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Comment by karmakaze | Hacker News Reader

On the subject, is there any compelling reason to use Windows 11 rather than Windows 10?

My plan is to use Windows 10 as long as it's supported, then stop using Windows altogether which is already only for games. Then I can hopefully use a Steam Deck or a future 'Steam PC'.

I can see how MS might consider Windows to matter less with their infrastructure/services business, but anything that keeps users on Windows rather than switch to the Apple ecosystem has to be worth the effort to make Windows suck less rather than cashing out. I'm trying to see the long term strategy and it might be making MS an open-source services company around .NET (and a Linux distribution) along with proprietary cloud and apps (SharePoint etc).

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Don't downgrade to Windows 11 (yes, it's a downgrade from my point of view). Windows 11 is very hostile to users. You can read my list of pain points with Windows 11 in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30748076

>Don't downgrade to Windows 11 (yes, it's a downgrade from my point of view)

Can't concur wit your PoV. Have not had any issues with it and the improvements in features and snappiness it brought over 10 was worth the upgrade.

You can read my list of improvements here (forgot to add Bluetooth improvements): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33870655

A lot of this list already exists in windows 10.

Definitely not all those improvements. I can guarantee you that.

I upgraded and can’t see why they even gave it a new number. Feels like some past Win10 upgrades were similarly large.

Apart from some cosmetic changes I have no opinion on, a few new and changed features (mostly good), the biggest difference I see is the new explorer context menu which is awful since you 98% of the time need an extra click to reach the item you need.

But apart from that, it feels like a solid version. Just the usual hardware support improvements alone make it an acceptable upgrade. It also feels slightly more clever in the MacOS way when it comes to switching between audio devices etc.

>I upgraded and can’t see why they even gave it a new number.

The latest W11 is still obviously Windows 10 version 10.0.22621.1037, and that's on the beta channel where the comment is "Updated the search box on the taskbar with more rounded corners."

> I upgraded and can’t see why they even gave it a new number

My theory is that MS never expected macOS to stop being OSX (version 10) and once Apple came out with MacOS 11, Microsoft had to follow suit.

Devils advocate I upgraded last week (after holding off for a long time) and it's working well for me. Memory management seems much better with WSL / in general (not having to restart nearly as much). I make use of virtual desktops a lot, and the no animation when switching between them is a nice QOL, but one I couldn't go back on.

You can make everything less hostile quickly by removing the search bar, and removing the "search web" feature in start menu etc in a couple of minutes.

WSL virtual environment will allocate memory during use, but won't release it... in earlier releases it would use up everything... in more recent versions (not sure when the cut from 10/11 was), it will limit to half system ram... You can set this manually with a config file in your home directory. WSLg is limited to Win11 though, even though it was in the insiders builds for 10 before 11 came out.

Win11 isn't too bad, but the increases in effectively advertorial software, ads in search results and breaking twice on me, my desktop is on my Linux drive most of the time, and I'll probably remove my Windows drive altogether (nvme/pcie adapter) for a 10gb nic.

> WSLg is limited to Win11 though

WSLg added support for Windows 10 recently. Run `wsl --update` to get the latest version.

At this point, the only Windows system I use is my work computer, and it's too locked down for me to update WSL or Windows to a new release cycle (21H2). Glad WSLg is on Win10 at this point though... Was really a turning point imo for working inside WSL... VS Code remote dev is also invaluable, but not the same as actual *nix apps.

If anyone is curious, end of life for Windows 10 Pro and Home is October 14, 2025[0].

We have a bit under 3 years to get Linux's gaming support to match Windows without needing to delve into using KVM with a GPU passthrough as a crutch.

[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows...

Linux gamer since 2020 here. While obviously not perfect, things are getting better at amazing speed. Between Linux getting better and Windows getting worse at compatibility, your 3-year timeline looks very doable.

Though multiplayer games will remain a pain point for the foreseeable future, due to anti-cheat shenanigans.

(Also, sometimes the compat is there, but figuring out how to enable it is a pain. d3dx* being a good example; for me, it was selectable in winecfg menu, but wasn't installed until I figured out winetricks. Steam and Proton issues are much less obtuse.)

AFAIK the two big services (BattlEye and EAC) both already support Proton.

Off the top of my head, the biggest games not supporting Proton due to anti-cheat are Destiny 2* and Halo Master Chief Collection, and Halo MCC is actively being worked on by Valve & Microsoft.

*despite running BattlEye now, the Destiny devs have a deep-seated trauma from their game being derailed by cheaters for the years prior before BattlEye, and thus make very obtuse choices like not allowing overlays or not flipping the BattlEye Proton switch and allowing Destiny 2 to run on Proton

Those services support Linux, but like you noted, not all the games that use the services do. (adding to your Destiny example, Fortnite has explicitly been denied[3] Linux support.)

[1]https://nitter.unixfox.eu/thebattleye/status/144147781631129...

