Am I missing something? Microsoft literally won’t let me upgrade because my fully functional processor is deemed to old for them. Of coarse the adoption rate is low if they start by excluding a good portion of their user base.
I don’t even understand why they make that distinction. I recently bought a used notebook with Windows 10 preinstalled that can’t be upgraded. But if you just boot up the Windows 11 ISO it works fine without issues from there.
Granted I don’t know why someone would want this; I was genuinely surprised when I noticed installation without a Microsoft account isn’t supposed to be possible. Then you get that system that just feels sketchy to use, Teams in autostart, online services in your menus and all that. And that’s just the stuff you can see. It’s a total disaster in my opinion. But it went downhill ever after Windows 7 as far as I can tell.
Because Windows 11’s primary new feature is SOC level DRM. Old CPUs don’t have the hardware. Obviously MS won’t advertise this, so they end up making vague arguments that Window 11 is “better” but never really elaborate.
Because Windows 11’s primary new feature is SOC level DRM.
Can you please what this means in idiot proof terms?
My pet theory is that it’s to throw a bone to OEMs. They came out saying “oop, 7th-gen and older Intel chips won’t work, guess you’ll just need to buy a new PC!” until someone over there noticed that their still-for-sale (at the time the requirements went live), few-thousand-dollar PC (the Surface Studio 2) was a 7th-gen chip so they made eventually an exception just for that one. Because “reasons”.
It baffles the mind. I have a brand new system, newest generation 7600 Ryzen processor, AM5 motherboard, plenty of ram, decent graphics card.
“Your computer does not meet the minimum requirements for Windows 11”
It’s almost certainly bugged somehow, but I’ll take it as a compliment, I’ll never willingly install that OS regression anyways…
Windows 11 has one specific limiting feature that drives me bonkers and it’s not being able to click the clock in the bottom right on a secondary monitor to pull up a calendar. Windows 10 has this, why remove it?
It’s a miniscule but good feature
It seems like they are going out of their way to remove good features. Like they removed the option to right click the taskbar and open task manager. They since added it back, but only because of user demand.
They have removed quick access to disabling the network, seeing and changing ip settings.
I can’t remember all the annoying issues, but there’s a lot.
I hate that it has become a general thing to ruin user experience and possibilities of customization. Google is doing the same with android.
My biggest issue is that you can’t open new file explorer tabs in the same window. So before you know it, you have 10 different file browser windows open. It wasn’t a Windows 10 feature either but there was an extension called Qtabbar that allowed it. That doesn’t work on Windows 11. So I’ve been using free commander as a work around. It’s annoying though.
Seems like a lot of stuff like that though. At this point I only use windows to play games and I want to interact with the OS as little as possible, so I don’t understand why I would want an updated UI with more ads and Microsoft integrations when it does nothing to improve what I actually use it for.
At launch you couldn’t even have that clock on the second screen, they added it back partially in an update, non-clickable.
And win11 is filled with this sort of thing. It’s the worst update windows ever got, except maybe for winMe - which I don’t recall that well.
VISTA comes to mind when i was getting more into computers. I missed XP so bad. Then 7 came out and it was great!
My minor but really irritating gripe is the unmovable taskbar (which I’m not sure if this has changed or not), I’ve been a top taskbar person since xp and it doesn’t make sense to me to remove a feature like that. Apparently there are Reg hacks or third party tools to do what I want but I really shouldn’t have to resort to that Imo.
I have tried a reg hack, which worked pretty well, but it kept resetting after every update. And changing the registries I did (don’t recall which I changed or if they still work.) also came with some annoying issues, like window preview still show on top of taskbar (so outside of your screen) among other thing.
I also preferred to have a smaller taskbar which is also no longer possible.
So I have given up and resorted to a bottom taskbar on autohide. But even that has some wonky interactions, with for example windows + tab, where there is a nice shade behind your different virtual desktops, but it stops at the original location of the taskbar.
This was linked as an answer in an Microsoft answers thread with this being the thread in question. Honestly I have no idea why it was removed, and I’m pretty simple with a top taskbar. I know a few people who use side taskbars pretty heavily.
From a technical perspective, they didn’t remove it or any of the other missing features from the taskbar since the win11 taskbar was built from scratch without any of the old code for 10. For whatever reason, that feature wasn’t prioritized in the new taskbar build so it wasn’t built yet, or they didn’t want to add it.
