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Comment by _l4jh | Hacker News Reader

I honestly don't understand Microsoft's plan with Windows 11.

6 years ago, with the release of Windows 10, it was all about "this is the last version of Windows!" and they went with the rolling release model. A little strange but they stuck with it for 6 years until suddenly this summer they announce Windows 11 and they went hard talking up how it was a huge change to Windows but in reality it isn't. At all.

It has a new visual layer sure but the applications are still the old Windows 10 (and so really the old Windows XP?) ones with that new look. They introduced a new store and support for additional stores such as the Amazon Android app store.

I guess what I am saying is I don't get why now they are calling it Windows 11? They could have just carried on calling it Windows 10. They have introduced big UI and feature changes in previous Windows 10 updates (perhaps not quite as big as the new taskbar and Explorer changes).

It is a free upgrade for Windows 10 license holders (consumer anyway, not sure how it works for Enterprise?).

It just all feels so rushed and messy and the end product is just not very good as we can clearly see here.

I don't want to hate on Windows, after all they have introduced some really interesting new things since Windows 10 initial release such as WSL. It is just there didn't appear to be a want or need for a Windows 11 and this rushed mess makes it look like Microsoft didn't (doesn't?) know what it is doing with Windows either. Shrug.

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They want to drop support for a lot of hardware, and can't figure out how to do that without looking really bad while staying as Windows 10.

That is really the difference between Win 10 and Win 11: Requirement for UEFI, TPM 2.0 and a CPU that does AVX2 and FMA3, and some kind of hardware-assisted virtualization.

UEFI allows them to rewrite their entire bootup codebase with only one target. Literally hundreds of megabytes of sourcecode will be removed from their tree, some of it dating back to the 80's, and replaced with something that is much, much smaller and cleaner.

TPM 2.0 and hardware-assisted virtualization allow them to move the kernel one level up in the privilege hierarchy, while properly verifying it during boot to eliminate entire categories of exploits and providing trusted computing that might actually work this time. (Not entirely positive, but it's a desirable feature for them.)

And having all the cpus that can support the OS also support the good vector instructions greatly raises the baseline against which most software is compiled. This is an often underlooked point: The benchmarks and the most performance sensitive programs might get multiple code paths or versions for different cpus, but by far the most software made for Win 10 still only targets a very low baseline. Even if it's not 32-bit, most programs only target the ancient SSE2 (!) because that's the baseline that's quaranteed to exist if you have a 64-bit cpu, never mind it's over 20 years old now.

Also, some of the recent processors that support everything you've listed are dropped. A hunch at the time of Windows 11 announcement was that https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/bitlocker-sleep-mode-vuln... can only be fully mitigated in the CPUs (or the mitigation caused performance degradation).

This is insightful. Thanks

I'm not sure I buy your point about ISA extensions. Many programs still target Windows XP or Windows 7, and if that "lag" remains the case, then it will be many, many years until vendors can reasonably require Windows 11 as a proxy for those ISA extensions. In the meantime, vendors can offer a Windows XP-11 version, and a Windows 11 "optimized" version, but at that rate, it would be just as much work to put the optimizations in the single version and make the program automatically detect the CPU, saving the user the trouble of figuring out which version they need while also making the CPU optimizations work on older Windows versions.

I don't think Microsoft is concerned about ISA extensions for third parties. Apps can use function multi-versioning to support beneficial ISA extensions. I think they're more interested in ISA extensions and CPU features for first party code. They can enforce protections in drivers, kernel modules, and services.

But Microsoft can do that too? They can compile one version of each DLL for SSE2 and another for AVX or whatever if they want, same as any other vendor. It's not like they can just turn off SSE2 for everybody, because it would break every program, and even new programs may use SSE2 instructions in combination with newer x86 extensions. Even if they did (and I'm not sure it's even possible in x86), I don't see how it could increase security anyways; any new Spectre vulnerability or whatever is probably going to be just as exploitable if not more so using AVX load instructions as SSE load instructions.

Yep, I develop a media software, something to handle live audio, video.. I tried last year to upgrade from sse2 to sse4 and got bug reports from users the week after, apparently a lot of people still use old Phenom and Atom boards...

I was still happily running a 2009 Phenom II until last year, when I was forced to upgrade when the motherboard started acting up. The thing is, performance-wise it was just fine. In 2009 it would be unthinkable for a 1998 CPU to be anything but a paperweight, but the performance plateau of today is real

It's more anachronistic than that.. people don't really use that much paper anymore that they need paperweights.

Maybe a keychain ornament.

