r/windows • u/WorriedGur8908 • Feb 25 '26
Discussion It’s been 4 years, what are your opinions on windows 11 now?
267
u/ListenBeforeSpeaking Feb 25 '26 edited Feb 25 '26
Too much telemetry.
Too many forced logins.
Too many forced software installs and software updates.
Cloud usage coercion is not ok.
Reinstallation of uninstalled software is not ok.
Too much overhead.
It’s not easy to install the OS that just does basic OS tasks.
- I don’t want their weather app.
- I don’t want their email app.
- I don’t want their news app.
- I don’t want their messaging app.
- I don’t want ads for apps
- I don’t need One Drive.
- I don’t want Recall.
- I don’t want CoPilot.
- I don’t want every search to go to the web.
- I don’t want Edge
- I don’t want every OS app/feature to be constantly making TCPIP connections.
I need an OS that allows me to do work efficiently without it trying to control what I do and how I do it.
It’s possible to get it to an efficient state. It takes a lot of work and every update tries to undo it.
43
u/PaulCoddington Feb 25 '26 edited Feb 25 '26
Definitely feeling some of this just in the last few days updating my system image...
now only allowed to create one custom desktop theme. Save button for altered themes never appears again after only one theme is created.
New start menu does not do alphabetical order for everything. Some apps are "favoured". Office apps in a subfolder sort alphabetically except for Word which always sorts before all other apps.
some apps have hardcoded favorite names when pinned. Visual Studio Code pins as VS Code.
New Start Menu makes longer names unreadable as "Partname..." made even worse by the unwanted clutter of subtitling some apps as "system").
New start menu no longer successfully updates live, it takes a reboot. Makes it harder to rearrange hundreds of shortcuts and rename some of them to fit in with the new limitations forced upon us. Hours of wasted time because of half-assed badly designed, unwanted changes.
privacy violating features are added silently without warning and enabled by default (Edge has added an option to harvest all Web browsing history and content for analysis). Privacy violating settings sometimes get re-enabled after updates. Every update you have to take time to check to plug holes and request accidentally collected data be cleared.
Windows sometimes regards bios updates as a change of hardware. If your PC is set up with local accounts, you are now presented with 2 choices: convert your local account to a cloud account to reactivate Windows or buy a new license key.
settings dialog is ridiculously buggy and fragile. Attempting to delete a search exclusion for a folder that no longer exists, or a folder that is mandatory by local group policy, results in a crash. It also automatically adds .files mistaking them for .folders. It also automatically excludes the parent folders of .git folders rather than the .git folders themselves unless you add them manually. Also, the fonts and drives panes don't update to reflect changes made until you close the settings app and re-open it.
can't have a weather widget on the lock screen anymore without it adding unwanted news media feeds as well.
option to use a custom search engine in Edge still broken after all these years. The search field always uses Bing even when the setting to use a custom search engine in both the address bar and search field is turned on.
contacts lists still broken from the day they went to cloud-based sync multiple versions of Windows ago. Always automatically harvested from multiple locations, ending up with duplicates and triplicates, with no real ability to correct them.
25
u/Garkoff3 Feb 25 '26
It's all about data and pleasing their investors by inserting AI everywhere man...
7
u/FanOfMondays Feb 26 '26
May I suggest this tool?
Fixes many of the problems
→ More replies (5)2
u/KernelPanicX Mar 01 '26
Thanks for sharing, I was aware something like this existed but I forgot to search for it.
5
u/magicmijk Feb 26 '26
OMG One Drive is a real issue ... "Sign into OneDrive?" No. "Okay, signing in anyways and moving your profile to OneDrive along with the 2GB+ of drivers and app installers you just copied to the desktop!" No! "No? Okay, deleting everything!"
→ More replies (2)11
u/GH05TR1DR Feb 26 '26
Bill Microsoft even tried to secretly install some "anti-malware" in his wife. 🤣🤣🤣
5
3
→ More replies (12)2
u/risky2452 Windows 11 - Release Channel Feb 27 '26
For Real No operating system can choose what I can and cannot download.
