Every update Microsoft releases for Windows 11 breaks something for someone. For example, the December update broke Windows Update itself for me. Most people will luck out and not be affected by any issues, but it really doesn’t inspire much confidence in Microsoft.
Honestly, I thought Windows required secure boot ever since 7 if not Vista… then again, I was under the impression Secure Boot was mostly an attempt by Microsoft to make it harder for people to install Linux.
Also, I’m not convinced anyone genuinely likes Windows or Trusts Microsoft and it remains a major OS not out of any brand loyalty, but because of reasons like:
-You can walk into just about any store that sells PCs and walk out with a relatively cheap laptop or desktop with Windows preloaded and you can take your Windows machine to just about any repair shop and get service.
-Apple PCs have a reputation for being more expensive.
-Linux has a reputation for being hard to learn.
-Windows has a reputation for being by far the best for serious gaming.
-Systems preloaded with Linux are hard to come by, unlikely to be carried by local stores, often buried by mainstream vendors who have Linux offerings, vendors speciallizing in Linux often lack the economies of scale to keep prices down, etc. If you want to use linux, the cheapest option is often to just take an obsolete Windows machine and give it a second life with the Penguin or buy a Windows PC and nuke the copy of Windows it came with. Even if Windows and Linux had identical learning curves and the transition from one to the other was seemless, the simple fact is you’re probably going to have to install Linux yourself instead of it just coming on your machine… and since finding in-person support is also hard, Linux users kind of have to be their own PC repair person unless they are lucky enough to have a Linux Guru as a friend or have access to a local Linux Users’ Group.
In short, people use Windows not because its good, but because its the path of least resistance
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Not to mention even professional repair people might have no idea what Linux is! The most recent time I took my Lenovo Thinkpad in (to an independent repair shop on campus) to have the battery replaced, the tech booted it up, stared blankly at the lock screen, and said “…this isn’t Windows. Thinkpads are supposed to run Windows.”
He then refused to change the battery unless I let him wipe the hard drive and install Windows. So my battery has gone un-changed ever since.
For a typical user sure, but for a repair tech that’s pretty pathetic. What does the OS have to do with changing a battery? 
Great question! I’m not great with hardware myself, but I haven’t been back to that repair shop since. If they’re considering wiping my hard drive because I asked for a battery change, I don’t trust them with my devices.
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After installing a battery, a tech would absolutely want to boot the computer and run hardware diagnostics to ensure that everything is fine, that the battery is delivering the correct amount of power and isn’t overheating
A skilled tech would often prefer Linux diagnostic tools, and just boot the computer from a USB stick though.
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Bingo
Sure, I entirely agree! Hence, my earlier point: if someone has this feeling, they shouldn’t be using anything Microsoft-related. In which case, upgrading Windows is a non-issue in the first place. If you are using Windows and have become offended by Microsoft, you probably should switch to a non-Microsoft product. In which case, upgrading Windows becomes a non-issue. But if you are going to use Windows, offended or not, upgrading, at the very least, to keep up with security updates is generally a wise move.
Secure Boot came with Windows 8 and UEFI firmware. It wasn’t Microsoft’s invention, to be fair. Intel, AMD, Dell, HP, and Apple all agreed that the 30-year-old BIOS was a security disaster and needed to be replaced with signed verification. And then the debate: vital security feature or anti-competitive wall? Technically, it prevents rootkits. In practice, Microsoft mandated it for Windows 8 certification and required manufacturers to include Microsoft’s public key in the motherboard firmware. On ARM devices like the original Surface RT, they even blocked users from disabling it, making Linux impossible to install.
For Windows 10 users, the situation is similar to Windows 8: Secure Boot is enabled by default on x86/x64, but you can disable it. With Windows 11, Microsoft now requires Secure Boot to be enabled as a system requirement, though technically, you can still disable it in firmware settings. If your system was already running Windows 10, Microsoft does allow the upgrade to proceed even without Secure Boot enabled.
So, relevant to the OP’s context, two situations apply: (1) you already have Secure Boot enabled with Windows 10, and that won’t change with the Windows 11 upgrade, or (2) you do not have Secure Boot enabled with Windows 10, and that won’t change with the Windows 11 upgrade.
Yes, you can exempt specific directories from Windows Defender’s real-time scanning (in the Virus & Threat Protection settings). Or at least you could last time I played around with it. Right now, I use Norton so that it pre-empts Defender in the settings. But prior to that setup, I was able to add exclusions to Defender. I checked my old settings, and for Android Studio, I had to exclude my .gradle cache, and AppData\Local\Android\Sdk\build-tools at a minimum.
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I’ll confess to not knowing much about secure boot beyond it generally getting in the way when trying to setup a clean install of Linux and being a pain in the anatomy to disable when you can’t see and have to rely on sighted assistance from less tech savvy individuals to read the BIOS menus, but I remember needing to disable it when converting my Win 7 machine to Debian.
And yeah, any repair person wanting to wipe the harddrive just because the machine has an unfamiliar OS on it is an immediate black list offense for that repair shop… honestly, even without that, lack of recognition of Linux is a pretty big red flag… I feel like being a Linux user isn’t the badge of technical know how it was 20 years ago, but it’s still a good sign of someone knowing more about computers than just what is taught in minimum to graduate highschool computer classes and what young people pick up through cultural osmosis.
You know, Microsoft was and is a board member of the UEFI forum and was very much part of the creation of secure boot and its inclusion in UEFI.
Security was not the primary reason for the creation of UEFI, but rather architectural limitations and maintainability of BIOS were. BIOS was limited to 16-bit real mode, had very limited hardware support and couldn’t natively support GPT partitions or large disks, being limited to MBR partitions and 2TB disks. UEFI was an outgrowth of Intel’s EFI for Itanium machines dating back to the 1990’s and had existed for over six years before secure boot was added. Secure boot was added to UEFI approximately one year before the release of Windows 8.
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Yep, agreed. As I said, it wasn’t their “invention", as it were, but they were definitely involved and quite invested, the primary driver of the specification once it got rolling, and certainly the enforcement arm, if you will. Which I totally get, people don’t like. But, as I said, I was responding more to the original question of updating from 10 to 11 and the OP’s purpose of “what it may mean to move from Windows 10 to Windows 11.” People searching to see whether that was a good idea often came across the idea that an upgrade somehow made the Secure Boot situation “worse,” when in reality it didn’t (contrary to what you often heard on certain gamer forums).
Now we all just have to see if tundish took the leap!
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I’m putting it off for as long as I can!
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this has aged well with the MacBook “I guess we’re doing loss-leaders now” Neo