The only people who say this are the ones who HAVEN’T tried it. Tbh it’s just like every other boring windows OS. Slapping a new coat of paint on it barely qualifies as “hot pile of excrement”.
There were Windows products people were genuinely excited for. 95 being the obvious one, but WinXP did really deliver the promise of modern, NT-based windows for the home desktop, and Win7 felt like we finally broke free of the stagnation of XP (worsened by the bad press Vista got).
I willingly went out and acquired a legit copy of Windows Vista (at the time, the pre-pre-predecessor to Bing Rewards let you grind some crummy games for a few weekends to earn enough tokens for a copy) but even being told Win11 is free and will be delivered directly to my desktop, I just go in and slide the TPM option to "off" in the BIOS to make sure it doesn't prompt it.
But my perspective is unusual. The friction increase for Windows 11 over its predecessor is, for me, slight; but I've used so many WMs and DEs that adjusting to a new one is hardly noticeable. To a normie, Windows 11's pebble-in-shoe UI changes -- the start menu location change, the right-click menu change, the emphasis on connecting you to Microsoft and third-party apps and services rather than getting things done -- would be sources of profound aggravation.
That sells you on Windows the same way stepping in cat barf sells you on your new pet.
The entire experience is cheapened.
MS Edge, for instance, actually has an excellent base UI. But the UX is destroyed by plastering horrible tabloid news and ads all over the first launch experience.
The engineers are MS are obviously very good at what they do. But it feels like the rest of the product and marketing departments get ahold of things and jam in trashware and ruin it.
Windows 11 is fine. It's fine. The graphical changes to the UI are in improvement to my eyes, and they are slowly adding back utility. Such as right-clicking on the task bar and being able to launch the activity monitor!
They even have tabbed explorer windows now!
Still, MS did such a bad job of launching W11 that my two gamer teenager kids and their friends have sworn off it for as long as they can!
I'm staying on Windows 10 until EoL in 2025. If Windows 12 is out by then, I may switch, otherwise, I'm moving to the long-term support version of Windows 10.
Using fucking Corp licenced Win11 Pro and still getting ads/spamcontent in my OS?