance, speed and productivity features you can get more done on the web.

So many buzzwords to unpack there.

> Windows 11 delivers the best Windows ever for gaming and unlocks the full potential of your system’s hardware with technology like DirectX12 Ultimate, DirectStorage and Auto HDR.

Hasn't every release of Windows and/or DirectX made that same claim?

> Windows 11 is optimized for speed, efficiency and improved experiences with touch, digital pen and voice input.

Yet wont run on 4 year old hardware....that's some piss poor optimisations.

I'm probably not the target audience for these kinds of press announcements but I really wish companies would dial it back a bit.

> Windows 11 is optimized for speed

Yet has a half second delay on any UI interaction. [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/tbIvIS1kl3I

I get mild anxiety watching that video

> "Rename file" option moved one click deeper into the context menu

Why do UX designers make these useless tweaks, utterly workflow-breaking for anyone who's relying on any kind of muscle memory ?!

I suspect it's because of telemetry - someone figured out this particular entry is not used often enough and doesn't deserve a 1st level entry. I just hope they don't do the same with F2.

I got a new Dell laptop that has End and Home overlaid on the function keys. Normally the F keys are doubled up with hardware specific features like brightness and volume. But I guess they had some empty ones and figured, "who even uses these?"

https://supportkb.dell.com/img/ka02R00000085brQAA/ka02R00000...

So I can either use F2 (and every other Fkey) or I can use Home and End. There's a dedicated button to toggle between the two modes. It drives me nuts.

I was hoping for a long time someone would take care of this problem and start the "pc-ization of notebooks" revolution. That is, make them modular, just like modular smartphones (that mostly failed I think). It means going in the opposite direction that Apple is going. It means a slightly higher cost - but overall smaller carbon footprint in the long term. I'd like to be able to switch the keyboards in my laptop - but nowadays they make it difficult to remove the battery (or almost impossible, if you happen to use newer Mac Books). I'd love to upgrade my screen - and screen only. Same for webcam, touchpad, WLAN modem and other peripherals. I realize there are challenges, but many of them (like detachable screen) have already been solved by another revolution. Sadly, the industry is going in the opposite direction.

Framework Laptop A thin, lightweight, high-performance 13.5” notebook that can be upgraded, customized, and repaired in ways that no other notebook can. Proof that designing products to last doesn’t require sacrificing performance, quality, or style.

https://frame.work/

The weirdest thing about the always-on icon grouping is the (lack of?) design rationale behind it. What's the point of saving space in the taskbar? There's no content of any kind there and modern displays typically have ample horizontal space.

I think it depends on the software. I have ended up with dozens of PHPStorm windows, because of a situation where windows would be restored on branch change but not auto-closed. Combining them into one icon made it manageable.

It's literally the first thing I disable on a fresh install.

> Widgets, a new personalized feed powered by AI

Who asked for that?

You’d be surprised how much my father raves about simply having news shown to him when he opens up Edge.

Nobody asked for this, but telemetry at MS shows these have extremely high engagement by the people who don’t immediately disable them.

Early on many of us raved about that sort of thing too before we realized how bad it was.

Lmao no one.

And yet I'll bet you a million bucks that windows 11 still has a virtually unusable file search function.

Windows file search is so bad.

Also bad: this morning my router was acting up and I would get intermittent connection. I normally hit the Win key and start typing the name of program I want to launch, but the start menu was seemingly locked-up due to the connection issue. What the hell? This OS runs on like a billion machines.

I'm still genuinely surprised that Microsoft hasn't fixed the search. You'd think that being unusable would get them to address it, but I suppose not.

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> Windows 11 is optimized for speed

>Yet wont run on 4 year old hardware....that's some piss poor optimisations.

Of course it will be faster. It's achieved by dropping compatibility with older slower hardware.

It's good to be optimistic, but you should be aware that gaming benchmarks show 0-2% lower performance in Windows 11 compared to Windows 10. Sure, it's in beta, but if you're advertising higher performance and ship in two months... That higher performance won't magically appear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mT-q2nNxAc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbIvIS1kl3I

Ah, come on, they really haven't. They just have taken old hardware out of their testing matrix, so if it doesn't work, they don't want to fix it. Most likely stuff will run fine.

It requires TPM 2.0 or it refuses to install. This includes first generation Ryzen first released in 2017 or any Intel CPU before 8th gen.

Also keep in mind that not every computer you buy today includes the latest generation or even the last generation. Looking at the items on the shelf at the local best buy I see 8th-11th gen. Machines were sold new earlier this year that will never run windows 11.

The TPM is not part of the CPU... It is a completely separate chip.

Your point stands that many older computers had no incentive to include a TPM, and as such did not.

Microsoft is doing the right thing by providing the stick to make hardware manufacturers include a TPM.

the "TPM" on modern intel/amd boards isn't a discrete chip but a soft implementation in the board's firmware

"fTPM"

if they insisted on a discrete TPM they'd be at maybe 1% market share (high-end workstations for enterprise only)

What exactly is the TPM providing the end user?

Protection from some attackers, maybe, but centralizing all of their secrets into a single location that may very well be backdoored. Why can't I use my own private key in a TPM? Who else has the private key in my TPM?

The whole point of a TPM is to reduce the possibility of a backdoor.

And you do own the private key in a TPM, what makes you think you do not. Do you "own" the private key on a U2F device or a yubikey or a tensor?

The special sauce of a TPM is the tracking of various parts of the the hardware.

No matter what, your boot loader is unencrypted. It MUST be read by the hardware to decrypt your actual OS. Without a TPM, you can modify the bootloader or the bios, or many other things that would allow an attacker access to your key.

With a TPM if anything is modified it will refuse to deliver the key. This is a level of security currently impossible without it.

As far as I know the TPM is not a true hard requirement for installation. I'm pretty sure there are some tweaks you can make to the install ISO that will bypass this.

At least the dev build run here on TPM 1.2, including bitlocker.

Edit: I think the requirements are not enforced when installing new, not upgrading from a installed win 10.

Some of supported cpus are much slower than some not supported ones.

> modern, fresh, clean and beautiful

Everytime I hear these words that means they've regressed in terms of UX/UI.

I prefer these adjectives: Old, tested, functional and straighforward.

de-hyped

> The new design and sounds are modern, fresh, clean and beautiful, bringing you a sense of calm and ease.

The new design and sounds are modern.

> Snap Layouts, Snap Groups and Desktops provide an even more powerful way to multitask and optimize your screen real estate.

Snap Layouts, Snap Groups and Desktops provide a way to multitask and optimize your screen.

Widgets, a feed, provides a way to access your information.

> Windows 11 delivers the best Windows ever for gaming and unlocks the full potential of your system’s hardware with technology like DirectX12 Ultimate, DirectStorage and Auto HDR.

Windows 11 delivers Windows for gaming.

> Windows 11 is optimized for speed, efficiency and improved experiences with touch, digital pen and voice input.

Windows 11 is optimized.

>> Snap Layouts, Snap Groups and Desktops provide an even more powerful way to multitask and optimize your screen real estate.

>So you've added some features to the way I drag windows about a screen?

The only thing holding me back from a ultrawide screen monitor is that I snapping two docs per monitor so I can have 4 across. If they add this feature I'll be happy.

You can get this functionality in Windows 10 using PowerToys https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

>> Snap Layouts, Snap Groups and Desktops provide an even more powerful way to multitask and optimize your screen real estate.

> So you've added some features to the way I drag windows about a screen?

Hey, if they added PowerToys' "Fancy Zones" built-in, that's already a good enough reason for a version bump to me...

Yeah but you can just use Fancy Zones.

Not on my work machine, its not approved by Global.

DirectStorage will become important, but of course its artificially limited to a Windows version like usual.

https://www.pcgamer.com/windows-11-directstorage-windows-10/

It's not even exclusive.

I was really hoping that we were past having to think about different versions of Windows. Microsoft hyped Windows 10 as the 'last version of Windows' and that's how it should be. But now we have to go through this stupid cycle again, wasting user and IT department time doing upgrades, as well as developer time worrying about version support.

Within Windows 10, the updates really were versions in several significant ways.

- They have support end dates!

- Hardware support can vary between version (updates). I could not even get Windows 10 Build 1903 to boot with a newer GPU. I had to boot using the iGPU and update to 21H1, and then I could boot. Trying to install the driver on 1903, the installer said this version of Windows was not supported (!)

- The UI can be changed. Just one small example, early versions of Windows Hello did not support using a PIN to login. Later versions started to roll back all the pushes to use Cortana.

> I could not even get Windows 10 Build 1903 to boot with a newer GPU. I had to boot using the iGPU and update to 21H1, and then I could boot. Trying to install the driver on 1903, the installer said this version of Windows was not supported (!)

but this is a driver/software issue. you can pinpoint your software to higher versions.

I was hoping Windows 11 would be substantially different under-the-hood and not just rounded corners. I know backwards compatibility is Windows' under-acknowledged killer feature, but there is a on of cruft and inefficiency that is included as a result. The typical Windows user is not going to need to run programs from the 90's and 2000's. Why not make Windows 10 the compatibility focused platform and make 11 the slimmed down version? I suppose a rough parallel would be how Apple transitioned to OS X.

I concur. At this point, it's probably better to create some kind of virtual machine as a compatibility layer. That way it can be updated separately and it doesn't need to be part of the actual system. Alternatively, it could probably be a sub-system like WSL - and completely optional.

Interestingly enough, this has been done before!

Windows 7 introduced "Windows XP Mode" which was a container running a virtualized Windows XP for applications that didn't work correctly in 7. But since they also had the per-application compatibility settings, it wasn't the first pick for most users.

While it's a good idea on the surface, it still means they have to maintain compatibility code within that virtual system. Perhaps if they separate it well enough, and it has a dedicated team, while the core OS team can focus on a slimmed down, "current stuff only" version... but I suppose it's also hard to know where the line is drawn in the sand.

