Where I live (in the USA), they are still building new gas stations. Are they expecting the government to bail them out? What kind of business person sees the impending end of fossil-fuel cars and builds a gas station?
Some things that have caught my attention & made me buy a 2nd hard drive to eventually get around to installing v11 & dual booting. I don't trust 11 based on what I've heard from friends, colleagues & Microsoft's multi-decade track record of rotating between a solid OS & experimental OS not ready for production.
* Dev Drive - faster partition of your drive made specifically for software dev work. Also attempting to create a nice widget screen for GitHub & others.
* Apple iMessage Connection - Ability to send messages from your Apple phone. I've heard this is missing a lot of necessary features though & is really 1/4 baked. A lot of that may be due to Apple more than Microsoft.
* Live captions - haven't tried it but sounds like Windows 11 will create captions off any audio played, even offline. I love Edge's read aloud mode & reader mode. Windows is winning the accessibility game in my opinion & I'm not a person that requires these to function. They just improve my life. Another accessibility feature is voice typing via a shortcut. I probably won't use this often but nice to see & may come in handy on a laptop for me.
* Android Apps - haven't tried it but sounds like Android apps work in Windows now.
* Different backgrounds on virtual desktops. I'm hoping there is other improvements to virtual desktops. I'm a huge user & I rarely see the background but I'm glad to hear they're dedicating time here.
* Test the different AI features they come up with.
Better memory management. Seems to be handling the same workload with less swapping than window 10. Did an in place upgrade so my workflow and setup was exactly the same.
Developers should appreciate the upcoming Dev Drive [0] feature which allows you to disable many of the file system filters, thus improving performance for large repos.
Has anyone been able to come up with a real-world benchmark showing a performance difference? My understanding is that the effect of the new scheduler is almost unnoticeable.
In any event, no new OS features are worth dealing with nonconsensual ads popping up whenever I move the mouse the wrong way.
It will run but you won't get the full benefits of the split between performance and efficiency cores.
Looks like I was a bit wrong in my earlier comment, they have recently updated Windows 10 to support the concept of P/E core differences, but the way they assign processes to specific cores in Win10 is very unsophisticated compared to Win11.
Windows 11 task scheduler talks directly to the Thread Director, a microcontroller added added on gen 12+ CPUs, while Windows 10 scheduler was modified after release to account for them through collaboration with Intel.
According to both MS and Intel, thread scheduling on 10 is not as optimized as on Win 11.
According to benchmarks (typically games), performance is roughly the same. Most wins go to Windows 11, some to Windows 10, but within negligible ranges of difference to where it doesn't matter on either. That was reason enough to stick with Windows 10 on my 13600k i5 build still.
There's nothing in 11 that makes it compelling to me, and there are a few things that make it worse. In other words, it's pretty much like most other Windows updates of late.
Your mileage may vary, of course. There are new features that might be of value to you.
Per recent announcement, Windows 11 is going to have Windows Copilot. Windows 10 - I doubt it. This alone is convincing enough to me - and it's also the only reason I'm considering downgrading my Windows from 10 to 11.
Considering how miserably bad GPT is at writing Powershell scripts to perform functions in Windows, I wouldn't hold your breath on it being truly useful.
Forget code. This is not the Github Copilot, aka. ol' completion model powered autocomplete. I'm talking about Windows Copilot, i.e. something more like Bing Chat, except it's fully, deeply integrated with the OS. See the demo video. It's not meant for techies like us to ask it to write PS scripts for us. It's for any user to be able to ask "how the fsck can i make the text smaller?", or "where the fsck did my document go?", or "what the fsck am I even looking at?", and the Copilot is supposed to tweak relevant system settings for you, find and arrange windows, summarize or edit documents you have opened - and suggest what software you could use or install (this is where monetization will enter the picture) to do the thing you asked it how to do.
(Also, I found GPT-3.5 helpful with PowerShell; didn't have a reason to try out GPT-4 on PS yet).
Copilot is supposed to tweak relevant system settings for you
That was my issue. I don't know whether ChatGPT was giving me instructions for the wrong version of Windows or just hallucinating solutions, but things as simple as "Can I write a script that, when run by a shortcut, toggles the desktop screen resolution between 3840x2160 and 1920x1080" and the output doesn't work. Then you tell it it doesn't work and it does it entirely differently, and that doesn't work either. If ChatGPT has no idea whether what it says works, will Windows Copilot? I have my doubts.
the Win+. emoji/special characters board is substantially less usable. this has been my only, yet biggest gripe so far. it was nice to be able to hit Win+. then type "heart" and get, y'know, the heart emoji, to send my wife—no idea how the Windows 11 one shipped given how unusable it is.
For specific emoji, and other characters/sequences, you use regularly you could use something like WinCompose (other compose key tools exist, this seemed to be the best of them at the time I was last looking) to setup shortcuts.
You don't get the search functionality though, so it is not useful for first time use of a character or discovering “new” ones.
I tried to go to their site to look up a drug that my spouse takes - you can't look up prices without signing up and you have to give them your phone number...NOPE!
Liquid soaps are a poor choice from an environmental/cost standpoint. Most of the soap goes down the drain and is wasted. Bar soap stays on your hands and last many times longer.
That may be the case now, but liquid soaps revolutionized laundry when they came to be. Washing clothes with bar soap is a royal pain. Powdered laundry detergents really didn't start to catch on until the 1940's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laundry_detergent
Also, washing machines didn't really start to catch on until the mid 1940's, prior to that it was still pretty much scrub boards. Scrub boards are bad enough with liquid soap.
I found soap nuts to be the cheapest, most eco-friendly, and reasonably efficient detergent there is. Just drop a bunch of soap nuts in a cloth bag into the washing machine, and it produces enough foam to make everything clean.
I immediately thought of this one. Perhaps more useful to the 99% of us who dont work with SMD. I am sure the 'detector' would provide amusement to a few people.
I'm pretty sure more than 1% of electrical engineers have worked with SMD - they're tough to avoid these days, unless you are strictly doing microelectronics, or a power engineer bolting things together with bus bars.
Dave Jones is a riot, his videos are equally hilarious and informative. If you're interested at all in modern electronics I highly recommend giving them a watch.
Looks like that Adafruit ruler is a branded version of the PCB rulers that are all over eBay. They all have the same design with the phrase "one PCB to RULER them all" on the back.
Given how prevelent these rulers are in the industry, it seems a little disingenuous for the article to make it sound like it was dreamed up from scratch. More like “this type of ruler is a good idea, we should have one of our own”.
This is not as good as NVidia ruler, unfortunately. From one of the Amazon reviews:
its neat, not as neat as the nvidia ruler that my boss showed me, i bought this one on a wim after my boss showed me the one his son got from nvidia, the nvidia one had alot more stuff because it was a 12" ruler, i either neglected to see this was a 6in ruler, but im pretty sure it didn't mention it before, it does now, but i got it and was totally disappointed at the tiny ruler..
FYI, we're a long time Linux shop (mostly Ubuntu server) and are slowing moving away from it because I don't like the direction it is going (systemd, etc). I've got more than half of our systems on FreeBSD/OpenBSD now.
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