Windows 11 still not winning the OS popularity contest
theregister.com
theregister.com
All they have to do is kill off the mandatory cloud sign in everywhere, the telemetry, the crapware bundled with it, fix the S3 sleep problems, actually do some QA for a change, make the onboarding experience smooth as butter, deal with the buggity hellscape that is Windows Hello, fix all the stupid HiDPI weirdness, clean up at least 50% of the legacy shite hiding behind it and start respecting customers again and they will have a product.
Oh and fucking stick to one UI for a bit.
Edit: honestly I would love to use Windows on a daily basis. I lived through the glory days of Windows 2000 and it was consistent and dependable back then. Every step forward since has been two steps backwards.
...but that legacy shite is where me and the rest of the IT folks can actually find the options that have been removed from the 'improved' interface!
I can't tell you how often I've repeated this.
Windows UI/UX was at it's pinnacle for Win2k. I miss it.
That point is in jest but it really annoys the hell out of me that the excellent work the core windows guys have been doing is being compromised by the veneer of diarrhea over the top.
Well, you basically list major problems we have with Windows in general. 11 is not that different from 10 in that respect. So it's hard to say "the direction it's going in is the correct one" - I understand why they are pushing this stuff down our throats, but they are not winning users. Whoever can switches away.
The amount of time I spend worrying about and preparing for a hard drive failure has significantly gone down.
I'm able to have one device at home, and another at work, and they stay reasonably in-sync with one another.
I'm able to check things from my phone (even if I can't be productive on the phone, at least having access to progress made on my home machine is important).
I see others commenting here about how hard it is to create a local-only account on Windows 11, and I don't want to dismiss such criticism, but I'm personally never going back to a local-only account on my devices.
It’s not a backup and it’s a shitty safety net for trivial cases. Fortunately I had beem backing up OneDrive up using Beyond Compare to an external disk and doing a binary comparison so I could find the cocked up files and recover them.
It’s funny the only time I’ve had to do a restore is because Microsoft’s cloud fucked up.
I do not want that at all!
No, that's not what was said and I'm not sure how you interpreted that. I have a work device at home and in-office. My work devices use different user accounts from my personal devices.
It's like religion. You have one. Good for you. Don't shove it down other people's throats.
Edit: I just realized this could read rather harsh. I didn't refer to you explaining your preferences, but "shoving it down our throats" is seemingly the current attitude of MS as a whole.
File explorer right-click menu change: check Advertisements for MS store/MS services in working areas of the UI: check
Harder to create/use a 'local-only' account on non-enterprise versions of the OS: check
Not that long ago, the `safe` option for businesses was to wait until ServicePack 2 for an OS was released before we installed it. MS would have better W11 adoption if they had just called it Windows10 SP2.
I used W11 (because it came pre-installed on a laptop I bought) for 2 weeks. The right-click menu changes were infuriating. The 'Start' menu is still an abomination. I had more popups advertising MS services and pushing a MS Account then I ever saw on the popup-hell of the 90-00's internet.
IMHO It would take using 'Start10' (is the new version called Start11?) to de-crapify W11 before I would want to use it, and since the upgrade is primarily cosmetic; then what's the point of upgrading?
Having a scheduler that actually works with 12th generation and 13th generation P+E cores coming out of Intel is a pretty important problem methinks. Especially if you're a user who wants to take advantage of the E-core's efficiency to increase battery lives on your laptop.
> Instead what it does do is makes unnecessary UI changes.
I do wonder why the Microsoft / Windows folk keep reinventing their UI. Literally reinventing it. We're on WinUI 3 now, from like Silverlight -> Windows 8 Metro -> Windows 10 UWP -> WinUI3 (I'm not sure where WinUI1 or 2 stand, but its probably somewhere in that Win10 UWP era).
I get that Microsoft's business strategy keeps changing. But it has to be annoying for Windows developers to try to keep up with all that.
Win11 is probably an opt-in upgrade due to the UI changes. The idea of Win10 being the last version ever was nice, but if all upgrades happen automatically you can't make any serious UI changes because people hate stuff just suddenly changing on them when they don't expect it. Note that Apple never made any move as bold as removing versions, and they were able to continue making UI changes as a consequence in each version. People moan, the people who don't like it don't upgrade, and eventually have to pick between support or upgrading but they're never forced so the blowback is minimal.
