It's sad and ironic to see phrasing like "We’re proud that Windows 11 is the most inclusively designed version of Windows" when you're basically telling all your long-time power-users to fuck off. Then again, "inclusive" has already become a loaded doublespeak word in these times.
We’ve improved the experiences for touch in Windows 11 when you’re using a tablet without a keyboard. You’ll see more space between the icons in the Taskbar
What if I'm NOT using one?
Thank you Microsoft, for taking away even more customisation, dumbing down the OS to new levels, and shoving more adverts in our faces. Now people have even more reasons than before to try Linux or macOS.
A new era for the PC begins today
You're right about that --- an even more locked-down and user-hostile (all in the name of "security", of course) era begins.
As a long-time Win32 developer who started writing utilities for DOS and then moved to Win16 for a short while, the direction that Windows (and the PC platform in general) is going is really sad and horrifying to see.
"diversity" and "inclusivity" have always been the tech industry most favorite buzzwords that never ever meant a damn thing concretely, but you put them there to virtue signal to a certain crowd otherwise someone might accuse you of an imaginary thought crime. Of course it's meaningless by definition.
This is a terrible update which adds very little of value for the end user, it only turns Windows non pro into some sort of SAAS that Microsoft is going to milk forcefully.
In this context, I'm sure it's got a very diverse UI made up of many different pieces of varying awfulness, and is rather inclusive of plenty of bugs and unfinished misfeatures too.
Diversity is meaningful and when I'm looking at companies I always look at the staff page to make sure there's some diversity at the leadership level and that it's not a bunch of people who look exactly the same.
I really hope it's sarcasm (so difficult to detect in these times) but in case it's not: why would anyone care about someone else's looks? What matters is what they do, it doesn't matter if they're Indian or African or Asian or all of the above. Sad truth: if you base your decisions on someone else's race, you're a racist.
Honestly, why should anyone care? Look at the old photos from Bell Labs: these guys all looked "the same." So what? Why would anyone even care about their looks? What matters is a combination of skills and passion that gives excellent results, not your current idea of "diversity."
The leader of Bell Labs at the time was so incredibly racist that he dedicated tons of resources in eugenics and “scientifically proving” that black people were inferior to white people. You are really going to use William Shockley as an example for why it was ok that everyone at Bell Labs looked the same?
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.2711641
From time to time a person appears that is both intelligent and has morally questionable views. Sometimes these views stem from mistaken reasoning and the tendency to think "I was right on so many cases, I'm also right on this one." There are many cases in the history of mankind, like Descartes who advocated vivisection. This does not invalidate their contribution to science.
Shockley was a controversial figure who died alone. It is not fair to identify him with Bell Labs. Also, people gradually dissociated from him as it was more clear his views are extreme. We can find these kinds of people in any culture, it means nothing in the context we're discussing.
This might be an American thing, though. A while ago I came across an essay that basically said UNIX is racist [0]. It's hard to have meaningful conversation in such circumstances.
> We must historicize and politicize code studies. And, because digital media were born as much of the civil rights era as of the cold war era (and of course these eras are one and the same), our investigations must incorporate race from the outset
Nobody is arguing about contributions to science. You said, "everyone at Bell labs looked the same. So what?"
I told you exactly why people at Bell Labs looked the same and why that is a problem. If someone refuses to hire black people because they think black people are inferior, the answer isn't, "so what?"
>to make sure there's some diversity at the leadership level and that it's not a bunch of people who look exactly the same.
Let's be honest here. You're looking for a specific demographic, and you're not actually concerned with the composition of the talent pool from which they were hired. It's an increasingly popular de facto anti-meritocratic movement and I don't think trading some amount of competence for diversity at social scales will actually be good for society in the medium to long term.
People have different values of course, when I'm look at companies I always look at the product they develop and whether it suits my morals and ethics and whether their work/management practices suits mine.
I'm not talented enough to guess people's sexuality or nationality just by looking at their pictures like you and pass judgement on appearances. Or is it because I don't care what color or sex my would-be coworkers are?
It's fascinating to me just how poorly they understand their long term developers. I've been making a living developing on windows since the early 2000s (having been a Unix guy before that) and the inexplicable inability to produce a working GUI solution for .NET core just leaves me flummoxed. Yet Electron.NET works fine across Linux, Windows and OSX.