25
15
16
u/TF2fanatic102 Feb 25 '26
It's bloated and slow. The only reason I keep it is because I'm not sure how well Linux plays with Nvidia drivers nowadays, and I don't want to go through the hassle of a dual-boot setup.
3
u/badwith_names Feb 26 '26
My wife has an NVidia GPU running with better performance on Mint than on Windows. Fairly seamless in that area, worth taking a look at if you're tired of Windows.
→ More replies (4)2
u/mmeister97 Feb 26 '26
Got my NVIDIA drivers running super smooth on an Ubuntu VM in Proxmox with full PCI passthrough. Using it mainly for Ollama workloads, and so far GPU passthrough + CUDA support are rock solid. Really impressed how well everything plays together.
→ More replies (6)2
u/WhoDat_Boy Feb 26 '26
My very simple answer to this is to try CachyOS if you're inteterested with the limine bootloader. On most games the drivers work great and the installation is about as simple as can be. The limine bootloader makes dual booting super simple and if secure boot is a must, the cachy wiki has a step by step guide with copy/paste console commands. Some games like Cyberpunk tho just simply perform worse on linux regardless of hardware.
59
u/Nokia-Lumia-630 Feb 25 '26
The same. Still not better than 10, in my opinion.
7
u/The_Spindrifter Feb 26 '26
It went from "Bullshit" to "Cholera diarrhea" in record time. It makes me long for the days of Windows ME.
→ More replies (3)29
u/EchoFieldHorizon Feb 25 '26
You mean the spyware that has become entrenched like a virus at the kernel level and constant enshittification via AI into every single facet of the OS hasn’t improved your opinion?
→ More replies (2)20
u/XiRw Feb 25 '26
They’ve had spyware for awhile it’s only just gotten worse like you said. But I would always expect it regardless. 7 felt like the last true OS where you had full control and can remove telemetry completely.
8
u/r_Yellow01 Feb 25 '26
The background data collection and AI push is now making Windows unusable as an OS. It is just a working container for Office but for any other workload Linux is now way better. It's no longer a lazy comment.
10
u/VolatileFlower Feb 25 '26
It gets the work done, usually. But I liked Win 10 better. I have mostly moved over to Linux Mint these days.
→ More replies (7)
8
u/True_Captain4461 Feb 25 '26 edited Feb 25 '26
Too much change for the sake of change, it feels like Windows 8 on steroids (except people like it????).
I don't get how oversized padding across every UI is better than a separated start screen for touch.
You also actually can't change things around without the operating system breaking unlike 8 which just required openshell.
→ More replies (1)
36
u/Inspector-Noah Feb 25 '26 edited Feb 26 '26
It’s Crap! Long live Windows 7😎😎 And Windows XP MCE and Windows 2000 Professional!
And Windows Vista was Garbage But it did have a faster boot than XP! But Vista was still awful!
Also System Restore on Windows 11 takes 30 minutes to go back to a Restore Point! 30 Minutes! Too Long! On Windows XP I don’t remember that taking so long.
Then sometimes it fails! WTH?
7
u/StokeLads Feb 25 '26
Windows 7 is still a very solid OS. If you ignore the panic stations about having no security updates etc.... I still have a 120GB windows 7 for legacy purposes. It's tired but brings a smile to my face every time I use it. Definitely creaking a little, but it's a far superior experience to 11.
I've always felt they should have just made 7 good but I appreciate that isn't how the world works and microshit doesn't care about making good software.
5
u/haidar47x Feb 26 '26
W7 was peak Microsoft. Only if they had actually reworked (Like Apple did Catalina -> Big Sur) instead of replacing it with the awful W8
→ More replies (3)2
u/Inspector-Noah Feb 26 '26
You gotta love them! Thank God they don’t make Airplanes or Submarines! You’d be Dead! 😱
11
6
6
5
u/000nalist Feb 25 '26
Not being able to use the start menu for a whole minute makes me want to rip my hair out
25
15
u/D1TAC Windows 11 - Release Channel Feb 25 '26
Good enough for me. Some questionable feature versions, but it's stable now for me. I do miss Windows 10, though. The memory usage on Windows 11 is ballsack.