I still have a hexa-core Phenom II as my primary desktop workhorse. I'm not looking forward to the day the motherboard or CPU flakes out. It really does fulfill most of my needs. The only real advantage I can see by upgrading to something more modern is lower power usage. From an environmental perspective, I'm guessing I'd have to run the new system for a long time to make up for the impact of manufacturing the new motherboard and CPU.

I agree about the performance plateau, I'm using an FX-8350 for gaming, and I'm fine. Even handled Cyberpunk 2077 well, and that only came out not even a year ago.

I don’t know, I had a phenom running for years as a server that was running a Linux vm for automated torrenting, a Linux vm running the ubiquiti NVR, and the host itself serving as a media server. But that’s about all it could do. ;)

I realize that sounds a bit like a Monty Python critique of the Romans, but there’s no way I would/could use the platform as a daily workstation professionally. It served its last days as a home servant droid well, but just. It’s longevity in a low-demand role was only possible by augmenting it with an array of SATA SSDs and a hypervisor. I finally put it down a while back (and still had one backup mobo NIB for it). All the above relatively lightweight functions it was performing can be done with better performance on a far smaller footprint for size/power consumption/noise today. Those attributes are part of an improving performance profile. People talk about a performance plateau, which I’ve pushed back on in other posts as really being a demand plateau for many of its advocates. Case in point, using the phenom platform as a daily workstation. If one can even think about pulling that off, it can only be because their expectations have dropped very low for performance or their needs haven’t changed since Phenom was in its prime. Yeah it runs the old workloads like it always did (and why would it not? Even better when augmented with more modern hw/sw), but no way under the sun would I be able to overlay my current demand profile on a phenom platform and have anything but swamped resources and interminable delays. I say this as someone who fully appreciates the awesome power we have in a 5v/2A RPi smaller than a deck of cards, and what can be done a larger platform drawing less than 60w today, let alone what can be done with 1000w. The phenom platform is highly inefficient in comparison to the tools now at your disposal.

Newer CPUs have better security (hardware encryption, better virtualization, etc). Not nearly as much better as it should be, even compared to ARM, but better.

Thank you for the excellent summary here. You should have written the tl;dr for the Windows team even though I know that officially saying this would likely piss off just as many people.

One follow-on question - any insights into how what you wrote above explains why Microsoft dropped support for AMD Zen in Win11 (Zen+ and higher are only supported)? Looking at Wikichip, it doesn't seem like there's a feature missing, so perhaps there's an unfixable bug in Zen?

Isn't RDRAND broken in Zen1? (I think it was broken on launch in zen2 and zen3 also but they patched it in agesa updates)

I don't know if that's the case, but wouldn't that be a strange reason to withhold a Windows release from it?

If nobody uses Zen1 then it's worth dropping just so you don't have to test it.

As someone who has actually written (albeit following a tutorial, for a hobby project) a working non-UEFI bootloader, and having done a lot of experimentation with dual-booting, manipulating disk images, etc.:

I find it hard to believe dropping legacy boot support saves hundreds of megabytes of any data in the OS, let alone source code. (If anything, the UEFI code is orders of magnitude larger / closer to that size, than legacy boot support.)

I could believe that dropping legacy boot support drops a lot of complexity and arcane, old code that's no longer as well-understood. However the actual footprint of that code can't be large. The boot sector is only 512 bytes, then you chain to a secondary and maybe tertiary step in the boot but those are measured in kilobytes or megabytes, hardly hundreds of megabytes (compiled).

But the fact is once the boot process has completed there's no longer any reason to refer back to any of the stuff that happened during the legacy boot while the operating system is running normally; by that point how the boot was accomplished is a non-issue. So it's not like, for example, supporting outdated/obscure hardware where you have to keep a bunch of drivers around.

Maybe the size includes pdf/docx/ppt notes. Maybe there are a few decades of accumulated copy+paste+modify code chunks. Or maybe it really is just complexity -- but at the end of the day that's what matters.

> But the fact is once the boot process has completed there's no longer any reason to refer back

The instruction pointer is hardly the only state here. Doesn't the __SM__ structure (and the mess that came before) cascade into a bunch of configuration? It seems to me that it really could look like keeping a bunch of drivers around.

Or maybe this is a comment on a forum full of people that like to pretend they are experts in any subject at hand, and the author has no idea how big this source code is. Literally.

This. MBR+LILO booting is dumb simple, these people don't know a shit about what their are talking about.

> TPM 2.0 and hardware-assisted virtualization allow them to move the kernel one level up in the privilege hierarchy, while properly verifying it during boot to eliminate entire categories of exploits and providing trusted computing that might actually work this time.