[2]https://areweanticheatyet.com/

[3]https://nitter.unixfox.eu/TimSweeneyEpic/status/149051919491...

Its actually faster. https://www.technipages.com/windows-11-is-faster-than-window...

From that article:

> Conclusion

> Windows 11 definitely feels faster and smoother compared to Windows 10. Much of this comes from the improved memory management system that Windows 11 is using. If you own an average computer in terms of specs, you’ll definitely notice the difference. The same is valid for old low-specs machines. Windows 11 feels a lot snappier, even on HDD machines. Overall, it runs better than its predecessor on many computers.

Windows 10 system requirements[0]:

* Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster processor or SoC

* RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) for 32-bit or 2 GB for 64-bit

Windows 11 system requirements[1]:

* 1 Ghz or faster with 2 or more cores and appearing on our list of approved CPUs.

* RAM: 4 GB.

Gee, they made it "feel" faster and all they had to do was quadruple the memory requirements and restrict it to whitelisted hardware. However do the wizards at Redmond perform such sorcery?

[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-syste...

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-syste...

>Gee, they made it "feel" faster and all they had to do was quadruple the memory requirements and restrict it to whitelisted hardware. However do the wizards at Redmond perform such sorcery?

What do the system requirements have to do with the better performance for 11, if the tests were performed on the same hardware?

You yourself posted the reason why it's faster and it isn't because of the system requirements: "Windows 11 definitely feels faster and smoother compared to Windows 10. Much of this comes from the improved memory management system that Windows 11 is using. If you own an average computer in terms of specs, you’ll definitely notice the difference. The same is valid for old low-specs machines. Windows 11 feels a lot snappier, even on HDD machines. Overall, it runs better than its predecessor on many computers."

Also, Windows 10 was launched in 2015, while 11 launched in 2021, it can be understandable they advertise higher system requirements today vs 2015, as computing hardware has also evolved in that time frame and so have the demands of the apps people run on their system, and they wish their users to have the best experience and if they'd advertise lower system requirements, then some users would complain "it's slow". This way they make it clear on which hardware you can expect a decent experience, and it's in no way gonna be on a system with once CPU core and 2GB of RAM. Hell, even the 4GB required for Win 11 seem incredibly conservative.

Dammed if you do, dammed if you don't.

> What do the system requirements have to do with the better performance for 11, if the tests were performed on the same hardware?

> You yourself posted the reason why it's faster

First, note well that the article lacks benchmarks and is careful to only ever say Windows 11 "feels" faster.

If Windows 11 can preload 4 times as much in RAM that might be described as "improved memory management system" which would make it "feel faster". It is also an approach that is denied Windows 10 due to its minimum system requirements.

I find that spending some time turning off all the bloat that is enabled by default on any given Windows version results in an immediately responsive UI, such that feeling faster is not much of a selling point.

It is just amusing to me how each new version of Windows is billed as "the fastest ever!" while the minimum system requirements continue to balloon.

Yeah but it punches you in the face so often it's a net loss.

This is what is frustrating. The core of windows and the shell is fine. It's just got a veneer of diarrhoea over everything.

I'm at a complete loss at the moment of how they manage to run the product like this.

I don't see why you posted this? The poster specifically asks for compelling reasons, because they know about the downsides that "punch you in the face". This diverts the conversation back to "windows 11 bad" instead of actually commenting on the content of ape4's comment.

I'm not sure I need an abject justification of why I posted that as I think it's fairly obvious, but here goes. I posted it because quite frankly Windows 11 is less notably productive and more distracting which is a net reduction in any realistic performance metric. Thus I disagree with the trite point that windows 11 is faster.

You're being called out for offering unsubstantiated criticism and you respond by offering more handwavy criticism.

Comes at a cost to background process performance though.

> The Secret Ingredient: A New Memory Management System

> Windows 11 prioritizes apps and processes running in the foreground over background apps.

That's acceptable for a desktop OS. It's not pretending it's server OS.

IIRC this is one of the NT kernel features since its inception. Maybe they tweaked the slider towards foreground apps a little more.

Didn't Windows already used to have a setting for this? I remember I used to set it more to 'balanced' than make the UI faster back when I had a Windows work machine. I guess that was more for process scheduling and not the MMS.

Windows 2000 used to have a setting for this, yes.

This feature has existed since Windows NT. Nothing has changed about it. By default, Windows will raise the priority of foreground apps a tick. You can turn that off if you want.

For my work computer the Start menu takes 4-5 seconds from hitting the Windows key to opening, and another 2-3 seconds to register what I'm trying to type in. I didn't see that test included in the article, do you have a measurement on your machine for this?

Something must be wrong on your system. I habe an previous gen ultralight laptop and opening the start menu is instantaneous.

Maybe try disabling indexing or those web search feature.

For my home computer both of these are instantaneous. But I admit I have tweaked performance on this machine because it's mainly used to music production.

