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Comment by bluescrn | Hacker News Reader

And they expect people to ‘upgrade’ (downgrade) from Win10 to Win11?

Win11 is clearly the new Win8. Still hoping it can be skipped entirely and that a more desirable Win12 will eventually be announced.

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I don't see why everyone expects Win12 to be a good version. Why would they go back on all the new user hostile changes? It's not like you're paying for the OS - they'll want to extract value from you somehow.

Right now it looks like Win12 will just be Win11, but with more integrated "AI"-stuff.

There’s a history of alternating between bad and good versions as they push bad ideas then back off and polish up the important stuff. Of course, there’s no guarantees that the pattern will continue

The more desirable upgrade from Win10 is Linux 6.8. With proton and the game emulation ecosystem built by Valve there’s really no reason left to run Windows.

It's, still true, every other windows release is shitty. Just look at them: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, Windows 11.

Windows 11 is only marginally worse than the baseline terrible set by 10. They screwed up the UI again and continued gradually ratcheting up Microsoft account requirements and new ads. If 11 hadn't have been released the later items would have just come to Windows 10 in the form of a feature update.

10 was full of spyware from the outset but for some reason people argue that it is better than 11 in this regard in a weird bit of revisionist history. The biggest problem with Windows 11 is it dumps hardware support for anything remotely old.

10 is manageably terrible, but moving most stuff to the new control panel is annoying to say the least.

If you use an alternate shell then you get an error msg as it expects explorer/start menu.

Personally, I think Windows 10 is the exception to this pattern. I don't think that it counts as a "good" release -- it just got rid of a couple of the more horrific aspects of 8. That said, I haven't been forced to use it yet, but it does look like Win 11 will be even worse than 10.

After Win8 and it's attempt to push a locked-down touch-centric mobile OS upon users of a 'real Windows', Win10 was 'more than good enough'.

A lot of the unwanted parts of Win8 lived on, but they could mostly be ignored, they weren't aggressively shoved into your face

Agreed. Back when windows 10 was out, 8.1 was considered a good release and 10 was considered a bad release. Now 10 has suddenly become good somehow, and 8.1has been lumped in with 8.

I don't personally know anyone who considered 8.1 to be a good release. It was welcome because it did blunt a couple of the more egregious sharp edges of 8, but that doesn't mean it was anywhere near good.

Agreed. But people hated 10 more than 8.1, so they labeled 10 as a bad release and 8.1 as a good release so that the pattern could fit. Now that people hate 11 more than 10, people say that 10 was good so that the pattern can fit.

I wonder if there is any debloating possibility for Win11? I'm already scared and maintaining my positions on Win10.

-- EDIT --

After all, Windows is just a set of executables and registry entries. The former or the latter can be removed or replaced somehow.

I've heard good things about the Chris Titus Tech winutil. I've also used O&O shutup 10 and it lets you disable a lot: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

Tiny10 and Tiny11 were debloated stand-alone ISO's by a developer who chose some of the most despised default features & apps, and removed them in advance from the install media. Based on media from recent years these are still available, but appear to have been surpassed by the more versatile "Builder" approach where you can do more of a personal selection of extraneous features to retain or eliminate.

So now it's "Tiny11 Builder" which is like a template script you select your features from, and you have to supply your own Windows ISO which you download from Microsoft:

https://github.com/ntdevlabs/tiny11builder

After the process is complete you end up with your own custom Tiny11 ISO, debloated according to the Powershell builder script.

Using your Tiny11 ISO no differently than the original ISO from Microsoft, you can then clean-install that same debloated version on target PC's instead.

Once installed, it does have a smaller resource footprint, but this is Windows 11 so it's never going to be exactly "tiny".

Alternatively, Ameliorated seems to have taken a similar path to Tiny11, also for Windows 10 as well:

https://ameliorated.io/

They added arbitrary cpu limits so no.

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