Windows 11 - Full production release - Easy upgrade, no problems - and no thrills.

[muslhead]

R U using Google Chrome? with AdBlock+ to eliminate ~98% of the ads and bugz too?

and only having google track everything you see, do, and desire? whats the difference?

 

[mhardy6647]

PS: I really think they need to monetize Calc. Maybe charge a monthly subscription. Or some pop-up adds. Put a news feed on it. I'm sure they are working on that idea , as I type.

A monthly subscription. Genuis!

 

[Doodski]

and only having google track everything you see, do, and desire? whats the difference?

I figure there are so many users of gOOgle stuff that the huge amount of data becomes a fog, a mist, a huge expanse of data that can only be used for general purposes because to isolate specific users would require too many resources. Maybe I'm dreaming and maybe not but my life is on google at this time so it better be safe.

 

[anmpr1]

If i had strong negative feelings about Windows i would surely switch to a different OS, after all there are good alternatives.

I used linux exclusively for about 10 years, it's still my favorite OS because of it's customizability, but eventually i got fed up with the recurring manual maintenance. I used OSX for about 4 years but it wasn't for me, i never really felt at home in their philosophy. I've also used Chrome OS devices for a few years which were pretty nice, and i have a large Android tablet with keyboard that is surprisingly flexible and powerful, i could technically use that as my sole machine.

On my main laptop i switched back from linux to Windows when Win10 arrived with WSL and it just worked™, i haven't really felt the need for anything else since.

However if things started annoying me greatly or breaking all the time, then surely i would just move again to one of the alternatives, instead of going online and complain about Windows not being what i want it to be. That just feels like a waste of time and energy.

Life's too short to spend your time complaining instead of just fixing the things that bother you.

First, pointing out problems in something is not 'complaining instead of fixing'. I don't know why you would think that? And even if it was, fixing is not an option. How can anyone 'fix' something like Windows? The source code is proprietary, and hidden.

A 'waste of time and energy'? In fact, the entire premise of ASR is to 'point out' shoddy engineering, or good engineering, as the case may be. Is that 'complaining'? Is that a 'waste of time and energy?' If criticizing an engineering project (even if it is the 'human engineering' of a user interface, one running on probably 90% of the desktops in the world), is a waste of time, then I suppose that criticizing someone who is criticizing it in the first place is doubly wasting their time?

Second, WSL (I presume you are not talking about the World Surf League, but that would be less ironic, if you were) is an interesting thing. It is a 'good thing' on its face, however we must remember how it was not that long ago when Steve Ballmer was telling anyone who would listen to him (and he was hoping that everyone would) that Linux was a cancer. He used those words. At the time, as you also no doubt recall, MS was accused of 'backdoor funding' what was left of the old Santa Cruz Operation, in their attempts to shake down (i.e., destroy) Linux, in the courts. Linux survived no thanks to MS, but rather because of IBM, Novell/Suse, and Red Hat. If it was up to Ballmer, there would be no WSL. But you could still surf the North Shore, so you'd have that going for you. LOL

The mainstream press (ZDNet, PC World, and even the generally helpful Tom's Hardware) have all panned the Win 11 user interface (among other things). Were they wasting their time?

What they won't do, however, is get Nadella on the horn and ask him a few simple questions. Ask him why MS continues to muck things up so badly, when they really don't have to? Ask him what's the reason for it? Or ask if there even is a reason? Maybe, if they did, and if he had the 'nads to respond, he would just say, "If you don't like it, fix it if it bothers you. Or migrate to OS/2. Or build your own OS." Or maybe he would just say, "I have no idea. It's just the way we roll. Why don't you get a life? Why are you bothering me with stuff I don't care about?"

 

[litemotiv]

@anmpr1

Perhaps you didn't realize before but Every OS Sucks, it's just a fact of life.

 

[storing]

WSL... is a 'good thing' on its face, however we must remember how it was not that long ago when Steve Ballmer was telling anyone who would listen to him (and he was hoping that everyone would) that Linux was a cancer

Can you elaborate, what do you mean exactly? Do you think WSL is going away? Do you think MS is leveraging it to kill Linux?

