The forced buying of new computers for Windows 11 when Windows 10 was allowed on really old computers really turned a lot of people against Microsoft and they started looking for alternatives. Apple with their M Series Macs and the new Flatpak-based Linux distros have caught a lot of people's attention, along with developers fighting back against Windows' planned obsolescence with software like Supermium and extended kernels to keep previous Windows versions alive.
The only thing really bad about win11 are the UI changes they did to the taskbar. Apart from that the os is solid with great features that are very helpful. One example is the window tiling stuff that is simple and easy, but you can pull of quite complicated layouts too.
The multi desktop feature is way better than what macos has. The multi monitor support is second to none. The performance is amazing, especially compared to a similarly specced macos machine. Ubuntu does still feel faster though.
If there's one thing I'd like, it would have to be a win2000 style UI. Truly the pinnacle of design and aesthetics.
Windows changing UI so often did soften the learning blow for me, when moving to Linux.
Especially nowadays on Linux where you I've only "needed" terminal for getting a graphics tablet to map and for a video card update. (I'm willing to ignore software development going to terminal, since serious software development usually goes to terminal on windows anyways) .
XFCE is quite good at being XP/2000 era gui. The version I'm using is practically XP except with local software search and workspaces.
I'm a unity developer who works with artists and the number of art friends who have had their projects absolutely destroyed in multiple different software packages by upgrading to windows 11 has committed to seeing how well the unity linux client behaves rather than upgrade.
I mean, they are ending support for windows 10 in a few months. Win 10 is pushing users to upgrade pretty hard. It's not surprising to me more people are on it now than before
People who are jumping ship won't show in the numbers until Windows 10 is at end-of-life.
We would need to compare percentage of Windows 10 user in 2020 to Windows 11 users in ~2026 to get a sense of the impact
I keep my taskbar on the left. Windows 11 does not allow this. I do not want to login with a Microsoft Account. This is mandatory in Windows 11. My PC’s CPU is not supported by Windows 11. My other PCs run Ubuntu. This is the last one still on Windows and it’s because of gaming. I’ll pay the $30 for extended security updates and wait and see if anti-cheat supports Linux by 2026.
Like I understand frugality and anti-consumption and all that but at some point if online gaming is your hobby you need to fund your hobby and do it properly. You’re wiling to spend $30 on extending security updates but not $50 for a processor upgrade on eBay I don’t really get the mindset.
Ridiculous effort? It’s the same amount of effort as flashing a Linux ISO. You have to flash an ISO to install the OS anyway, and you have to use some kind of tool.
Any anyway, being logged in to a Microsoft account doesn’t make my Windows experience bad. It’s not unacceptable to me to need an account to use Windows 11. Personally I’m gonna need to be logged in to access my Xbox digital content anyway, and if you’re not gaming on Windows I don’t even know what we are doing on this platform.
But anyway there’s a workaround that’s no more difficult than an ISO flash for those who don’t like it.
Windows 10 users won’t stop complaining about small issues like this and they had the same types of complaints with Windows 10 and previous versions.
I think it would be better for them to just switch to Linux and stop clinging to Windows 10 like they clung to 7 and XP way beyond their expiration dates.
>Ridiculous effort? It’s the same amount of effort as flashing a Linux ISO.
I suggest you leave that little bubble you're in behind.
Imagine your average user, who just wants a damn PC that works for web browsing, writing up word docs and watching a few movies or using their Spotify and browser to visit YouTube. Now imagine asking them if they think the ISO effort is easy. If you like, also imagine the average slightly elderly user who's put effort into making themselves learn the essentials of a typical Windows PC, has finally gotten comfy with its layout, and then suddenly, their stupid little taskbar is in the wrong place because "fuck you user, that's why" courtesy of Microsoft.
Do you think these people would or even should think "flashing a Linux ISO" is as simple as wiping one's ass? Do you think they would even know what such a step means? They shouldn't need to given the broadly spread user base for Windows machines.
The average user you describe doesn’t care if they have to login using a Microsoft account, and probably need to do so anyway if they have any Xbox content or a Microsoft 365 license.
Mac computers are the same way. While macOS lets you use the system without an Apple ID, you’d be hard pressed to find a consumer user who isn’t logged in for one reason or another, whether it’s the Mac App Store or iCloud Photos or something like that.
> A lot of the “never upgrade to 11” folks are completely unaware at how antiquated their OS is at this point.