I ran the Windowx XP Virtual Machine (in Windows 7) for at least one LOB app - it wasn't all that it was cracked up to be. Fairly complex to setup.

Windows 8 tried to isolate Win32 to a delayed loading sub-system and got lambasted for it. Admittedly, they hit the rough part of the chicken and egg gamble where they didn't have enough apps in the new/fresh/modern side with less compatibility cruft for enough people to see why it was worth it to delay load Win32.

Still a lot of reason to wonder if they had found a way to deliver the UWP platform earlier to Windows 7 ahead of 8's launch and got more applications up front of the transition if that attempt might have gone much smoother.

I’m pretty sure that’s how it works.

I think that is what they were trying to do with Windows 11 (especially given how much it resembles what they demoed of "10X" and that was 10X's plan to be a slimmer 10).

Unfortunately for them, most of my biggest complaints about Windows 11 are the places where they most broke backward compatibility and dropped "cruft" that I loved. The biggest example is that the inability to move the taskbar to a different side alone is a stupid removal that I'm sure removed a lot of ancient backwards compatibility cruft in the taskbar code, but that's something I've used on every machine under my control since Windows XP and its loss really doesn't make sense to me.

Careful what you wish for, old software had to perform well on very slow hardware, meaning it's blazingly fast on modern hardware. I doubt that (for instance) the NT kernel would magically become faster or better if it would be replaced with a "modern" rewrite, the opposite is much more likely.

>The typical Windows user is not going to need to run programs from the 90's and 2000's.

They very much do. Windows software use all sorts of legacy Win32 APIs, even if they have trendy new GUI on top. (and UWP is practially dead and not used by anyone)

I have to assume Windows 11 basically only exists because of pressure from OEMs who want to be able to slap a big mark on the box of their new laptops highlighting that it runs a new OS that your old machine can't run.

And this idea is supported by the fact that Windows 11 is only officially supported on the very latest CPUs for more or less arbitrary reasons.

> I have to assume Windows 11 basically only exists because of pressure from OEMs

Maybe partly, but I suspect that is only a small piece of the puzzle.

OSX and Android being at version 11 might make Windows 10 look old to the clueless (and there are a lot of clueless out there), and not having bumped up a version in over half a decade is something disreputable marketers (i.e. most marketers) could use to cast shade on it to make it look old-hat.

It also frees them from IE11 a bit more. There were promises to support IE versions for as long as any OS version that was release with them included, so IE11 will need to be supported (not in online apps, it is already deprecated in many including Office365, but at least receive security updates) as long as Win10 if they are to keep their word. Win10 will be around for quite some time so they still have a bit of that ball & chain, but Win11 means they have some sort of exit strategy for the legacy browser other than simply saying “fuck it, people can try sue us if they really care about IE”.

I'm sure there are other considerations that an officially clean dividing line (even though the difference between this and the usual Win10 feature updates may not be huge) makes better too, from marketing perspectives if not technical ones.

Certainly the OEMs (and retailers) have been having a field day with shareholders over this, but I think the obvious flaw with this conspiracy theory being the actual plan is that they could not have timed it worse. 2020 was one of the best years of PC sales (ever; one of the industries that did quite well with the shift in "safe at home" needs) and the OEMs weren't in that much need of another one just so soon. On top of that, the banner year of sales in 2020 created the largest semiconductor shortage in recent history, which we are still dealing with the repercussions of (the automobile industry almost entirely shut down and has huge stock of cars waiting for chips, for one big for instance; the continued lack of available supply of the Xbox Series X/S in stores despite Microsoft's promises to shareholders this year for another that should be obvious to Microsoft), and combined with the Great Logistics Crisis of 2021 every OEM should have a pretty good idea right now that Holiday sales are going to be extremely cramped right now in terms of possible supply.

I think moving away from supporting really low end hardware is a reason as well. They're ditching 32-bit processors entirely, so no need for a separate Windows 32-bit anymore. Dropped support for less than 4GB of RAM (which Windows runs badly on). Dropped support for sub 720p displays, which most software won't work properly on anyway. Etc

We already have different versions of Windows 10, it's just that people don't realize it. Microsoft lists separate hardware requirements for 14 different versions of Windows 10: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/min...

There can be breaking changes to new builds, too. A previous version of Windows 10 trashed performance of the AddFontResource Windows API - loading dozens of fonts went from near-instant to 15+ seconds from an SSD - so we had to adjust the way it's handled in LibreOffice Portable and the PortableApps.com Platform and steer users away from it.

Windows 10 didn't get rid of any of that. If anything it accelerated the rate of new OS versions.

You're going to have more differences comparing the initial release of Windows 10 with the current release of Windows 10 vs the current release of Windows 10 and the initial release of Windows 11.

You really thought Microsoft would never overhaul the UI of Windows ever again? Or that they would do it, but continue to call it Windows 10? "The last version of Windows" was pure marketing BS.

I honestly didn’t think they would do something like this either. I figured they were simply moving to an Apple model of giving away new versions for free since the enterprise subscriptions would be more than enough to pay for the development.

Maybe people will never leave Windows, but I think this is a mistake on Microsoft’s part. We’ve had them as great business partners for the past several decades in the public sector. Not only do they understand Enterprise better than their competitors, their monopoly also produced a generation or two of workers who knew how to use a PC for office purposes.

That last part isn’t true for the next generation to enter the workforce. If they know anything non-mobile it’s Mac OS/X. Once enough people stop being good at Windows it’ll no longer make sense for Enterprise organisations to keep paying the licenses. It’ll be decades before it becomes a threat to Microsoft and I’m sure they already know more about this than me, but I really don’t see where they are heading with Windows 11 in the private market except from out of it because nobody wants to buy an OS in 2021.

Windows 11 is free for Windows 10 users.

We've been getting some pretty major changes in each of the spring/fall updates anyway. I expected they'd keep going that route and eventually just drop the 10, and keep the update version available for documentation/support.

Market it as "Windows" and report the version as "Windows (21H1)" on the system information.

> Microsoft hyped Windows 10 as the 'last version of Windows' and that's how it should be.

Except that was a transparent marketing lie from day 1.

>I was really hoping that we were past having to think about different versions of Windows.

A varying level of support for Windows 10(21H2) extending up to five years has been pledged before sunset; slash and burn is a well known phenomenon in the tech world.

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2021/07/15/intro...

I also distinctly remember Microsoft saying they would never wait as long between releases as XP to Vista. I always wondered which promise would be kept, guess we have our answer.

As a long time Windows user, this is what is making me seriously think about quitting. To be fair, if Apple let you put MacOS on your own hardware I would probably have quit long ago. I just have to figure out if I am done with game development as well (which has been brewing for me recently).

Anyway, back to the point. This is the most anti-Windows step that this pathologically anti-Windows management has taken. You were never, in the past, forced to upgrade hardware because Windows flat-out refused to run on it. I have run Windows 7,8 and 10 on a laptop shipped with XP and it ran fine. 10 even added in-box support for Sony peripherals that 8 and 7 didn't have.

I fail to see how requiring TPM 2.0 or newer CPU features is going to protect the average user from malware, which is still the biggest risk to Windows users. If anyone knows, please educate me.

Enterprises can impose these hardware requirements on their systems, there was no need to force home users to upgrade. Instead of improving Windows so that it works better for users, it seems like MSFT wants to improve OEM bottom lines and sell more licenses.

I'm going the other way. I'm fed up with expensive hardware which will fail from designed in defects (just lost my macbook pro 15 to stagelight). Every version of Mac OS makes it harder to set up a dev environment, especially for beginners. I'm in the academic world, we have A LOT of beginners. I am a fan of Linux, but the recent systemd/wayland drama moved it further away from "year of linux desktop",IMHO. Getting older, I am less interested in tinkering with the base system. (Linux is still king for me for servers, obviously. Maybe I'll try one of the BSDs at some point).

In the windows world, you have a much wider choice of price point for hardware, you don't have to worry about drivers, "does netflix work" etc. With WSL2, I can run all the applications I need (and I develop mostly in WSL2). It's trivial to explain a student how to set it up, much more convenient than dual booting, or running a classic VM.

I use Pop!_OS(https://pop.system76.com) as my daily driver and there's no "tinkering with the base system" involved. Give it a try!

My main gripe is that, according to some of the comments, a Microsoft account will be required, at least for the home version. It might seem like nitpicking, and perhaps many people wouldn't consider it a major hurdle, but if I'm paying for an OS, I like the idea of it being a product and not a service, especially if it's paid for as a product. Tying logins more strongly to online accounts also sounds bad from a privacy perspective, and I'd like any online services to be there only if I need them, not pushed to me as a necessity.

Essentially, I want the core software on my computer to just provide a working environment for me and my applications. I don't want it to be an entire online system of services the vendor wants me to want. Helpful additional services are nice, but none of it should be required for a product to work.

I'm also not fond of the idea of having to explain to my elderly parents why they need to register for yet another online account with yet another litany of terms and conditions just in order to use their computer.

> My main gripe is that, according to some of the comments, a Microsoft account will be required

While I don't use Windows at home, if I did, this would be a complete dealkiller.

I was Linux-only at home (and, incidentally, also for work) for years but decided to keep the Windows install that came on my current laptop because I started gaming a bit more again.

I don't know if logging in will still be possible without phoning home and automatically logging in to various MS services every time, but if it's not or if MS just keeps turning Windows further into an online service (and the customer into a product), it'll probably be time to go Windows-less again.

Maybe run Windows in a VM with your GPU passed through.

Same, and same for MacOS if on your own hardware. Instead I'm looking to Linux; I've been testing it as a desktop system in a VM for work and enjoying it.

I need to keep Adobe Creative Suite running which is the only software likely to prevent this happening; now that the online version of Word is improved then customer expectations that I have Word & Excel are mostly matched (I won't revisit the problems with LibreOffice et al here - the Microsoft version still wins out when everyone else is using it).