In any case: whatever nonsense came out of Ballmer's mouth once, for a lot of usecases the thing works very well and on top of that they nailed remoting in VSCode. Sure I don't like that at all that most of this is closed source, but from a practical point of view: I can now run a rather mimimal set of non-interactive commands and get a pristine environment which gives ok-ish graphical editing and debugging for ensuring correct cross-platform behavior for my C++/Python/C#/PS code. Instead of keeping a separate machine or logging in to another machine or dual-booting or using a VM. Which more ofthen than not doesn't function in a 'just works' way, on the contrary. So yeah, sometimes I don't really care what other divisions of MS and their probably grossly overpaid yet incapable management are doing to Windows, nor care about what Ballmer said. But I'm still curious to what you mean

 

[pseudoid]

Those were the days before copy protection, and there was no on-line activation. My first Win 3.x experience was installing colleague's copied floppies. I think there were six Win 3.x floppies.

just for the benefit of those ASR peeps who haven't a cloo as to what "floppies" were or what a "copy protection" is about; please observe the 2 images:

History class is over!

 

[litemotiv]

I still have these in my closet

 

[muslhead]

I figure there are so many users of gOOgle stuff that the huge amount of data becomes a fog, a mist, a huge expanse of data that can only be used for general purposes because to isolate specific users would require too many resources. Maybe I'm dreaming and maybe not but my life is on google at this time so it better be safe.

for most, i think you are probably right. Count me out of Google and Apple and ....

 

[pseudoid]

Count me out of [g]oogle and Apple and .

I wanted to give you a half-thumb "Like" since I had two issues.
The "[g]" should always be lower-case ("@@" for "oo" for extra points).
The "Walled Garden" really is NOT a bad thing for those who do not know where the 'hood latch' is or have no time or inclination to find out.

 

[anmpr1]

Perhaps you didn't realize before but Every OS Sucks, it's just a fact of life.

Well, that may or may not be true, but I'm not arguing that. What I am arguing for is to not make your system worse than what came before. Try not to take two steps back for every forward step. For crying out loud, if you can't make it better, then at least keep it static.

Can you elaborate, what do you mean exactly? Do you think WSL is going away? Do you think MS is leveraging it to kill Linux?

In any case: whatever nonsense came out of Ballmer's mouth once, for a lot of use cases the thing works very well...

WSL is MS's admission that they couldn't control the entire market, and have therefore decided that to a large part it is in their best interest to work with folks who might see things a little different. That is a good thing for MS to understand. But how many times do they have to (re)learn that lesson?

People tend to forget just how contentious the situation was. God knows how much time, effort, and money was spent to sort it out. And I understand there are still some straggling remnants out there, awaiting a final verdict on some loose ends. It all came to a head with the 'SCO v Rest of the World' litigation. Literally the world. Almost everyone and his brother was involved in that. IBM, Novell, Suse, Red Hat, Daimler/Chrysler, AutoZone. SCO even, early on claimed that the GPL somehow violated the US Constitution. I mean, with all this happening, it wasn't just Steve Ballmer that was jumping around like a lunatic, probably!

If that had worked out differently, if SCO had been judged to own the Unix source code and copyrights, and if (as was alleged) Unix code had been introduced into GPL'd Linux code, in violation of SCO's copyrights, then the current Linux landscape would certainly be completely different, than whatever we have today.

FWIW, I think Win 11 is at its core a very good OS. It is stable, it appears to be pretty easy on resources--it is at least as quick (subjectively) as any Windows that came before it. I have no problems advising anyone to upgrade to it, from a strictly hardware functioning standpoint. Once more, what I just don't get is why they have to muck with the formula. It's the little things. Someone should really ask Nadella, or whomever is responsible for these decisions, about it. I'd personally be embarrassed, as a CEO, to release something less user friendly than what came before.

 

[anmpr1]

"It's the little things you do that make me love you", is something no one ever said about MS Windows. How they completely muck up what used to be so simple.

Since I complained about the 'context menus' in Win 11, it is only fair that I point out the 'fix'. Kudos to the good folks over at Tom's Harware, for figuring this out...

The most annoying feature of all is the truncated context menu you get when right clicking on anything.

In Windows 10 and prior, you could see all of your options right away, but in Windows 11, it shows you just a few choices and then makes you click the "Show more options" link to see them all. That's an unnecessary extra click that you may end up making quite a lot.

Fortunately, there's a registry hack that gives you back the full context menu. Open the registry editor and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\CLASSES\CLSID\ then create a new registry key called {86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}. Then add a new registry key called InprocServer32 under that. Finally, open the (Default) key in InprocServer32 and set its value to blank. As always, with registry key changes, you'll want to restart the computer to see the changes.

