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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

I finally got the upgrade to Windows 11 and it's... fine?

I don't get all of the hate. Maybe it's because I'm late and everything has been fixed, but it's actually been my favorite version of Windows so far. It finally axed some of the vestigial UIs from Windows 8. And built-in driver support for things like controllers and bluetooth accessories have been a huge upgrade.

I'm ready to be showered in a hail of messages about ads or bloatware or changed layouts, but I found all of the defaults and settings relatively easy to change - if anything easier to find than even Windows 10.

This is a relatively tiny blip, and nearly every other hardware survey tool seems to indicate W11 adoption is chugging along briskly.

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Maybe unexpected: I agree

One of the biggest improvement for me was improved multi monitor and multi-DPI/PPI support. Being able to just put two different monitors next to each other and moving windows between them works. They just adopt their rendering on the fly to the screens DPI setting and it works with most current software.

One of the biggest issues that block me from moving to Linux, I run my displays with 125% and 150% fractional scaling. That just doesn't work like that on Linux, fractional scaling comes with many drawbacks.

> One of the biggest improvement for me was improved multi monitor and multi-DPI/PPI support. Being able to just put two different monitors next to each other and moving windows between them works. They just adopt their rendering on the fly to the screens DPI setting and it works with most current software.

This was a significant fix from W10 to W11 as it was truly awful with W10.

It already works quite well with current Windows 10, the true nightmare was before Windows 10, or maybe with one of the earlier versions. But there was another big improvement with Windows 11.

It's not fine. File explorer context menu, taskbar, it was a half baked OS when first released. It improved, but they shouldn't have release it as it was. Taskbar is still a mess, sometimes I have to reboot to get it working again. And still I can't move on the side.

There is a decade old rule: don't upgrade to the next windows version before the first Service Pack is released.

Dude, it's not 2014. Decade*s* old rule!

Tell me I’m getting old without telling me I’m getting old. Thanks! ;)

I haven't had any problem with any of those things - maybe I lucked out with hardware support.

However, some longstanding problems I had on Windows with controller and displays and accessories have finally just disappeared.

So YMMV.

You still can't move taskbar on the side, something you could do for decades.

For the taskbar, usually just restarting explorer.exe should do the trick.

Open Task Manager, search for explorer.exe or Windows Explorer, right-click and restart.

> I'm ready to be showered in a hail of messages about ads or bloatware or changed layouts, but I found all of the defaults and settings relatively easy to change - if anything easier to find than even Windows 10.

The answer is very simple - you're just not a power user. You probably use email and a bunch of other specific apps and don't spend a significant amount of time in the OS (and configuring it).

That's not a bad thing. It's just how you use it for your workflow.

But please understand that power users work with the OS differently.

I get your point, but it's going to be impossible to change anything and maintain every single person's workflow:

https://xkcd.com/1172/

> I get your point, but it's going to be impossible to change anything and maintain every single person's workflow:

A configurable OS is harder and more expensive to maintain for MS and developers, so the trend is to reduce it in order to fit the 90% of the use cases and throw the 10% (arbitrary numbers) of workflows out.

Can't really blame them, but just so people understand the frustrations of others.

My Win11 upgrade broke the partition on one of my drives that was formatted as ReFS. I was able to fix it with a one liner that read the metadata and updated the ReFS version. But until it was fixed it was thrashing my HDD and explorer would crash because it was trying to read the disk.

Other than that, not terrible. But then again, I just use my windows install for gaming and dual boot into Ubuntu for anything research related.

It has annoying defaults with AI and Spyware stuff. The default UI also is too much like MacOS/ChromeOS. However, after 10-15 minutes of tuning, it becomes a better version of Windows 10, at least for my scenarios. I would NOT go back to Windows 10 right now.

Windows 11 was a medium update (XP SP3 like) package to Windows 10, which mostly includes quality of life improvements without breaking everything else. There was no "complete overhaul" jump as it was with 7->8 or 8->10.

I would not expect a user to run a pretty lengthy powershell command or edit registry to get the old right-click context menu though. The "More options" option is quite annoying.

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