Is it time to "upgrade"?: Does Windows 11 suck or rule?

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Voix des Airs

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  • #1
    So, for like the thousandth time, Windows 10 is telling me that "Windows 11 is ready for your PC" in the taskbar. But, to date, the prospect of Windows 11 has filled me with inertia. Thus this post.

    Is it time to upgrade from 10 to 11? Is windows 11 an upgrade? Bad? Meh? Did you install it and see God or been overwhelmed with regrets? Regardless, why? And assuming that opinions on this differ, why are those who disagree with you wrong?

    A few things I'm not interested in:

    - Mac OS (I actually relatively recently mostly switched away from that at home).​
    ​
    - Linux - it's not that I don't know how to use Linux, I do (in fact I couldn't really tolerate Windows without Cygwin - well, I could, but you know what I mean). Linux just isn't an option for a number of reasons.​
    ​
    - Answers that rely too heavily on "it depends on what you want/need." I've already pretty thoroughly researched it and know that all the SW I use works fine on 11. And what I want, given the direction that such things are going, I'm probably never going to get. For example, I'd like the OS to work right and not constantly forget sound settings or make a mess of the screen when using more than one monitor; and when something writes a file to the Desktop that said file actually shows up on the desktop without more from me. I could go on and on but... that kind of stuff. In my experience MS just never fixes things like this. I also don't want ads in my OS. Nor do I want to be always logged in at MS every time I use my PC. MS can go fuck itself with respect to these two things but 10 does both and I only expect this to get worse and worse. So the TLDR on this one is that Windows 11 will give me what I need and I've given up on getting what I want.​

    Thoughts? Opinions? Rants?
     
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    invertedpanda

    invertedpanda

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  • #2
    Eh.. I'm still hating some of the UI/UX changes. I honestly haven't found many reasons to like W11, but it's stable enough now that I'm basically OK with it.

    I wouldn't call it an upgrade unless you like some of the changes. I HATE switching between audio outputs now. I don't particularly enjoy the window snapping functionality.

    Oh, and Sticky Shift is STILL A THING I discovered, which.. I can't even fathom why. At least it's easily disabled.

    Anyway, I mostly game on my W11 rig; I do some video/photo production and image editing on it, too. Everything works fine.

    You mentioned Cygwin; WSL is pretty full-fledged. I actually use it all the time, and it replaced Cygwin for me. I have a Linux server and laptop for dev work, but I like having a good *nix shell available on my Windows machine.
     
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    continuum

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  • #3
    We jumped to Windows 11 en masse probably about the beginning of 2022, and by the release of 22H2 in September last year it was pretty good.

    Some of the UI irks can be reverted:
    Windows 10-style start menu is possible via several tools, I'm not sure what the current favorite is.
    File Explorer/desktop right-click can restore the Windows 10-style menu via a registry setting.
    Window snapping tool can be disabled or enabled in settings.

    Might be some others that I'm forgetting but those have been the main three for me.

    As invertedpanda said, WSL2 is actually pretty good.
     
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    Paul Hill

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  • #7
    I'm writing this on a Windows 11 Lenovo Ideapad Flex.

    It's... nice? I thought I'd miss tiles in the start menu but weirdly I don't. Everything's really quick and the window snapping works surprisingly well, even with the display folded over and it being used as a tablet. 22H2 added a bunch of stuff that helped a lot.

    Oh yeah and this may be me not buying a PC for eight years but the boot time is amazing, and lid open to boot is yummy.
     
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    Mat8iou

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  • #9
    After far more fuss than I thought it would be (Windows update thought my system didn't meet requirements, so I had to install manually and then a memory protction error from BIOS during reboot meaning the machine reverted - neither should have happened on a recent high end Intel based laptop with a clean install of WIndows 10 from a tier one manufacturer IMHO) I've got it installed on my laptop. I quickly reset the start menu position - apart from that, I'm fairly comfortable with it and all the software I've installed still works OK with it.
     
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    YoHo

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  • #10
    The one problem I've faced is, that various USB to RS232 devices that I have. One for a Cub Scout Pinewood derby track and another for a Model Railroad DCC interface have had driver issues with the driver that is supposed to be windows 11 ready. Now, both of those happened 8months-a year ago so perhaps it's been sorted out. However all the normal every day devices have worked fine.

    I got the DCC interface working. Never got the pinewood derby track happy.
     
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