I still think their decision to not allow the new taskbar to be placed on the sides or top is really stupid though, as someone with a 32:9 monitor, I’d much rather use some of my horizontal space for taskbar rather than limited vertical space.
Why would I upgrade to an OS that pushes ads on my login screen and start menu? Some software forces me to keep a windows machine around but I’m certainly in no hurry to upgrade from 10 to 11.
Because eventually you won’t have a choice. That’s how Microsoft works. Newer versions of Office come with slightly different file formats so people using older version have to upgrade. There’s no plugin for new format or just degradation of the document when opening. They outright refuse.
Microsoft pushed Windows7 in similar way. New version of DirectX supported only Win7 and not older versions, even though there’s no reason not to from a technical point of view. But new games supported new DirectX only and if you wanted to play better shell out those bucks.
In the end, biggest enemy to any paid software is not open source competitors, it’s previous versions of their own software for the very same reason you mentioned. Why would anyone upgrade if all they need is already there. Most people don’t need all the features of Office apart from different fonts and sizes, perhaps occasional table.
I’m still using Windows 7 in my home computer, for gaming no less, and only recently did some games come out that don’t support it and the only significant push to upgrade is the upcoming (end of year) end of Steam support for it, which is just going to make me use my Linux partition for games more.
Roughly only in the last 2 years have I started to have any inconveniences from having Windows 7 - basically the latest KiKad, for circuit design, doesn’t support it, so I kept using the previous version which has very rarelly has forced me to go find component and footpads which I would otherwise have already in the latest one.
The point being that if Windows 7 only started to get incovenient to use (both for gaming and professionally) well beyond not just Windows 8 having been launched but even Windows 10 having been launched, it’s reasonable to expect that Windows 10 will still be fine for use for many years.
Let’s see. Its full of ads, spyware and the ui is a complete mess.
I can’t imagine why people a digging in there heals
I am on Windows 11. The UI has been more consistent than 10 ever was and I am curious where the ads are.
The ‘news’ thing in the taskbar counts, I think. As does the recommended apps and preinstalled candy crush. It’s looking less and less like a professional tool nowadays.
You can hide the news button on the taskbar and I uninstalled all of those extra, pre-installed, bloat apps. My taskbar looks just as clean as it has for the past 20 years.
Too many features that I use daily as a Sysadmin are missing to consider w11 as anything more than a PITA currently.
At home my PC hardware is fully capable but my HDD will need a reformat, so I either rebuild my system from scratch (not gonna happen any time soon) or fork out for yet another HDD and transfer tools.
So it’s an imposed cost for little benefit and a whole mountain of inconvenience.
I literally disabled my TPM chip to prevent w11 force installing itself. Management forked out for a new fleet of w11 machines and staff are straight up refusing to move off older slower PC’s to avoid w11.
W11 needs a solid 12 months of re-adding existing features to be worth looking sideways at.
I hate that I can’t have labels in the taskbar. Really slows down my workflow
Do you mean these taskbar labels?
I bought a new laptop that came with 11, I haven’t had any super annoying issues… Actually the preinstalled Samsung apps are more annoying than anything OS related… But to be fair, when I was setting it up, I looked into how to do it without connecting to a Microsoft account - it’s possible but takes a little work. I wonder if that is the difference…
I mean… Full of Ads seems a bit exaggerating… And I have seen much worse UIs on Linux… The spyware part nothing to say, plenty of telemetry and other stuff so yeah…
Full of Ads seems a bit exaggerating…
One is enough. Especially considering it’s a paid product.
And I have seen much worse UIs on Linux…
This is like saying “Motorcycles are better, because I’ve seen some terrible car designs”
plenty of telemetry and other stuff so yeah…
So as long as many people do a thing, it makes it ok, ya?
Well both are operating systems just putting an example that I have seen plenty worse. And no it is not bad…yeah there is always something that could be better but come on if it was that terrible it wouldn’t be used by millions of people everyday without massive issues.
And for the last point to be clear I was agreeing on the spyware in case it wasn’t clear. I wasn’t saying that it was ok I was saying that yeah it’s true it has plenty so nothing to say on my part.
2 years is plenty of time to see where linux support is. We should have a good idea by then of where gaming and streaming quality stand for the foreseeable future.
Most of my PCs will easily go to linux, the big question is whether to suck it up and upgrade my gaming rig to 11 or just switch everything to linux.
