But what good things are there in Windows 11 over Windows 10?
I find it hard to get a reasonable overview with pros and cons, because seemingly every review goes straight into ranting.
I think I've heard about WSL improvements? Something you noticed and really liked?
Please don't try to convert me to Linux, I'm asking for a new Windows installation inside KVM/virt-manager on Debian, I already know the upsides of Linux :-)
The bad part is that is all the missing features especially regarding the start menu and taskbar.
It is to an large extend just a normal windows 10 service pack that MS Marketing Department has chosen to call Windows 11.
For Microsoft, the critical part is the new hardware requirements, that eventually will allow them to removed old parts of the windows code base and maybe that is why it is called 11 instead 10 Service Pack 1
In your scenario it doesn't make much of a difference if you install 10 or 11.
Looking at the list featuring Credential Guard, Virtualization based security, LSAPPL and TPM 2.0 support, it became pretty clear it was a list of feature we had in Windows 10.
For getting the start bar back to a windows 10ish state (essential): https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
Then there was just a key via regedit to restore the old right click menu: https://pureinfotech.com/bring-back-classic-context-menu-win...
There is a long list of things that no longer annoy me though… here’s the top ones:
1. My .git folder no longer gets corrupted after a reboot in WSL. That used to drive me insane and I lost hours of work several times. Hasn’t happened once since upgrading.
2. I feel like WSL integration has gotten light years better. Nothing specific comes to mind, but I basically work in WSL. (Still no native ipv6 support though. Sigh)
3. It feels like a smoother/snappier experience overall. Especially when it comes to gaming.
The problem is whenever I run any command in WSL, the progress bar/status stalls or never updates itself. Installing a new language, non package, Ubuntu stuff, whatever, doesn’t seem to work on first try. Once I ‘Ctrl+C’ and re-enter the command, it works flawlessly.
——
Besides that, I think Windows 11 has been great so far! I like it.
Everything else is a backwards step. The start menu is even more obtuse than Gnome and thats saying something.
My philosophy if things work I don't change them. For every new feature you may find a bunch of things no longer work or now missing completely.
If you think change in tools is bad, I’d agree, I like consistency. Linux doesn’t offer that though - vim upgraded from 7 to 8 a few years back and caused major changes to various defaults. Rxvt recent changed and sucked tons if time trying to fix paste (they put some ridiculous “security” thing so if I pasted a line from another terminal I had to then press “yes” to accept the paste.
Developers are never “done”, they fiddle, they make changes, and they set those new changes as default because they consider it better.
Personally I like the fact my screwdriver or saw or hammer works the same way as it always has, I don’t like to think about tools, I learn how to use it, and then I can concentrate on other things. Developers break that.
For me, XP was the boost to get off the bloated platform. Ugly skins, mandatory junk apps (Movie Maker or whatever) that you can't remove, mandatory IE for Windows Update... So many little things.
The one gain over Win2K was faster bootups/resume-from-hibernation. That I liked. That was the only thing.
But it was clear that MS would play its usual trick: compel upgrades by killing support for the well-loved older product.
So you couldn't really stay on W2K.
So I switched. Mac OS X on the desktop, Linux on laptops.
And frankly, the continued gutting of the UI in macOS, which has been going downhill since 10.6, is making Linux everywhere look appealing... Even with the shiny Arm chips...
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16881/a-deep-dive-into-intels...
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16959/intel-innovation-alder-...
Intel and MS worked together on the feature. A microcontroller embedded in the CPU monitors each thread's instruction stream along with other metrics, and feeds hints back to the OS scheduler about whether it should be on a P vs. E core. It can also detect when a thread is constrained by something other than frequency and temporarily throttle down the clock on that core to save power. I gather the microcontroller runs an ML algorithm pre-trained on "millions of hours of data" to help with thread classification.
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/virt...
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/desktop/modern...
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/snap-your-window...
Native WSL Gui apps.
Let your cheese move a little.
It's not a deep technical choice.
Good luck.
They are changing the executbale model to signed binaries and soon there will be no "Good old games". The idea that any software is "incompatible" is nonsense.
The "security features" are actually just content protection drm tech Netflix/google and game industry like sony has been working on.
It won't matter if you can copy files infinitely if they are signed and encrypted by an OS and CPU that won't execute the bits.
So no, windows 11 is the end of the PC as an open platform.
See here:
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html
From 20 year ago, they've been working with hardware vendors to tpm the shit out of all the components for shit like this:
https://www.theregister.com/2001/03/23/ms_plans_secure_pc/
So thats why windows 10+ will be shit, and you no longer own your pc.
Here's an example of things to come:
https://www.arch13.com/ms-windows-defender-decss/
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27914752