The idea of Win10 being the last version seems to have come from web apps which aren't visibly versioned. But the same problem crops up there, hence why big UI changes on sites like Gmail, Reddit etc have to fork the frontend codebase - sometimes for years.
They have burned lots of good will from WinRT advocates with all those rewrites, I doubt most of us care, other than those with a sunken cost in WinRT.
Which is such an odd behavior from a company who's main product didn't win because it was the best, or most ubiquitous, but because they maintained a religious amount of backwards compatibility for 15+ years while steadily improving the product.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
"There are two opposing forces inside Microsoft, which I will refer to, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as The Raymond Chen Camp and The MSDN Magazine Camp .... The Raymond Chen Camp believes in making things easy for developers by making it easy to write once and run anywhere (well, on any Windows box). The MSDN Magazine Camp believes in making things easy for developers by giving them really powerful chunks of code which they can leverage, if they are willing to pay the price of incredibly complicated deployment and installation headaches, not to mention the huge learning curve. The Raymond Chen camp is all about consolidation. Please, don’t make things any worse, let’s just keep making what we already have still work. The MSDN Magazine Camp needs to keep churning out new gigantic pieces of technology that nobody can keep up with ... Inside Microsoft, the MSDN Magazine Camp has won the battle."
This telling of the situation is rather unfair on both sides, of course.
The actual reason behind what happened is straightforward - Microsoft had to abandon Win32 because it was a terrible API even by the standards of its time that had no hope of keeping up with competitors, but their intended replacement (.NET) was too big of a leap and didn't manage to fully take over. They were trying to compete with Java and mostly managed that, but it was too far above the metal to replace Win32 in every context. In particular the Windows team rejected it as a way to build and ship Windows itself, leading to severely dysfunctional internal politics and dramas.
Plus their whole strategy for the web was "try to kill it by making IE dominant and then defunding it, whilst pushing people back to the Windows API". They didn't try very hard to understand why devs were flocking to HTML despite its massive disadvantages compared to Win32. In fairness nor did Apple or Sun or anyone else, really.
So: Win32 was dying, and was designed in such a way that incremental progress wasn't going to fix anything. The API itself was just too badly flawed. But they ceded the battle of ideas to Java and then couldn't find a way to incrementally port existing Win32 apps, because C# was too different to C++, and the various .NET C++ dialects just weren't a compelling story for games, the MS Office team, the Adobe suite etc.
Roll forward a decade or so and we have a needle scratch moment - the Windows team finally decide that they need a proper replacement for Win32 that can actually be incrementally adopted. WinRT is their answer. It's sort of COM but evolved and with databases of metadata that allow the auto generation of high quality language bindings (including a standard C++ binding), along with a pile of new APIs, which can also be incrementally adopted inside Win32 apps. It's actually, dare I say it, not that bad. At least in terms of overall design. Unfortunately by the time they finally get this strategy right the world has long since forgotten about Windows programming, with experts in it confined mostly to the video games industry, the Chrome team, and random old farts like me who occasionally still need to write a Windows app for whatever reason. Currently for me that's about making distributing apps easy - Conveyor [1] uses a small custom app that mixes Win32 and WinRT in the same program, a small EXE that drives the download/install. And it uses the WinRT packaging scheme (MSIX) which is Linux-like and has a whole bunch of advantages over other installation mechanisms.
Unfortunately for Microsoft whilst WinRT does get the foundations right, the implementations of the new APIs at the UI level (WinUI) aren't really being used by anyone outside the Windows team themselves, and it's a whole new UI toolkit written from scratch, not based on an evolved Win32 codebase. So a lot of little details are wrong. Try triple-clicking to select text in the Settings app for an example.
I guess the core question is how things could have been different. The WinRT strategy could have worked or at least resulted in slower decline, if it had been started around the Win 2000 era and if .NET had been a properly integrated feature of Windows. In other words if they'd retained strong technical leadership over the platform as a whole. They'd still have lost out to the web and Linux though, because even now their platform doesn't really grok why web apps or Linux are popular.