So all the talk about "Windows 10 is the last Windows you'll ever need" is now officially recognised as bullshit? How does that make Microsoft trustworthy enough to install anything else from them?
And all those gigantic system updates that Windows 10 has had you run several times a year ever since you first used it were good for absolutely nothing?
Feel free to explain how all this hangs together, if you like.
Your comment is actually a perfect encapsulation of this problematic mentality.
You’re clinging on to something that Microsoft never even said explicitly in their marketing materials or documentation.
Literally one guy at Microsoft at a conference (Jerry Nixon) said one quote at a conference. And for some reason a bunch of users can’t let that comment go.
So if all your distrust is about how Microsoft made you install big updates I don’t know how you expect to use any software or connect to the Internet at all. You have to download updates on Linux, too. And Mac.
It seems like these are unreasonable expectations.
Windows 11 clearly needed a new name because it had more serious hardware incompatibility breaks compared to 10. And yeah, a lot of insufferable people still can’t get over the fact that Microsoft won’t support a 10 year old processor for their brand new OS.
> So if all your distrust is about how Microsoft made you install big updates I don’t know...
What you don't seem to know is what I actually wrote, that you replied to: That was not about "distrust of Microsoft", but a question to you: If the OS is so horribly "antiquated", then WTF were all those humongo-updates for? Or, conversely: After all these updates over the years, how the F can the OS be so horribly "antiquated"?
My Windows rule-of-thumb is "Upgrade every other release." It served me well in the past when avoiding several weird Microsoft fads/features they love to cram into those 'cursed' releases.
98 -> XP, skip ME (to be fair, this window of releases was chaotic)
XP -> 7, skip Vista.
7 -> 10, skip 8.
However these days I only use Windows for games, and Valve is making inroads into that environment. Windows 10 might be my last Windows version.
> folks are completely unaware at how antiquated their OS is at this point.
This release cycle is stretched far beyond Microsoft's historical cadence. For comparison, 7 released in 2009, 8 in 2012, and 10 in 2015. Compare that to the 2021 release of 11. The last time Windows had that long of a release cycle was the XP (2001) to Vista (2007) cycle. That era was plagued with development issues and gave rise to the very long XP deployments that Microsoft struggled to escape as well.
It's not that it's 'old' that bothers me, but more like Microsoft doesn't give me a good reason for upgrading despite the long cycle. Microsoft's decades long obsession with "Appifying" their OS, their wavering commitment to Windows prompting Valve to invest in alternative OS development, the "Microsoft Account" to log in fiasco, the botched AI rollouts (plural!), turning all of their applications into subscription webapps, the list seems to grow every quarter.
It's not all bad. WSL is the single best thing Microsoft did in the last decade, and maybe ever! It single-handedly caused me to upgrade from 7 to 10 Pro for Hypervisor support. For a long time WSL + Windows was my primary development box. If I were in charge of Windows, I would double-down on WSL and begin the arduous process of moving the Kernel from NT to Linux (or BSD, etc etc). Windows would then become an application layer with paid business support rather than core development. I would drive ports of popular programs and invest in stuff like Mono and Wine for supporting the long-tail of applications. It would also fit with Microsoft's decades long strategy of Windows being the OS for multiple PC and hardware manufacturers, but shifting the revenue focus from OS sales to their App store and subscriptions.
Upgrade every other release is irrelevant now. It’s outdated advice. That really isn’t how the release schedule works anymore, since Microsoft isn’t using a boxed software release model anymore.
It’s just a waterfall of small features and improvements. Windows 10 stopped getting new features added 4 years ago and Windows 11 gets a major update at least yearly.
It’s not like Windows 10 is incompetent, after all, OSes are generally mature.
But it’s a collection of things where if you purchased a competitor or used a recent Linux desktop, you’d expect them to be there.
Little things like native support for 7zip, rar, and tar files.
Or tabs in file explorer.
Or under the hood improvements like variable refresh rate, DirectStorage, and more complete HDR support.
Those kinds of things you’d come from another OS released in 2025 and wonder why they are missing.
It would be like going to macOS Catalina. It wouldn’t immediately seem old but if you came from Sequoia you’d find a lot of little things missing.
Moving the start menu back to the left side is a built-in setting.
This is exactly what I was talking about. You hyper-focused on one easily revertable UI change and ignored the rest of the features, benefits, fixes, and improvements of an OS that has now been getting updates and enhancements for 4 years now while Windows 10 has been sitting there receiving basic security updates and nothing else.
