I am so out of the loop, I don’t have any windows computers anymore which means I don’t get to try Windows 11. The last windows I used was Windows 10 years ago just after upgrading from Windows 7 and I didn’t like it.
- do you have it already?
- what are your thoughts?
- did MS do well?
- is it fast, does it feel lean or bulky
Maybe I should try it out just to get a feeling for it, I think without knowing what most people will use I can’t talk about alternatives with them.
I used it on a virtual machine when it was still being prepared by Microsoft. It ran well. I always install from scratch and typically only install MS office, so it felt roughly as lean as Windows 10 does.
Big problem: every computer in my house that was capable of running Windows 10 is flagged as not capable of running Windows 11, including virtual machines. All of them. There’s a huge hardware upgrade push this time around. TPM and Secure Boot settings are only part of it - there’s a minimum processor generation and I would also need to expand the virtual hard drive size of all of my virtual machines.
For my use case, it makes more sense to keep using Windows 10 for software that I need for my business and to focus on chipping away at that increasingly-small list. I’ll probably buy a new family laptop in a few years designed to run Windows 11. Everything else in the household will be strictly Debian/Arch-based by then.
Ah that’s interesting, a big push for new hardware. Probably for performance reasons? It’s sad since the older hardware could run a leaner OS totally fine
Not for performance reasons, really. Windows 11 looks and feels a lot like Windows 10. There are plenty of processors that won’t be supported that can outperform a lot of processors that will be supported. It isn’t about pushing graphics or running high-performance software. The TPM and Secure Boot have to do with security and encryption. There are other ways to do encryption, but this is what Windows is choosing. The other requirements (generation-based chip cutoffs) seem to be largely arbitrary.
Ah I see
None of this stuff matters if your plan is to buy a new computer that is designed to run Windows 11 from the beginning. I’m just chiming in as someone who tends to buy power-efficient computers and use them until they break down. The upgrade path is a bit murky this time around.
I could change some EFI settings, buy a wifi TPM dongle or two and change some registry settings to force Windows 11 to install on a few of my computers, but Microsoft is not guaranteeing to update computers that are on the edge of acceptability. I’d rather pare down my windows boxes and start fresh with a new one a few years from now.