Windows 11 has started rolling out worldwide
blogs.windows.com
blogs.windows.com
We’ve improved the experiences for touch in Windows 11 when you’re using a tablet without a keyboard. You’ll see more space between the icons in the Taskbar
What if I'm NOT using one?
Thank you Microsoft, for taking away even more customisation, dumbing down the OS to new levels, and shoving more adverts in our faces. Now people have even more reasons than before to try Linux or macOS.
A new era for the PC begins today
You're right about that --- an even more locked-down and user-hostile (all in the name of "security", of course) era begins.
As a long-time Win32 developer who started writing utilities for DOS and then moved to Win16 for a short while, the direction that Windows (and the PC platform in general) is going is really sad and horrifying to see.
> Windows 11 Home edition requires internet connectivity and a Microsoft account.
No local accounts for Home edition. As for Windows 11 Pro or above:
- During Setup...
- "Set up for personal use."
- You'll see a "Let's add your Microsoft Account" screen.
- Click "Sign-In options" (blue href)
- Pick "Offline Account"
- [Splash screen warning of all the joy you'll be missing out on]
- Click "Limited Experience" (instead of "Next") on the Dark Pattern screen.
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-specifica...
I wonder how many people actually change their minds when they see these passive aggressive prompt options. "Skip trial" "Decline bonus offer" "No gift"
Anyways, do you know if it also stealth replaces your offline account if you sign into office, Xbox, etc? I got force signed in once trying to install flight simulator and it took me hours to remove all traces of the Microsoft account. There was literally no way to sign into just xbox to install one game without agreeing to replace my windows local account with a microsoft account, and it proceeded to auto sign me into outlook, one drive and a bunch of stuff I didnt want.
This is a terrible update which adds very little of value for the end user, it only turns Windows non pro into some sort of SAAS that Microsoft is going to milk forcefully.
I'm not talented enough to guess people's sexuality or nationality just by looking at their pictures like you and pass judgement on appearances. Or is it because I don't care what color or sex my would-be coworkers are?
Let's be honest here. You're looking for a specific demographic, and you're not actually concerned with the composition of the talent pool from which they were hired. It's an increasingly popular de facto anti-meritocratic movement and I don't think trading some amount of competence for diversity at social scales will actually be good for society in the medium to long term.
Honestly, why should anyone care? Look at the old photos from Bell Labs: these guys all looked "the same." So what? Why would anyone even care about their looks? What matters is a combination of skills and passion that gives excellent results, not your current idea of "diversity."
Shockley was a controversial figure who died alone. It is not fair to identify him with Bell Labs. Also, people gradually dissociated from him as it was more clear his views are extreme. We can find these kinds of people in any culture, it means nothing in the context we're discussing.
This might be an American thing, though. A while ago I came across an essay that basically said UNIX is racist [0]. It's hard to have meaningful conversation in such circumstances.
[0] https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-88c11800-9446-46...
- one of key quotes:
> We must historicize and politicize code studies. And, because digital media were born as much of the civil rights era as of the cold war era (and of course these eras are one and the same), our investigations must incorporate race from the outset
I told you exactly why people at Bell Labs looked the same and why that is a problem. If someone refuses to hire black people because they think black people are inferior, the answer isn't, "so what?"
A few UI elements have changed places, but it mostly feels like Win 10 to me.
People understandably get pissed off when features they have been using for over a decade suddenly disappear in an "upgrade". They expect things that used to work to keep working, and perhaps other things that didn't work to now work, but that's not what they got.
For me, the "new version of Windows is actually better" feeling faded around the 2K/XP timeframe. Since then it has only been increasingly minor improvements combined with increasingly greater regressions.
The sequence of events that means my main development machine is running Debian looked something like this:
1. Docker switches to WSL2, deprecates WSL1
2. My big dev box (running Windows Server 2019) can no longer test containers.
3. My laptop is running WSL2 so I'm spending more and more time in a Debian shell. All the CLI stuff works better there anyway.
4. I switch my big dev box to Debian and hey presto, suddenly Android Studio isn't a giant PITA. Let's try VS code. Oh ok, it's actually pretty cool.
5. I switch all my code base into VS Code.
6. What exactly do I need Windows for? A few games.
I now do most of my dev work on Debian and the transition was made painless by WSL2, Microsoft making Windows a bad choice for developers and the Docker people playing along. If you're already spending a lot of time in WSL2 and you do a mix of Android and .NET Core, you have zero reasons to stay on Windows.
It took a little bit of work but now my linux desktop works exactly how I want now, and Windows and macOS both feel strange to my muscle memory when I have to use them.
Not just power users - any user will need to throw their perfectly working hardware now unless fits MS's artificial requirements.
Four months public beta wherein they fixed almost none of the major problems. Listened to almost none of the user feedback. Massive inconsistencies and half complete ideas abound.
This isn't the worst Windows I've tried, but it is perhaps the worst RTM. If this was still in public beta I'd call it "serviceable" as a daily driver if you can deal with the quirks.
But RTM-ing this? Shipping new computers with an even buggier build than the latest? Ouch. My barely computer-literate relatives should not walk into a Costco and out with a computer with this initial experience.