The sequence of events that means my main development machine is running Debian looked something like this:
1. Docker switches to WSL2, deprecates WSL1
2. My big dev box (running Windows Server 2019) can no longer test containers.
3. My laptop is running WSL2 so I'm spending more and more time in a Debian shell. All the CLI stuff works better there anyway.
4. I switch my big dev box to Debian and hey presto, suddenly Android Studio isn't a giant PITA. Let's try VS code. Oh ok, it's actually pretty cool.
5. I switch all my code base into VS Code.
6. What exactly do I need Windows for? A few games.
I now do most of my dev work on Debian and the transition was made painless by WSL2, Microsoft making Windows a bad choice for developers and the Docker people playing along. If you're already spending a lot of time in WSL2 and you do a mix of Android and .NET Core, you have zero reasons to stay on Windows.
I made the jump to full time linux in 2020, finally tired of all the Windows annoyances and realizing everything I use day to day runs fine on linux. If I hadn’t done it then I would certainly do it now with this ridiculous Windows 11 rollout.
It took a little bit of work but now my linux desktop works exactly how I want now, and Windows and macOS both feel strange to my muscle memory when I have to use them.
I've been using Win 11 - preview, for development and personal stuff - for a few months and I really can't understand why people are getting mad at it.
A few UI elements have changed places, but it mostly feels like Win 10 to me.
Did you try moving the taskbar, switching the default browser, or any other feature that they just decided to make harder, slower, or impossible?
People understandably get pissed off when features they have been using for over a decade suddenly disappear in an "upgrade". They expect things that used to work to keep working, and perhaps other things that didn't work to now work, but that's not what they got.
For me, the "new version of Windows is actually better" feeling faded around the 2K/XP timeframe. Since then it has only been increasingly minor improvements combined with increasingly greater regressions.
That's not entirely true. Microsoft did fix a lot of the device driver instability that plagued Win2k / XP around when they released Windows 7. Windows 10 was a further improvement in stability but at the expense of all the adware / telemetry. I've been running Windows 11 for a while and I don't hate it, but I spend more dev time in VSCode and WSL2 so it just feels like a weird Linux distribution that gets in the way.
Other than the task bar I think everything else is OK, the ui is cleaner and modern. My main issue is that it feels more like a reskin than an actual OS update. What really changed under the hood? No ones talking about that.
I wonder how many people actually change their minds when they see these passive aggressive prompt options.
"Skip trial"
"Decline bonus offer"
"No gift"
Anyways, do you know if it also stealth replaces your offline account if you sign into office, Xbox, etc? I got force signed in once trying to install flight simulator and it took me hours to remove all traces of the Microsoft account. There was literally no way to sign into just xbox to install one game without agreeing to replace my windows local account with a microsoft account, and it proceeded to auto sign me into outlook, one drive and a bunch of stuff I didnt want.
Yeah, that's very annoying, previously I was just removing cookies, now I use one Firefox container for buying Xbox games, another one for Azure, and another for work. Microsoft seems really bad at handling multiple accounts.
Do you mean marginalized as far as the first time setup? Because the first time setup sucks but it sucks on macOS too. Once you're in it's pretty trivial to create local accounts. In fact it's still the same old "Computer Management" if you do it that way.
It surprises and disappoints me to see them making all of Windows Vista's mistakes again.
Four months public beta wherein they fixed almost none of the major problems. Listened to almost none of the user feedback. Massive inconsistencies and half complete ideas abound.
This isn't the worst Windows I've tried, but it is perhaps the worst RTM. If this was still in public beta I'd call it "serviceable" as a daily driver if you can deal with the quirks.
But RTM-ing this? Shipping new computers with an even buggier build than the latest? Ouch. My barely computer-literate relatives should not walk into a Costco and out with a computer with this initial experience.
Do you have any examples of specific things that aren't working for you?
I don't even think Windows 11 is all that different from a regular feature update similar to the ones that Windows 10 has been receiving for years now. It has the Windows 11 name because some visible UI changes have been made. Other than that, it's really the same OS as Windows 10 in the grand scheme of things.
Heck, Microsoft probably just fell into "doing whatever Apple is doing" by moving their OS from version 10 to 11 just because that's what macOS did.
> I don't even think Windows 11 is all that different from a regular feature update similar to the ones that Windows 10 has been receiving for years now. It has the Windows 11 name because some large and obvious UI changes have been made.
So it is just a regular feature update except all the big and breaking changes. I feel like this is a point that defeats itself.
