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Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

I still don't understand why Windows 11 exists in the first place.

Back when Windows 10 was announced, there was a lot of talk from Microsoft about it being "the last Windows" - meaning, that from this point on, all future versions of Windows would be delivered as updates, but the "product" from a user perspective would always be Windows 10. The user should not go through the "install new OS" experience ever again.

You can discuss whether it's a good idea to take so much agency away from the user, but it certainly shows MS was aware of the fact that users increasingly don't want to switch their OS every few years.

But then comes Windows 11 - and not just did the "last Windows" paradigm go out the window, but MS is back to making wild changes to the UI and having to nudge and pressure an unwilling userbase into switching their OS.

Why?

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The “last Windows” really appealed to me. I was pleasantly surprised they’d operate that way. So naturally they soon reverse course with no coherent explanation. And of course none of my family’s PCs are allowed to upgrade. Thank you Microsoft! :-(

This.

At this point: Why does even Windows 10 exist? Does anybody know any application, that couldn't run on Windows 7 if it wasn't the "we deliberately won't support new CPUs to force people to Win10" from Microsoft? What are the critical, structural problems in Win 7 that couldn't be patched and mandated Win 10? Sorry for my bitterness, I just think Win 7 was peak usability. I never saw technical reasons for change afterwards, only forced political ones.

Windows 10 is important because it reverts the changes in Windows 8 :) . In particular, you get again a nice program files menu at the left, instead of a slow change of a isolated all screen mode. (The tiles in the manu are a nice improvement from W7 to W10.)

> I just think Win 7 was peak usability.

See, right now I agree with you, but then I remember that I said the same about XP and, before that, about Win98. When it comes to Windows releases, Microsoft has a solid streak of "a good one, a bad one".

Therefore, my non-cynical interpretation is that there is room for improvement. With Android and iPhones eating the world, it would be reasonable for MS to try something new before becoming obsolete.

Whether we'll see such an improvement before Windows 12, that's a different question.

> I said the same about XP and, before that, about Win98.

But were you wrong?

My take was they get to do three things:

1. Fancy product launch.

2. Steal more control of your PC.

3. Reskin Windows 10.

They were able to do 1 and 2 for the small cost of 3. I don't know if any of this is true but that is what it appeared to me from the outside.

I think part was to drop support for older hardware. They may have feared that customers would get confused when windows 10.x.x doesn't work with their old cpu.

I think it's exactly this. IIRC the most notable change was a requirement of TPM module to have win11

TPM 1.2 has been required since Windows 10. Just not TPM 2.0.

Are you sure? I'm reading that TPM 1.2 came out in 2011, I'm pretty sure Windows 10 works on machines quite a bit older than that?

Ah. I misread the Microsoft doc.[0] It’s only required on versions 1607 and up if you want Device Health Attestation.

[0]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/informatio...

> I still don't understand why Windows 11 exists in the first place.

For me Windows 11 helped to make decision to finally switch to Linux. I always have been a Windows user, since Windows 95.

Everything has to end some time, I guess.

For me it was Windows 10 forcing itself onto user machines for months after launch, even permanently destroying user data to do so.¹ Oh, and the 260 character NTFS path limit, which bit me in surprising ways (MS published a reg hack to get around this on Windows 10², and I used rsync on MSYS2 to recover inaccessible data on Windows 7). I had been optimistic about W10 until then.

¹https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/27/12046738/microsoft-pays-1...

²https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/maximu...

Because Windows 11 sounds way sexier than 20H2. The "last Windows" is an all-round superior approach, except when your marketing department is looking at all the fuss about the new MacOS version.

People like new things.

Probably because a large part of their workforce would have become redundant had they not has some excuse of a job to give them.

They were certainly not going to skip a version this time and go straight from Windows 10 to Windows 12.

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