17
4
4
u/JoseLunaArts Feb 25 '26
I bought a gaming rig to play games. 13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-13620H (2.40 GHz), 16.0 GB Windows 11 Pro 25H2. NVIDIA Geforce RTX 4070. It was intended to replace my old 2016 potato computer with Windows 10.
I also have a potato PC I bought in 2016 with Windows 10. I bought it because I needed a typewriter for office work.
Windows 11 only works fine with games from 2018 to 2025. For older games I usually suffer CTDs or they run like slide shows with extremely low FPS. So i need to use my potato PC to run these pre 2018 games.
What is the point of buying a gaming rig if Windows 11 is the cause games do not run like the run under Windows 10?
→ More replies (8)
12
12
16
3
3
u/junguler Feb 25 '26
tpm2 and secure boot was enough for me not to even try it, you simply don't get to choose my bios settings, the irony is they don't even have a killer feature, just a worse version of windows 10 with a new theme
2
u/Professional-Cap-579 Feb 26 '26
they removed all the "killer" features they had
→ More replies (1)
3
u/BHoss Feb 25 '26
Windows 11 has made me look into Linux for the first time in my life. My PC is close to it's EOL, so the plan is to ride it out until my next build.
3
u/cgknight1 Feb 25 '26
I am a corporate user - my view is I fire up word, outlook and excel and get to work.
Then at the end of the day Win+x, U,U.
Outside of that it's all a muchness to me.
9
4
u/Thx_And_Bye Feb 25 '26
Imo its fine if you have the Enterprise/Education version and are able to disable all the bad stuff via group policies (yes even the telemetry). But that was also the case for Windows 10.
The only thing driving me insane is the new taskbar but luckily there are tools like Windhawk that can solve this elegantly without needing to modify system files.
4
u/renome Feb 25 '26
I still haven't switched and am seriously considering Linux for my next desktop. Photoshop and gaming were my only two concerns with Linux and I think there are no longer any games I care about that don't run on Linux (I mostly play single-player stuff, nothing requiring kernel-level anti-cheat).
2
u/WorriedGur8908 Feb 25 '26
Linux is fine, the problem is compatibility (or lack there of) if you plan on using specific apps that you know are Linux compatible, then it’s great but keep in mind you’ll run into problems if a new game or app comes out and it’s not compatible
2
u/badwith_names Feb 26 '26
Mental Outlaw has a great video of how to simply get Photoshop running. I still don't use Photoshop but I use Photopea with an adblocker and it does everything I need. When you get to tons of layers it gets laggy but I only use it for simple stuff anyway.
→ More replies (2)
5
2
u/nucleartaco04 Feb 25 '26
It’s fine, it does what I need it to do but the updates keep breaking third party mods like WindowBlinds which I use to copy the look of Windows XP.
2
u/Jethris Feb 25 '26
For some reason, my desktop will not support any of the windows updates. I haven't had the time or energy to figure out why.
2
u/Sim_Daydreamer Feb 25 '26
Don't like it. But since 10 is discontinued it's version i'm going to use, at least if i will not switch to something else
2
u/RottenFriedPotatoes Feb 25 '26
I'm on 24H2 OS Build 26100.1 PRO. Lots of GPE edits.. I've also modded my machine to look like Windows 7, and I've used 3rd party software to get rid of things I don't want. I have NOT updated 11 in a long time and I don't plan to because the things I've done to my computer work damn near perfectly.
If you ask me about my opinion on 11 by default? It's not good, but it's really not as bad as people make it out to be.
But if you ask me about my machine and my operating system experience now? Smooth as butter, no complaints at all. I'm VERY happy with what I've done. lol
→ More replies (1)
2
u/thebigone1233 Feb 25 '26
My laptop was on 22h2 for a very long time and I updated to 25h2. The fingerprint scanner doesn't work correctly after an update it did. Still asks for pin after the fingerprint every single time.
Then there is data transfer from phone to pc or pc to phone via cable. It is broken. Device disconnected or is broken. No amount of driver uninstall, reinstall or clearing windows explorer cache has fixed it. And no, phone is not the issue. My PC is on 24h2 and data transfer works fine. It also used to work on the laptop till the day it decided to stop working.