So I don't think win32 was a problem, in fact to this day it still has one of the best I/O, threading, event blocking, interface that exists as a core OS API. And as a GUI toolkit, its a bit low level, but that's fine too because it was flexible enough to allow things to be layered on top, or even with the Direct* APIs bypassed completely (direct2d anyone?). The GUI toolkits problems were mostly things it inherited from win16 (single event collector, lack of implicit threading support, etc). But while those are listed as problems, what most people fail to mentally merge, is that those same problems exist in the most "modern" environment people are programming in regularly too (aka DOM based javascript, which is basically single threaded, while not looking like it). Just about the entire win32 GUI programming problems can be summarized with a rule known for 30+ years. Don't block the WM_ event handler by doing "work" in it.
As soon as Java comes out and you see that some developers actually like AWT layouts, develop a C++ wrapper over Win32 that mimics that ability to lay out a UI in code. That would have muted my disgust at Win32 and MFC when I got Visual C++ 6 as a teenager. Not a new OS API, mind you; all of this has to be done in a way that works downlevel, back to Windows 95 and NT4. (I was using NT4 at my first job until I lost that job in early 2002.)
When the industry discovers the pain of registering COM components and ActiveX controls for VB6 apps, come out with a new registration-free flavor of COM (edit: or maybe go straight to registration-free WinRT) that lets application developers just drop the DLL and OCX files in the same folder as the app. Again, not an OS feature, just new interfaces and conventions to be used by applications, components, and VB itself.
Implement something like Chrome's installer and updater, so mere mortal application developers can have fast installation and smooth automatic updates. Something baked into the OS like MSIX is better, of course, but every advance has to work on the machines of users running old versions of Windows, or the rest of the industry will just ignore it.
Every advance in UI technology and fashion should be done in a way that can be incrementally adopted in Win32 apps, as the parent discussed. Direct2D did this right; it's just a shame that the internal UI frameworks Microsoft built on top of Win32 and Direct2D were only internal.
When developing a new high-level language like C# as an alternative to VB, go with ahead-of-time compilation, so mere mortal developers can ship self-contained, fast-starting applications that work on their users' older Windows machines. But also keep real VB alive; the jump from VB6 to VB.NET only further fractured the platform for third-party developers.
Edit to add: Also don't lure Anders Hejlsberg away from Delphi. Perhaps Microsoft didn't fully appreciate the value of a third-party development environment, free of Microsoft's internal politics, that was enabling ISVs to kick ass with self-contained applications that exclusively targeted Windows. One of the most successful Windows-first apps of the 2000s, Skype, was developed in the early 2000s with Delphi.
I think with these moves, Windows would have stayed dominant in desktop apps, possibly even preventing the rise of web apps.
https://behindthetech.libsynpro.com/001-anders-hejlsberg-a-c...
MSIX does implement the same UX and comes with every Windows 10+ install, the runtime can be installed to older Windows too. So they did do this in the end. Conveyor produces them and it now also implements a web-like update UX (for macOS too) where the app checks for an update on every launch and will update/relaunch itself synchronously with no user intervention. Delta updates make it fast - on a decent internet connection like those we have here in Switzerland it's practically as fast to update to a new version and start a desktop app as loading a web app! I gotta say it feels great, quite different to the old desktop app feel. Especially neat is the way Windows can share files and even file blocks between unrelated apps, which means if you install an e.g. Electron or JVM app and then another one, Windows won't download the files twice, it'll hard-link them into place. So they can even share the underlying memory when the two apps are running, reducing memory usage! And if they're slightly different it'll only download the changed blocks.
Why didn't MS do it 20 years ago? When Google's updater engine was new it was very controversial. We've all forgotten about it now, but the idea that apps would upgrade themselves silently, in the background, if you weren't even running the app at all, and you'd not even be notified, well this made a lot of programmer control-at-any-cost types extremely angry. Google did it anyway because Larry Page had an unusually extreme focus on simplicity and wanted a web-like experience, so pushed it through despite opposition. Now it's accepted as the right way to do things. Page doesn't get enough credit IMO for his product management insight and sheer force of will.
