I've been using Windows 11 without much complaint since its release, but off the top of my head, I can't name a single "feature" that would motivate me to upgrade if I were on Windows 10, besides "continued support."
I have a number of laptops and desktops around home, and I mostly cannot distinguish between the Win 10 vs Win 11 ones - except, Win 11 is more annoying. The inability to move taskbar is one, but they've also removed a lot of keyboard shortcuts for common desktop and file explorer activities for no reason I can discern. So I'll type up a shortcut, nothing or bad things will happen, and that's my clue "oh yeah, this one is on $#&@ Windows 11" :-/.
Also when I need to configure something, like sound or network or power options, it seems like the number of separate windows in different styles to hunt through keeps proliferating.
When unplugging and plugging back in external monitors it moves windows back to the same monitors they were on before unplugging them. This is probably the most significant QoL feature.
The control centre generally feels better than Windows 10, except for switching sound outputs or getting to the volume mixer, which require too many clicks.
The settings app is a little more cohesive and has had some more control panel functionality transitioned into it.
Nothing they couldn’t have fixed in Windows 10, but it is overall better for me due to the above.
My new-ish work laptop runs Windows 11, but my personal desktop for gaming on a 6th gen Intel doesn’t meet official requirements. It has TPM 2 though, so once October arrives I reckon it’s better to run Windows 11 in a “technically” unsupported manner rather than stick with an OS which is no longer getting updates (and no, I will not switch to Linux as I’m not looking for another hobby).
> (and no, I will not switch to Linux as I’m not looking for another hobby).
Respectable. The state of desktop Linux is pretty good but it's very much a 'your-mileage-may-vary' situation. Every 'exotic' thing you introduce into your setup (having a variable-refresh-rate monitor, having an HDR monitor, two monitors of different refresh rates, running Wayland over X11, having a brand new GPU, having an NVIDIA GPU) is another possible, sometimes likely, source of pain.
Some of the multiplayer games I play with my friends can be played on Linux, but I make a point of using my Windows partition for those because I don't want to waste their time on my troubleshooting.
I know ya crapped on Linux but Pop! OS is pretty great. It's the only distro to play nice with my Nvidia graphics out of the box. Multi monitor support is great. I even use a weird docking station and it works just fine. Steam works great for like 70% of games.
Win11 gave me tons of sound and Bluetooth issues to the point it felt like Linux alsa issues from 2010 or something.
I still have my win11 install on another partition but I rarely use it now. Just for niche stuff.
> When unplugging and plugging back in external monitors it moves windows back to the same monitors they were on before unplugging them. This is probably the most significant QoL feature.
Sometimes. Sometimes it does. It's all very random. My work laptop drives me nuts, when plugging back into the dock my windows return to where they were about 3/4 of the times. A quarter of the times they just all bunch up on the main monitor.
On my laptop, it doesn't nag me, but it does nag my son sometimes when he logs in. My son is not admin, so I don't know why Windows bothers non-admins with this.
At least I hope non-admins can't upgrade, but knowing MS, maybe they can.
That happened to me as well. I get told in the windows update dialog thing to check if I am windows 11 compatible, which I pass but I still don't get Windows 11 offered.
It might've been backported at some point, but for a while if you wanted to get the most out of an AMD Ryzen 7xxx, you needed to be on Win11. Generally about an 11% performance improvement.
The big feature I miss was taken away in Fall Creator's Update --- styluses working as styluses and selecting text, as opposed to being dumbed-down to an 11th touch input.
Basically GPU access in WSL was the only feature I was interested in, but I find the forced onedrive to be super annoying etc, etc. I’m considering paying for the long term version of Office for each of my devices just to not have their stupid cloud features.
I'm looking forward to the better window placement snaps. I plan on buying an ultra-widescreen monitor the day that work upgrades us to Windows 11. Manually positioning windows for a monitor that size is frustrating in Windows 10, you pretty much have to disable all the snaps because they work against you snapping windows into undesired sizes if you come close to the edge of the screen.