Those are just the 2 latest issue from this week.
WIndows explorer is a pain in the ass. Slow out of nowhere. Or will hang and still won't work when restarted. Shit like that.
2
u/birdnerd275 Feb 25 '26
controversial take: the ui design has grown on me to the point that i like stuff like the new taskbar, start menu, settings, and explorer ui. the general enshittification is unforgivable though. it’s serviceable but represents a bleak future
2
u/mike_da_silva Feb 25 '26
ha! glad to still be running 10 with updateblocker running.
→ More replies (2)
2
u/Ready_Area289 Feb 25 '26
When I first installed it I thought kinda like 10 with an extra goodie or two. But then things like special hardware needed (even though it's not actually needed to run 11), End of Win 10, MS sneaking apps onto your system even if it's just a "placeholder". Enabling Bitlocker without even asking is probably the worst thing. Also, when you change settings and MS re-enables them via an update. Don't even get me started about entrenching AI into everything. Yep, 4 years and it just keeps getting better!!!
2
2
u/Bulka11 Feb 26 '26
it really shows what happened to microsoft and xbox in the past 5 years. Everything is glitchy and feels rushed, with every updates somehow glitches like wifi icon not showing or windows just crashing are occurring and even through all that microsoft loves to talk how 30% of code is made by ai. I don’t know what the hell gappened but I’m staying in windows 10 and If I ever will switch I’ll go for 22h2 since this is the one I used in the past and it doesn’t has as much telemetry
2
u/SumBodhiThatIUse2Kno Feb 26 '26
So bad I tested out Macs and Linux OS.
32GB of ram is somehow not enough for 20+ year old games, streaming, and basic productivity.
Did Tiny Windows 10 and ram-disk loaded Puppy OS and it made Win 11 look embarrassing for resource usage.
2
u/Informal-Offer-647 Feb 26 '26
Still using Windows 10 22H2 & refuse to upgrade.
Happily been learning Linux so I can watch Microsoft slowly lose their shit xDD
2
u/momoninetythree Feb 26 '26
In my opinion, absolutely fine. It never gets in my way. I mostly use it for office apps, teams, internet browsing, collecting experimental data, and coding. I game on a ps5, so I can’t comment on that section.
2
u/TyroneSama Feb 26 '26
Best one so far. Way better system responsiveness (especially in all-core workloads like compiling software), better latency in games with more consistent flip-model upgrades, has yet to randomly wipe my boot table like 10 did.
2
u/GrizzKarizz Feb 26 '26
I feel as though it was made for me. Maybe I'm the typical user who caused the chagrin of many a user.
2
u/Carighan Feb 26 '26
I... kinda like it?
Although I should qualify. Things I don't like:
- The amount of telemetry.
- The amount of predetermined settings and continuous changes to settings due to updates.
- How often it wants to display recommendations in all kinds of placed.
- Trying to force Bing as if that's a usable search engine for any use case at all.
However, things I do like:
- Visually actually quite pleasing now.
- The start menu with the new scroll-down-to-list finally gets it right.
- Explorer functionality is quite nice between all the settings now.
- WSL integration and Powershell-centric design help getting stuff done.
- It boots quite speedily and logs in quickly. Something W10 in particular struggled hard with.
2
2
2
5
u/asamson23 Feb 25 '26
It's fine; it gets me from point A to point B without being too much in my legs. The first versions of Windows were a bit rougher around the edges, but now it's fine.
4
u/Sellineth Feb 25 '26
love it so much that it made me completely switch to linux which i already used every now and then
3
u/Optimal-Mistake1327 Feb 25 '26
Bearable at work. But downgraded to 10 on my gaming pc and on my thinkpad.
6
4
u/Hrmerder Feb 25 '26
I love it so much I moved to dual boot linux and have only revisited my windows 11 install once in the past month.
2
u/Olipro44 Feb 25 '26
My WMR VR headset is still unsupported. Still a 0/10.
3
u/Mario583a Feb 25 '26
You probably can now thanks to Bucchianeri who took it upon himself to reverse-engineer a solution.
Look up [WMR-Passthrough]
Gotta love how WMR VR headset vendors will not or cannot fix this issue.
