Issues with Windows 11

General Off-Topic Discussion
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I logged in to one of my laptops this morning to be accosted by an update wizard which wanted me to modify my setup from Windows 10 to 11. Now, I don’t know what the benefits of that might be. But when I am presented with one humungous roll-up-my-arm Yes button, and the alternative only a tiny ‘perhaps later’ equivocater, I gather everything back into my rucksack and GTFOOT.

This thread is for general rage-venting, and perhaps every now and then some wise-posting about what it may mean to move from Windows 10 to Windows 11.

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If you play your Windows installation media backwards, you hear satanic laughter. But even worse, if you play it normally, it installs Windows…

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I have no firsthand experience, since I’ve been on Ubuntu for a decade now, but I’ve heard only bad things about this upgrade. My sympathies.

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I was forced onto windows 11. Since then it never stop updating and nagging me to enable various things i don’t want. The worse one was its ploy to rearrange the windows menu so that “update” was in place of shutdown. That wasted an age.

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I do not miss Windows.

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I use Windows 11 because I do AAA gaming and Linux has not yet achieved performance parity. It’s only a matter of time, I’m sure.

Every new version of windows has new bloat and tracking to turn off. I’m numb to that after all of these years, but I resent that so much of that stuff is no longer exposed within Windows itself. You need utilities or powershell scripts to get rid of a lot of it. It’s pretty obnoxious

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I ditched Windows nearly 20 years ago and have never been tempted to give it another try. Everything I’ve heard and experienced suggest its mostly been downhill since Win 2000.

Life is Good with the Penguin.

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I really want to remove the network card from my laptop before I turn it on and begin the music project recovery process. If Windows 11 appears before I complete this, I don’t know what I’ll do. My laptop can barely handle Windows 10.

I was forced to switched to Linux, but I’m glad it happened. I feel dread when I need to use Windows now.

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I’ve been using Windows 11 for a while (it launched in 2021), and I have had no issues to speak of. That said, I have rarely had issues with Windows. And I’ve been using it since Windows 2.0. I’m also one of those who tend not to have many of the problems users report with Mac upgrades.

I do agree that Windows comes with more bloat that tends to increase as new versions come out, and, as Drew said, I’m just used to removing it or keeping it uninstalled. But I do that once, and then I use the system for many years and never think about it again. So, for me, that tradeoff isn’t worth complaining about too much. A few issues that I’m aware of and that people didn’t like or at least debated over:

  • Windows 11 didn’t necessarily introduce new categories of tracking that weren’t already present in late-stage Windows 10, but it did make several “telemetry” and data-collection features more prominent, integrated, and harder to avoid during the initial setup. While Windows 10 had “Basic” and “Full” telemetry, Windows 11 rebranded them as “Required” and “Optional.” But contrary to what many people seemed to think, they were exactly the same in Windows 10. When setting up the PC (whether new or upgraded), the simple solution is just to decline all “Tailored Experiences,” “Advertising ID,” and “Location” prompts. Whether we should have to do that is a debate people have endlessly. I choose to just decline the options and then get on with my life, but I do understand why people have these annoyances.
  • Windows 11 integrated advertising more deeply into the user interface. You may see banners in the Settings app suggesting you subscribe to Microsoft 365 or Game Pass. This has never been something I could get worked up over, but that’s also because I don’t spend much time in the Settings app, and I’m not sure why I would.
  • In Windows 11, the taskbar is locked to the bottom and lacks the “never combine” labels found in Windows 10. That personally doesn’t matter to me at all, but I can see why people didn’t like the change.
  • The right-click menu hides many options behind a “Show more options” click. This one did get annoying for me because I use it a lot across various apps. But if you use a choice regularly, Windows does remember that and makes it part of the non-hidden options. A good example is “Open with Code” (as in VS Code). Initially, it’s hidden until you do it enough. But I tend to use the command line for that anyway. (And, to be fair, with all the apps that can integrate with the context menu these days, the menu can get huge. My guess is that if Microsoft didn’t do the auto-slimming part, people would have complained about “context menu bloat.”)
  • Some people reported “delays” when opening folders or right-clicking to open the context menu. I personally never experienced that to any great degree. This was attributed to the new “Fluent Design” approach, which is based on XAML and WinUI 3. It is demonstrable, but it also depends on hardware.
  • If you’re a gamer, it might matter that some users reported stuttering or lower frame rates initially, which was linked to new security features such as their Virtualization-Based Security. The thing is, VBS is a critical security layer that demonstrably protects the Windows kernel from malware. In doing so, it can create a “performance tax” by using hardware resources for isolation. The impact of this really depended, and it was generally more severe on older or mid-range CPUs. All this said, if you upgrade from Windows 10 to 11, VBS is typically disabled by default, so you likely won’t see any such performance hit.
  • There was a lot of misinformation on Secure Boot. While Windows 11 does require a system to be Secure Boot capable, the OS itself technically only requires it to be supported, not necessarily “Active” or “On” at all times to function. That said, many modern multiplayer games now require it to be actively enabled to run, and they do so because it helps their anti-cheat mechanisms. People got up in arms because they thought this was a Windows requirement, and it’s not.
  • Windows 11 has significantly deeper Copilot integration than Windows 10, and some people reactively just don’t like that. However, during my time using Windows 11, I turned off one pop-up, and it hasn’t come up again. One significant accessibility feature it added, however, was the ability to generate real-time English subtitles for any audio or video playing on the PC, regardless of the language. For people with motor disabilities, the voice control in Copilot is surprisingly good in my testing. I don’t have such disabilities, but I entirely appreciate the level of work that has gone into this.