> only thing about Windows 11 that resembles Windows Vista are the vague complaints
I was specifically referring to Microsoft shipping an OS that didn't have enough time in the public test phase and thus shipped with bugs/quirks/issues. That could refer to both Vista and 11.
> If everything else was the same and this was a Windows 10 feature update instead of "Windows 11"
I'd instead be lambasting it for both its bugs/quirks/incompleteness AND how inappropriate it is to ship major breaking changes in a feature update.
To be honest the argument that Microsoft ships feature updates this bad is inaccurate but also quite funny as a "defense."
I think you've posted the wrong link by mistake. This one is just a bunch of people saying "it's not ready" and "who moved my cheese". What are the bugs?
Not that your IT department will be letting you update today, but something to look forward to is that Teams in Windows 11 uses the shared Edge WebView runtime (replacing Electron), which means it takes around 50% of the RAM it did in Windows 10.
Also, WSL graphics support (which isn't coming to Windows 10 for some reason), winget has been moved to stable (that is coming to Windows 10), and Windows Terminal is included in the box (but doesn't replace the cmd.exe or powershell.exe terminal emulator for some reason).
Neither cmd.exe nor powershell.exe are terminal emulators, rather they are both shells / scripting languages. The legacy looking crappy terminal window is usually conhost.exe.
Windows has a console interface unlike that found on Unix, using APIs rather than escape sequences to interface with the console. Also, its console implementation was historically coupled tightly with the conhost.exe application, which historically is both the terminal emulator and console endpoint simultaneously.
The blog series centered around
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-command-l... is the best resource I've found online that discusses Windows' legacy console support as well as some vision of how this subsystem has changed in the years since.
These changes improved OS interop, but also de-couple the legacy crap so that third party terminal emulators can be better supported on Windows generally (separating the console endpoint from the terminal display), allowing for the creation of `CreatePseudoConsole()`.
Prior to this, third party terminal emulators that wanted to support Windows apps had to run the legacy conhost.exe and shove the window way off the desktop (to hide), and then scrape the window for its contents. This is/was required so that the app has a console backed by a conhost.exe process (responding to the console apis). `CreatePseudoConsole()` fixes a lot of that mess.
Ahhh, yeah; keen on the new term. The WSL window support looks great too. I develop in Linux VMs, but my host is Windows 10 pro. Been sticking with vbox this far.
The hosts of popular gaming channel Linus Tech Tips challenged one another to switch to Linux. Maybe Windows 11 is so power user hostile and Steam Deck is the push everyone needed that 2022 will finally be the year of Desktop Linux?
I think what’s different now is that way more “mission critical” software is now web/Electron based. The lock-in just isn’t as strong as it used to be.
Yeah. 10-15 years ago, I remember that a few things were keeping me on Windows - gaming, some killer apps (iTunes support, OneNote for note taking, best in class MS Office support), and general hardware support.
I now look at my Windows taskbar or macOS dock and there is pretty much nothing that I can't use on Linux. I guess there's no official Google Drive desktop client yet but there are other solutions people have recommended to me. My Spotify/VSCode/Obsidian/1Password critical stack works just fine on any platform.
I think the Steam Deck will be successful using Linux but that's because it's a device designed for a specific use. As a portable device designed to play games through Steam it will excel, because Valve has put a lot of effort into making gaming on Linux "just work."
As a general purpose desktop OS Linux still isn't there for most people in my opinion, as much as I want it to be. Every so often I try to make the switch to Linux full time and there's always some hitch that pushes me back to Windows. I don't even mind digging around and making changes in conf files if it will fix the problem, but I always encounter something that I consider a deal breaker where I hit a brick wall and just can't figure it out.
The result of development driven by "group studies" and "user feedback". When you conform to the ideas of the most basic users, you get a system unfit for those that that are not browsing Facebook and playing Farmville.
Windows lost 10% market share to mac and Linux since 2019. Microsoft should be firing more people and having singular leadership in direction. Make something for the developers, the graphic artists, the people that need their operating system to be apart of their work, not hinder it.
This falls on deaf ears of course, Microsoft is far from saving unless something significant of top leadership gets the boot and somehow attracts a new visionary that isn't already working in greener pastures.
Welp, I guess it's not for me. I'm unable to upgrade my Microsoft Service Pro (2017) as the CPU is not supported. Which is odd, the CPU is more than capable and all the other requirements are met. I get the feeling of planned obsolescence.
