The world's worst kept secret is has been outed, with Bill's boys in Redmond confirming Windows 11.

There is a bunch of features being covered online and it doesn't look terrible.

No doubt trog will avoid updating until the oldest legacy version of Windows falls out of support; what about you guys? Will you pay fiat for it? If offered an early access discount or freebie will you take it up?

Personally, I'm kind of knuckles deep with MS, being a 20 year partner and full stack .net developer, so I will probably grab the first official insider build and give it a run.

yer, ill be jumping on board as soon as i can

Windows 10 is a bit schizophrenic but I love the weird little guy anyway. I certainly don't have any problems using it though.

Last time I tried a stand alone Linux desktop distribution the UI and desktop completely fell apart after about 15 minutes.

I then went and installed HiveOS for the job and was much happier. I feel like Linux is amazing at lots of specific roles (Web servers, routers, mining rigs, controller logic etc etc) but my experience with it as a general desktop environment has been universally poor over 30 or so years now.

I have a two year old top shelf Dell XPS laptop and it has been a chore. I believe a lot of my problems are specific to Dell so I get that it's probably not necessarily a Windows 10 thing, but even as someone that has a vague understanding about COMPUTARS it's hard to not correlate. Also the biggest problem is laptop-specific - this is the first time I've ever had a laptop as my primary work (and play, after my desktop GPU died a couple months back) machine and it fkn sucks.

None of them are really showstoppers except for the first two.

- Until literally last week, I've had constant but random problems with the laptop sleeping. It wouldn't sleep - it would look like it did, but then it would just come back online after a few seconds of appearing slept. I tried a bunch of different things which seemed to work for a bit then stop. After finally spending a few hours diving into it last week I figured it out - Dell and MS have collaborated to make it s***, basically. Now I have working S3 sleep but it's not as nice as the other one. This doesn't sound like a big deal but sometimes I'd put my laptop in my bag thinking it was off, get on the bus, get home, take it out and find out it was hot as the surface of the sun and battery was almost flat.
- the system randomly locks desktop, like Win-L locking. This happens in the middle of games, watching shows, typing emails, whatever. Totally random and can't trace it back to anything. (I stopped for a Dota game while writing this and it locked mid-game.)
- just ghastly horrible control panel stuff which has 1/10th the functionality of the old control panel. Sometimes it has an 'advanced' menu option which opens the real old control panel so you can do stuff but otherwise (at least in Home) feels like a totally crippled OS.
- the generally flat design is par for the course these days but f***** sucks and feels like MS threw out 40+ years of interface design and HCI research. Trying to read dark grey text on black background in the stupid new Settings stuff and wondering what is clickable is a grind (maybe this is just a defect of 'dark mode'?). slightly related I thought this was pretty funny/interesting.
- another 'dark mode' defect(?) is Explorer with a black background does a weird quick white paint each time you bring one to foreground. It literally feels like it's a really quick hack and is really distracting
- BlueTooth support is s***e. This is really the first time I've ever used BlueTooth seriously so maybe it's always this bad? I just bought some new BT headphones and after a few sleep cycles of the laptop, BlueTooth simply stops working, and Windows thinks the Bluetooth radio "device has been removed". Only fix is a reboot (and even that doesn't seem to work for some people.)
- seem to have regular problems switching audio out from speakers to (wired) headphones and have to do this manually more than I would have thought.
- this is my first time with a 4k monitor but the pixel scaling stuff is almost comically bad when you're switching between 2K/4K modes or moving applications between them. I dunno if other OSs are this bad.
- just dead set dumb s*** like not being able to set a folder containing folders of images for backgrounds, necessitating annoying processes like this to do really basic stuff - something else that has changed at least once since I first installed so the old method no longer works
- in the last few months(?) you can no longer do a new install without a MS online account?! (I just read you can ALT-F4 at that stage of the install and it skips it but haven't tested it yet). I think this is mostly a Home limitation?

None of these are unique. If you search for any of them there are thousands of the usual forum posts with people desperately trying to find a fix. See my comments in that WP post as an example of a thing that changed several times over the course of a couple years and has required constant adaptation for something that is an absolutely bog-standard core thing and absolutely is critical in a laptop.

Ironically I haven't had problems with the Windows Updates stuff force rebooting me but not sure if that's because I'm pretty paranoid and reboot immediately anyway or if they kinda fixed that.