After waiting for 22H2 I finally upgraded (in place). It feels faster and looks like my 16gb of ram fill up slower which I attribute to improved memory management. All my multi device Bluetooth issues are also gone (had problems with Bose headphones disconnecting, Bluetooth keyboard not working a times using Windows 10).

I did install startallback so I can have vertical taskbar and modified registry to bring the Windows 10 right click menu back (which to be fair to Microsoft wouldn't be needed if my other software would use the win 11 APIs to add options to the menu)

Generally my experience after 2 weeks is good.

Windows 11 has finally fixed bluetooth - in 10 you get two audio devices", bluetooth stereo and bluetooth hands-free. When you are watching a video, and someone calls, your headseet switches to a 'hands-free' mode and all sound that is still streaming to the stereo audio device dissapears into a black hole.

Windows 11 actually understands that this is a single audio device and handles bluetooth mode switching for you. This removed a mahor painpoint for me.

Otherwise, in my opinion, its a normal mixed bad - something is better, something is worse. Meh.

I've come to the point where the only time I will take an OS upgrade is if security updates are stopped (unlikely) or if I'm switching hardware. My theory is that no OS "upgrade" will improve performance. Theoretically it could include optimization, but usually includes bloat because the minimum standard is raised.

Nested Hyper-V on AMD hardware.

(Though ironically, the biggest users of this feature I'm aware of are Linux VFIO enthusiasts trying to run multiplayer games in a VM.)

The only compelling reason to use windows 11 over windows 10 is if you enjoy the cosmetic changes and don’t care about the loss in functionality or you’re willing to install third party software or mess in the register to undo this loss.

I don’t care about their cosmetic change so I will do the same: hang to windows 10 until EOL and then pray to god that nvidia and wayland will have fixed their rough edges (night light, etc).

We're getting there! Wayland is slowly becoming more and more usable, and unless you've got an nvidia GPU, there's a good chance you wouldn't even notice you're running Wayland most of the time.

My intel igpu laptop is running Wayland full-time and it works perfectly. No tearing, night light works, xwayland is seamless, input stuff works*, and there's working sleep and resume, including sleep and throttling on low battery.

* You can't change the set of keyboard layouts without restarting Wayland, but you can switch layouts just fine.

I think MS is just playing around with different UI concepts and seeing what users will tolerate in 11 before cleaning everything up in Win 12 just before the support ends for 10. At work, we're still on Win 10, with no plan to move to 11, which mirrors my strategy at home.

I also largely avoided Win 8, staying on 7 almost until 10 was released, which was a tolerable 'fix' of 8's experimental features.

> On the subject, is there any compelling reason to use Windows 11 rather than Windows 10?

WSLg, although it was developed on Windows 10 and only 'requires' Windows 11 by way of anti-feature.

(You can use other X11 display servers on Windows 10 but the UX sucks compared to WSLg, even though WSLg is a bit of a buggy mess.)

WSLg added support for Windows 10 recently. Run `wsl --update` to get the latest version.

Oh, ok!

Then no, there's no reason to 'upgrade' at all.

Windows 10 gets very confused when you have monitors with different DPIs and you're switching between them, which is very common for me nowadays. Windows 11 doesn't seem to have any problems.

It also has better HDR support and feels faster to me.

I believe the direct storage implementation on 11 is faster than 10, so gamers looking for every last FPS might switch.

I'm personally hoping steam/proton/anti-cheat etc improves so that I can dump the entire mess...

AutoHDR is 1000% better in my experience. Still some quirks, like Windows Key+Shift+S Screenshots not being tone mapped on my HDR monitor sometimes, but otherwise W10 HDR wasn't too pleasant.

I'd switch today if Valve could fix all the problems with their VR kit on Linux. Yes, even though that means ~$1000 in hardware costs for me to buy a new headset and base stations and whatnot. Microsoft has managed to burn so much of what made Windows my preferred OS away that I'm willing to put up with Linux Desktop's bullshit instead.

Linux desktop since 2016 here. The nice part about the Linux bullshit is that it's always the same bullshit. You don't get brand new bullshit shoved at you.

It's nice to feel like you really own your software.

I went to Windows 11 on my laptop and hate it. Windows 10 will stay on my desktop for as long as possible.

That said, there is one thing that really bothers me. They only added support for the 6GHz Wi-Fi protocol in 11 (as part of WiFi 6e). So I can't use the 6 GHz channel on my desktop. It's really annoying.

There's many features being released for 11 only. Seemingly to incentivise people to switch. Windows subsystem for Android being another (beta).

I have seen Uni student buy Apple laptops after their Windows laptops have automatically upgraded or by mistake and they hated the experience.

Connected OS to your MS account, gear up for operating system level Ads and counter productive UI. I think this will finally have me buy a Mac and use Unity for VMware if I need to run something Windows related. Thanks Microsoft.

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