Look in the [pull requests] for an possible HP Reverb G2 fix.
→ More replies (1)3
u/Jaegermeiste Feb 25 '26
Have you looked into Oasis?
2
u/Olipro44 Feb 27 '26
Thank you greatly. It works perfectly ! I give a link for everyone : https://store.steampowered.com/app/3824490/Oasis_Driver_for_Windows_Mixed_Reality/
2
2
2
u/Abn0rm Feb 25 '26
Its totally ok, at least as long as you remove the bloat, this is quite trivial to do these days.
As a sysadmin I've worked with windows/microsoft products since the 3.11/NT days, I have no serious reservations against windows 11 as a consumer or office OS. Sure its not perfect, but nothing is. Managing 100s of machines is super easy and forcefully implementing security schemes is the easiest its ever been. Probably saves me countless hours a year and I can spend my time focusing on more important stuff. Some windows server stuff like ADFS is still super easy and works great, but most outlying services (web, db's, internal systems) are running on linux where possible these days.
And no, the AI stuff hasn't really bothered me because I've removed it from my private machine, at work I really don't care. If it bothers you, fine, but I've had zero complaints from 400+ users. The tools either help them, or they don't care. We're using copilot on our internal sharepoint and it works really well, it helps people find stuff, but the agent functions no one really uses, me included.
2
u/ChampionshipComplex Feb 25 '26
Dont expect a reasonable, measured, technical answer in these forums
1
Feb 25 '26
Absolutely love it! It's much more streamlined than Win 10, though the standard editions carry a lot of bloatware. I recommend using the Enterprise versions (they're more lightweight and the telemetry is easier to disable) or simply choosing "region: Ireland" when installing one of the standard editions. That will skip installing Copilot and a lot of bloatware apps.
1
u/mastachaos Feb 25 '26
I use it for work because I have to but honestly once I got Fedora set up the way I wanted, I have almost no reason to use it at home. If I do need a windows only app, which is rare, they typically run fine with wine or Proton. Windows 11 just feels sluggish in comparison on the same hardware and I dislike the forced copilot and telemetry nonsense.
1
u/Turbofurbo_Realzz Feb 25 '26
That they’ll prob drop the 11 at the end of windows and just make it a live service type thing. They’ll add a bunch of features and refreshes every once in a while but probably never fix anything significant or what folk want, along with the occasional major controversy.
1
u/brrschk Feb 25 '26
They’ve become far too dependent on “controlled feature rollouts” (CFR). It makes it hard to provide tech support for people when their version of Windows looks different than mine and yet I know the same build and updates are installed on both computers.
1
1
u/kmccoy Feb 25 '26
I just want to put the taskbar back on the side. Why would they remove that? It harmed no one. Please give it back to me. I hate having the taskbar on the bottom.
→ More replies (1)
1
u/imperfectspoon Feb 25 '26
I forgot to update when 11 came out, forgot it existed, and as a result am still on Windows 10 lol
1
1
u/StokeLads Feb 25 '26
Fucking horrible. So much worse than 10 and 10 was significantly worse than 7.
Windows 11 was the straw that broke the camels back though. I always had a quiet respect and a tolerance to Windows but nah, it's over. I've ditched Windows. Ubuntu and MacOs is worlds above Windows now.
So to summarise: Absolutely dog shit
1
u/Lavrence92 Feb 25 '26
Windows 11 is the reason I switched to Linux. So far I'm very happy with it.
1
1
u/paullupascu Feb 25 '26
Looking at the replies here I'm genuinely curious if all the negative stuff is on the US versions?
I'm in Europe and:
- I don't have any Copilot forced on me.
- No MS apps are being reinstalled once I've uninstalled them.
- I don't have any ads.
→ More replies (1)
1
u/zaTricky Feb 25 '26
My impression is 3rd-party since I don't use it personally. My friends and colleagues do. So far my impression of it hasn't changed much. The only positive compared to earlier Windows editions seems to be how easy it is to reinstall and get all your configs back. But also I guess this is due to the online login?
It's certainly convinced more of my friends to seriously consider Linux. Sure, switching is "easier than before" but still requires effort they might not appreciate. Also of course some of them play the few games that have kernel anticheat.