So Microsoft is going all in with hardware based security while everyone is still recovering from Spectre and Meltdown and dropping in additional layers of software fix CPU security flaws? Is there a betting pool somewhere on how long that will take to backfire?

It won't for them, because they've shifted culpability over to the hardware vendors.

A big part of it is not just hardware based security, it's virtualization based security (VBS). Essentially adding a hypervisor layer under Windows that manages access to sensitive processes like lsass, which handles credential material. This is a huge improvement in the Windows security model, and even if there are bypasses, they are non-trivial and consist of more than just elevating to admin/SYSTEM as is the current case.

I agree wholeheartedly, but this made me chuckle:

> providing trusted computing that might actually work this time.

Ahah, sure. <Pinky & the Brain tune starts>

> the most software made for Win 10 still only targets a very low baseline. Even if it's not 32-bit, most programs only target the ancient SSE2 (!) because that's the baseline that's quaranteed to exist if you have a 64-bit cpu, never mind it's over 20 years old now.

Windows 10 will be widely used in 2031. You're not going to drop support for it and old CPU regardless of Windows 11 existence.

No, but since everyone on Win11 will be on a new baseline they can force developers to either support both Win10 and Win11, and not one for all, on the lowest support level available.

That doesn't make sense to me. Win 10 programs compiled against SSE2 will still work fine on Windows 11, so they can't force developers to choose.

> and can't figure out how to do that without looking really bad while staying as Windows 10

Would that really look so bad? Even the Linux kernel dropped 80386 eventually.

Windows 10 feature updates occasionally phasing out hardware support after a few years wouldn't seem wrong at all in my eyes, they could easily explain it as a trade-off necessary for getting "10 forever". And Windows users were already used to not getting their feature update immediately on older hardware, an eventual escalation from late to never wouldn't have been surprising at all.

But do you pull kernel updates automatically, unattended? Because Windows feature updates are like that - every now and then they may market them up, including popping up some notification in the system, but otherwise they just get installed automatically over time. If they started dropping compatibility with older CPUs and software with subsequent updates, they could find themselves in the middle of a huge PR mess when one of their automated updates suddenly breaks a chunk of some industry. Makes more sense to create a version boundary if the changes are really as extreme as GP described, preventing large amounts of users from sleep-walking into a disaster.

Windows 10 feature updates (recently twice a year, named $year'H'$term) have been gated by hardware compatibility lists for quite a while (since the start?), and there's even a distinction between feature update versions that have their own "Long Term Servicing Channel" and those that don't. Sounds familiar?

The boundaries you ask for have already been in place, long before 11.

I didn't know that - especially about "LTSC" for feature updates. Thanks for correcting me.

I just booted Win 11 using legacy bios. Just remove those artificial checks in the installer and no more problems.

Mostly agree but AVX isn't still a requirement because Intel still sell Celeron without AVX. Even Core i5-L16G7 (sold in 2020) don't support AVX at all, because Tremont core (used for Celeron and little core) don't support AVX.

> That is really the difference between Win 10 and Win 11: Requirement for UEFI, TPM 2.0 and a CPU that does AVX2 and FMA3, and some kind of hardware-assisted virtualization.

Only SSE4.2. It supports Intel CPUs without AVX2 since that was missing from some Celeron/Pentiums.

Win11 does look rushed. They want TPM2.0 and to move the CPU requirements up about 7 years (which puts more than half of my computers and several family members into EOL with respect to windows). The UI looks like some steps forward and many backwards. I am also thinking this sort of cutting out older harder in this way will make many people re-think if they need a computer or something like an ipad.

I think I might upgrade one VM and see. Then leave most of my computers alone for now. It will take them a bit to shake out the quirks on this. It took them about 2 cycles to get win10 into a usable state. Which is fairly typical of them 'wait until service pack 2'.

>which puts more than half of my computers and several family members into EOL with respect to windows

Why? It's not like Windows 10 will suddenly stop working for you. That will keep being supported until 2025 which, at 10 years total, is quite plenty. Sure, you won't get any of the new shiny features of Win 11 but if you're PCs are so old, then you won't need them anyway.

Also, feel free to switch you and your family to Linux.

After 4 years they'll either not get security updates or have to switch to Linux. There are plenty of PCs running older hardware that'll most likely be perfectly fine after 2025 but no longer be able to run a supported version of Windows.

>After 4 years they'll either not get security updates or have to switch to Linux.