Same, I have a i7-6600k that should be more than sufficient (there are people that have upgraded with that processor), but I really won't bother. I've been toying with the idea of going Linux full-time again. I've done that 3 times in the last ten years and I really would like to just do it once and for all. Problem is there's always something small and nagging or an update that breaks something that worked and I was back on Win... The Linux experience is just not as polished as Win/Mac unfortunately :/
So the Microsoft product managers got bored with the current iteration of the start menu, and decided to feed their fetish by redesigning it again, and calling it a "new era for the PC". It's like watching a mid life crisis unfold.
In Windows 11, when you click the start menu, a rhombus stretching from the bottom left to the top right appears and the menu selections bounce around inside it like a DVD screen saver.
While on one hand I definitely stand corrected and not really floored that they decided to go against this, I don't know how marketing wouldn't have the foresight to see that a never-changing number would keep themselves evergreen. I mean, Apple still numbers the iPhone (as do other brands' flaghsips) to ensure people quickly know which one is the newest. Whereas Windows hides this designator (e.g. 21H2) behind a few clicks.
My anecdotal experience with 11 is it seems fine.
- My mechanical engineering applications have no issues, I can do my job.
- It defaulted to focus mode so there's been no distractions so far while I'm working.
- Not finding any friction with the OS yet, just nice touches with UI and an overhauled settings menu that seems fairly intuitive.
- The "Start menu" search seems to work much better and has always been my primary interaction with the OS, I never navigate, setup your index locations correctly and you'll never go back.
Notes:
I had switched to Edge back when it became Chromium based. Privacy aside, it's not IE and it works for me.
I don't tweak the OS unless there is friction with getting what I need done, if my apps run it's doing its job. If I need extra functionality then an application is responsible to add it, not the OS.
If you're trying to do something dramatically different to how the base OS works then obviously its not the OS for you, if you have no choice then try working with the OS and not against it. If you're trying to run old applications based on old APIs then you need an old OS don't expect them to always work in future.
A lot of complaints seem to sound like people who want to use a linux-based OS but for some reason refuse to?
I'm also curious what customisations are being made, are they actually functional or are you just spending too much time on r/unixporn and trying to make things pretty, please elaborate on your griefs.
Basically a TPM chip can be used a secure key store. This allows to use digital signatures to check if the boot chain, kernel or modules have not been tampered with.
I'm almost glad my PC doesn't support it. I have zero reason to upgrade my current setup, it doesn't look like a decent upgrade - and I'm spending most of my time in Linux based systems anyway. This might just be the push I need to just wipe this horrible software from my computer forever.
11 feels like XP with a new skin. I think they are shell shocked from vista and will never make drastic changes again. I don’t blame them vista was complete disregard for existing apps.
> I think they are shell shocked from vista and will never make drastic changes again.
Did you ever use Windows 8? Because that released in 2012, just 5 years after Vista. Drastic, un-asked for changes that ruined the user experience; hideous tablet/touch interface that was mostly unusable; sub-par touch/app development model that no one adopted.
Basically it was another Vista-like release all over again.
...and basically lose your user base - especially corporate - altogether. The ability to use existing software, often developed in-house or bespoke at "we don't want to go through that again" prices, is what keeps Windows going. Break that and nobody has any good reasons to stick with Windows anymore.
I didn’t say you needed to get rid of windows…they can keep it steady and incremental like they are now. Have a parallel OS that pushes boundaries and can truly innovate!
This may sound goofy, but at least 50% of the reason I personally switched to full-time Linux this year was the shock of terror I experienced when reading about the “no more moving the taskbar” thing. As a die-hard “taskbar on-the-side” guy (mostly because of all you kids and your big widescreen monitors!) the thought of not being able to change that filled me with just enough horror to finally migrate to Fedora earlier this year. Couldn’t be happier so far - honestly I wonder now why I didn’t do it sooner.
We’ve improved the experiences for touch in Windows 11 when you’re using a tablet without a keyboard. You’ll see more space between the icons in the Taskbar
What if I'm NOT using one?
Thank you Microsoft, for taking away even more customisation, dumbing down the OS to new levels, and shoving more adverts in our faces. Now people have even more reasons than before to try Linux or macOS.
A new era for the PC begins today
You're right about that --- an even more locked-down and user-hostile (all in the name of "security", of course) era begins.
As a long-time Win32 developer who started writing utilities for DOS and then moved to Win16 for a short while, the direction that Windows (and the PC platform in general) is going is really sad and horrifying to see.