The web would probably still have risen, but maybe a lot slower. Even a hypothetical much improved Win32 wasn't ever going to be a good way to represent documents, and on the web a lot of "apps" are closer to interactive documents than apps, or evolve out of documents. Microsoft didn't and still doesn't have anything in the platform that recognizes this.
The goal of Conveyor is to make it as easy to distribute desktop apps as it is for web apps (or much easier if you need things like hardware access or offline support, of course). The long term idea is that if it's easy to do stuff outside the browser, it'll become possible to explore alternative architectures that are maybe more appropriate than HTML.
One idea I keep coming back to is file associations. The web doesn't have any such concept because it doesn't recognize that apps can exist independently from documents. Imagine there's a simple way to form a little graph, such that a piece of data can point to another node using edge labels like "view", "edit", "transform-to:text/json" or whatever. These are like the verbs that file explorers allow apps to associate with files. And then the target node can itself be a file like a script with an association like "execute". By following the links you build up the entire software stack needed to work with the target file, you can sandbox that stack and execute it, and users can override the associations for any kind of node to replace the default functionality with something else. This would make the original XML vision of separating data and presentation actually happen because you can define a custom Markdown+JSON format that holds the content for your blog, associate it with a separate program that renders that to <whatever>, associate that in turn with something that renders your <whatever> format to pixels and so on.
I think that sort of addition would have been a possible way that Microsoft/Apple/Linux could have combatted the competitive threat of the web. But nobody was thinking about it.
Can a Windows app packaged with Conveyor actually be installed and updated on an ordinary Windows 7 machine, without the user having to do anything extra? I suppose we don't have to worry about Windows 7 for much longer, but that time isn't yet here.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/msix-core/msi...
That said, Conveyor itself isn't tested on anything less than Windows 10 and won't automatically install MSIX Core. Windows 7 isn't supported anymore and Chrome is about to phase out its support for it too. So far we just don't see any demand for a better UX on Windows 7, so the user would have to apply that themselves. Or, just download and use the zip version, of course.
(I might be outing myself for missing something fundamental - but can you really blame me for losing track of MS's platform reboots?)
ANY other UI technology is probably a better long term bet than anything Microsoft come out with.
There's a trend in the general tech zeitgeist where people think anything older than a couple years is decaying old cruft and needs to be redone. Whether that's UI/UX, programming languages, architectures, etc.
Any software shop that fancies itself as a cool, move-fast-and-break-things environment for hip young Silicon Valley-types needs to always be following the latest trends lest the stubborn organization and its red tape turn us into the next BlackBerry.
I blame Google. After having enough products of theirs that I used and liked ripped away from me and replaced with something worse, and having to adapt to a new Android UI with every annual OS update (their favorite place to rearrange is the quick settings/notification shade - I don't know if a year went by where they didn't redesign it), I finally swore off using any new services they come out with, de-Googling where I can, and bought myself an iPhone. I won't say Apple is perfect for not doing stupid UI redesigns, but at least the texting app looks pretty much identical to what Steve Jobs demoed in 2007.
It is my understanding that "e cores" in AL/PL are all about space, not power. Did I read the graphs wrong?
Getting the old right-click menu back is done through a registry setting.
Reverting the taskbar back to Win10/2000 style for things like ungrouping of task bar items, items in multiple rows, items with titles and a quick launch area i use this: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
How so? You could ask Richard Stallman whether he has any idea about why....
That's not true. I'll try to exemplify some problems and improvements Windows 11 solved over 10:
- App windows return to their place on their respective monitors between laptop dock-undock switches. On Windows 10, all windows get dumped to whichever monitor powers on first when you dock back the laptop. Though I haven't used Win 10 in a year so they could have pushed this fix there as well in the meantime.
- WSL with WSLg comes enabled out of the box, making pulling stuff off github and running it in a native linux environment much quicker and easier out of the box, without all those hacky steps Windows 10 needed to get WSL.
- Window tiling is massively enhanced with more tiling options, without the need for PowerToys like you do on Windows 10.
- Screen capture and recording with OCR is now more polished and seamless out of the box.