To be fair, Windows 10 will be 10 years old at that time and their PC will be over 11 years old which is an eternity in technology time. 11 year old HW is not very energy efficient and is often vulnerable to various side channel attacks that need SW mitigations which make them even slower. Newer HW is more secure, while being more energy efficient to boot. Even if Microsoft would continue support for ancient hardware, the chances are Nvidia and AMD would drop driver support for what they consider to be legacy hardware, like they alwasy do.

I also keep my 15 year old PC (Core 2 Quad) going for my parents but I moved it to Linux as I can't expect Microsoft to keep supporting such old hardware for free forever and at some point, the SW and HW industry have to keep moving forward and that sometimes means removing support for legacy stuff even if that means cutting some users with old hardware off (they still can keep using their systems after all, just not run the latest and greatest SW).

Is Apple doing better officially supporting hardware overs 10 years old?

> 11 years old which is an eternity in technology time

No its not. For casual use, 15 year old PC is very much fine and works perfectly in many use cases ie for our parents. You may swap for SSD but that's it, it can be blazingly fast for the tasks required.

Forcing everybody to move into Linux when they can barely handle Windows is quite a stretch, there might be licences to software which won't work, same for hardware. Lets not forget whole world isn't on HN level of computer expertise to debug issues.

>Forcing everybody to move into Linux when they can barely handle Windows is quite a stretch

Nobody is forcing you to do anything. You can keep using whatever HW and OS you have as long as you wish. What's your point?

11 years is a very long time in the personal computer industry. It’s a little under 20% of the time we’ve had such an industry.

PC hardware of recent years is much longer lived in terms of performance than in earlier years.

A PC from 11 years ago is likely running a spinning hard disk and running a 32-bit version of the OS, no?

Vista was released in 2007 and supported x86-64. The first x86-64 machines from AMD were released in 2003.

But did people typically run Vista 64-bit or the 32-bit version?

No data to back this us, but my intuition would be that other than government or big corporations, everyone buying a new machine with Windows installed would get the 64 bit version. And even then the uber-conservative government / corporate buyers wouldn't be rolling out Vista, they'd be sticking with XP.

I’ll ask some MS pals for some data.

I bought my first 64bit AMD CPU somewhere around 2001-2002 (at that time this premium turned out more or less useless). And as I mentioned, you may switch HDD to SSD to get very acceptable performance from even quite old computers.

> bought my first 64bit AMD CPU somewhere around 2001-2002

I doubt it. The first Athlon 64 was launched late 2003.

I meant slightly more recent, like when Windows 10 was released. But no, my relatives have PCs from 2010 running 64-bit Windows that I upgraded to SSDs in the mid-2010‘s and that are still running perfectly fine. I myself was running a 2012 PC (with SSDs from the start) until last year, and the replacement isn’t that much faster. I’m also running a second PC from 2016 that doesn’t meet the Windows 11 requirements but would surely be fast enough beyond 2025.

"Windows 10 is 10 years old"

It's a rolling release, so with 21H1 it's only half a year old.

And I don't care what they do. It will be the last Windows for me.

21H1 is a release which is half a year old, the OS itself was launched in 2015 which makes it 10 years old in 2025.

The issue is that hardware purchased last year and not supported by Windows 11 (like for example the Surface Studio 2 still sold by Microsoft, and other currently sold CPUs) has a much longer lifetime than five years.

> To be fair, Windows 10 will be 10 years old at that time and their PC will be over 11 years old which is an eternity in technology time.

To be fair, the PC won't be that old. Every single machine with Zen (1st gen Ryzen and Threadrippers), for example.

To be fair my 11 year old desktop CPU is faster than the cpu in my brand new work laptop.

Seriously. I’m working in a school. We have lots of computers from 2012. Maybe they will finally be replaced by 2025 (I kind of doubt it), but we’ll still have lots of machines from 2014/2015.

With how little my grandma uses her computer for and how confusing OS changes are, I almost wonder if I'd be better off installing ReactOS.

> have to switch to Linux

Come, now, we all know it's mostly hobbyists keeping 15+ year old PCs running with Linux

Assuming you could afford to upgrade, it's pretty bonkers keeping these old inefficient machines running from a power consumption standpoint.

I had a bunch of old Dell Precision workstations and I eventually got shot of them because my electric bills were becoming more and more eye-watering. I built a cheap PC that (with virtualisation) can carry out all these old machines workloads and more, and my power bills were a fraction of what they were previously. Quite an eye opener for me with regards to how energy efficient new stuff is.