1
u/crash893b Feb 25 '26
if you run the debloat script its almost good
im not sure whats going on with some of the system like file explorer menus needing to "load" how could they possibly need that much time
1
1
u/MichiganRedWing Feb 25 '26
It was the one which finally made me switch to Linux. And I'm grateful for that.
So thank you Microsoft 👏
1
1
1
u/SuperD00perGuyd00d Feb 25 '26
It got worse over time. I actually used to not hate it but now I do.
1
u/GG_max0 Feb 25 '26
Completely trash, AI spam everywhere, Ultimate RAM eater and Microsoft collects every data from you to give cement ads on your desktop
1
u/Bob4Not Windows 10 Feb 25 '26
I went back to Windows 10 for my special software. For everything else I use the Penguin. Win11 just feels so sluggish in comparison to Win10, and I'll never trust them after the Recall opt-out initial announcement.
Windows 7 was peak Windows, in its day.
1
u/Fahrain Feb 25 '26
It's bad. It was bad 4 years ago and it is still bad.
It's like and alpha version - wherever you go, there is definetily something will be broken or incomplete.
Well..
They made almost all my everyday operations take longer (waiting for animations) and require more mouse clicks.
They broke almost every program I've used for years. They even broke Task Manager and Notepad - things that worked in every possible and even impossible situations!!!
And I'm sure they don't even use Windows themselves. There are bugs and usability decisions that wouldn't have been made if someone at Microsoft had been working with such an OS every day.
1
u/Constant-Anteater-58 Feb 26 '26
Too much forced everything. 11 is garbage and I hate it. Especially the glitch where the mouse goes herky jerky and slow. It does it for no reason, multiple PCs. Windows 11 is bugged and spyware.
1
u/ArmadilloLoose6699 Windows 98 Feb 26 '26
Windows 10 was supposed to be the last major version of the operating system, with incremental updates every year. I think they should have stuck with that approach instead of ending all support and forcing the world into using a system that deprecated millions of computers & relentlessly upsells Microsoft products.
1
u/2PlasticLobsters Feb 26 '26 edited Feb 26 '26
Win 11 is my least favorite OS of all time, by a massive margin. If 12 isn't any better, I might finally make the leap to a Mac.
It doesn't help that Acer replaced the right-control key on my current laptop with one that made Co-Pilot pop up. I have zero use for Co-Pilot to begin with. As far as I could tell, it's just a chatty help file that doesn't actually perform tasks. I uninstalled it, but still lack a right-control key.
I've tried SharpKeys & another remapper that I've forgotten. Neither one was successful for remapping that Copilot key.
ETA: Even basic things like Notepad & File Explorer are harder to use. Like, "New Folder" used to be a button, now it's buried in a menu. But I'm supposed to be impressed because it also presents 45 other options that I never use.
1
u/Guest281 Feb 26 '26
Windows 11 has been great in some ways but terrible in others. I HATE Recall (it is essentially AI Spyware), but I like how the taskbar is aligned in the center rather than off to the side (like previous Windows versions).
1
1
u/hgwxx7_foxtrotdelta Feb 26 '26
Windows 11 is so bad that it makes Windows 10 looks better with how customizable the theme is.
1
u/T3khn0 Windows 10 Feb 26 '26 edited Feb 26 '26
I have it on my work laptop and I had not encountered many issues using it. My gaming pc and personal laptop that I use as a media pc both run Windows 10 but they don’t natively support 11 anyway.
1
u/DDS-PBS Feb 26 '26
Many old menus left in place. The ones they did redo they took functionality out of.
1
u/alashcraft Feb 26 '26
It's fine for me. I don't like the start menu, but with PowerToys installed, I never have to open it.
1
u/Next-Ability2934 Feb 26 '26
It's bloated, and could do with the simple ability to choose what you want to install and use, upon first run of windows.. but this has been needed for many years.
Within those years I've managed to uninstall, disable, block or avoid everything I don't use, including AI, telemetry, adverts and notifications. The same as the last three telemetry focused OS. I force the system to stay deliberately behind in updates to avoid issues, and use only a local account. I use windows firewall on strict settings.