- Dark mode is way better than on Windows 10 with many more components of the UI capable of turning dark. On Windows 10 it was completely half assed with many UI elements staying white and blinding you. It's still not perfect though (right click on a file, show more options, click on properties and get blinded), but still overall much better than Win 10 as yes, it set the bar that low.
- The quick toggle menu next to the clock is much more useful than on Win10, very similar to the one on the latest Gnome, with the most useful features available like switching power modes, switching Bluetooth/audio devices or toggling Night Light.
- I can change speaker volume just by hovering the mouse cursor over the speaker icon next to the clock and flicking the mouse scroll wheel, just like in Gnome and KDE. Really love this one.
- Start menu search is better and smarter than on Windows 10. I just hit the start/meta key and type the first 3 or so letters of an app and it nails it. It also indexes the latest files you accessed so you can type the first few letters of a file and it will bring it up.
- The settings menu/app is now far more feature complete and lets you easily find and change a setting without having to dig out the old control panel like you might need on Windows 10. The control panel is still there hidden away, but I really never had to open it by now in almost a year.
- Multi-finger trackpad gestures for workspace and window switching is better and more seamless
- Win11 brings enhanced security features like core isolation
- HDR support out of the box is far better, if you have one such monitor
- Basic out of the box apps like screenshotting annotation I previously mentioned, image viewer/editor, video player/editor, are now fully featured and actually useful, meaning I can actually start using the OS after installation and get to work, without first going to download Chrome and then going to download third party PDF readers, video players and image viewers, etc. as was the typical post-installation ritual that plagued every previous Windows release to make it actually usable. It's finally a more cohesive and productive experience out of the box. I still download Notepad++ though, that's irreplaceable.
The only annoying and unforgivable thing to me is that they're forcibly grouping all opened apps into taskbar icons without labels, a-la GNOME/MacOS. Just let me have my mess of apps with labels spreading across the entire taskbar Microsoft, I'm more productive that way, as my peripheral vision keeps track of which app is where even on a messy crowded taskbar. Don't try to think you know what's best for me and dumb things down for me just for the sake of superficial aesthetics. I paid for the entire taskbar, and damn-it, I wanna use it!
Hope this helps.
I think they got the idea right with Windows 10 being the "last" version and really just shouldn't have moved to Windows 11. It is still my belief that they only did that because Apple dropped the Mac OS X thing.
So the question because whether or not we view Windows 11 and a true new release or just a bunch of point releases rolled up and a version bump for marketing reasons.
That's irrelevant. GP said that Windows 11 brings no fixes over Win 10 when that's just not true in any way. People keep moving the goalposts to try to support their false argument.
These should have just been in a service pack for Windows 10
If you do a USB install, the TPM requirement is a soft requirement that doesn't need to be fulfilled for Win 11 to install and work.
Try it.
The point was that Win 11 is far more polished and feature compete than Windows 10, yet people somehow gloss over this and pretend that Win 10 is somehow better (it's not, it's really janky and backwards in comparison, just look at the settings menu and dark mode implementation). Win 11 really fixes many of Windows 10's shortcomings and jank.
Broken how? Are you talking about the settings menu or the control panel? You can do everything from the settings menu now, why would you try digging up the control panel? Unless maybe you're a sys-admin maybe trying to do some corporate stuff.
>the lack of functional grouping in the start menu
Thee start menu grouping works fine for me. Have you actually used the latest release of Win 11, or are you commenting based on stuff you read on the internet?
>they broke another hundred things
Can you please name the 100 broken things? You named just two things which either aren't broken but more like you either haven't used or don't like how they are. But that's not the definition of broken.
The first couple hits when i google it, remain links to 3rd party software enabling the function.
Edit: Still not sure how to do it, went down the first half dozen links, which were to things like this: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/forum/all/how-do...
and no answers. If it takes me half an hour to figure out how to do something that every single version of windows since windows 2.0 could do, then... fail.
another edit: and to reply to some of the things you added after the fact. Type control panel into the search button on win11 pro/etc and notice all the stuff that remains there because it doesn't have similar functionality in the new control panel. Pretty frequently I find myself in that control panel because what I want to change can't be changed from the new control panel.
