I've been using Windows 11 without much complaint since its release, but off the top of my head, I can't name a single "feature" that would motivate me to upgrade if I were on Windows 10, besides "continued support."
I have a number of laptops and desktops around home, and I mostly cannot distinguish between the Win 10 vs Win 11 ones - except, Win 11 is more annoying. The inability to move taskbar is one, but they've also removed a lot of keyboard shortcuts for common desktop and file explorer activities for no reason I can discern. So I'll type up a shortcut, nothing or bad things will happen, and that's my clue "oh yeah, this one is on $#&@ Windows 11" :-/.
Also when I need to configure something, like sound or network or power options, it seems like the number of separate windows in different styles to hunt through keeps proliferating.
The control centre generally feels better than Windows 10, except for switching sound outputs or getting to the volume mixer, which require too many clicks.
The settings app is a little more cohesive and has had some more control panel functionality transitioned into it.
Nothing they couldn’t have fixed in Windows 10, but it is overall better for me due to the above.
My new-ish work laptop runs Windows 11, but my personal desktop for gaming on a 6th gen Intel doesn’t meet official requirements. It has TPM 2 though, so once October arrives I reckon it’s better to run Windows 11 in a “technically” unsupported manner rather than stick with an OS which is no longer getting updates (and no, I will not switch to Linux as I’m not looking for another hobby).
Respectable. The state of desktop Linux is pretty good but it's very much a 'your-mileage-may-vary' situation. Every 'exotic' thing you introduce into your setup (having a variable-refresh-rate monitor, having an HDR monitor, two monitors of different refresh rates, running Wayland over X11, having a brand new GPU, having an NVIDIA GPU) is another possible, sometimes likely, source of pain.
Some of the multiplayer games I play with my friends can be played on Linux, but I make a point of using my Windows partition for those because I don't want to waste their time on my troubleshooting.
Sometimes. Sometimes it does. It's all very random. My work laptop drives me nuts, when plugging back into the dock my windows return to where they were about 3/4 of the times. A quarter of the times they just all bunch up on the main monitor.
Windows only “forget” their old place if you move them or with applications like Slack they are “minimized” to the system tray.
Win11 gave me tons of sound and Bluetooth issues to the point it felt like Linux alsa issues from 2010 or something.
I still have my win11 install on another partition but I rarely use it now. Just for niche stuff.
Then windows decided it was my turn to be nagged and OH MAN I understood ...
I have no good answer for exactly how that situation plays out. I swear it's not a local device setting.
At least I hope non-admins can't upgrade, but knowing MS, maybe they can.
I hate all the advertising and spyware, so I'll never run Windows 11 at home, but we have a whole team dedicated to disabling that sort of stuff at work, so I don't have to think about it.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzon...
When I had the choice I still went back to Windows 10.
My Windows machine has seen an uptick in use over the last months for development purposes, but it's still stuck on Windows 10. I don't think I need or want to upgrade it.
Two questions:
- Do I need to upgrade it?
- How do I get comfortable with Windows shell? PowerShell doesn't do Unixisms. There are too many shells. Command Prompt / CMD, PowerShell, there's some utility that installed mingw64 terminal, and WSL is also a thing. Which one(s) should I use?
I'll expand on my shell question: The thing I'm struggling with now is that when I install utilities like git, cargo, etc., they seem to work for some shells but not others. They seem disconnected and not have the same access, visibility, and privileges. What can I read or do to get me over this hill? Which one(s) should I use? (I assume "CMD" is dead?)
I'm doing mostly Rust / TypeScript development on Windows, FWIW.
The first rule of PowerShell is to install the "real" PowerShell [1] instead of using the one bundled with Windows (which is out of date and importantly doesn't interoperate as well with non-PowerShell commands). I still don't like it, it's way too different from UNIX shells, but at least it's usable.
CMD hasn't gotten any improvements since like 1995 but it isn't going anywhere either. If you need something vaguely like a UNIX shell and that's always available, it's not a bad choice.
WSL2 is fine if you work mostly within its environment, which is made easier by things like VSCode's Remote extension. However, accessing Windows files from within WSL2 is surprisingly slow, so you really want to commit to it if you start using it.
I'm doing Rust on Windows too and apart from installing the MSVC tools and a compatible version of libclang, and occasionally figuring out how to write PowerShell, it's not been too much trouble. WinGet is pretty good and the library has quite a large selection of development tools.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/insta...
That's the current plan but it wouldn't surprise me if they change their mind given the large Windows 10 install base still out there. They've done that before with Windows XP and 7.
-The absolute crap of a start menu now being all but useless -Advertisements -Increasingly forced to online accounts rather than local
Also the UI changes didn't improve anything, and the changes make upgrading more painful and frustrating than needed. One thing OSX has got right it doesn't keep making major surface change every upgrade.