In terms of whether the upgrade matters, it’s mostly like with browsers: continued, up-to-date security patches and feature updates. I rarely care much about interface updates because they never really affect me.

On the specialized side, one update I liked was to the Windows Subsystem for Linux, specifically WSLg, which lets you run Linux graphical applications (like GIMP, text editors, or even browsers) natively alongside Windows apps. It includes a built-in X server and Wayland compositor that starts automatically. But that only matters if you’re using WSL at all. Windows 11 was also the first to officially support systemd, which allows you to manage services (like Docker or databases) exactly as you would on a native Linux machine. That’s helped with some projects I’ve been working on.

I know you mentioned a laptop, and I’ve mostly been talking about a desktop. Laptops all have their own characteristic profile variability, more so than desktops, so it’s hard to say what your specific experience will be. I can say that my son has used various laptops throughout most of high school and college, all running Windows 11, and has reported no significant issues.

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I use Windows 11 at work. It’s fine. Not really too different from Windows 10, and that’s even on non-administrator account. No doubt there’ll be some settings you’ll want to change and some AI junk to disable, but it’s serviceable.

I’m still on Win 10 at home because my CPU isn’t new enough for Win 11. Haven’t decided what to do about that yet…

You can actually set the taskbar to show full tabs not just icons, and to show each window separately.

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Yep, that’s true! I should have made it clear that it was an original concern of people. But any update done now would definitely include 23H2, which is when I think some of the Windows 10 stuff was brought back in.

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Regardless of the merits or otherwise of Windows 11 versus Windows 10, it’s worth pointing out that Windows 10 is very much approaching End of Life. Regular security updates are currently only happening if you’ve signed up to the Windows 10 Consumer Extended Security Updates programme. if you haven’t done that, you’re getting no security updates at all. If you have, you’ve got security updates until October 2026, but you want to have done something by then. Whatever OS you might move to, staying with Windows 10 beyond that is a very bad idea, unless you use the computer entirely isolated from the Internet.

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My laptop regularly begs me to switch to Windows 11. However, it can’t switch to Windows 11 because there’s simply no space for Windows 11. It keeps forgetting that there’s no space for Windows 11 so from time to time it’ll attempt to install Windows 11 against my will and against the technological constraint of lacking memory, and it always ends up coming back to me, digital tail between its non-existent legs, asking if I considered switching to Windows 11 perhaps, since it’s free, did you know you can switch for free? And I pat it on the top of its touchscreen, knowing that we are, in this moment, the same creature, lacking space for any meaningful change to happen to us. No, we cannot switch to Windows 11, buddy. I’m sorry.

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That’s the same situation here. Then it says, “we will not be rolling out any more updates!” And proceeds to roll one out every month or so.

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There’s an IF work in there somewhere…

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There’s more to this story than simple “misinformation”. When Windows 8 was released alongside Windows RT on ARM, RT was intended to be the future and x86/x64 Windows a legacy platform. On ARM it was mandated by Microsoft that Secure boot could not be disabled and it was locked to only MS keys in order to be certified for Windows. It was only the absolute abject failure of RT and 8 that caused MS to reverse course.