I really have no idea what this means as that's never my workflow, but it could be a valid complaint. I just hit the start/meta key, type the 2-3 letters of my desired app/file, then hit enter.
>Type control panel into the search button on win11 pro/etc and notice all the stuff that remains there because it doesn't have similar functionality in the new control panel.
Like what? I consider myself a relative power user and haven't needed to touch the old control panel at all, at least for cases that cover 99% of windows use-cases, as for power user uses cases that aren't covered by the new settings menu, I usually go directly to the registry editor. Just because you find control panel results in the start menu search, doesn't mean you can't do those things in the new settings menu.
>Pretty frequently I find myself in that control panel because what I want to change can't be changed from the new control panel.
For example, what things?
>> I really have no idea what this means as that's never my workflow, but it could be a valid complaint. I just hit the start/meta key, type the 2-3 letters of my desired app/file, then hit enter.
Right, its fine for you, and I'm happy for you because your workflow doesn't involve having a machine with 100's of applications installed that you can't remember the name of because you use them once every couple years. For example I have a cdripping application installed its categorized under "media->rippers". If I type "ripper" into my application search box (this is win7) my cdripping app doesn't show up, if I type CD in, it doesn't either. Because its called "audiograbber" and its quite nice, and quite old too, because its from a time when people ripped CD's by the car load. It still works fantastically, and once in a while I click the "used cd" option in amazon and buy one for $2 because they are cheaper than the .mp3s. And for some reason I can't ever remember its name (rather I mentally think of a couple of its competitors).
Listing everything alphabetically or showing a giant pile of icons doesn't work for me. Which is funny because I can drive a unix machine from the command line all day, but even then I still reach for the KDE start menu sometimes.
And I'm sure your happy with the task bar too, which I find helplessly useless because I've been putting my windows task bar across the left hand side of my screen with textual descriptions for 25+ years. That allows all the terminal windows/etc to stack up and have their machine/menu descriptions visible on the left 1" or so of my screen when I hit the windows key or mouse over there. I don't have to mouse around or alt tab for days to go through the 100's of firefox and putty windows I accumulate over the space of a couple weeks.
Similarly I think MS devs should have mouse free weeks where they are forced to navigate the OS using only the keyboard, since that is the primary input device of a _desktop_ os. If I want a tablet OS I will get a android/ios tablet instead of a 1/2 functional windows one. At least on those I can categorize my games separate from my CAD/EE apps, and my media production tool set.
That same desktop has what works out to ~7K x 5K worth of screen real estate, and don't get me started how broken windows is now with that kind of space.
So, while I think integrating tablet and desktop UI's is a reasonably good idea, what has happened is that MS no longer has a desktop OS. Its a bad version of 2010 era iOS. The UI isn't scalable or usable for heavyweight desktop use, its largely a toy, not ideal for large scale server deployments, not a good tablet OS, and now its not a good desktop OS either. For all the shit windows 8 got, the idea of having a "desktop->tablet" switch wasn't all that bad compared with what we have now.
None of the constant MS churn was a problem, when the old options were buried under some menu item, or in a registry hack, or sitting on the disk somewhere (progman anyone?, that thing shipped for what 15 years after it was deprecated, and still probably runs on 32-bit windows). The problems started when MS decided they were going to wholesale rip things out without regard for how people were using the OS, and then fail to provide a replacement.
> I can change speaker volume just by hovering the mouse cursor over the speaker icon next to the clock and using the mouse wheel, just like in Gnome or KDE. Really love this one.
Except Windows 10 (on my desktop) has this one already!
(I do like WSL - which is on Windows 10, but haven't tried WSLg yet.)
On my laptop, I can forgive the horrible limitations of the task bar, the regressions of the start menu, the gross clickbait news widget (I want the weather widget but I'm not sure if it's worth the trade off. Much prefer the Windows 10 weather live tile and app.) I just turn on my laptop, fire up games, and try to ignore the rest of the mess that is Windows 11. I only put it on there to validate my suspicions that I would not want to use 11 over 10, and that is exactly what happened.
Edge is on Windows 10; I'm not sure why you list that as a feature of Windows 11.