When your IT guy finally forces you to upgrade, you'll spend a week getting used to the places where your cheese got moved and figure out "oh shit this thing actually has a bunch of neat stuff in it that I didn't have before."
Is it the task bar you can't move? I am trying to make the point that emotions are enough to discredit it. Ads and spyware, general user hostility. It is superficial to bring that up.
Windows does not want me and I don't want Windows.
The task bar can’t be moved anymore. I don’t agree with it either but that wasn’t the issue in your comment, which was start menu alignment, which can be adjusted.
My point is that most of the emotions discrediting it are the same emotions that discredited 10 and other versions. People just don’t want to upgrade because they don’t want to upgrade.
If you are specifically using Windows 10 you are still using Windows with all that same user hostility, spyware/adware and all. All those complaints you have about windows 11 are the same complaints I heard from the windows 7 die hards who refused to upgrade to 10 until 7 was pried away from them. And then I heard them from all the people who refused to leave XP way past its expiration date.
It all you want is for Windows 11 to look like Windows 10 there are free utilities for that [1], just like when I installed classic start menu with Windows 8.1.
If you’re already on the Linux boat or thinking that’s your next move when security updates force you off of Windows 10, that is obviously a much different choice with much more logical thinking behind it.
But the people who are clinging to Windows 10 are doing so for really dumb and often misinformed or already-addressed reasons (e.g. issues with early releases that have been addressed by Microsoft in subsequent updates).
And sure, there are people who have who have legitimate hardware incompatibility. Thats a reasonable reason to avoid the upgrade.
Did you honestly think the main issue is the location of the start menu, and not the toxicity of the incessant pushing, or are you just pretending to as a cheap discussion gambit?
(If anything, your reference to the treacly treatise on the moving of cheeses makes me lean towards the latter.)
My point is that Microsoft has always been this way and that the people who are clinging to Windows 10 for these emotional reasons rather than evaluating 11 on its merits are basically drawing a false line in the sand.
If you don’t like the toxicity of Microsoft in windows 11, why were you okay with it with Windows 10? My view is the same people complaining about Windows 11 complained about Windows 10 and basically every prior version.
Like if you’re mad that Windows 11 is spyware and nags you to buy OneDrive and changed your UI, well, that’s the same thing that Windows 10 did. So why is anyone so insistent on sticking with Windows 10 when Windows 11 at this point has 4 years of feature updates have a laundry list of improvements and modernizations?
And yes, people who won’t upgrade because “the UI changed/got worse” grind my gears. That just shows that you refuse to learn and adapt.
I am much more understanding of the people who switched to Linux or won’t upgrade to 11 over hardware compatibility. But everyone else is just keeping themselves a version behind over digital superstition.
> If you don’t like the toxicity of Microsoft in windows 11, why were you okay with it with Windows 10?
Who says I was? It just came with the computers I bought / was given by my employer(s) in recent years. But they'd said that was it; we were supposed to be done with all that once and for all. So why shouldn't I be annoyed at having them spew their toxicity at us all over again?
> And yes, people who won’t upgrade because “the UI changed/got worse” grind my gears. That just shows that you refuse to learn and adapt.
Why should we have to? What's the use of "learn and adapt" when there's scarce-to-none actual improvement in return?
If you were given computers by your employer for work then the OS isn’t your problem. You are paid to use and adapt to the OS. If you don’t want to do that job you should go flip burgers.
If you bought computers from your employer and you want to change the OS go ahead and do so. I’m not criticizing the person who does that. But whining about the OS on that machine makes you look bad because you’re the one who chose to buy the computer. If you don’t like the OS that’s on it go why did you buy the computer? Nobody twisted your arm to buy your employer’s computer.
Again, Windows users complaining about their computer having Windows and then continuing to use Windows is tired and annoying. They complained about ever major version and once they were finally forced by EOL to use the newest version the newest version became their favorite. All the “Windows 10 will leave my cold dead hands” people said the same thing about Windows 7 and Windows XP.
And again, my argument was that people who don’t want to learn and adapt just claim there’s scarce to no improvement because they don’t have any willingness to discover those improvements because the initial adaptation is a dealbreaker for them. They’ll go to their graves saying that Windows XP was the best Windows OS ever while hand waving over all of its flaws and limitations.
So, have fun having worse battery life because your laptop doesn’t support dynamic display refresh rate, having a worse content experience because your OS doesn’t support HDR properly even though your monitor does, having less secure slower WiFi because your OS doesn’t support WiFi 7 and WPA3, having a cluttered work environment because file explorer doesn’t support tabs, needing to install third party programs to unarchive tar and 7zip formats, and the list of feature additions you’re missing out on goes on and on.
