So, who's planing on upgrading to / skipping Win11 and why?

[Jay-Bruce]

I've never realy loved a windows version since 7, and I have to admit that I was surprised by the anouncement of Win11, but from what I've seen, I'm not convinced. The more I look at it, the more I'm likely to stick to my (currently modded wo within an inch of its life) Win10 setups on my laptop and desktop, I just don't see any must have feature in Win11 that makes me want to jump over. And now I'm wondering, am I just getting old, or is microsoft who's becoming misguided, which is why I'm asking my fellow tech-heads what's their thoughts on and plans for Win11?

[Saracen999]

I'm skipping.

Why?

a) most of my machines aren't even 'compatible'
b) even if they were, I'm not seeing any convincing reason why I need to upgrade, and
c) there are several things, not least the taskbar being locked to the screen bottom, that I really don't like.

So for me, reasons to skip > reasons to upgrade. For other people? YMMV.

[BobF64]

I will skip it on my desktop machine, because, at over 10 years old, its not compatible, and i have no intention of buying a new one just for Windows 11.

Laptop, that i sometimes use when away from home, maybe, dunno, cant remember if its compatible or not tbh.

[Richh]

Well, I popped on here today to see what the general reception to 11 was like - and also to see if there was anything I'm missing.

Have been busy as hell the last few months, so no time to look at an Insider build, and finally got the release installed on a spare hard disk a couple of days ago.

First pleasant surprise is that it installs and runs perfectly on my old (Z170) Maximus VIII Hero/8700K box without any jailbreaks or compatibility overrides. But...

As things stand at least, it's not replacing my main W10 build. The dealbreakers for me are the utterly useless and counterproductive new Start Menu, Taskbar and Explorer behaviour. And, in addition, it feels sluggish compared with 10 -although at this stage I have no idea how much of that is down to running it on a spare (albeit fast) rotating hard disk rather than an SSD. The Settings is.. well, the whole thing is a real mishmash of 'modern' style - but with the classic Control Panel applets still popping out here and there, looking totally incongruous.

Have been able to get OpenShell running - but there are incongruities - like Classic Start Menu launching from the Windows key, but not from clicking the Start button.

Whole thing has the feel of an incompletely and inadequately tested Service Pack rather than a 'new' OS, and reminds me of the mistakes made with Windows 8 - quite a few of which seem to be repeating now.

Will have another go at getting the UI components running the way I want them without glitches, but as things stand, distinctly unimpressed.

[Kovoet]

Not changing over for a while. I game a lot and have an AMD chip and there are problems with both. I'm not having any problems with 10 at the moment so I can wait a while yet.

[Jonj1611]

Upgraded my Vivobook, no problems with the upgrade, the start menu thing is a bit naff but other than that were no issues. Was a completely empty laptop with a fresh install of Windows 10 so didn't have anything to lose

[Jay-Bruce]

It's interesting to see that this thread's collective response seems to be "not touching it" or "tried it and its naff" - particularly given we are all techies, who ought to be excited about new bleeding edge stuff... Looks like microsoft need to go re-evaluate their life.

Well, I popped on here today to see what the general reception to 11 was like - and also to see if there was anything I'm missing.

Have been busy as hell the last few months, so no time to look at an Insider build, and finally got the release installed on a spare hard disk a couple of days ago.

First pleasant surprise is that it installs and runs perfectly on my old (Z170) Maximus VIII Hero/8700K box without any jailbreaks or compatibility overrides. But...

As things stand at least, it's not replacing my main W10 build. The dealbreakers for me are the utterly useless and counterproductive new Start Menu, Taskbar and Explorer behaviour. And, in addition, it feels sluggish compared with 10 -although at this stage I have no idea how much of that is down to running it on a spare (albeit fast) rotating hard disk rather than an SSD. The Settings is.. well, the whole thing is a real mishmash of 'modern' style - but with the classic Control Panel applets still popping out here and there, looking totally incongruous.

Have been able to get OpenShell running - but there are incongruities - like Classic Start Menu launching from the Windows key, but not from clicking the Start button.