The only thing that does not work is that the numbering of minoris at home and office changes (they are swapped) so I get the winding on the wrong ones.
But I never have them all gather on one monitor when there are more available.
I'd be hard pressed to describe anything as needing a new Major version number upgrade. i stand by my original comment as calling it: Win10SP2
Work laptop got upgraded to it, on my private one I am keeping Windows 10.
It used to be that Windows had it's own quirks, but the UI and functional interfaces were generally roughly equatable with what you'd get on a popular Linux distro, or OSX. Now, though, while you can still get under the hood easily, Microsoft has messed with the UI/UX so much that it feels more like trying to use an XBOX for productivity than a desktop computer OS.
If it wasn't for the fact that you can generally assume reverse compatibility and drivers for literally everything from MSFT, I think they'd have lost huge marketshare with this release. It's a Vista for a new generation.
I don't like how much content it grabs from the internet on things like the menu bar and the start menu...but that's about my only gripe with it.
I say this as someone that grew up using linux and gnome 1.4, 2.0, 3.0, having gone through various other desktop environments andwindow managers like enlightenment, kde, openbox, fluxbox, xmonad, etc. and abbreviating microsoft to "m$". I don't like microsoft as a corporation, and I'm no fanboy. but it seems nicer to use than what I've seen in the linux world. I definitely like it more than macOS.
Sometimes windows can still feel cluttery, but I'm very happy with how they allow easily snapping windows to current positions/sizes.
I generally am only using firefox, clion/goland/emacs (in wsl2), and various games though. So maybe I'm just getting a limited experience. I also use it on a very beefy machine (12 core amd ryzen 9 3900xt, 128gb ram, 2x2tb nvme, gtx 3060). It could be on more average hardware that it's a terrible experience.
Yes, older CPUs don't have certain security features. That's unfortunate, but it's not like running Windows 10 is more secure for them. Just turn those features off when they're not supported.
MS didn't learn the lesson that apple taught them, about how a desktop interface doesn't work well on small screen devices without keyboard/mouse. Instead what they appear to have learned is that small screen UI's designed for touch should be used on desktop systems with screen real estate measured in 10's of square feet, and where the primary input device is a keyboard followed by a mouse.
And its terrible. People complain because it sucks. Not being able to figure out which window is active because they removed most of the visual active/inactive window hinting, not being able to find more than a couple dozen programs works great for a work computer where your day job involves sitting in one of a small number of applications all day long, but fails miserably for any other use case. Even android/iphone can group program/icons by function these days (and have you seen anyone under 20's phone screen? Those kids have 100's of applications installed).
And yet the past 10 years of MS "advancements" are largely things people either didn't ask for, or are reversions of things that were possible in older versions of the OS. Sure the task manager can now display network utilization, but you can't figure out if the window your typing in is active until you realize that you just typed your SSH key unlock pin, into slack. And don't get me started on the scroll bars, the new control panel UI has the same abominable f*ed up scroll bar situation as most web apps, and it still can only do about 1/2 of what the old win7 control panel could. You have to try and scroll it 1/2 the time before you can be sure there isn't more information below the bottom of the window. Its just one user hostile change after another, and they add up... over and over. until it feels like the entire point is just to screw around with people.
BTW it is a nice combo with the Guix package manager ontop when one needs recent libraries and stuff for development. Saves a ton of time.
When everyone wants 10 bucks from you, 10 bucks isn't cheap. That model scales poorly at the PC price point.
They need to break Windows 10 and remove choice.
Also amusing to report that someone installed Windows 11 on an old pentium [0]. Evidently Microsoft used a processor blackist, but nobody thought to go back that far. So yes, arbitrary hardware restrictions.
[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/no-new-pc-needed-windows-11-runs-...
Windows 11 was released in Oct 2021. In Oct 2022, its market share was 15%.
Windows 10 was released in Jul 2015. In Jul 2016, its market share was 28%.
So not ALL that much of a difference, definitely not enough to be writing articles like this and expect to be taken as serious journalism.
i haven't seen a windows machine in the wild for a while already
EDIT:
looks like i hurt some Microsoft Windows fanboys, life must be hard https://i.imgur.com/pbSoAUn.png