For me Unreal Engine is the bottleneck. It does run on Linux, but the experience is not frictionless (relatively speaking, for that software :) )

I'm in the same boat. The UE dev workflow is the first issue, but there's also the surrounding ecosystem for me like the Epic launcher, Substance, Bridge, Mixer and Affinity that I don't want to have to replace and also don't have time to fiddle with if they don't work 100%.

My experience moving away from the happy path by doing UE dev on a Mac a few years ago was so painful I have a hard time believing the linux experience is going to be a net win. Unless you're using the same tools as Epic, shit just seems to break a lot.

> You were never, in the past, forced to upgrade hardware because Windows flat-out refused to run on it.

You definitely were, I had to upgrade to a newer laptop because versions of Windows after 7 didn't support 32-bit processors without PAE (this mattered to me because my laptop had a Pentium M).

I have plenty of old laptops sitting in drawers that I can't use with cli only Linux because so many of the distos have a kernel that insists on PAE which most of them don't have. As such I leave them running XP which is a shame as they'd be perfect as little Linux boxes for tinkering.

Q4OS (https://q4os.org/) is a Debian based linux designed explicitly for this use case -- with a prominent 32 bit version.

Brilliant, I'll check it out. Cheers!

If it helps, v3.8 is guaranteed to be okay without PAE (go with trinity, based on KDE 3.5 as a DM, rather than plasma) -- from their release notes:

>Q4OS Centaurus is based on Debian Buster 10 and Plasma 5.14, optionally Trinity 14.0.6, desktop environment, and it's available for 64bit and 32bit/i686pae computers, as well as for older i386 systems without PAE extension. We are working hard to bring it for ARM devices too.

ooh, interesting. I did not know that. That must have been annoying.

it's not there to protect users against malware

it's there to protect "content producer's" business models against you

and MS are hoping to take a cut of that

Check out PopOS if you're going to dip into Linux. It sits on top of Ubuntu and provides a good out of the box experience.

Isn't it great, some years ago, ubuntu "was sitting on top of debian", but provides a good out of the box experience. Don't get me wrong, I like ubuntu a lot, but I wonder if we have a "NOPEos" in 5 years, sitting on top of PopOS.

It's turtles all the way down.

Maybe. Ubuntu's gotten burned a few times in trying new UI paradigms, so now they're fairly conservative and have settled into a model where they make their money on the server.

PopOS is a great distro for people just hopping over and new to Linux. All the software and features most people want are there and easy to install, with even Steam/Gaming being just a click or two away.

TPM does make disk encryption more simple and effective for a typical user.

but would TPM prevent you from downloading ransomware that encrypts your files ? It doesn't seem so to me, but I have not delved very deep into how Windows uses TPM.

It does not, once the system has booted, the TPM doesn’t protect you. (For drive encryption purposes)

It doesn't. If you are familiar with Apple Secure Enclave/T2 and Google Secure Element, they are same thing. It just hold the encryption keys and validate them to the system. Bitlocker use TPM to validate the key before unlocking the volume or the entire disk to the system.

What you are thinking of is the Windows Defender, it have the capabilities to prevent a thing like that.

I've been reading the feedback on /r/windows11 for a few weeks, and this release feels rushed. First available to public test at the end of June[0], and they're shipping it less than four months later with almost none of the issues/limitations/complaints being addressed.

This whole release feels very, if you'll excuse the expression, "lipstick on a pig." They didn't really fix any of the underlying and longstanding issues people had with Windows 10, threw a new thin veneer on top, and called it a new thing.

This October 5th release just feels like them expanding their public beta test to most Windows 10 users. I'm normally an early adopter (e.g. running iOS 15 Beta 7 right now), but I'm going to wait six months or more after Oct5 because this isn't even close to being production ready.

[0] https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2021/06/28/announc...

There is no lipstick. It is all pig.

Windows exists because people run it on laptops and desktops. Not tablets and phones. Every time MS tried to make it otherwise, they failed. Windows RT, Windows 8, Windows 10S, Windows 10X - each was less attractive than its predecessors, and each damaged the desktop attractiveness of Windows.

Now we have an OS that tries to pretend it is a mobile OS, not a laptop and desktop OS. Control Panel that takes away more control from the user with each update, Search that won't find the most simple things, Explorer hanging randomly, OneDrive's broken sync and the rest of the UI are painful to use even on a beefy desktop.

Even worse, it doesn't work well on mobile/touch devices. The new Control Painal changes from update to update, the Explorer UI gets less and less responsive and obvious, the and the file selection dialog is about as broken as someone could make it on purpose.

I really have no clue who they're building Windows for anymore. I'm reminded of the joke https://milk.com/random-humor/suit_joke.html about the tailor. Windows is the suit.

People do run in on tablets. OK, maybe not tablets like the iPad, but many people, including me, has 2-in-1 devices, where you laptop has a touch screen and where you use the device like it was a tablet.

When you use a windows laptop with a touch screen, you get really comfortable with reaching out and tapping it for small things. I wouldn’t have though I wanted one, but I unintentionally started accidentally touching my MacBook when I switched away. So touch support is obviously useful at some level!

I mean, they learned from 8-10 that they can perform development and updates while some people lose all of their data.

> Windows 11 is optimized for speed, efficiency

So why does it not support five-year-old hardware?

I realize it's all just marketing, but I'm actually really frustrated with how developers seem to be defining "performance" nowadays. There's nothing impressive about running fast on a fast machine. Not everyone has access to the latest and greatest hardware, nor should they, lest we want to ruin the planet.

If you're doing complex 3D modeling, that's one thing, but please tell me—what is the average office worker doing today that wouldn't have been possible on a PC ten years ago? And then please explain why Windows 11 needs a minimum of 4 GB of memory.

"What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away"

> And then please explain why Windows 11 needs a minimum of 4 GB of memory.

It has Teams integrated directly into the operating system. There's a GB of RAM right there off the top.

Well, maybe that’s a reason to not have Teams integrated directly into the Operating System. Or to make Teams not take up so much memory—we had IM apps 15 years ago which ran just fine on a fraction as much memory, what happened?

It’s not really a problem today when people have the option of staying on Windows 10, but what happens in 2025? Seems like a lot of e-waste—and, well, a lot of expense, for people who have a lot less money than I do.

Do we really want all our schools and libraries to replace all of their technology so that Microsoft can push their bloated chat client? What does that do to overall technology access in our society?

Yeah, it's a stupid idea, but they are going all in with Teams as a big feature, after the past year and a half of remote-first work/school. I can only hope that the efforts to rewrite the Teams app to use WebView2 instead of Electron will have some savings in resource usage, but I'm not holding my breath. I thought the Lync client was bloated when it was doing the same things with a tenth of the resource consumption...

I expect that the more onerous hardware requirements that appear right now to obsolete older hardware will be rolled back, or will turn out to not actually be real technical constraints. You can still play most video games on a PC from a decade ago; hardware improvements have almost completely stalled out as far as the average user can perceive them, and it doesn't seem all that likely that that paradigm is going to shift in the near future.

Sources say that the "Windows Integration" for Teams is a separate app entirely written in either C++/XAML or C#/XAML, I don't recall which I read it was. It sounds like Microsoft's current solution to "Teams is bloated on Windows" is to give you a native half-capable Teams client in your Taskbar so that you can use Teams before you launch the real Teams client.

I had heard some odd rumblings that it wasn't actually working with real Office 365 corporate Teams accounts, only the semi-related new consumer Teams accounts that have started rolling out.

I hope that this isn't an indication that there is going to be another weird bifurcation of almost but not quite compatible clients that confuse the hell out of users, like we had for years with Skype vs Skype for Business.

https://tomtalks.blog/2021/07/preview-microsoft-teams-2-0-on...

To be fair that might be a minimum for a decent experience. Even using Linux with less that 4GB of ram is sub-optimal. Open a few browser tabs, some documents and maybe some ram-hogging Spotify playing in the background and you'll be hitting the swap in no time.

Worth waiting 6-8 months for debloat scripts to become refined

Is there an OS that offers reasonable user experience with modern software on just 2GB ram? And with reasonable I mean using browser like Chrome and few of electron apps... I have no doubt they could run Windows 11 in 2GB, but the rest of software ecosystem is so bloated that they would just fail at that space...

I was recently surprised to find that Windows 10 only requires 2GB. I've tried running it on machines with 2 or 3GB and can barely open the start menu (slight hyperbole, but it does take a while to open).

Have you used Chrome on an OS with less than 4GB of RAM?

The amount of memory used by many modern websites is also atrocious!

Many 4GB Chromebooks work fine and are popular.

Right. So that's the perfect minimum for Windows. The amount of 2GB Chromebook models for sale is very tiny and likely all old models.

Sorry, I misread and didn't see less than 4GB.

Comparing tech specs for Windows 10 vs 11: they doubled RAM requirements from 2GB to 4GB. They tripled storage requirements from 20GB to 64GB. Minimum CPU speed stays the same. That's comparing 64-bit vs 64-bit, the increased specs are even more extreme when considering Windows 10 32-bit.

Windows 10 system reqs [1]:

- 1 GHz or better processor

- RAM: 1 GB of 32-bit OS. 2 GB for 64 bit OS.

- Storage: 16 GB for 32 bit OS and 20 GB for 64-bit OS

- Graphics card: DirectX 9 or later with WDDM 1.o driver

- Display 800×600

Windows 11 system reqs [2]:

- 1 GHz 64-bit processor

- RAM: 4GB

- Storage: 64GB

- Graphics card: DirectX 12 or later with WDDM 2.0 driver

- Display: High definition (720p) display that is greater than 9” diagonally, 8 bits per color channel

- Internet connection (Windows 11 Home edition)

[1] https://www.technologytips.com/windows-system-requirements/

[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-specifica...