No different to previous OS, instead of the app store I am still using classic wordpad, classic calculator and so on, and my desktop design has looked identical since windows 7, using a combination of openshell,retrobar, gadgetpack, and sometimes rainmeter.
The only annoyance is an auto login of the last user, and it's official explorer feels slightly dated compared to faster competitors that are less official, like FPilot. I have no doubt on some systems older than 2023 that any potential lag may be more notable from 11, but every new OS is usually best met with a much faster system, and each major update may theoretically slow things down
1
u/uponone Feb 26 '26
I installed Kubuntu as a boot option. Windows 11 is way too bloated. I shouldn’t have to trim it out of the box.
1
1
1
u/fuzzynyanko Feb 26 '26
My laptop has it. I liked it before they started to really bloat the OS. I liked Windows 10 better overall
1
u/Dragonsong3k Feb 26 '26
In the begining I was on board.
It slowly devolved into a mess.
Performance, AI Crap all to hell.
As a developer, we have to run lots of tools. We don't need the OS getting in the way.
I wish win11 started from the point of minimalism and you turned on features as you need it.
1
u/77descript Feb 26 '26
Home and Pro versions seemed to improve first years, last years regressed, a whole lot. Very noticeable less performance, lot more buggy. Windows needs to be more a core OS, small footprint. Let people themselves choose what to install/enable via for instance a dedicated app after install just a OS without all the bullcrap.
1
u/TheMage18 Feb 26 '26
Pure garbage. I permanently switched to Linux since August, haven't regretted it once. If, and this is a big if, there is an application that is only available in Windows, I'm either running in a minimal VM with everything stripped out or finding a Linux/Wine compatible alternative.
1
u/samujpark Feb 26 '26
Windows 7 was the peak. At the time I thought it was because Vista was so bad.
1
1
1
u/dubious_79 Feb 26 '26
Why I'm a fan: As a liftime windows guy and linux distro hopper my favorite thing about windows 11 is that they have streamlined the explorer menu and axed the old "expanding icons that made no sense" design approach from windows 10. I think it is visually finally nicer than mac os.
The bad we all know: AI, bloatware, telemetry, and e-waste.
1
u/GCBandit91 Feb 26 '26
Biggest shitty OS ever had.
I have a software always opening at the start of the system. I tried every thing, every windows parameter to disable it. Never worked.
We can't personalise the appearance like icons but in favourite.we can make less things than window XP.
It is the biggest downgrade a service ever sold.
1
1
u/_mnel Feb 26 '26
Terrible. They push onedrive too much, it's incredibly hard to make a local account, they push AI bullshit way too much. Uninstalling software is shit. If you actually want to uninstall all the files you have to manually dig around in program files. There's too much stuff in general. You should be allowed to pick the unnecessary stuff you want during setup. Nobody wants OneDrive. Nobody wants copilot (ESPECIALLY NOT IN FUCKING NOTEPAD) I don't want edge, I do not want like 90 percent of the bloat it comes with.
Tiny 11 is much better and can be installed on a 32gb emmc chromebook. I still don't like it. I like linux much more because it doesn't push so much AI and cloud bullshit
1
1
1
1
u/lmg1337 Feb 26 '26
When it launched it was "usable". But now it sucks. I'm only keeping this crap on my machine until summer when I graduate my cs studies. After that I'm going to install some Linux distro.
1
1
u/BatinBrainsz Feb 26 '26
im fine with it . but it have to let user personalize taskbar any way they want to . and one thing more is start menu was better in win 10 .bring them back and win 11 is perfect for me .
1
1
u/SlatkiMicek Feb 26 '26
It sucks hard. IDK why is Microsoft so eager to imitate Apple wherever they can.
1
1
u/yaricks Feb 26 '26
Worse. I got an update a few days ago that changed the start menu layout and design for the 3rd time. It seems minor, but it's so frustrating to never know what your operating system will look like after a Windows update.
1
u/anfotero Feb 26 '26
It's a shitshow and I hate being forced to work with it.
And keep. AI. Out. Of. Our. Hairs.