The biggest positives I've found so far:
- cmd.exe supports better copy and paste
- Latest version of Lightroom works (f*** you Adobe, there's zero reason I should need Win10 to run it - it works on Win7 OR Win10, but not 8.1?)
- new PowerToys - FancyZones (a tiling window manager) is very nice

I haven't tried WSL yet - I have too many Linux VPSs to manage so I haven't found the need, but I am keen to try it as it does sound cool. What else am I missing?

not sure what you are talking about with control panel, mine is as full featured as any windows os.

where do you go to change settings? [What's left of] Control Panel or the stupid Settings "app"?

If you're lucky, there'll be a link between the two and Settings will open the relevant Control Panel. Or there might be a helpful message in Control Panel telling you to f*** back off into Settings (e.g. Control Panel -> Device Encryption, which, after an inexplicable pause of about 4 seconds, gives you a screen saying "go to Settings" - not even the courtesy of a link to click on.

(Also I just noticed but the Control Panel background colour does not match dark mode theme and is white instead)

The whole thing feels so half baked. I feel like you guys are all using a totally different OS to me or just way more tolerant of little bits of s*** like this

Oh s*** I just realised that you mean that the classic (legacy) Control Panel doesn't implement the new UI's dark mode preference. Mine doesn't either, all there in its tidy whitey 90s chic glory.

I'm almost certain that the entire classic Control Panel is currently in maintenance mode so changes to the new UI won't be reflected there.

Sorry I just didn't connect those things as an expectation, my bad lol

Sounds like his Dell has piss poor AHCI/APM and some mild gfx issues

Definitely Dell is suspect here but MS have been complicit (I don't expect you to read the full history of this dumb sleep issue but they deliberately added then removed some functionality around Hybrid Sleep). Just annoying.

I'm almost certain that the entire classic Control Panel is currently in maintenance mode so changes to the new UI won't be reflected there.

Yeh I figured that was the case. I don't mind them wanting to make a new piece of s*** Settings panel for idiots or people on phones or tablets or whatever, but it should be a layer on top of the previous power control panel, at least until they get to the point where the new version has at least the same level of functionality as the old one.

flat design can f*** off, it's just s*** everywhere

Ironic I know (it's WINDOWS ffs) but the drift to cmd line for admin tasks has been a thing for years now in the server OS, with the ui more of a collection of status screens and simple interfaces, the Real Work being done via Power Shell.

I don't mind PowerShell but just haven't had enough of a use case to get proficient with it. I tend to do bits and pieces in it when required and am always impressed at how deep the integration goes, and usually slightly annoyed at the verbosity and surface complexity. I know everyone that groks it properly loves it but I don't do enough general Windows stuff to need it.

I did have a use case for WSL a couple days ago and set it up and it is pretty cool!

Windows 11 allegedly supporting Android apps would be a big deal for me.

Have been chewing over this one as being a dirty .net hoe I obviously have opinions on Windows.

Right now my computers explodered though so I'm dealing with that. Plan is to fire up the Enterprise Edition during the rebuild, I want to confirm some things before I chat more :D

Read the 'something something hyper-v' bit for you. WSL uses Hyper-V and uses special powers to unlock the feature when installed onto Windows Home, which normally does not allow a tier-1 hypervisor to run.

Virtualbox is incompatible with the situation where it can see Hyper-V running but can't use it, and seems to lack a force-tier-2 mode that it normally falls back to, so just falls down in a heap.

Your core problem here is that you are using Windows Home to do serious dev business. Its in the name of the product, is intended for web browsy facebook office apps style usage, not OS virtualisation. Until Virtualbox patch for Home+WSL you'll probably have to revert.

found a new package manager for Windows recently. before i used chocolatey which was ok but a change is as good as a holiday, so winget got the job. the cmdline integration is all really smooth and while not as robust feeling as a systemd package manager for Linux it’s maintained well enough at GitHub to be good enough for Windows without having to go all WSL tendrils.

Windows 11 alright. can it just NetBoot from a UEFI prompt and not need installing by now please ?

What did you replace Unity and Visual Studio with?

Read the 'something something hyper-v' bit for you. WSL uses Hyper-V and uses special powers to unlock the feature when installed onto Windows Home, which normally does not allow a tier-1 hypervisor to run.

Virtualbox is incompatible with the situation where it can see Hyper-V running but can't use it, and seems to lack a force-tier-2 mode that it normally falls back to, so just falls down in a heap.