> They tripled storage requirements

> Storage: 16 GB for 32 bit OS and 20 GB for 64-bit OS

Though in reality those storage requirements are incorrect for current Win10. You can't fully update the OS in that small a space, at least not without some technical hacking that the average user is not going to care for. And that is before installing anything else.

32Gb should be considered the minimum for Win10 currently IMO (maybe 24Gb at a push) so the really requirements have only doubled and hopefully in that they've included much more wiggle room (so the new requirement is “to run well with common apps and some data” rather than “to operate at all”) meaning this is not comparing like for like.

Also having run Win10 on 2Gb some time ago and finding that painful, I doubt a fully updated instance will operate acceptably at all in that little.

Just a nitpick, but Gb is usually used in networking & storage to mean "gigabit", which is an eighth of a GB, or "gygabyte"

Not to mention that these are frequently mixed up with non-SI units GiB and Gibit that are multiples of 1024 instead of 1000.

Storage size units are confusing =)

The arcane versions of those units have meaning only within the circle of people that actually understand them. Which makes them fairly useless other than for the purpose of being pedantic, wowing or misleading people. For the laymen, kilo means 1000, mega means 1000000 and giga means 1000000000. Having gamed on a machine when I was young that only had 64 * 1024 * 8 bits, I can appreciate the order of magnitudes here. Slightly over 0.5 megabit. But still. Who actually cares when a mobile phone might transmit that in a few ms (i.e. a few thousandths of a second).

I've seen a lot of people have a hard time with the difference between GB and Gb, so I'm always happy to explain.

In this case there's no possible confusion, but I figure it can't hurt to know which is which =)

Cheers

> - Internet connection (Windows 11 Home edition)

Does this signal the end of Microsoft account-less logins?

Yes, Windows 11 Home will require an internet connection and Microsoft account on first startup.

Any idea yet what happens to those of us upgrading from Win 10 Home with a local account? Is this signaled before we finish the upgrade process or do we just get locked out?

How does that work on holidays? "Just" use mobile data?

It only requires an internet connection to setup. You can login with an Microsoft/'Online' account even when offline.

Unless you have pro, yeah.

Those requirements don't strike me as egregious. I think the only issue will be that cryptographic generator that motherboards need. I think it's the TPM chip?

It sounds pretty reasonable for modern systems. Also considering that they likely want to avoid things that barely run it. I don't think one should even buy less than this hardware for any productive use.

Agreed. The last time Microsoft tried to run on underpowered hardware, we had vista. It was a solid platform but was a big resource jump from XP

I wonder how well it will run on the minimum requirements.

Try running Windows 10 either directly or as a VM on a hard drive, it is painfully slow. Things like installing updates will just take hours to days and antivirus scans will make the system unusable. IMO, Windows basically requires a SSD.

There's a 32 bit version of Windows 10? It can't even use a full 4GB of RAM

it can, just not all in the same process

PAE works surprisingly well

PAE can't be used in consumer Windows versions (unless you install 3rd party kernel patches)

  HIMEM.SYS

> 1. The new design and sounds are modern, fresh, clean and beautiful, bringing you a sense of calm and ease.

THIS? is the number one point they want to highlight? Feel at ease, user, while we mine all your data and force feed you buggy release after buggy release of changes you don't want and didn't ask for!

Modern software in a nutshell really. It's garbage, it's going to get more garbage, we don't give a shit how bloated and painful it is, here are some pretty pictures.

This isn't just a modern trend. The XP everyone remembers is SP3 and that came very late in the life of Windows XP. It's first release, however, was an uglier version of Windows 2000 (albeit with a few bug fixes here and there). Most insulting of all, XP had twice the CPU and memory foot print of 2000.

The Win ME crowd loved XP but many of the Windows 2000 folk ended up waiting it out for a few years before upgrading (or switching to Linux in my case).

I expect the same will happen here. MS will still officially support 10 for a few years but not really show it much love. Eventually 11 will diverge into something worth upgrading to (or the last stubborn few will have migrated onto another platform entirely).

What makes you so optimistic?

Windows 10 didn't get any better in 6 years.

I haven’t heard enough about the under-the-hood details of Windows 11 to not believe that this release is not much more than a slight refresh to the desktop environment.

They redesigned the app store, the settings, the file manager, added android emulation and changed the update cycle. it's also snappy with more agressive caching from what i heard. the search was also overhauled to be faster and more relevant

i would have loved for them to include more privacy and security features instead of the widgets panel for instance (which only allows microsoft services anyways so far) but it still looks like a decent release

> the settings

Did they actually redesign it this time, or just redesigned - again - the "most common" options and fall back to the old version, old version+2, old version +4 etc for any of the more detailed panes....

Reminds me:

https://youtu.be/-rwoPiM-8Qk?t=305

They're doing the same thing with the Explorer context menu, hiding the old options behind another layer.

Oh no, that's awful. 7Zip is the perfect example to demonstrate that.

(not too taken with the plus it gets in that video for windows terminal, which has been available for ages)

I guess I'm staying on windows 10 until 2025

full redesign, it's significantly better than before

what does the network adapter options look like now?

Its still split across like 3 dialogs from 3 eras.

The Widgets Panel seems like the place that Live Tiles have gone to die. Outside of the "new AI widgets" they keep trying to hype the rest of the apps that show up there are just Live Tiles apps showing their old Live Tiles in new slightly more rounded boxes.

I’d say the first two things you listed fall under “slight refresh to the desktop environment”, but, yea… forgot about the Android emulation. That’s pretty cool. And the last couple of things you mentioned are certainly welcome improvements.

As the owner of a 1st generation Threadripper I'm pretty pissed off that my 4 year old CPU is unsupported.

My guess is that Microsoft will backtrack on this within 6 months of release because basically nobody will upgrade their processor just to use Windows 11. They have a history of doing stuff like this and then backpeddling when fewer people put up with their shit than they expected.

Then again, lately they've been doubling down on stupid shit nobody wants so who knows. Either way, I know I won't be upgrading to Win 11 any time soon and the company I work for certainly isn't going to rush out and buy all new workstations for it either.

I'm not sure it will be basically nobody, but they will figure that most people who will do it will have done it by then. This release even seems to say that they will lower requirements early next year. Then I guess there will be lawsuits when the old CPUs run it just as well as the new ones because there haven't really been major CPU changes (other than integrated GPU improvements).

Windows 10 isn't going away so they have no need to backtrack.

The purpose of Windows 11 is to sell new hardware. New releases of Windows always caused a jump in OEM hardware sales. When Microsoft went to the Windows 10 forever model, Microsoft and the OEMs lost this huge marketing opportunity.

I wish Greta Thunberg (or another environmentalist like David Attenborough) would say something about the fuckery of how this upgrade is going to generate significant e-waste. Shame the companies that do this.

I say this as a Windows 7 on Ryzen 2 user.

Is Win7 still secure?

No, especially not for non-technical users. I support a popular software package and we run integrity checks on our own binaries - in recent months, the number of people that contact us and send us samples of our binaries infected with some common trojan on Windows 7 has skyrocketed. And that's just infectious malware.

IMO, Windows Defender is the greatest thing Microsoft has done with Windows 10.

> Windows Defender is the greatest thing Microsoft has done with Windows 10

I have not worried about an anti-virus in a long time, granted I have adblockers/use VMs but idk maybe that's just WD being good. I remember doing tech support work a long time ago and how Malware Bytes was one of the good ones (free) to use/actually worked.

It's Microsoft Defender. There are a lot things that are turned off by default, otherwise you computer would slow down. Windows 11 is going to turn those things on by default.

Windows 7 still receives security updates under the Extended Security Updates (ESU) subscription program. It's unlikely, but possible, that the poster has such a subscription. I have Customers who do because they needed more time to migrate away from legacy applications that functioned under Windows 7 but not under Windows 10 (or, more often, functioned fine but were "unsupported" by the application "manufacturer" under Windows 10).

Someone has made a tool that downloads and applies the patches that MS is still giving to the extended support customers and he is pirating. Although I'd like to see people's faces when I tell them that someone is Russian^W Ukrainian...

First gen Ryzen is unsupported? That's hilarious.

My 1800X goes like a bat out of hell for everything I need it to do and I have zero intention of upgrading it.

They can keep Windows 11.

> They can keep Windows 11.

For 4 more years, then Windows 10 is EOL.

I simply don't understand how technical users have not all switched to LTSC at this point. LTSC 2019 will receive security updates until 2029. In the future, you may have to use the IoT LTSC version to get the full 10 years of support, but I assume someone will work out how to do this (my understanding is that it is still a full version of windows, with some built in "kiosk" features).

LTSC is amazing, Windows as it should be. You can pretty easily disable any telemetry and disable unneeded features (and many of the annoying ones don't even come installed by default). I am using Linux 99.5% of the time, and I still use LTSC whenever I need to use Windows for something.

How would one actually (legally) hey ahold of an LTSC key?

I agree. Once you try it, you see that it is truly Windows 10 as it should be. Very small install, with minimum extraneous junk. Works on most, even older laptops etc. Controllable update, telemetry, etc.

90% of the linked article is trying to peddle laptops and tablets that support Windows 11 so it's pretty obvious that they are just trying to milk the OEM OS market with a new OS.

You really shouldn't be. It's hot steaming garbage that requires a frickin Microsoft Account to even activate (unless you buy the $$$ Pro License). And it doesn't even allow you to switch the panel position away from the bottom of the screen, which every version of Windows since 95 could do. Just avoid this.

As someone who always gets the pro version because home has always had arbitrary restrictions and as someone who has never changed the taskbar position, neither of those are reasons to avoid Windows 11.

The reason to not care about it for me is that it doesn't actually improve anything in any notable way. There's no compelling reason to upgrade.

Time to switch to Linux

I'd love to. Linux supports Quicken, AutoCAD, and Affinity right?