IKR. My parents are still rocking my old gaming PC from 2006-2007 with a quad core Intel Core 2 Quad and Nvidia 6800GT and it serves them fine. However, by modern standards that PC is an absolute energy hog for what it does. The CPU alone has a declared TDP of 105W (in practice, maybe even more). A modern laptop-grade quad-core Intel Tiger Lake 1165g7 would absolutely destroy it in terms of performance, and at 15W TDP, consume only a fraction of the power.

I love fighting planned obsolescence and reducing e-waste by repairing and keeping stuff working as long as possible but at some point old hardware should be replaced if funds allow it for the sake of energy efficiency and the environment.

That is fair enough. But most of the boxes I bought are fairly efficient, being laptops (usually 45w max under load). Sandybridge was a pretty good platform for its time. It was not until recently that they have iterated out of it. If you had a desktop yeah I would recommend the upgrade. My use case was portability with some very light gaming, and a decent screen for programming. I had done that cutover from power hungry boxes to fairly efficient ones in about 2006. I dumped about 40 bucks off my power bill. My rub with this upgrade for win11 is it seems kind of arbitrary. Mostly TPM. A feature I do not want or have a need for.

> If you had a desktop yeah I would recommend the upgrade

Aye, I was thinking more about older desktop machines rather than laptops, which by their nature are designed to be as power efficient as possible to extend how long you can run off of just the battery.

And again just to restate to others, it's worth upgrading if you can afford it. After I dumped those old Dells, I reckon I saved the nearly the price of a whole PC each year after kitting out with newer gear (until the price of electric went up again).

Apropos Windows 11, it seems there may be ways around the TPM requirements, though not ideal:

https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/how-to/bypass-windows-11-tpm...

> Why? It's not like Windows 10 will suddenly stop working for you.

While this is true, Windows 8.1 started to pester me about my hardware constantly on an older (but not old at the time) PC when it was getting towards EOL with an obnoxious popup.

Windows 10, as of the October patch Tuesday, is already warning users that their machines are not Windows 11 ready

I think there weren't that many advances in raw speed. The only thing it is missing is HEVC hardware decoding (i don't remember if it has h.264, possibly not)

What I'm trying to say: 10 years is not that much for computers these day?

I’ve been fully off Windows for about a year now but if I was using Windows I’d be a bit upset if I had bought the non-free version that Windows advertised as the last Windows OS you will ever need and now they are going back on that. That’s classic old Microsoft behavior.

They allow free upgrade.

We have a computer (laptop) from 2011 - Lenovo w520, with 4 core i7 (second gen) and 16GB ram, full hd IPS screen, and factory SSD, and dedicated Nvidia Quadro with 2GB graphic ram. Boy this computer still rocks, and the battery still lasts 2-3 hours. I think there weren't that many advances in raw speed. The only thing it is missing is HEVC hardware decoding (i don't remember if it has h.264, possibly not)

What I'm trying to say: 10 years is not that much for computers these day?

Unfortunately, things being EOL'd is increasingly common place. I have issues with 'your OS is no longer supported' on both my iPad and Android phone. This becomes a problem when things like your banking app no longer work because they insist on being upgraded, but the upgrade won't install.

What kind of iPad do you have if the OS is no longer supported? For mobile devices, Apple is comparatively good at supporting older generations.

iPad4 I think. Old, but otherwise perfectly fine.

4th gen iPads got dropped because they only have a 32-bit CPU.

My hunch is that the minds behind Windows 10 being the last Windows have moved on. New blood needs a reason for a promotion.

Or possibly the opposite. Somebody's personal or professional enemy suggested a legitimate reason to go to Windows 11. And they realized that with a few small nudges that would look innocent they could sabotage the entire project and by extension their enemy's career.

It could very well be that old timers behind Windows 10 are getting tired of the new blood getting in their way. So they let things progress in a way that would let them stab the Windows 11 people in the back and swoop in to save the day with Windows 12.

This could be a movie with Dinesh from Silicon Valley as Microsoft’s CEO

Edit: ok wait this could be an episode of Silicon Valley although I haven’t see the last season

It's all just a long-play by the windows 13 people, who will have their revenge as a dish served cold.

This is a long play by Windows 3.1 developers who introduced hidden code which would execute mid-2021 to release automated marketing messages for "Windows 11" and force update the code base with small time UI changes.

During the development of Windows 8 this code was discovered by a select and secret group of people. However, it was impossible to stop the scripts, silently executing on servers which are running in inaccessible concrete enclosures in Redmond since the 90s.

Cutting power supply or opening the enclosure to get to these servers would severely damage other critical hardware so they started soft countermeasures. Unaware developers would spread Windows 10 as the "last" Windows release but the operation to mitigate the Windows 11 terror could not be endangered by exposing this information.