I hate all the advertising and spyware, so I'll never run Windows 11 at home, but we have a whole team dedicated to disabling that sort of stuff at work, so I don't have to think about it.
Microsoft solved it on Windows 10 already with their own extension called PowerToys, it adds a really powerful window management extension to windows and it's completely free(plus a tonne of other very useful utilities).
See if your work place will let you install PowerToys, which includes FancyZones. It’s a Microsoft power tool (not third party), so they might allow it, and it has much better window snapping.
The better Window snapping is great. Explorer can open folders in a new tab instead of a new window. The snipping tool shortcut (win+shift+s) automatically saves screenshots you take, instead of showing a notification you have to click. The snipping tool can also record videos, can do OCR and can take delayed screenshots
When I had the choice I still went back to Windows 10.
But auto-stretching windows to the screen's height has somehow turned into a frustrating game of mousing over a 0.001 pixel sweet spot at the top of the window. Maybe there's a hotkey for it though.
I'm predominantly a Ubuntu / Mac user (roughly 60/40).
My Windows machine has seen an uptick in use over the last months for development purposes, but it's still stuck on Windows 10. I don't think I need or want to upgrade it.
Two questions:
- Do I need to upgrade it?
- How do I get comfortable with Windows shell? PowerShell doesn't do Unixisms. There are too many shells. Command Prompt / CMD, PowerShell, there's some utility that installed mingw64 terminal, and WSL is also a thing. Which one(s) should I use?
I'll expand on my shell question: The thing I'm struggling with now is that when I install utilities like git, cargo, etc., they seem to work for some shells but not others. They seem disconnected and not have the same access, visibility, and privileges. What can I read or do to get me over this hill? Which one(s) should I use? (I assume "CMD" is dead?)
I'm doing mostly Rust / TypeScript development on Windows, FWIW.
Windows 10 will go EOL in October, so you should probably try to upgrade sometime before next year.
The first rule of PowerShell is to install the "real" PowerShell [1] instead of using the one bundled with Windows (which is out of date and importantly doesn't interoperate as well with non-PowerShell commands). I still don't like it, it's way too different from UNIX shells, but at least it's usable.
CMD hasn't gotten any improvements since like 1995 but it isn't going anywhere either. If you need something vaguely like a UNIX shell and that's always available, it's not a bad choice.
WSL2 is fine if you work mostly within its environment, which is made easier by things like VSCode's Remote extension. However, accessing Windows files from within WSL2 is surprisingly slow, so you really want to commit to it if you start using it.
I'm doing Rust on Windows too and apart from installing the MSVC tools and a compatible version of libclang, and occasionally figuring out how to write PowerShell, it's not been too much trouble. WinGet is pretty good and the library has quite a large selection of development tools.
> Windows 10 will go EOL in October, so you should probably try to upgrade sometime before next year.
That's the current plan but it wouldn't surprise me if they change their mind given the large Windows 10 install base still out there. They've done that before with Windows XP and 7.
I personally will never migrate to Windows 11, EOL or not. I'll keep using it for games that I can't get to work under Linux even after it is EOL, until Valve stops supporting it for Steam. At that point I'll delete the partition and never look back.
Agree, I use both Mac/Windows a lot and I feels like Apple usually has a couple OS features that make me want to upgrade whereas windows there's nothing
-The absolute crap of a start menu now being all but useless
-Advertisements
-Increasingly forced to online accounts rather than local
Also the UI changes didn't improve anything, and the changes make upgrading more painful and frustrating than needed. One thing OSX has got right it doesn't keep making major surface change every upgrade.
Paying? I believe my Windows 10 got upgraded to Windows 11 for free. IIRC this OS install that I'm using originally started as a Windows 8 and I didn't have to pay to upgrade it even once, but may be misremembering...
