Microsoft is releasing a big Windows 11 update on September 26. Update 23H2 includes the new AI-powered Windows Copilot feature, a native RAR app, a new volume mixer and a lot more.
Gonna get downvoted to crap for this, but what the hell - hi, it’s me, I’m that one guy who actually loves Windows a little more with every release. I’m continually surprised by the good stuff that’s baked into the OS now (e.g. Much better multi-monitor support) and how the real power users can do a whole load more besides with Powertoys (key remapping!) - It’s really encouraging to see that I need fewer and fewer specialist programs to get Windows to work just how I want.
I’m not wildly sold on AI being baked into the OS, but what the heck - Microsoft have earned their goodwill from me in recent years. I’ll play around with it with interest.
I was like you until windows 10. I opted out of that. It just felt like losing control over my computer. Windows 11 even more so.
I’ll be very surprised if AI is actually “baked into” the OS. A client to their cloud AI will be baked in, but that’s not the same thing IMO.
(btw powertoys is great, multimonitor support is great too, if they finally fix the task bar I might finally go to Win11)
A client to their cloud AI will be baked in
That would instantly kill the feature for me. Hope its easy to remove but I know how shitty MS is about getting that data.
You could use things like StartAllBack to bring back the “classic” taskbar and start menu (Windows 7 style) There’s Open Shell and Start 11 too, I don’t use them but they’re good afaik.
I use Start 10. It’s good, and I’ve tried Start 11 on a Win 11 VM, but while it sort of lets you ungroup the taskbar it wasn’t a great experience. I want MS to do it for real.
I was dealing with this yesterday it’s so stupid.
When I press the screenshot button on my keyboard it should only screenshot the display that the cursor is currently on. There is absolutely no reason that it should screenshot the entire display.
Tl;Dr I hate hate hate windows, but 11 is better than 10 (feature wise) and works good for being windows.
When using windows (at work and only at work), I hate it every day. I actively think “I hate windows”. Sometimes multiple times per day. It’s not objective at all (even through there are good, objective reasons to hate windows).
BUT: Upgrading from windows 10 to windows 11 is an improvement (If you ignore all spyware and corporate crap shenanigans). Windows became a little less ugly and does some things that you would previously have to hack into it.
Windows terminal is usable, at least compared to other windows terminals. Don’t get me wrong, it sucks, but it sucks less than many other things. Powertoys is band aid, but that band aid is still pretty useless.
That new AI crap ware is just garbage that is forced on users. I don’t want their crappy “AI” that (in my opinion) highly violates open source licenses (the GPL at least). And I don’t get why they do that too, most people don’t even code, why would they need that copilot crap ware?
Luckily, I might have the option to ditch windows and install a proper OS, only with the cost of being my own IT department.
Honest question: What about the Monitor improvements? Haven’t noticed anything.
I used to have DisplayFusion to customise just how I liked, so I don’t know exactly when a lot of this stuff changed - could even have been Windows 10 - but things like support for different backgrounds on each monitor, ability to indicate the relative heights your monitors are set at so the mouse flows smoothly between them (useful if you have a proper screen and a laptop one for example), mouse will scroll the window where the cursor is currently located rather than the active window as default, easier snap layouts to simulate a dual monitor setup on one…generally it just works exactly how I would expect out of the box.
I’ve been using Linux in various ways since the mid 90s, work has dictated OSX to me for the last decade or so, and I still choose windows as my desktop OS. I use copilot, and it’s great for development, but also great for generating text in a lot of ways. I miss it in my browser when I go to put in a pull request, and I miss it sometimes when explaining blocks of code or giving someone else an outline of how to do something. It doesn’t really lower my need to understand things, but it just speeds up the most mundane parts of the job. If ‘having it in the OS’ means it could fill in those bits, I’d wish even more I could use windows for work.
It’s great as a dev platform with WSL2 a great experience, VS codes built in remote server, native first class hypervisor support (with competent virtual networking). I know IT admins still hate it, and I’m sure a lot of the things that don’t affect me still suck, but they are building a good user experience.