Your core problem here is that you are using Windows Home to do serious dev business. Its in the name of the product, is intended for web browsy facebook office apps style usage, not OS virtualisation. Until Virtualbox patch for Home+WSL you'll probably have to revert.

yeh it's just a bit annoying that I've been running VirtualBox flawlessly for 2+ years on this machine and setting up WSL seems to silently break it. Feels a bit victim-blamey to blame it on Home vs Pro. (I have been wanting to upgrade to Pro for a while anyway but now I kinda feel obliged to see how far I can push Home - it looks like you can install full HyperV with some command line f*****y so maybe I'll give that a go :)

MS will cheerfully put up multiple obstacles in front of my face to make sure I really want to install Chrome and am I sure I don't want to try Edge? But when it comes to crippling some other application I don't even get a README with a warning! (note: I didn't read any of the readmes so maybe there is a warning and it's all my fault)

The slightly weird thing is that my Ubuntu VM seems to actually boot up just fine, it just dies when starting X. If I switch to console everything else seems to work just fine? So actually it probably would do for my purposes anyway as I barely use any desktop stuff in it, I just want some console-based dev stuff running.

My 2c. Linux is the future of OS. Checkout Pop_OS and Elementary for slick looking Linux OS.

I try to run an Ubuntu Desktop every year and every year I get about 10 minutes in before something drives me mad with frustration because it simply doesn't work.

well, you have no idea what my day job is or what my technical requirements are - so I don't really feel like you're qualified to give me advice about what operating system I should be using? FWIW my "consumer Dell laptop" is the single most expensive PC I have /ever/ bought, owned, or used (edit: I actually mostly bought it so I could play Dota while I was seconded to a company in HK for 3 months!) . What is a "non-consumer Dell laptop"? Or do you just hate Dell

I generally don't like giving Microsoft any more money than I absolutely have to; Home has met my requirements for two years and continues to do so. The only reason I really wanted to upgrade was for more BitLocker controls, because they are gimped so hard in Home. (Also feels weird for someone telling me I should be using Windows for dev in 2021 given I am usually the only person in a room wherever I am on a Windows PC because every other technical person is on a Mac but we probably at least agree those people are potatoes).

I'd also note that MS make the difference between Win10 Home and Pro as opaque and obscure as f*** in almost everything they write these days - also having to deal with OS release numbers to find out if something is compatible is some f***** dumb Linux s***:

"To update to WSL 2, you must be running Windows 10.
For x64 systems: Version 1903 or higher, with Build 18362 or higher."

Outside of "you need Service Pack 2 installed" I don't recall ever having to deal with this many layers of complexity to figure out of Windows software is going to run.

Anyway I uninstalled the WSL virtualisation stuff and now VirtualBox works exactly as it did before. I'll prolly stick with this until this distro breaks in a couple months because of some dumb Ubuntu update and then I'll try WSL again (I kinda got jacked off with WSL because the clipboard didn't work seamlessly between host/VM and I couldn't figure out how to fix it in 5 seconds).

edit: maybe we should just start talking about why Windows 11 is going to be better, aside from the Android thing I posted not sure what other compelling reasons there are going to be to run out and upgrade

I've had one BSOD that I can remember since late 2013, which was when I got my last desktop PC (Win8.1). I took a photo of it it was so unusual - woulda been around late 2016. I'm sure they still happen but they must be pretty closely linked to bad hardware these days?

I've not been a huge fan of Windows since Windows 8 onwards, though Windows 10 was a huge improvement on 8. Windows 7 was good, Windows XP was good....Windows 10 I've had to live with, it was OK. Mostly I hate the skitzo UI in Windows 10 and the s*** they keep jamming into it. Not sure what I think of Windows 11...my time is spent 60/40 between Windows and Mac and on the surface (haven't not directly tried it) it seems like Microsoft is going down the Mac path with the new Windows 11 UI/experience. On top of that their focus seems to be more toward a mobile driven experience with the UI (e.g. these are changes being made to suit touch users vs. normal people).

Finally had some time to look into the "random" locking and realised it wasn't random at all, it was exactly every 30 minutes. Once I figured that out it was easy to discover it was just a typical run of the mill 6 year old bug in the lock screen slide show thing. Was frustrating as it was intermittent; only seemed to happen after my system had been online for a long time, which it wasn't usually until I started using it more often.

^ pretty much agree with everything you said, except that while I do have the same problems with fixing dumb Windows s*** (like the above thing I mentioned), my issues with desktop Linux exceed the Windows ones in both frequency and scale and general annoyance. e.g. there's almost always some fix for the problem but it's inevitably for some specific distro or tied to some package or driver that I don't have for whatever reason.

I try to install desktop Ubuntu every year to see how it goes; last issue I had was the trackpad on my machine (very old, like 2012 era Dell XPS) was super flaky - like I couldn't click and drag at the same time. I think I fixed it in the end but it was one of those annoying basic problems that have to be fixed before you can do anything else.

I am increasingly likely to jump ship to Linux after Windows 10 if it can play Dota 2 though

Let me know if you want to know anything about 11, have been on it for a few weeks now on my main doing things PC and despite some things that s*** me I prefer it to 10 now.