After that, I don’t know why anyone would trust them. Windows is a giant advertising and spyware platform first and a usable OS a distant second.

Debate? There are people (other than Microsoft) that think you should have to do that? Also, you do know that turning that off doesn’t turn off all the spying, right? “Not much worse than 10” is a heck of an endorsement. :slight_smile:

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Oh this is explicitly my plan, yeah.

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Entirely fair points here, but we might risk shifting the conversation from “Windows 11 upgrade concerns” to “Microsoft’s historical trustworthiness” and “privacy philosophy debates.” The original context was upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11, and I just picked the arguments someone would likely encounter if they did a “pros and cons to upgrading to Windows 11” search.

Your points about Microsoft’s historical behavior with RT are totally valid historical context, but would it be relevant to someone upgrading from Windows 10 to 11?

Windows RT was a completely separate product line (ARM-based, couldn’t run x86 apps, OEM-only, no upgrade path from mainstream Windows) that failed and was discontinued years before Windows 10 even existed. The strict Secure Boot requirements on RT never applied to (and never migrated to) mainstream Windows.

Secure Boot is often what people bring up in these discussions, and x86/x64 Windows has always allowed it to be disabled since Windows 8. That hasn’t changed through Windows 10 or 11. So RT’s restrictive policies tell us nothing about what to expect when upgrading from 10 to 11 on a standard PC. The two product lines had entirely different design philosophies, and the locked-down one died a decade ago. The former point is more of what the “misinformation” I was referring to meant.

Regarding telemetry, Windows 10 and Windows 11 have essentially the same telemetry architecture. You’re absolutely right that turning off those toggles doesn’t turn off all data collection. However, that was also true in Windows 10. (Full telemetry is also impossible to turn off in Macs, unfortunately.) The “Required diagnostic data” that can’t be fully disabled existed in Windows 10 as well. The upgrade itself doesn’t increase surveillance; it maintains the same baseline, with arguably slightly better (if not any more palatable) disclosure during setup.

So, I would say that when someone asks, “Should I upgrade from 10 to 11,” neither the RT history nor the telemetry situation represents a new concern introduced by Windows 11. And the Secure Boot change was, in fact, not a reality. These are either (a) concerns about a dead product line that never affected mainstream Windows, or (b) continuation of what they already had in Windows 10.

I would say that if privacy or trust in Microsoft is the dealbreaker, that ship sailed years ago: probably with Windows 10, or arguably even earlier. I would argue that if someone has made peace with Windows 10 (or prior versions), Windows 11 doesn’t materially change either situation. And if someone hasn’t made peace, I would argue against continuing to use Windows, so upgrading wouldn’t matter.

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Jeff, do you know if I can stop windows defender scanning my compiles. It slows my work process quite a lot. For example exempting certain directories. Android studio also warns about this, but doesn’t have an answer. Thanks.

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Secure boot through RT was an attempt by MS to get a stranglehold on the PC market. That it (and Windows 8 more generally) failed doesn’t make it misinformation. If the Windows 11 policy on secure boot hasn’t changed from 10, then that isn’t really relevant to a Windows 11 upgrade either, but you mentioned it first…I however think it might be useful for people considering an upgrade as to whether or not they wish to continue to support a company that is actively hostile to their users.

Some other things that might be important to potential upgrades:
Tighter integration with data harvesting Cloud/AI features.
Big brother-like Windows Recall - now apparently disabled by default due to backlash (but unremovable, so keep your eyes open after updates).
A stronger push toward using Microsoft Accounts instead of local ones.

I imagine more telemetry, more advertising, etc. with deeper intergation into the OS making it harder to get rid of but honestly I spend a limited time with Windows through work these days, so I can’t argue specifics here.

When I switched to Linux it was so refreshing to have an OS that only does what I want, with no ads, no telemetry and no general shittiness.

Edit: If the upgrade involves a new PC, you might want to read up on Microsoft’s Pluton. It has the potential to do much the same as the restricted Secure boot policies on ARM, but now applied to Intel/AMD cpus. Microsoft hasn’t changed their goals, just the method to get there. Their goal is PC hardware that will only run Windows. If you think Windows is crappy now, wait until that comes to pass…

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