Whole thing has the feel of an incompletely and inadequately tested Service Pack rather than a 'new' OS, and reminds me of the mistakes made with Windows 8 - quite a few of which seem to be repeating now.

Will have another go at getting the UI components running the way I want them without glitches, but as things stand, distinctly unimpressed.

I was reading this article, and the guy was having issues with openshell on windows 11, and made a workaround by making a custom icon that is a 99% transparent PNG in paint.net, then this overlays the standard w11 icon that peeks under the classicshell start menu icon. Details can be found here:
https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/...pen-shell.html

[IAmATeaf]

I’d love to try it but I don’t think any of the household laptops or desktop meet the min spec so will have to wait and see if MS ever launch a W11 pauper edition

[BobF64]

It's interesting to see that this thread's collective response seems to be "not touching it" or "tried it and its naff" - particularly given we are all techies, who ought to be excited about new bleeding edge stuff... Looks like microsoft need to go re-evaluate their life.

The "problem" is that, as techies, we get excited about actual new things, not pointless and unnecessary reskinning efforts.

Windows 2000, as far as i am concerned, was the last time the UI was most functional, with least unnecessary graphical crap.
Since then, its all been about "improving" the customer experience, and that has been firmly aimed at non-computer users.

[Output]

I've no current plans to do so. If I do, it'll probably be when Win10 goes EOL (I didn't even move on to 10 until 7 went EOL).

The "problem" is that, as techies, we get excited about actual new things, not pointless and unnecessary reskinning efforts.

Exactly. To me, Win11 just seems to be Microsoft's second go at doing what they tried to do with 8, namely make it more like a tablet OS for everyone despite it not being the suitable route for PC users.

[Corky34]

The "problem" is that, as techies, we get excited about actual new things, not pointless and unnecessary reskinning efforts.

It's not only that but something i listened to the other day reminded me of how half arsed their pointless and unnecessary reskinning efforts are - The 'new' settings app, they've been working on that for almost 10 years and it's still half baked.

New bleeding edge stuff is great and all but when it's done badly or left half finished it just feels like a kick in the teeth, it just feels like they're releasing shiny new stuff because they know people will focus on that rather than the mess they've left behind.

[IAmATeaf]

Windows Settings are a mess because somebody in MS refuses to let go of Control Panel

[Corky34]

I wish it was that simple but i suspect it's not just because somebody in MS refuses to let go of Control Panel, it's a cultral thing within MS IMO as you see the same thing loads of Windows things. Take the CLI, Command Prompt, for example. Instead of making it better they came up with PowerShell but because PowerShell doesn't do everything cmd.exe can do they now have two CLI's and because switching between the two is awkward they come up with yet another program in an attempt to make it easier.

The same happened with NTFS, instead of making it better they created ReFs but ReFs is missing loads of the feature of NTFS, heck you can't even boot from it.

[Saracen999]

Windows Settings are a mess because somebody in MS refuses to let go of Control Panel

But why do they?

Maybe because completely replacing how all that stuff is done is fine for the technically more literate users, but for those (and I know a few) that still haven't quite mastered actually scheduling a recording on their VCR (and yeah, I am serious about that) they've spent years working out how to do the basics with control panel and then, wham, it's all changed.

More seriously, lots of business users can do what they need to for their jobs, but change that and lots of staff retraining follows, as do complaints from such users.

Yet, if you enable both systems, you now have to maintain both and end up with an OS with a split personality.

They are a bit between a rock and a hard place, perhaps just evaluating the relative size and importance of which group to annoy least.

[DanceswithUnix]

I'm rather comfy up on the fence for now.

... but then I'm typing this in the comfort of my work Linux environment, and Windows is just for launching games. So I'll need that AMD performance loss fixed before I adopt it, but I'm sure I'll move over at some point.

Right now I'm more miffed that my Linux KDE setup has lost its wobbly windows. I liked wobbly windows, but it looks like they didn't have an active maintainer so with Fedora 34 they went. It's not just Windows that can disappoint

[AGTDenton]

I'll be dabbling here and there on it earlier than I would normally. Unfortunately because it's now effectively Windows 10+ it's easy for machines to auto upgrade so I can envisage the incoming support calls when things no longer work.