Well...I guess. Any time you have to dive into the Registry in order to fix something that should never require fixing in the first place, you pretty much know all you need to know about 'user experience' and MS. I'm still torn: A) are these people incompetent when they create an 'upgrade', or B) do they do what they do on purpose, just to 'muck' with their users?

 

[pseudoid]

The most annoying feature of all is the truncated context menu you get when right clicking on anything.

I finally relented and upgraded to Windows11Pro, in our NUC8 and NUC10. I was mostly worried about my network/server 'stacks' getting mangled during both these hands-off upgrades. Zero snags.
My 'most annoying' issues are just a few:
*Microsoft still has not figured out how to fully integrate my old-and-trusted ControlPanel with the sucky 'Settings' doodat.
*I also wish the FileManager was really a FileManager and not some discombobulation, sometimes called MyComputer, other times called the Explorer or wutevr... IMO it should be called the Titanic, as it is bloatware barely afloat...
*Last one is Microsoft messing with the working TaskBar capabilities (no left/vertical position), just to feel like cheap/imitation iOS designer suit... jeeez!

Thank you for that "truncated context menu" reg hack; I had noticed that truncation and had probably cussed it out and moved on.
Surprised that the "registry" has not gone under the witness protection plan fully and still available for the old timers.
Has the PowerShell improved much in Win11?

 

[anmpr1]

My 'most annoying' issues are just a few:
*Microsoft still has not figured out how to fully integrate my old-and-trusted ControlPanel with the sucky 'Settings' doodat.

I could tell from Win Tin Ten that 'Control Panel' was effectively on the way out. How did I 'know' that? Simple. MS never wants the user to be in control of anything.

I wish that was just a bad joke on my part. But it's the sad truth.

 

[storing]

MS never wants the user to be in control of anything

Depends on the user: e.g. powershell+WMI+registry let's you control pretty much everything there is to control; there's so much more than what is in Control Panel let alone the new Settings crapp. But the latter is aimed more targetted for 'dumb' users who just want to tweak look and join a network, or something like that, you get the point. And the users in between are sort of left out. It's not that there is no control, it's just that some manager decided it mut look different, well, because.

 

[pseudoid]

let's you control pretty much everything

True! but if one must order who got the most "control", I would categorize it as follows:
Linux >> Full Control
Windows >> Much Control
Apple >> Some Control
gOOGle+Android >> User is nothing but a data point... or two.
Raspberry/Arduino >> DIY first and then go hunting for code!

 

[bravomail]

True! but if one must order who got the most "control", I would categorize it as follows:
Linux >> Full Control
Windows >> Much Control
Apple >> Some Control
gOOGle+Android >> User is nothing but a data point... or two.
Raspberry/Arduino >> DIY first and then go hunting for code!

from my playing with CoLinux (driver for WinXp which loads Linux via Virtualization) and pUbuntu (Linux version which worked with CoLinux), and then trying to run my favorite Linux (at the time - PuppyLinux) - with Linux u just hit certain wall and cannot proceed.
There r such walls everywhere in Linux, so I eventually gave up. I'm using highly hacked WIndows 10 machine.

 

[phoenixdogfan]

My newest PC is a 2014 vintage HP Envy with a fourth generation HP 4720 HQ I7 Haswell processor and 16 gb of DDR3 memory and a Samsung Evo 250 GB SSD. It's wicked fast and runs Windows 10 Pro just fine. Does everything I need it to do as a home theater PC and daily internet browser, and with quiet setting and a very quiet fan base/platform runs quietly in a closed equipment cabinet.

Apparently it's too old or something to upgrade to Windows 11. Just as well as far as I'm concerned.

 

[pseudoid]

Apparently it's too old or something to upgrade to Windows 11.

This has been in much discussion elsewhere and briefly here at ASR.
I have a Z170 Asus Premium MoBo w/TPM but Windows has changed their mind TWICE about being unqualified, then qualified then unqualified again. GO figure! But there are work arounds which I will not exercise until I find a suitable work-around (an app?) for Left/Vertical Taskbar. YMMV

 

[storing]

with Linux u just hit certain wall and cannot proceed

Can you give an example? Is this still about ability to control, or perhaps rather not getting things working? In any case: *nix isn't exactly known for this. There are however problems for which the solution requires climbing over 'walls' like having to adjust code and compile yourself to get things working.