To avoid global customer confusion, they chose their own strategy to deal with the sudden upgrade to "Windows 11" in 2021. They took the narrative into their own hands and jumped from Windows 8 directly to Windows 10, inventing some plausible story about why Windows 9 was missing. This way, the automated upgrade to Windows 11 could be masqueraded as their own choice

But that'll be a bad release in the good/bad pattern so they'll be avenged by the Windows 14 people.

I was thinking more that the "traditional" faction in MSFT, over 6 years, might have accumulated enough grievances and failures of the rolling model, that they made their case again and the leadership eventually went "fine, fine, we'll go back... for now".

This is all part of the temporal war. The Windows 20 faction is manipulating the time line.

Couldn't it also just be that the hardware manufacturers / OEMs finally managed to successfully arm-twist someone in MSFT into declaring a new version, in order to intentionally obsolete more hardware?

It's hard to do that on the "rolling release" Win10 model, which is actually why I liked it. There was sort of an implication that if it was "the last version of Windows" then I probably would be fine with my current hardware for quite a while.

But major version upgrades have always had the risk of your hardware going obsolete with them.

Just smells like an excuse for forced obsolescence to me.

My thought was that this only happened because macOS went to 11.

Microsoft swears up and down that they never "officially" said that W10 would be "the last version of Windows". [0] Rather, it was said by some developer, which the media took and ran with. Microsoft, for their part, seems to have just smiled and nodded without ever feeling the need to dispel that little hiccup.

[0] https://www.pcworld.com/article/394724/why-is-there-a-window...

A Microsoft employee speaking at a Microsoft event is going to be considered an official Microsoft representative. Seems like false advertising that Microsoft didn’t correct the record before it was convenient for them to do so and after a bunch of people had paid for Windows 10 Pro.

Windows 11 is a free upgrade for anyone who has Windows 10, so having paid for Windows 10 Pro doesn't really give anyone a right to be angry.

What about if they have a 7th gen Intel chip or first-gen Ryzen, and aren't eligible for that upgrade?

Instead of getting Windows 10 support on that hardware indefinitely now they're done in 2025.

If anyone purchased Windows 10 assuming it would be supported forever, that mistake is truly on them.

Anyway no one receive infinite support for hardware. For consumer perspective, Win11 is just rebranded (and upgraded) Win10 because they don't pay for upgrade.

Probably some marketing experts thinking that Windows 10 would seem out-of-date now that Apple decided to stop versioning macOS at 10.x forever.

I was in the same place as the parent comment until I started seeing a blitz of laptop ads after not having seen them for years.

Mostly around Windows 11-ready machines.

So I agree with marketing experts, but Apple's probably not the catalyst, selling laptops is.

It's because of two things: OEMs wanted Microsoft to help them sell some new devices (minimum requirements for Windows haven't been raised for the most part for 13 years. If your machine could run Windows 7, Windows 10 worked fine), and because the cancelled Windows 10X project (because every time Microsoft claims they've figured out how to compartmentalize Win32 apps they kill it internally) had a brand new sparkly interface that could be backported without a ton of extra work.

During a global chip shortage?

I believe 2025 deadline would be the best timing for this push because PC sales will decrease because many people/companies already bought PC in 2020-2022.

This just has the handwriting of somebody (or a few people) in charge that just wants to put "Launched a major windows version" on his resume to get another promotion:

- Rushed

- No quality

- Regressions

- Bugs

As you say, there is no apparent technical goal behind Windows 11.

This makes me wonder what use "Launched Windows Vista" would be as a line item on a resume.

I built a new computer around Windows Vista and it worked fine. Almost all the issues where related to users installing it on older systems that didn't have drivers (new driver model) or couldn't handle the graphics. Even considering the issues on older hardware, it still was better than the releases of 95/98/XP. Windows 7 didn't have as many issues since the driver model and hardware requirements were similar to Windows Vista. I really consider Windows 7 a Windows Vista Service Pack.

> Almost all the issues where related to users installing it on older systems that didn't have drivers (new driver model) or couldn't handle the graphics.

This is extremely revisionist. Microsoft did a two-tiered badging program for Vista: Vista Capable and Vista Ready. They originally only had a single tier: Vista Ready.

Vista Ready hardware had WDDM drivers, adequate RAM, and capable enough graphics to run Aero. Such hardware could run any version of Vista. Vista Capable badging was introduced later which meant the hardware could only really run Home Basic which didn't support Aero. This badging program was for hardware sold contemporaneously with Vista's lease.