I guess those improvements are scarce to none because by not using them they must not exist. A tree in the woods doesn’t fall down if you aren’t there, right?
W11 Bluetooth is utterly broken. W11 will not recognize the bluetooth devices that I make and sell.
W11 is a great upgrade for my business and I am endlessly thankful that Microsoft is forcibly ruining my employee's machines one by one with forced updates to W11.
My other favorite feature is that w11 natively keylogs my employees and sends screenshots of our entire proprietary codebase to Microsoft. I find so much value in this feature. It's never been more efficient to leak customer and business secrets!
Works on my machine. I highly doubt that the millions of people using Windows 11 all have broken Bluetooth. Maybe you need to fix your hardware that you designed?
> with forced updates to W11
Windows 11 hasn’t been forced upon you. You can use Windows 10 after the support runs out at your own risk.
But again this isn’t a change for Windows 11 specifically. Every OS connected to the Internet has an expiration date in which you must upgrade it. If you don’t like this on Windows 11 then you don’t like this on 10 and 8.1 and 7 and XP. It’s not a logical reason to dislike Windows 11 specifically compared to its previous versions.
> natively key logs my employees and sends screenshots of our entire proprietary codebase to Microsoft
This sounds like a wild overstatement. Are you referring to the optional preview Recall feature? The feature you can easily disable and isn’t even on by default for corporate machines? [1]
The one that only does processing locally?
> Privacy and security are built into Recall's design. With Copilot+ PCs, you get powerful AI that runs locally on the device. No internet or cloud connections are required or used to save and analyze snapshots. Snapshots aren't sent to Microsoft. Recall AI processing occurs locally, and snapshots are securely stored on the local device only.
Two or three tweaks to register like right-click context menu, search, and Windows 11 is pretty good, I'd say.
I've been using it privately for months and professionally and the only thing that bothers me is that on my corpo laptop the Windows search is slow, but I bet that's because of corpo crap, not the Windows itself because on my home PC it is robust.
>unaware at how antiquated their OS is at this point.
What are your thoughts on my leet 2006 Core2Duo Windows 7 Pro?! With an AMD 5770, it won't stream HD but still rocks games of its era... I use it for occassional stock trading, only.
It's probably the next machine I'll mothball, but will still be air conditioned =D
I recently revived my parents HP all in one from 2008, sporting a t5850 core duo.
It's surprising usable, but I found out that recent versions windows don't support sse4.1 (Microsoft has provided escape hatches to upgrade old hw to Win11, but requiring sse4.2 is a hard requirement now), so Windows 10 is the final version of windows this machine will get. I suspect in few years I'll probably move it to Linux, but for browsing and document editing it's a wonderfully competent machine.
You mean the completely optional preview feature that isn’t even finished yet?
I really don’t understand why a new feature that can be turned off is a problem.
For what it’s worth as long as Recall can be implemented securely it’s a really useful feature that a lot of people will like. It might even be the most innovative desktop OS feature to hit the market in the last 5-10 years.
I think it did what Windows 8 did for desktops to tablets. Just all around worse to use on them for no good reason. And pretty much every UI change is a step back and kind of brain dead. Really the only positive I can think of is x64 support on ARM but they had that working on Windows 10 but decided not to roll into the mainstream release. It's not unusable but I'm not convinced it's BETTER.
Again, like I said in my original comment, this is the kind of stuff that the never-11 people beat their drums to without ever using Windows 11 and certainly without using a recent build.
There are a number of components of Windows 11 where the UI is clearly beter. The screen capture tools are an example. Notepad.exe with tabs. The Game Bar. Settings, while far from perfect, is slowly improving.
No, they just label the entire thing as a step backwards using blanket and sweeping language, which makes it hard for me to believe since it's so vague and accusatory.
Yeah, but the actual UI you use on a day to day basis dozens of times a day got worse. Context clicks, the start menu, etc. Something like Notepad I imagine most people either never use or immediately replace with something drastically better like Notepad++. Small improvements in the corners don't make up for the dump in the middle of the room.
All of these are minor quibbles that can easily be addressed with a single free utility. [1]
I’d rather do some customization than lose major under the hood modernizations.
Context menus and the start menu don’t bother me on a daily basis. I just hit start and type in what I want. I disabled internet searches with one registry key edit and I only had to do it once. The context menus are fine, they function.