I'm almost positive that everyone still using Windows is doing so because they have some Windows-only workflow they don't want to give up. Everyone else has either moved to Linux or given up desktop computing altogether.

> Time to switch to Linux

Windows 10 and 11 can run that app. It's called WSL2

Apparently not if you're using a four year old CPU, at least for Windows 11.

Can they do that without sending any telemetry without you having to resort to firewalls, domain control or other stuff not available to the average user?

No. But they can run Windows-only programs as well. Linux is objectively better that Windows in the privacy (and package management) department, but Wine just doesn’t cut it sometimes.

I tried a year ago to switch to Linux, with Windows in a VM, but it just wasn’t good enough for my liking. I wanted Windows program support but with the power of the Linux command line (such as building C and C++ programs from source). and WSL does that really well. I ended up switching back a few months ago…

Lastly, there’s the aspect of online school. Proctoring systems such as ProctorU and Examity mandate Windows or macOS.

Can they do it on a 1st generation Threadripper?

WSL Doesn't support CPU performance counters (PMU) or systemd the last time I checked. It's fine for some things but it's more of a simulacrum of Linux.

WSL2 is Linux in a VM.

Linux can also run Windows. In fact ironically Windows used to run faster inside a VM on Linux than it did on bare metal.

>n fact ironically Windows used to run faster inside a VM on Linux than it did on bare metal

Any sources for this? I don't think it's true.

It's not that crazy a statement if you have a virtual disk. Linux would cache that disk image and thus file system operations in Windows (which are known to be slower than in Linux) runs much faster because they're not getting stalled by slower hardware operations. It's worth remembering just how slow the old mechanical drives were -- the difference might not be as distinct (nor even exist at all) between virtualised and bare metal now that SSDs are the norm.

As for why file system operations are slower in Windows than on Linux, there's quite a lot of discussion around that from WSL. I don't really recall the internals of Windows fs operations but there is something about those syscalls generating events that trigger other processes (eg so you can attach a virus scanner) vs Linux's approach of optimising the syscall for performance. The Linux approach does have it's disadvantages in that often you'd want to write software that is triggered upon a file system event and there's no way to watch a nested directory. But overall I'd take the win with fast reads and writes.

I run a windows VM in my Linux host for work every single day. When I leave that org, I just delete the VM and its files.

Which comes with it's own host of issues, particularly involving networking.

My desktop is a bit older - but can handle everything other than the security chip changes. Also pretty pissed off.

Are you sure your CPU doesn't have the required security chip? On Intel systems it is called PTT and is present in almost all CPUs over the past decade IIRC. But often disabled in the BIOS. I thought AMD CPUs have also had it for a while.

Sadly not. i5-6600K doesn't support it, and my motherboard is literally one version short of having the chip.

I have the regular i5-6600 in my game system and it does have it so I am almost certain that chip does as well (and a quick search shows up someone with the k version who was able to enable it). For some reason the setting is under "peripherals" for me, I guess most likely the setting is hidden somewhere for you as well.

It looks like for CPU/firmware TPMs, not all motherboard manufacturers supported it on their 100/200-series models.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/motherboards-that-su...

I think people are blowing the "unsupported" word out of proportion.

MS have already said you can install Windows 11 on whatever you want with the media creation tool.

Being unsupported just gives them an out to not deliver drivers or do QC for obscure or really old hardware configurations.

Since Threadripper is a new enough platform I wouldn't expect that to happen for quite some time.

The people being really stung by this are larger organizations like schools and hospitals who _need_ that support. This seems like it's throwing a bone to HP, Dell and co.

MS also said that unsupported PCs won’t be entitled to receive Windows Updates, including security updates.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/28/22646035/microsoft-window...

Right, not being entitled to provide them doesn't mean they won't provide them. I addressed this in my above comment:

> just gives them an out to not deliver drivers or do QC for obscure or really old hardware configurations

As others have mentioned they've already done this with Windows 10 and received a bunch of backlash for it. I have an old tablet (that shipped with Windows 8) that can't run the latest Windows 10 builds because there isn't a supported graphics driver. I had realistic expectations about niche hardware like this but many people assume that if they successfully install the OS it'll just work/be updated indefinitely. They're making it clear with 11 this isn't the case.

My Surface Pro 4 won't be getting Windows 11 either. However, Windows 10 will stay supported until 2025 which by then I will have upgraded. I'm not happy about it but it is what it is.

Yes reports suggest you will be able to download the Win11 iso and manually install or upgrade the system, but I haven't seen any guarantees that those systems will continue to receive security updates or support.

Same with my 4 y/o i7 Kaby Lake. This is simply unacceptable.

me too, I wouldn't consider first gen Ryzen as something unsupportable either. But at least they're still allowing for installations and well, I'm not so sure if a CPU from 2017 needs to be supported for new Operating Systems. Either way I hope they achieve something special with the new OS given they are putting the bar so much higher.

I'm not. It just means Microsoft has entrenched me further into the free Unix ecosystem even than I was before.

I sort of buy that they're not supporting CPUs without a TPM chip, but it's absolute nonsense that they're also obsoleting a ton of new CPUs for really obscure reasons.

As the owner of a 6? year old i5-6600 I’m … ambivalent.

I have a rock solid i7-920. It's aged well.

Just stop using Windows.

> Just stop using Windows.

As a happy user of i5, I don't feel any need to upgrade to Windows 11 from Windows 10.

> As the PC continues to play a more central role in our lives than ever before

Does Microsoft really think this? I'm finding it's pretty common to meet people who don't own a PC at all. They just use their phone and possibly a tablet.

> "PCs are going to be like trucks," Jobs said. "They are still going to be around." However, he said, only "one out of x people will need them." (https://www.cnet.com/news/steve-jobs-at-d8-post-pc-era-is-ni...)

This feels true more and more.

And it's like the people who make trucks don't get it and keep trying to make their trucks more like cars to appeal to the car market.

They can't be happy controlling the entire truck market, must keep infinitely growing.

Right. It’s been a bit frustrating to see this in Gnome, but at least I can use another theme to shrink things back down a bit.

And to be fair to Gnome, their apps run on devices ranging from my multi-monitor PC to my Pinephone. Being able to scale reasonably well is, in my case, a massive boon.

GTK and Gnome are two completely separate things at this point. Gnome, the desktop environment, is under-built and introduces a lot of anachronisms to the Linux workflow. GTK, the app toolkit, scales quite well across mobile and desktop devices, I agree. I certainly like it more than QT's touch-based experiences, and I might just prefer the design language to Apple's own HIG, in a way...

I recently got a 2 in 1 laptop and gnome has been much better than any other desktop I've used so far. Beyond the touch friendly UI for touch itself, it's also been good for touchpad use and its touchpad gestures are very fluid. I still use KDE on desktop but for any laptop I'd recommend GNOME for sure.

But the PinePhone does not run Gnome, it runs Phosh, based on Gnome. A mobile environment needed to be specifically developed anyway.

And Gnome apps often overflow the screen when they were not specifically designed for phones.

While supporting high school kids throughout this pandemic, I quickly learned that a lot of these kids have near zero experience using Windows, OS X or any other "traditional" desktop operating system. Their computers were their iPhones, iPads and Chromebooks.

The strategies behind ChromeOS and iPadOS made a lot more sense after realizing this. Those operating systems aren't made to appeal to the people who have been using desktop PCs their whole lives. Rather, they're designed to appeal to those whose computing experience is pretty much ChromeOS, iPadOS and similar mobile platforms.

I agree which is why I find ChromeOS's marketing campaign strange[1]. The commercials talk about no viruses, never slowing down, etc. Basically pointing out common issues with traditional OSes.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-WPIZcTGpI

I think for most people, the future is phones with a desktop mode. Walk up to any screen/keyboard/mouse and slap down your phone on the wireless charge/data pad to activate and do what you want. When you're done, pick it up and take everything with you.

Even most devs would be perfectly fine with the processing performance of a modern phone if they could install the software they needed.

Yes they think this, but not in the way you or I think about it. At least this is my admittedly cynical take. There is a strong push across tech to erase the concept of a Personal Computer, and make everything function like a tablet. Calling tablets/phones PCs is part of this, by muddying the water, as well as attempts like these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfR_Jj4grZE

Interfaces and functionality keep being dumbed and locked down like they are on tablets and phones. Microsoft and Apple are watering at the mouth for the day when the true personal computer is gone and every computing device is a walled garden where every user uses their pre-approved apps doing only the pre-approved tasks, preferably as thin clients into their controlled cloud.

And millions if not billions of users will be perfectly content with that -- especially if it means they won't have to deal with the hassle of keeping their computing devices clean, updated, and malware-free on their own.

Nerds mewling about "general purpose computing" do not understand the market, and do not want to.

I think it's fine that a lot of what we've traditionally used a PC for is now available in more appliance like devices for people. But I also think that personal computing is a revolutionary tool and absolutely should exist for people inclined to use it. Problem is, pretty much everyone who used to make PCs would much rather burn them to the ground so they can sell appliances instead.

Even here on Hackernews, even among people who computer for a living, in their daily lives total control over their machines is a distant second to "It Just Works".

Part of Just Working, in this day and age, involves Just Updating Automatically and Just Protecting You From Malware, the latter of which involves tight restrictions on what can be run, and what it can access when it does run.

Companies want to sell appliances because appliances are more useful to the average person and therefore make more money. We're all going to have to reckon with the Gramscian heartbreak that most of the proletariat don't really want a revolution -- just less hassle in their lives.

> art of Just Working, in this day and age, involves Just Updating Automatically

Except that automatic (or forced) updating totally breaks the "Just working" mantra. I've learned to dread every update that comes down the pike. It's quite a change from the old days when updates were something that you generally looked forward to (and could ignore if the particular update made your experience worse in some important way).

Non-programmers I know who have a personal desktop or laptop, it's always for gaming and/or piracy, and that's it. Everything with a "central role in [their] lives" is on their phones.