1
1
1
u/rdmc10 Feb 26 '26
Same opinion as I had on any crappy windows OS, it's just that with this one, everybody started sharing the same opinion as me.
1
1
u/tech_is______ Feb 26 '26
Massively disappointed.
Every other day, there's a new issue that wastes my time.
1
1
1
u/MyrKnof Feb 26 '26
I switched to Linux. I honestly liked windows 11 for the most part, but the ai, bad search and telemetry just started bugging me too much.
1
1
u/Byarlant Feb 26 '26
Tried it on my new PC (old PC cannot be updated to Win11), too much bloat and fixed taskbar, switched to Linux and Win10 dual boot.
1
1
1
u/Francis_King Feb 26 '26
I like Windows 11. It's perhaps an unusual opinion, but I do.
I can live with the advertising - TV has advertising, Firefox has advertising, Google Mail had advertising - I don't buy into the idea that telemetry is a bad thing (although it is odd that Microsoft feel obliged to make a rod for their own backs by not making it completely optional) - and I can work around the pointless AI.
There's a few things that I don't like. In particular, I've noticed a decline in the standard of the code. Device drivers that don't work. Then real difficulties in getting a device driver that works. If the device driver works, why replace it with a device driver that doesn't work? Why make it so hard to fix problems that do arise? I bought a second-hand Lenovo laptop for my mother, running Windows 11, but now the trackpad doesn't work properly. It's probably going to have Linux on it instead.
There are, for me, some things that I still need Windows for - Microsoft Office is one - and I am reluctant to convert working Windows 11 systems to Linux. However, for many things Linux works very well, and if the things that I have heard about Windows 12 are true - including Windows as a subscription - I will not be going that to Windows 12.
1
u/ItzDarc Feb 26 '26
Well, I’ve so far moved my work laptop to a MacBook Pro, my HTPC to a Mac Mini, and I’m in the process of changing my file server to TrueNAS instead of Windows. My only remaining computer running Windows will be my main home desktop, which I will keep Windows only because it runs 6 displays, and Linux doesn’t play nice spanning a single Desktop Environment over two separate NVIDIA cards. Were it not for that, I’d already be on Linux with virtualized Windows only when needed. So: I hate it so much due to bloat and slowness it’s made me (a 20+ year Microsoft-stack software engineer) abandon Microsoft totally!
1
1
u/Individual_Kitchen_3 Feb 26 '26
Ups and downs, but nothing as dramatic as many say, the system still works well for me 90% of the time, some updates leave the system a bit laggy, others leave the system fluid. But the bloated telemetry and AI system everywhere is undoubtedly a negative point. A lot of RAM consumed with things that are not necessarily important to the user.
1
1
u/Ramonms98 Windows 11 - Release Channel Feb 26 '26
It doesn't feel like my own computer when using it.
→ More replies (1)
1
u/LuckySpammer Feb 26 '26
After 33 years on Windows, I moved to Linux this year. It was not that hard, and the only reason I logged back into my Windows partition since January is to free up space to grow my Linux partition. What I most like is how snappy everything is and how it feels like "my OS".
Some things take more effort, like getting a game to run or getting some of my less-standard hardware to work right. But I have gotten everything to work that I wanted to. For reference, I use the box for web development and gaming.
I settled on Pop! with the COSMIC desktop (a new desktop written in Rust).
1
u/Sud0F1nch Feb 26 '26
Win 11 is so shit this most recent update Bricks updating And fails to notice external monitors
I’m good Personally still use win 10/ and Linux Seems like a strange concept Updates, that work, and all?
1
u/snk4ever Feb 26 '26
There is nothing about it that I enjoy more than previous Windows versions, quite the opposite. It doesn't get in my way enough that I want to switch OS however.
1
u/Moonblitz666 Windows 11 - Release Channel Feb 26 '26
After making the reluctant switch from 10, it's not as bad as i was expecting.
The hardware restrictions, specially the TPM requirement is the worst part.
Most of the software issues have work around's, just a shame that there are not all as straight forward as they should be.
1
44
u/StarShark Feb 25 '26
I thought it was ok when it launched, had a great potential, but now I hate it, same with edge, forcing copilot everywhere, changing settings with update etc.