Millions of Vista Capable machines were sold that were honestly barely able to run even the Home Basic version of the OS. OEMs ended up having to offer downgrades to XP because of Vista's performance problems. Out of the box it ran slower than XP on the same exact hardware. Lots of third party software ran slower on Vista vs XP.

Vista was a terrible release of Windows. People that had problems with it weren't just people with old hardware upgrading. If you ran it on a high end system you probably didn't run into many of its performance issues. It basically brute forces it's way to usability. For many millions of others Vista was a shit show.

I had always heard the prompt for Vista Capable was some specific Intel integrated-graphics chipset (915G? 845G?) which was flooding the market, but would never be Aero capable. Nobody wanted to write down the inventory, so they gave us a stupid badge.

On the other hand, Vista did provide a mass market platform that could be a great scapegoat for the 64-bit transition. Everyone needed new drivers anyway.

As I recall, the XP-64 product was basically a painted over Windows Server release that was basically a non-starter.

I don't even know how hard a project has to fail to make it an "unsuccessful launch".

Feels like launching something will always be seen as a positive. Or are there examples that say otherwise?

Forcing automatic updates on the users seems like an example of not being successful to me. Not allowing the users to disable that automatic update with a simple on/off type of options also seems like a failure.

Oh I can think of tons of failed launches from a technical/quality/user perspective. What I meant was the manager/executive lens.

Like at what point is launching anything ever seen as a negative because it seems even the people in charge of the biggest disasters seem to do fine afterwards and just move on to a job at the next megacorp no problem.

The technical goal is to simplify the OS by dropping legacy hardware support and code for it, and only support machines with UEFI, TPM 2.0, AVX2, FMA3, and VT-x or AMD-V.

See this list of processors:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/min...

and this blog post:

https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2021/06/28/update-...

I can empathize. As a consumer, though, I'm not sure I like it. I've got a lot of machines on Windows 10 LTSC that will be looking for a new OS in 2029, that may or may not require a hardware replacement...

That makes sense at least. But at the same time: doesn't really mean anything if it does not result in increased quality or performance for us users. It probably only saves Microsoft money and time and that doesn't really mean anything for anyone but Microsoft.

I would welcome it if the freed resources were actually used to make Windows better for the user, but I doubt that will be the case.

I mean, it's 8 years from now. MacOS will have had 8 new releases by then, likely dropping support for any pre-2020 hardware and most pre-2023. It's hard to be grudgey about a 10-year lifespan for an OS, when even your mouse probably doesn't last that long.

> I don't get why now they are calling it Windows 11?

It could just be a coincidence that macOS went from being version 10 to 11 last year, but it could very well not be.

> 6 years ago, with the release of Windows 10, it was all about "this is the last version of Windows!" and they went with the rolling release model. A little strange but they stuck with it for 6 years until suddenly this summer they announce Windows 11

Because in 2020, after many years at 10, macOS bumped its version up to 11. [1]

[1]: https://www.apple.com/macos/big-sur/

They were still bumping a number, but it was the minor version.

But regardless, no one ever really mentioned the numbers. There was a hard announcement of the new OSX/macOS version every year with a flashy new name, first cats, then California locations. I don't think anyone ever considered OSX a rolling release in the same way Windows 10 was.

And Debian is also on 11.

(GCC too, and, technically, X)

X11 is deprecated though.

I'm glad it's not an update to 10. I simply cannot fathom who at MS thought the taskbar "updates" (regressions) were viable. If they made this just an update to Windows 10, then I would have to be stuck on an old version, because something that I rely on is no longer working correctly.

I always figured they stuck with 10 because they wanted to change upgrade cycle/business model, and MacOS is stuck at 10 too so they won’t be “behind.”

Then we got MacOS 11 and, well, here we are.

99% of it is this I suspect. And the other 99% is a backlog of "breaking" changes they wanted to implement.

Yup, it makes total sense to me that apple went to 11 so microsoft also had to. Then they probably looked around to see what they could put in a windows 11 and bit off too much. The deadline likely was set in stone from the start, and that’s why it looks like a rush job.

The TPM and UEFI upgrade in base requirements led to a version fork. Nothing more.

"this is the last version of Windows!"

Fun fact: Microsoft never said this. Instead it was picked up by the media somehow and Microsoft simply chose never to correct anyone on it. My source is the Security Now podcast.

If it's anything like the last time then Bill Gates is going to have to answer questions about "10 ought to be enough for anybody" for decades.

But hasn't Bill not been in charge for like forever?