Hell, I am a programmer, and those are the only reasons I have anything other than phones & tablets. Computers are for computer-focused nerd stuff, phones and tablets are much better for interacting with the real world thanks to their form factors and attached sensors & gadgets (home projects, hiking, gardening, learning, playing music, communicating, navigating, budgeting & bills, and so on).

Tiny screens and keyboards on touch screens will never be the best for authoring activities, even for most of the activities you've listed, including communicating.

Take my dad for example - not a tech guru, but works in Excel all the time, does renovation planning in Sketchup, etc.

Imagine trying to use Excel on your phone to actually do something beyond passively viewing a document. Imagine trying to manipulate a model with any degree of precision. In my experience, anyone who needs to do significant authorship prefers real keyboards and larger screens.

Phones and tablets are passive consumption and quick communication devices only, the exact opposite of what we should be encouraging in many ways.

>Phones and tablets are passive consumption and quick communication devices only, the exact opposite of what we should be encouraging in many ways.

Passive consumption and quick communication is exactly what a lot of end users use PCs for. A tablet would be very viable for these users.

> Phones and tablets are passive consumption and quick communication devices only, the exact opposite of what we should be encouraging in many ways.

They are really far from being "passive consumption and quick communication devices only". They're outstanding tools & aids for all kinds of things, most of which desktops and laptops are much worse for. What's with HN and labelling phones and tablets a "consumption devices"? It's wildly incorrect, to the point that it doesn't stand up to a moment's scrutiny.

They do are mostly consumption devices though. And passive ones at that. I use my phone for according, that's one active use. I really can't use it for planning hikes, but i guess i could (it just that after 4 days without sun, i'm always happy to have a map with me, so i'll have to plot the hike on the map anyway). I guess i could have two activ use. I use it to get alert when a combo high tide+wind+temperature+nothing in my schedule, but really, i coded this on my PC, run it through my server and just use my phone company API to receive a text message, so that's passive too.

Research on wikipedia when i'm not sure about a name or something? Its consumption, but active consumption.

All my other uses are passive or are about communication, and takes 80% of my time on the phone.

Please xplain to me other uses? I guess i could use it for photography, but i don't really care.

- Photography and video (capture and editing—is a desktop nice for that? Sure, but the desktop can't also be your camera)

- Art (sketching/"painting"/et c)

- Music (tuner, recording, accompaniment, sheet-music display, composition, synth, metronome)

- A vast array of essentially secretarial functions (especially for phones) that aid all kinds of activities (reminders, lists, taking dictation, voice-recording, calendar stuff, organizing information)

- Construction, home projects, crafting of various sorts, and car repair (my phone is a: level, tape measure, notebook, calculator, flashlight, and reference manual)

- Tablets are pretty good for writing, with a wireless keyboard. Arguably better than a laptop per se (because you can position the screen separately from the keyboard for better ergonomics), but worse than a desktop or docked laptop with a large screen.

— Hiking, walking, outings in the city—navigation, wildlife & plant identification, ride hailing.

I'm far from a phone/tablet power-user and I use them for all kinds of stuff. If I had to live with only one personal computing device—well, it'd have to be a phone, because they're indispensable for all kinds of interactions with third parties that assume you have a cell phone, but if I had two the other would be an iPad Pro, no question whatsoever. I'd feel crippled with only a laptop or desktop, for almost every task except tinkering with computers, which I care about doing outside of work less with each passing year.

Most of the actual benefits of computing, in my personal life, as in, what makes my life easier, or helps me accomplish things, are better-available or only available on phones and tablets, and much of the rest is good-enough on those that I'd have trouble justifying a desktop or laptop just for those tasks. The main exception is fiddling with computers. Laptops and desktops are good for fiddling with computers (and not only that, to be clear—3D modeling and such remain much better there, too, for example—but that's really all I use them for, as far as productive use).

I think I also have a fundamental problem with classification of things into "consumption" or "creation", because it seems like successful and good and actually useable by and useful to normal people applications of computing tend to end up in the former, even if it's in service of tasks that aren't "consumption", like, "oh, navigation is just consumption" or "payment reminders are just consumption" or "AR sensors automatically measuring things for you is just consumption". Isn't the point that computers do what we need without our having to write a program from scratch every time? Shit, I thought computers doing stuff for us with, ideally, no commands or effort required, was the whole point of what we all do (I mean, that and selling ads, obviously).

For that matter, many of the benefits that a computer gives me over pencil and paper, for writing software, is "consumption"—that is, the output from tools I didn't write and often didn't even deliberately invoke, like code navigation, documentation look-up, hints, autocompletion, warnings, auto-formatting, et c. But those things are still tools aiding in creation. I don't like dismissing phones and tablets as "consumption devices" because they're not great for programming, when they are outstanding tools, far superior to a laptop or a desktop, for all kinds of other activities.

A close friend of mine is an event coordinator. She shoots photos and videos on her iPhone. She edits the content directly on her iPhone and uploads the content to social media. And of course, the iPhone is her primary communication and organizational tool.

She has a Mac, but it might as well be a $1,100 thin client for Google Docs, as that is the only productive thing she does on it. I have no doubt she'd get by fine with an iPad or Chromebook (although I wouldn't recommend either at this point).

I know this discussion has been going on for years now, but:

I am not a programmer. I own a personal desktop and a personal laptop as well as a smartphone.

I do use it for gaming and media (though, honestly, streaming unlicensed video is something I only do on an ancient laptop tucked away behind the TV. The desktop only holds my actual collection of music/movie rips).

I also use my desktop to edit photos, videos, and music. I use my laptop to DJ for fun sometimes, or to take with me when I am away from home for an extended period. I like to experiment with digital art, 3d graphics, and interactive projection/light stuff.

During the last year+ I used my personal desktop over my work-issued laptop to do live conferences with composited graphics and "real" green screen chromakey, as well as a vocal mic and other sources connected via USB interface. It was powerful and flexible enough that I could run all of the browser-based stuff, office applications, and the live streaming software without breaking a sweat on a single box.

I could go on, but I imagine it's moot. I am perfectly aware that many, many people have no need for any of this stuff. But I personally like having a powerful and extendable computer that can be used for multiple tasks, often simultaneously. I can't imagine trying to do these things on an iPad or my phone (certainly not lots of them at once, or as effectively).

This comment is mind-blowing to me. Every single one of the activities in parens is far better accomplished on a desktop with a real keyboard and a large monitor IMO. You really prefer to manage finances on your phone?

> You really prefer to manage finances on your phone?

The phone apps for my banks and credit cards are better than their sites. I'd want my reminders on there, anyway. If a "hey pay this bill" reminder comes in, I can take care of it as soon as I have a spare 20 seconds. I can check my balances in seconds, (almost) no matter where I am. Venmo's very handy and I don't think I've ever used it anywhere but my phone. Hell, I even do some (very, very much hobby-tier) trading on my phone. Basically all my actually-important personal stuff happens mobile-preferred or mobile-only. I'm not sitting down making spreadsheets on my phone, though, that's true—I do still like a desktop/laptop or an iPad + keyboard & mouse for office-productivity sorts of programs.

> Every single one of the activities in parens is far better accomplished on a desktop with a real keyboard and a large monitor IMO

... which other ones? How?!

"home projects, hiking, gardening, learning [...] communicating, navigating" phone wins at all of these, for most people, in some cases simply for the "it's easy to carry around" factor, but that's still a real issue. I'm not going to take a laptop hiking or use it to figure out how to get somewhere in an unfamiliar city. I'm not taking it out in the garden, I'm not taking it to the driveway to work on my car, I'm not dragging it under the sink while I fix a pipe, it can't measure things for me, it can't act as a level, or a flashlight, I'm not going to use it to take a picture of the label on the box of screws I need to buy more of when I run to the store later, or of the arrangement of something I'm about to disassemble, et c. I'm not going to sketch ideas on it (paper or iPad, for that, and if it's paper and it matters I'll capture the result with a phone camera).

As for playing music, composing, that sort of thing: iPads fit great on a music stand, they're easy to carry around, the battery lasts a really long time so they're not fussy, they can attach to MIDI devices for all sorts of purposes, and iOS has excellent software available to use in that context. Phones and tablets can replace a metronome and electric tuners. They can play accompaniment or give you a beat. For some music-related tasks, yeah, you probably want a laptop or desktop, but the things an iPad's good at, it's really good at, and it can usually at least do OK at the rest.

My banks' phone apps suck. Logging in to the website is way faster. I still get mobile alerts, but if it's something I need to take care of I take care of it when I get home anyway.

home projects: I'm not entirely sure what this means in terms of computers, but for me it conjures images of designing things in CAD. I'm not even sure if that's possible on a phone

hiking: Looking up trail information and maps is 1000x better on a 27" 4k monitor than a tiny phone screen. Actually out on the trail, the only electronics you're likely to find with me are a PLB and a Kindle.

gardening: Likewise to hiking, looking things up and reading/learning are better done on a proper screen. I don't need a computer of any kind in the garden.

It seems like where this is going is that I feel the need to have a computing device/internet access readily at hand far less than you do.

Every time I've used iPadOS I'm struck by how much more enjoyable it is than either Windows or OS X. The OS feels super fluid, and I can switch between the Apple Pencil, Magic Keyboard and multitouch seamlessly and without compromise. With iPadOS 15, Apple has essentially fixed the issues with multitasking as well.

If it weren't for me being a programmer, and iPadOS file management sucking, I really don't see what would be in the way of me using an iPad full time.

iOS/iPadOS is the only graphical OS I've used without constant bullshit performance issues affecting the UI (stuttering, pauses, unresponsiveness to input) and with notably low input latency, aside from BeOS and QNX (back when they still offered free Proton desktop copies of that for hobbyist users). MacOS and very stripped-down Linux or BSD desktops are the closest I can get to that experience on the desktop, these days, and even those aren't terribly close to being as good.