Switching to Linux is a pain, but its a pain once, staying on windows is the pain that keeps on giving
That’s hardly a Linux-specific problem. There are plenty of Windows problems I’ve encountered where running some random dude’s registry update script is the recommended answer. If you are running anything with Admin / Root rights in any OS you had better understand what you’re doing.
Lol fwiw one thing ChatGPT is shockingly great at is Linux troubleshooting for some reason. Google first but if you’re stuck paste in that error code and see what it advises you to do…its been my savior a few times!
Gaming is much better on Linux thanks to Steam, but having lots of problems with more recent games and their cursed launchers. I try and remember that Gen X had to figure all this stuff out with early versions of Windows and I should resurrect the same determination that got me through back then… but I’d be lying if I said it was easy.
I totally agree, I just cba. I have too much going on in my life to start from scratch like that again, and windows is just easy now. I hate the whole drm model, but like most people, I’ll live with it unless Linux finally becomes an easy, viable alternative that’s supported to the same degree as windows and feels just as easy to use.
It really depends on the games you play. The thing is, you need to be really honest with yourself in regards to what you play and how far you’re willing to go for the ease of use. Most, if not all games that don’t require invasive anti cheat will just work,there are outliers like media foundations cinematics that just don’t work without protonGE, but even that’s not really a problem and getting smaller and smaller with every proton update. Are you comfortable installing the heroic games launcher from a terminal if it’s not available in your software center? If so, then that opens up a whole new library of games to play from Epic and GoG, if not then use a distro that has it preinstalled.
The Linux community will make you think it’s an easy transition, and for the most part it is, but as someone who moved to Linux full-time and has been running only Linux for about 6 months, there are still hurdles to jump over, it was about 80% click install and play, and the other 20% was troubleshooting and trying different versions of proton. I’m willing to live with those odds if it means complete freedom of my computer and cutting all ties to Windows. If I want to play games that have anti cheat though, I either have to use GeForce now or use my consoles. However, increasing support for crossplay makes this a non-issue in most cases.
I do hope you make the jump, it’s pretty clear the path Microsoft wants to follow and I don’t want any part of it, neither should anyone else. We’re in sort of a golden age of Linux gaming right now thanks to Valve, and the momentum doesn’t seem to be slowing down thanks to the steam deck.
I don’t really play any anti-cheat multiplayer but I do play some AAA with DRM like Assassins Creed.
I’m fully comfortable with linux to the degree that I can start with a TTY and set up my own GUI with a window manager (though I prefer to just install a DE.)
Proton has been hit or miss with me on my laptop: sometimes the game won’t load, or it’ll load but the graphics will suck, or it’ll run nicely but all the good mods aren’t supported. That’s what I mean by seeing what the state of gaming is in 2 years: at that point Steam Deck and Proton should be pretty mature.
Outside of that, the Windows streaming apps support 4k but resolution is generally limited in the browser, though I suppose I could use my tv’s streaming apps. I’ve used my work software on my linux laptop so I know that’s a non-issue.
At this point, I don’t have a push to switch, but I’m not really excited for 11 and I might have to reinstall anyway to upgrade because apparently the Windows 10 install didn’t leave Windows 11 enough free space at the start of the disk or some bullshit. And if I have to reinstall anyway in 2 years, I’ll probably just do linux.
If your laptop is Nvidia unfortunately it can be hit or miss and that’s just the nature of Nvidia on Linux right now. If you have AMD and in some cases Intel, you’re set and there’s minimal to no setup required.
My one game that isn’t fully supported (with mods and add ons) is FFXIV. I’m not switching until ACT (DPS parsing with packet capturing as a windows firewall) is supported. All my others mods for FFXIV are supported very easily it seems.
Why in the world do you need packet capturing for an MMO…I can understand DPS meters and tracking, but surely there’s an addon that works.
I’m playing a heavily modded skyrim playthrough, 1 click button with wabbajack. There’s support for it but… Not much. I also play FFXIV, half support again. PoE works fineish and Bg3 works somewhat. League works? Not as straightforward when I last tried it. Modded D2 works somewhat but it needs to be configured. Last Epoch worked iirc but I haven’t checked, and their game needs heavy optimization so I’d hold my horses if what they do can be applied to Linux too. I haven’t tried dark souls but that shit lags on any Windows machine so it’s basically a 1 to 1 port lmao.
As you see, all of them are -ish experiences. It’s always googling issues, checking compatibility… I just want to game man.