He still held an influential position on Microsoft's board until March 2020.

I like to make fun of Bill as much as the next anti-MS shill, but influential position on the board is not the same as writing the code with a 384k memory limit.

Also, how much influence do board members have on code of an OS anyways? All code must be written in Rust type of decisions. You must refactor these 10 lines into a function to be used later kind of decisions? That seems way too boots on the ground for a 30k' view type of position/job description.

I'll grant this could be true, but like many I have clear memory of them saying this, and denying it now seems like a bad case of rewriting history in order to save a marginal bit of face. It's like how Bill Gates was never supposed to have said anything about 640K being enough for anyone. So what if he said it? He may be rich and famous, but does that mean he doesn't occasionally say something that seems rather silly in hindsight?

I'd respect them more if they just said "yeah, we said it would be the last one, but you know what... We reckon we can do better. This one goes to ELEVEN!"

There, that's your marketing done as well, Microsoft. So they changed their minds. Wow, it's almost like they're human beings or something! It wouldn't be nearly as noteworthy as denying it is already proving to be...

Windows 11 purpose is to clear out legacy requirements so that MSFT can streamline development. Obviously they are running into some technical issues while doing this. Frankly, I’m not sure if this is a one-off, or they are just bad at building things cleanly.

Microsoft has plenty of problems, but I don't think anyone can seriously suggest they are bad at building things to last. They shoulder backwards compatibility to a degree that almost no other company would even consider.

Sorry if I wasn't clear - MSFT is absolutely phenomenal at backwards compatibility, and mad props to them for it.

My comment about "building things cleanly" is more about making a clean break from the past. It's not in their DNA, and since Windows 11 is doing that, I expect they'll hit some bumps in the road.

As for being a "one-off" issue was whether the bugs resulting from the clean break process are just a few, or if there is a whole host of issues that are about to crop up due to the big changes that have been made.

Windows 11 is technically simpler than 10[0], (not sure what the LOC counts are like though), but when changing/removing a bunch of things, I expect they will have issues. It's hard to do when your history is adding things for new features and keeping old code for compatibility - different process & different thinking.

[0] - I'm ignoring WSL here as a whole because I'm not familiar with the architecture yet.

Ah, that makes sense. Yeah, clean breaks like this are definitely new ground for them and you're right that growing pains wouldn't be shocking to see.

Windows 11 is indeed rushed. Since Apple released MacOS 11, Microsoft needs to release a new version as well. It's obvious[1] that Microsoft took the features made for Windows 10x and glued them into Windows 10.

[1]: https://twitter.com/vhanla/status/1434730813183209472

So that they could get a lot more media attention compared to just another incremental release.

Well yes, it's as simple as that. It doesn't look like you're innovating if you don't change version numbers.

> It is a free upgrade for Windows 10 license holders (consumer anyway, not sure how it works for Enterprise?).

I'm using Windows 11 Enterprise and upgraded from Windows 10 Enterprise with no activation prompts etc. (VS/MSDN W10 Enterprise key from work)

>it was all about "this is the last version of Windows!"

Supposedly that isn't something Microsoft actually said. A "random member of the press" started that.

Follow the money. I'm sure that they're revenue dropped since not producing new numbered versions of Windows. Now would be about the time a new version would be coming out. Windows 11 even if it's the same as what you'd get via updates would still mean that they can sell more new licenses and a bunch of upgrades, especially corporate ones down the line.

Think about it. Windows 10 with indefinite updates is like an iPhone with replaceable battery and ongoing iOS updates.

Apple was doing Mac OS X forever but then it went to 11 and soon 12 (in reality still Max OS X)

> I don't get why now they are calling it Windows 11

FOMO looking at Apple? I don't know.

Making it slightly whataboutism-ish, the same thing happened with Apple. When Apple transitioned from PoerPC to Intel, they kept 10.x because changing architectures kinda sorta wasn't a big deal for Apple. Same happened with 32bit -> 64bit transition. Same with HFS->APFS transition. It was no big deal.

With Mac OS 11 though? It's the same OS that is slowly circling down the drain after years of neglect. The only thing that is different is the new architecture. Which wasn't a big deal 15 years ago, and now for some reason it is.

Same thing at Microsoft? "We have to be seen as moving forward with a system we have no idea what to do about"?

MacOS 11

I think its to gain leverage on internal discussions and meetings. If you generate revenue, you are the defacto master of the product.

S/he who pays the bill will have his will.

The rolling release can not hide that Windows had internal architecture rot driven by those who paid the bills (add-tech & stasi-spy-department).

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