PC sales were dying out, but they shot back up in 2020 as people needed them for working or learning from home.

I've been a Windows user since Windows 2 and I'm hoping I never have to run Windows 11. I've switched to Ubuntu on my work laptop and my (System 76 Meerkat) side-project/consulting work mini-PC. Desktop Linux is not great but is good enough, especially when running under alternative DEs like Regolith.

I used to be a diehard Windows user. I was even a contractor on Longhorn for Microsoft and I have a DLL I wrote that still ships in the System32 folder (it used to be two but I don't see that one in the System32 folder now in Windows 10). I used to be proud that I could walk up to any PC in a store and hit a key combo and tell me kids "I wrote that" when the Narrator window popped up.

I still run Windows 10 on my old personal laptop just to run Quicken/Quickbooks but my current side-project is an app to replace both of those with a single app. I'm looking forward to the day I can wipe Windows off that laptop and install Ubuntu (or maybe ElementaryOS as I've heard good things).

Goodbye Windows.

If you have a moment, can you say the primary drivers behind your move? Thanks!

The #1 I have to say is my current Windows 10 Pro version (which I paid $100 for) is throwing a huge modal up each time I reboot trying to get me to create a non-local Windows account.

The only options are to create an account or dismiss the modal - no option to not ask me again.

#2 is all the telemetry.

Have you looked into GNUCash (GnuCash.org)? It’s a venerable open source project that I believe was started to offer an alternative to Quicken and may be an acceptable alternative to QuickBooks at this point. I haven’t used it personally but if I could go back in time I would make a strong effort to make that work before using Quicken/QuickBooks.

I've tried it but it doesn't tick the boxes I want:

- runs in a browser so my wife and I can use it collaboratively for both personal finance and a dual member LLC we have for real estate

- allows me to see a rolled up balance sheet and income statement with our personal finance and the two LLCs (the dual member one mentioned above plus another I use(d) for consulting).

- supports the sort of unique daily budgeting system I've used via a spreadsheet for the last 10 years

- uses a plain-text format (like hledger, beancount, etc)

- lets me do another project in Elixir/Phoenix

Yeah, the runs-in-a-browser thing is huge, especially if you want to outsource your bookkeeping. The monthly cost for QB online is crazy, especially when they want you to pay per-company. Be sure to post a Show HN for whatever you come up with please!

Why should I upgrade? What is the point?

What would I get for all my trouble?

Nothing in the article is compelling. Windows' quality control is abysmal. I'll stick with the devil I know in Windows 10.

You get Teams forced into your taskbar, a news feed that forces you to use Edge and adverts for Microsoft 365 in your start menu! Hooray!

I'm sure the 'third world' is bracing for the ecological disaster this will create. Anybody with a device more than four years old will toss it right in the trash and buy something new.

Sure, it will create lots of devices for us *nix people, but that won't stop tens or hundreds of thousands of working computers going to "recycling". Of course, we don't actually recycle e-waste, we just put it on a barge and take it to SE Asia or Africa where children burn it to harvest the metals.

The "greenwashing" of new devices is harmful - the best thing we can do is continue to use the ones we already have, and make them more repairable and supportable. A big part of that responsibility falls to Microsoft, who has done something reprehensible here.

"Best" part is, a large percentage new computers (laptops, small desktops, AIOs) have all the components soldered.

Just toss that motherboard complete with the processor, GPU and SSD - who cares, you're using a glass straw!

> I'm sure the 'third world' is bracing for the ecological disaster this will create. Anybody with a device more than four years old will toss it right in the trash and buy something new.

They really won't. Much like with Windows 8-10, a lot of people are just going to refuse to upgrade and stick with 10 (or even 7) for years and years until something finally breaks compatibility with something they care about.

I've seen many commenters positioning Windows 11 as a "bad" windows in the good, bad, good, bad... alternating theory of windows versions. We'll see if that perception is widespread, but Microsoft may be back with a Windows 12 that fixes some of the issues before too long.

Bottom taskbar on laptop screens is a no-no.

I disagree. I prefer bottom taskbar on my laptop.

BUT... on my desktop where I use two 27" screens, I vastly prefer having my taskbars being on the "inside" edges where the screens meet. I'm probably not in the majority, though. But just, don't take away my choice!

I also strongly prefer a bottom taskbar on my laptop.

Amen, I use vertical bars on all my screens, even desktop screens. It is the aspect ratio...

Auto-hide. I like the taskbar and dock at the bottom of the screen, but gotta have auto-hide.

I already thought about it and tried, and the experience is even worse than with just bottom.

That's an odd opinion. I definitely prefer bottom taskbar on laptop screens. Side taskbar on any screen is a no-no.

I'm a left align convert. Simply because there's little vertical real estate on wide monitors compared to horizontal. Why take up valuable space?

Lets you full screen apps a lot cleaned too, but that's just my opinion.

I want more apps open. On a wide screen I'll have two apps open in side-by-side half-screen. A side taskbar makes the two apps imbalanced from the center of the screen while a bottom taskbar changes the basic geometry in a symmetrical way.

Fair enough. I guess I don't care as much about everything being perfectly symmetrical.

It is a rational option. It takes much less space on the side while still showing my running apps, time, tray and notification counter.

I usually too many windows open, just like too many tabs, and I don't like seeing them grouped because that requires an extra step to click the right window.

All these windows don't fit bottom/top Taskbar and therefore I put my Taskbar left or right of screen.

you can change the location of the icons to the left, if the centered layout is what you mean

The taskbar itself is what is being referred to, I believe. Having the taskbar mounted to one side of the screen allows for a bit more vertical space to be used by apps, which is pretty nice on aspect ratios that limit vertical space, i.e. 16:9. It’s the way I currently run my taskbar and I can’t really imagine having to use it locked to the bottom of the screen.

I think they want a vertical bar versus horizontal, I prefer this setup for laptops too, e.g. I have the dock on macOS on the left and Ubuntu/Gnome it is the default. It makes a huge difference when vertical screen estate is at a premium, as is the case with many laptops.

I would too but mac does it in a pretty annoying way compared to say ubuntu unity.

With multiple monitors, it snaps to the side most one you have plugged in regardless of your primary screen.

I get there's a lot of dragging and dropping involved with the bar, but in Unity it let you set a threshold for mouse speed to limit you going to another monitor.

Just let me put it on the side and do that if I'm dragging something, it's not too difficult.

This probably means it's finally time to move on from Windows 7. Too many games are starting to require W10/DX12...

My plan is to stay on W10 until the 2025 EOL approaches, then evaluate Linux+Proton. I suspect by 2025 I will mostly be playing games old enough to work fine on Proton and not interested in keeping up with every new release.

Hope you enjoy no privacy.. :) I think windows 7 was the last good version of windows.

My personal workstation is still Win7 (+ Garuda Linux).

When it becomes impossible to use it with Win7 I still just stick with Linux, Windows 10 is really, really disappointing, and Win 11 is somehow, worse.

Thing is, even MS is aware of that, helping developers port some AAA games to Win7 (but NOT Win8! for example Cyberpunk 2077 runs on Win7 and Win10, but not on Win8)

Planning to move to the LTSC branch so at least some of that telemetry will be minimized.

I think I will move back to Linux and put windows in a vm for any windows software I need to run. I did this in 2008-2012 and it worked well.

Then you can easily deny network access to the VM except for whitelisted IPs. Since the vm is just for a specific task it doesn’t need to talk to many.

How on earth are microsoft/windows.com images still low resolution. It really stands out and detracts from the visuals they're trying to sell.

But I don’t want Windows 11. Windows 10 works just fine.

Uff, I wonder if it's possible to decline the upgrade and still be served Win10 security fixes for a few years. Looking at past Win10 updates which mostly added fluff but never really improved anything I am not looking forward to Win11.

Windows 10 will still be supported until around 2025 but after that you're SOL

Windows 11 (the insider builds) are very buggy. I'm usijg w11 on two machines: MSI with 7th generation CPU, and Lenovo Thinkpad e14 with 10th generation CPU and they both have serious issues. The MSI have an audio driver issue where I have this noise from the speakers coming in constantly and the only way is to disable the audio driver. Thinkpad issue is even more annoying. Thinkpad won't shutdown or even sleep. It always auto reboots! And it's very annoying! I would have to fully drain the battery for the laptop to shutdown and I know that will be very disastrous on the laptop.

A contrarian note in the sea of negativity here: I have it on all my machines since the insiders release a couple of months ago and I'm very happy. Everything works. WSL2 has GUI support. UI looks nicer than Win10. I'm not sure about the hardware compatibility gripes -- will it really not install on old hardware or is this about "supported" status? It runs just fine on my Surface Go fwiw.

The taskbar for me is the thing which makes Windows 11 completely ruinous:

1. No drag and drop support, so you need to drag + alt-tab in order to find the right window to dnd into.

2. Windows in the same program always collapse into the same item, with no option to have them split out. To find the one you want, you have to use the flyout previews, which do not have titles. Clicking the taskbar button itself nondeterministically chooses which window to open.

3. No text on the taskbar. Got two programs with similar icons? Tough.

4. The Start button is now completely useless once the crapware is removed. Clicking into the start menu's search bar actually switches you to a different, more useful menu (the search menu). There is no way to make the search menu the default.

5. The default menu size is enormous, taking up about 8% of screen retail for the sake of 5 or 6 buttons. Had to resort to registry hacks to get it down to a usable scale.

Those are just a few of the things that I stumble over daily, after about 6 weeks of using Windows 11. Windows 11 is NOT ready for general release and they seem to be actively punishing power users by removing the features they need in favour of "simplifying" the surface-level.

The first thing I think of when I see that UI is that it looks like a Linux desktop knockoff of a better desktop experience. That better experience used to me MacOS and/or Windows but now Windows is no better than Linux desktops. Will Windows 11 finally bring in the year of the Linux desktop?