I don't even think Windows 11 is all that different from a regular feature update similar to the ones that Windows 10 has been receiving for years now. It has the Windows 11 name because some visible UI changes have been made. Other than that, it's really the same OS as Windows 10 in the grand scheme of things.
Heck, Microsoft probably just fell into "doing whatever Apple is doing" by moving their OS from version 10 to 11 just because that's what macOS did.
To me the only thing about Windows 11 that resembles Windows Vista are the vague complaints revolving around people's cheese being moved (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Moved_My_Cheese%3F).
https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/pugqvj/after_3_m...
> I don't even think Windows 11 is all that different from a regular feature update similar to the ones that Windows 10 has been receiving for years now. It has the Windows 11 name because some large and obvious UI changes have been made.
So it is just a regular feature update except all the big and breaking changes. I feel like this is a point that defeats itself.
> only thing about Windows 11 that resembles Windows Vista are the vague complaints
I was specifically referring to Microsoft shipping an OS that didn't have enough time in the public test phase and thus shipped with bugs/quirks/issues. That could refer to both Vista and 11.
> If everything else was the same and this was a Windows 10 feature update instead of "Windows 11"
I'd instead be lambasting it for both its bugs/quirks/incompleteness AND how inappropriate it is to ship major breaking changes in a feature update.
To be honest the argument that Microsoft ships feature updates this bad is inaccurate but also quite funny as a "defense."
I think you've posted the wrong link by mistake. This one is just a bunch of people saying "it's not ready" and "who moved my cheese". What are the bugs?
EDIT: perhaps this would be more informative https://www.notebookcheck.net/Windows-11-is-now-widely-avail...
Also, WSL graphics support (which isn't coming to Windows 10 for some reason), winget has been moved to stable (that is coming to Windows 10), and Windows Terminal is included in the box (but doesn't replace the cmd.exe or powershell.exe terminal emulator for some reason).
Windows has a console interface unlike that found on Unix, using APIs rather than escape sequences to interface with the console. Also, its console implementation was historically coupled tightly with the conhost.exe application, which historically is both the terminal emulator and console endpoint simultaneously.
The blog series centered around https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-command-l... is the best resource I've found online that discusses Windows' legacy console support as well as some vision of how this subsystem has changed in the years since.
These changes improved OS interop, but also de-couple the legacy crap so that third party terminal emulators can be better supported on Windows generally (separating the console endpoint from the terminal display), allowing for the creation of `CreatePseudoConsole()`.
Prior to this, third party terminal emulators that wanted to support Windows apps had to run the legacy conhost.exe and shove the window way off the desktop (to hide), and then scrape the window for its contents. This is/was required so that the app has a console backed by a conhost.exe process (responding to the console apis). `CreatePseudoConsole()` fixes a lot of that mess.
I now look at my Windows taskbar or macOS dock and there is pretty much nothing that I can't use on Linux. I guess there's no official Google Drive desktop client yet but there are other solutions people have recommended to me. My Spotify/VSCode/Obsidian/1Password critical stack works just fine on any platform.
As a general purpose desktop OS Linux still isn't there for most people in my opinion, as much as I want it to be. Every so often I try to make the switch to Linux full time and there's always some hitch that pushes me back to Windows. I don't even mind digging around and making changes in conf files if it will fix the problem, but I always encounter something that I consider a deal breaker where I hit a brick wall and just can't figure it out.
Windows lost 10% market share to mac and Linux since 2019. Microsoft should be firing more people and having singular leadership in direction. Make something for the developers, the graphic artists, the people that need their operating system to be apart of their work, not hinder it.
This falls on deaf ears of course, Microsoft is far from saving unless something significant of top leadership gets the boot and somehow attracts a new visionary that isn't already working in greener pastures.
Sorry to sound challenging but, as linux user, I really would like a source for that.
Sorry, 20% market share in the U.S. since 2017. Mac taking a big leap ahead.
Windows 11 is Microsoft's attempt to hoover up Edge and Windows Passport evaders.
It's a shame, I was just getting into Windows 10 as my personal dev desktop. I guess i'll give Ubuntu another shot.
The new future is people as a product.
Not a rhetorical question.
In my case on a Z270 PC from 2017, a BIOS update enabled the dormant and otherwise unadvertised TPM.
Notes: I had switched to Edge back when it became Chromium based. Privacy aside, it's not IE and it works for me. I don't tweak the OS unless there is friction with getting what I need done, if my apps run it's doing its job. If I need extra functionality then an application is responsible to add it, not the OS.
If you're trying to do something dramatically different to how the base OS works then obviously its not the OS for you, if you have no choice then try working with the OS and not against it. If you're trying to run old applications based on old APIs then you need an old OS don't expect them to always work in future.
A lot of complaints seem to sound like people who want to use a linux-based OS but for some reason refuse to? I'm also curious what customisations are being made, are they actually functional or are you just spending too much time on r/unixporn and trying to make things pretty, please elaborate on your griefs.
Can anyone please explain what TPM (2.0) is and whether it works for or against me?
Make a new OS without the windows debt.
Did you ever use Windows 8? Because that released in 2012, just 5 years after Vista. Drastic, un-asked for changes that ruined the user experience; hideous tablet/touch interface that was mostly unusable; sub-par touch/app development model that no one adopted.
Basically it was another Vista-like release all over again.