Interested in the highlights; no idea what differentiates it at the moment

UI stuff is so hard to express in words but I'll give it a go. Maybe should have just done a video oh well.

I'm subbing in Server 2019 Standard pics for Windows 10 out of laziness. I didn't bother with the Start Menu changes because its hard to hear about the new OS and not know what they did there. If you're incapable of using the internet let me know if you want a rundown of that too I guess ;)

The Settings sub-system has been completely reworked. Its mostly for the better imo, in particular in terms of UI flow and context.

Windows 11 Enterprise
https://i.imgur.com/3oQIVMW.png
Server 2019 Standard
https://i.imgur.com/vAgZVj4.png

They removed this right click taskbar menu altogether:
https://i.imgur.com/tIxNAIa.png

It now just shows a menu that only takes you to the taskbar settings 'page' or whatever you call that. If you have a habit of right-clicking empty space on the task bar to bring up the menu for opening the Task Manager you'll probably wand to start memorising ctrl+shift+esc or the ctrl+alt+del menu. There may be a small number of people who have this habit though and everything else in this menu was made irrelevant with the new Start Menu.

Ribbon UI is gone from the Explorer window, and in general feels less overblown and wanky:
https://i.imgur.com/WYxJpj7.png

Right click menu in Explorer now has a step-down from a core menu to the full regular right-shell menu:
https://i.imgur.com/XEa4xwa.pnghttps://i.imgur.com/qBYnOYl.png

This change (as well as the movement of copy and paste from words to icons) takes a little while to get used to, especially if you use a program regularly that features shell integration prominently.

I expect (hopium?) that you'll be able to customise the top level. 'Copy as Path' is good if you remember its there.

I try to install desktop Ubuntu every year to see how it goes; last issue I had was the trackpad on my machine (very old, like 2012 era Dell XPS) was super flaky - like I couldn't click and drag at the same time. I think I fixed it in the end but it was one of those annoying basic problems that have to be fixed before you can do anything else.

The issue is not distro specific but hardware specific, especially for laptops, the number of different drivers required is huge. Trackpads are at the bottom of the list, even for highly used laptops like Macbook pros, the trackpad is always the hardest to get working proper.

I think the difference here is that those who use linux on desktop have very few issues but as soon as you jump to laptops the issues explode due to hardware.

Installing ubuntu or similar every year or two isn;t going to fix the problem, you need to hunt down the drivers for that particular laptop.

But most citizens these days are on laptops, right? Like people owning desktops is basically limited to gamers these days, and half the ones I know now (including myself, to my shame) are currently on laptops.

That's a really good point I haven't really considered. I wouldn;t say just gamers but for sure most individuals would have a laptop for every day stuff (I know I do!).

The other problem I've had though is - at least with Ubuntu and Debian - doing dist-upgrade has brought back old problems that I thought I had resolved. So if I want to try to keep my distro up to date, I seem to run into a whole set of new problems in between major releases. I don't really want to have to do a fresh distro install every major release.

Nah, never do a dist-upgrade unless you're after a must have feature or something is fixed in the next version. Find an LTS version to stick to.

I think the linux-nerds preferred laptops is Lenovo, especially the Ideapads, they work great:
https://support.lenovo.com/au/en/solutions/pd031426-linux-for-personal-systems

I got an older ~2017 IdeaPad from my brother last week, installed Linux Mint 20 LTS. I was super surprised that everything worked, including the hotkeys for changing brightness, backlight for keyboard, wifi etc. The trackpad was functional but not great.

For my line of work, having a linux machine is essential, much easier than windows that's for sure. The latest macos big sur update is a nightmare walled garden experience for trying to install anything outside of the norm. And now that windows 11 is going down that route...

The future looks really promising for linux, with Valve's Steamdeck + Proton running on Arch Linux for gaming, Framework laptop and PinePhone for highly modular devices running linux, linux first laptops and a really healthy OS ecosystem, it's the golden years!

edit: Checkout System76 and Tuxedo for linux laptops. No personal experience but lots of love from the reddit linux community for these two.

Anyone been following linus' challenge? Thoughts?

Only a tad. It's done well to highlight issues with linux but I thought the views of his counter part to be much more rounded. A lot of issues Linus faced were kinda dumb and a quick google gave the solution. Also their use case is extremely niche, gaming is one thing but streaming ontop super niche. Linus complaining that certain software wasn't available on linux (again very niche software for streaming) was annoying.

Overall I think it was great to see huge players branching into linux.

Linus from Linus Tech Tips, a Youtube person.

He and a co-worker decided to roll Linux for a month on the personal PCs and uploaded their experiences.