> Will Windows 11 finally bring in the year of the Linux desktop?

Is this sarcasm? After so many years, it's just hard for me to take seriously. Linux UX, not just in the DE department, is still trash for any non-technical user.

Even as a technical user the mixture of the settings app, control panel, and other misc administrative tools in Windows 10 are a bit confusing at first. A non technical user will struggle with any advanced system configuration no matter what operating system they use.

My mom has been using the latest LTS Ubuntu for a while now and it once unattended upgrades and automatic backups were configured (the latter was done with a built-in gui program that even allows you to restore a previous version of a file by left clicking on it and clicking a button) there have been zero issues about things not working or being hard to find. The software center is similar to the app stores in smartphones and more intuitive that going online to download an .exe installer file from hopefully the official website of the software creator. I have seen many PCs of people that ended up downloading software from Softonic and having the installer sideload "PC Optimizer Pro <current year> edition".

> Will Windows 11 finally bring in the year of the Linux desktop?

Ha ha ha, no. We've heard that every new Windows since at least XP and it is never true because the problems with Linux Desktop that keep people from using it don't get fixed because they are deeply structurally ingrained.

Some day Microsoft will finally fuck up Windows bad enough that anyone still using a Desktop PC will have no choice but to run Linux[0], but they've got a ways to go yet.

[0] Unless Haiku takes off, in which case maybe I don't live in the worst timeline after all.

Windows already brought the year of the Linux desktop with WSL2 lol.

I've been using Win11 Dev Channel Insider builds for a few months now and it works well. The UI is better than Win 10 and arguable better than Win7.

Just set the task bar to use the traditional left side style and it looks pretty much identical to how it looks now. What makes it look like a knock off?

The flatness of the UI and lack of colours are things that a UI made by someone without design skills would fallback on to avoid looking ugly. If the elements aren't there, there's less to complain about--except there is.

This feels extremely rushed. They didn't even push it out to QA (aka Windows Insiders) until the end of July.

It doesn't really look like a compelling case to upgrade, for somebody who is happily using an LTSC build of Windows 10 that is rock-solid.

I agree. My first reaction was "too soon" as well.

I use macOS and Pop_OS! as my main desktops but I have Windows 11 installed for gaming.

I like Windows 11 a heck of a lot better than Windows 10, which wasn't too awful. Performance is really good. The UI is much nicer. The OS is slowly getting less cluttered. winget is passable. The system monitoring tools are really good. The colors are really well done (well, aside from the new icons, which I find ugly).

The new tiling features are great -- although #!@!$ Windows Terminal Preview still does not support them, even with today's release!

If Windows 11 sat upon some sort of *NIX-based OS, it's probably at the point where I'd switch away from macOS, although I'm not sure whether that's because Windows is improving or macOS is getting worse. WSL exists, but it's still just a VM.

Will it ship with a vertical task bar option? Will it ship with a task bar that I can copy/paste between windows by dragging objects onto the taskbar button of the paste target?

None of the Windows dev machines where I work qualify for Windows 11, and that makes me very happy indeed.

Time to switch to Linux. Apparently these days even gaming works pretty well.

Classic Shell please come back!

It's going to be a buggy POS.

XP Good, Vista Bad buggy half-baked UX nightmare 7 Basically a sendoff of Vista / Apology for it. *They could have updated 7 forever and I'd be happy.*

8 Bad

8.1 Less Bad, but bad.

10 Passable but stealing your data and watching everything you fucking do and you can't do shit about it, you must get updates and we buried all the system settings you loved behind stupid tablet UX

11 (I have no faith in m$)

Am I the only one who really enjoys Windows 11 so far? I use the beta daily and it has been quite reliable and way more snappy than W10 on my Thinkpad. I really like the new UI which feels more modern and harmonic, settings are finally cohesive and uncluttered (Control Panel is still in there somewhere but why should I care?). Animations are snappy, the window management is improved, new GPU accelerated Terminal is really nice, WSL has GUI support and even some Cuda now. It really feels like a nice mix between Mac OS and Linux (with WSL) so I really don‘t get all the hate.

Does it have tons of telemetry, cruft from 20 years in the kernel and some rough edges? Sure! Is the hardware requirements a bit ridiculous? Sure! But I think it is a nice OS that feels very productive and provides me with tons of value. And it is so much easier on the eyes wich I care about a lot. To each their own I guess but it sometimes feels a bit depressing how HN crowd trashes every OS. (I feel its similar with MacOS and Linux)

Is everyone here still using C64, Windows 2000 or OS9 because it „was the last good system“?

> Does it have tons of telemetry. . .? Sure!

I'm somehow unable to identify the moment where the computer stopped being your kingdom and we started to happily share access to it with various companies. It was not always like this! I remember repeatedly clicking "no" when Windows 98 politely asked if I agree to send a bug report to Microsoft.

No one sensible is happy about it. Many are happily being paid to promote Win11 in a fake grass roots kinda way. Microsoft has admitted to gaming Hackernews and yet hacker news continues to permit their submarine advertisements.

>Microsoft has admitted to gaming Hackernews

This is interesting. Where did you see that?

https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-corp-msft-q1-201...

"In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress..."

This is an extremely important piece of information. It made me sad at first, because I'd expect that smart people (that includes dang & pg, not only the users) are harder to game. Nevertheless, when you take into account almost limitless resources Microsoft has, it's no wonder they managed to influence the discussion here. Specifically, HN is the main place where I hear the voices that MS completely changed, that they have nothing to do with their misbehavior from the 90s - which seems a bit naïve at least.

In any case, it's good to remember that whenever any MS-related topic comes up.

It was definitely when one agreed to use Windows 10, if we’re talking about MS operating systems.

There is another comment in this thread about how “Microsoft has put lipstick on a pig and hasn’t made what the users actally need”.

Quite opposite - we can be sure that Microsoft have focused on what features to develop for Win11 based on telemetry data from Win10. Whats so bad about that? (Sadly, turns out what the majority needs is not realy what the small tech crowd “needs”)

I’ve never really understood the outrage. Win11 IS the culmination of Win10 telemetry data.

In the “good old days”, when we drove to fix our cars to a dealer- they catalogued how worn out are some parts together with mileage. To know which ones to improve for next models. How is this different than telemetry? Or new?

I am pretty well convinced that the use of telemetry has had a net-negative effect on software development. Not that the use of telemetry data is inherently bad, but that so many companies appear to use it nearly exclusively, and tend to draw conclusions from it that are questionable.

> I'm somehow unable to identify the moment where the computer stopped being your kingdom

Phones started it, and Windows 10 followed (That's when I stopped using Windows). The only reason my kid still have a Windows PC is Roblox (but it is starting to work pretty well in Linux).

> Am I the only one who really enjoys Windows 11 so far?

Probably not, but consider that people have a lot of different use cases for their computer and a lot of different priorities and Microsoft has been pretty consistent lately about ignoring pretty much any of them that aren't "I really wish my desktop were a clunky tablet".

> I really like the new UI which feels more modern and harmonic

Subjective, but feeling more modern is precisely the opposite of what I want in a UI. Modern means slow and cumbersome with lots of wasted space, sparse options, and unreadable widgets.

> Control Panel is still in there somewhere but why should I care?

Control Panel had nothing wrong with it and probably still has settings options that are missing from the new ones?

> new GPU accelerated Terminal is really nice

It's performance is remarkably terrible for something that's GPU accelerated. Casey Muratori has said a lot about it. https://github.com/cmuratori/termbench and https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm were a result. It doesn't mean a lot in terms of quality of Windows 11, I just think it is a good illustration of modern Windows team's development practices.

> Does it have tons of telemetry, cruft from 20 years in the kernel and some rough edges?

Cruft is fine because it is there for backwards compat, which is huge for a tone of desktop use cases. Linux Kernel has a ton of cruft too for the same reason. Telemetry is bullshit and wastes my computer's resources to effectively spy on me.

> Is the hardware requirements a bit ridiculous?

The hardware requirements are very ridiculous. Windows 11 is not revolutionary, but somehow manages to require twice the minimum specs of ten in some metrics, and a TPM module.

> To each their own I guess but it sometimes feels a bit depressing how HN crowd trashes every OS.

They all have problems, big problems, so they all deserve it. I find it more remarkable that people consistently try to say that everything is actually ok!

> Is everyone here still using C64, Windows 2000 or OS9 because it „was the last good system“?

God I wish they were still viable.

I,m still using Windows ME and Word 97 for writing work, because everything else feels clunky, fat, and unrefined.

For programming work, after many years of Windows and Mac, I,ve moved on to environments which do not force changes on me.

When my WORKSTATION is concerned, I just can,t tolerate unsolicited ,,improvements,,.

I still use Windows 7 and it works absolutely fine. Really.

Microsoft and its secretions are a special kind of bad. For a while, Mac's were 'new' to a lot of people, but they're quickly becoming the OS your mom uses to check facebook. Linux will forever be the nerd OS, and that's a double edged sword.

BSD, as you know, is fictional.

Win+Z tiling is a life changer. Nice to see Terminal is now part of the OS too.

It would frankly be difficult for them to downgrade Windows at this point, at least in my opinion. Microsoft did 'the right thing' here by taking design cues from more streamlined OSes like ChromeOS while deriving it's visual style from the frosted-glass infatuation that MacOS is famous for. It's a surprisingly happy medium that iterates quite successfully on it's core product.

The reason I'm not using it though? I switched to Linux 2 years ago, and I wouldn't come back for all the software upgrades in the world. The issues with Windows run incredibly deep (for my use cases) and Microsoft's inability to slaughter any sacred cows has left an extreme disparity between cruft and class, as you pointed out.

I'm just too tired of putting up with Windows to give it more of my time. I'm glad that it's starting to look and feel better though, it's an important step in the right direction for their 'core audience', so to speak.

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