W11 - Worth upgrading from W10 ?

[SiliconWizard]

It's the same kind of notch that's on some mobile phones for the front camera (and possibly other sensors), I suppose?
I don't like it either, not that it'd be a dealbreaker. I admit that with the M1, switching to a Mac is more and more appealing.

[Marco]

menu bar

I'd rather not.

[Monkeh]

My phone has a literal hole, not a notch, for the camera, and.. I just don't see it any more, it doesn't matter. There's nothing up there but a clock and some status symbols, apps stay out of it - and this is the horrible unusable Android which is literally worse than not having a phone oh god I'm channeling my inner eti please help

[bd139]

It's the same kind of notch that's on some mobile phones for the front camera (and possibly other sensors), I suppose?
I don't like it either, not that it'd be a dealbreaker. I admit that with the M1, switching to a Mac is more and more appealing.

Rather large 1080p webcam which works in low light + truetone sensor + camera indicator LED sit in there. No FaceID unfortunately. Apparently the FaceID sensor is slightly too deep to get in a reasonable screen profile.

[50ShadesOfDirt]

"Therefore the sanest response to Windows 11 is to hold off upgrading ..."

One could live in fear (of every other release), per the fine folks at Quora or other such sources, or ... do what I do, which is load a virtualization package, load w11 into it, and test. Find a wart that you aren't happy with, and fix or work around it with some googling ... repeat. After a (for me, short) period of time, it was ready to install onto my primary platform, supplanting w10.

FUD is one approach to OS installs ... best practices are another, and with a few of these, any OS will be at your command in short order.

[bd139]

Or you could do what I do which is leave it two years for everyone else to do that first.

[james_s]

"Therefore the sanest response to Windows 11 is to hold off upgrading ..."

One could live in fear (of every other release), per the fine folks at Quora or other such sources, or ... do what I do, which is load a virtualization package, load w11 into it, and test. Find a wart that you aren't happy with, and fix or work around it with some googling ... repeat. After a (for me, short) period of time, it was ready to install onto my primary platform, supplanting w10.

FUD is one approach to OS installs ... best practices are another, and with a few of these, any OS will be at your command in short order.

I'm not interested in being a part of their unpaid QA team. Starting with Win8 the amount of warts became nearly insurmountable and 10 pushed over the edge for me. I see no sign of 11 being any better. I just want to use my computer, I don't want to spend my time fighting against a hostile operating system.

[nctnico]

"Therefore the sanest response to Windows 11 is to hold off upgrading ..."

One could live in fear (of every other release), per the fine folks at Quora or other such sources, or ... do what I do, which is load a virtualization package, load w11 into it, and test. Find a wart that you aren't happy with, and fix or work around it with some googling ... repeat. After a (for me, short) period of time, it was ready to install onto my primary platform, supplanting w10.

FUD is one approach to OS installs ... best practices are another, and with a few of these, any OS will be at your command in short order.

I'm not interested in being a part of their unpaid QA team. Starting with Win8 the amount of warts became nearly insurmountable and 10 pushed over the edge for me. I see no sign of 11 being any better. I just want to use my computer, I don't want to spend my time fighting against a hostile operating system.

Same here. I run various Windows installations in a VM (which runs on Linux) nowadays. When Windows starts acting up or slows down, I restore the VM and have a working system within seconds. Gone are the days of trying too figure out why something suddenly has stopped working & fix it.

[james_s]

Same here. I run various Windows installations in a VM (which runs on Linux) nowadays. When Windows starts acting up or slows down, I restore the VM and have a working system within seconds. Gone are the days of trying too figure out why something suddenly has stopped working & fix it.

That's the direction I'm headed. I'm running Win7 Pro on my daily driver and Linux on everything else (except vintage machines) at this point. At some point when Win7 becomes non-viable I'll go to Linux and run Windows in a VM as needed. I used almost every version of Windows from 3.0 to 7 and most of them grew on me fairly quickly, I think Me was the only one I didn't use since Win2k came out around the same time and was vastly superior but starting with 8 was the first one that was unusable without 3rd party hacks. I used 10 for almost 2 years at a former job and it never grew on me, it felt like it was fighting against me every step of the way and it was a constant battle to just keep it out of my way.

[SiliconWizard]

Same here. I run various Windows installations in a VM (which runs on Linux) nowadays. When Windows starts acting up or slows down, I restore the VM and have a working system within seconds. Gone are the days of trying too figure out why something suddenly has stopped working & fix it.

That's the direction I'm headed. I'm running Win7 Pro on my daily driver and Linux on everything else (except vintage machines) at this point. At some point when Win7 becomes non-viable I'll go to Linux and run Windows in a VM as needed.

Almost exactly the same here.

I used almost every version of Windows from 3.0 to 7 and most of them grew on me fairly quickly, I think Me was the only one I didn't use since Win2k came out around the same time and was vastly superior but starting with 8 was the first one that was unusable without 3rd party hacks. I used 10 for almost 2 years at a former job and it never grew on me, it felt like it was fighting against me every step of the way and it was a constant battle to just keep it out of my way.

The Windows versions I ever used were: Win 3.11, 95, 95 OSR2, NT 4, 2000, 2003 server configured as workstation (that was pretty good), then 7.
Each step felt like for the better. The biggest step I experienced was when switching to NT 4. Felt like going from a toy to a professional tool.
Had to use 10 for some job too but didn't like it, and the telemetry crap was a no-no for me.

[DavidAlfa]

I've been using it for a year+.
After restoring the left-side taskbar and classic mouse context menu, it's way better that Windows 10, faster and less buggy.
Win+X menu brings a decent quick menu, also admits keys for faster access.

The only really annoying thing is window combining/grouping, it's enabled by default, there was a registry hack but was later removed, use Win+tab as alternative.

W10 had serious issues every then, now and tomorrow, stuff breaking after updating was common, also I hated so much the black UI, a little worse and they would have go back to Windows 3.1.

Still, I prefer Windows 7 by a lot, would use it if companies didn't make such big efforts to make it obsolete.

My system has uncompatible CPU (i7-3770k) neither TPM, yet I get all updates, although McrappySoft said unsupported machines wouldn't get them.

I'd say: Give it a try!

[Bassman59]

Have MS made any of their basic programs any better ? For instance the basic photo viewer is crap, as is the basic paint.

I suppose it's not up to MS to do anything, but they used to make that stuff pretty good years ago.

And even the calculator in win10, I'm sure it's worse, I don't use it tho anymore, I just use my real TI calc.

The standard Windows mail program is designed to force users away from email to ... anything else. It's really terrible. But that said, Mozilla Thunderbird is worthless shit, too.

The Mac Mail program still works well.

[Bassman59]

Of all the things to strangle yourself over  .

It literally sits in the menu bar and stays out of the way. Same with the phone. It literally gives you more screen. 

Some people just like being miserable bastards.

If they don't like the notch, wait'll they get a look at the rounded upper corners of the screen!

(Typing this on the M1 Pro MBP. And yeah, the screen makes everything else look like blurry crap.)

[Marco]

On the other hand, you can get an Lenovo 14" Ideapad 5 Pro with a 2880x1800 display for a third less than a Macbook Air.

The time when everything low end on the PC was FullHD is long gone.

[bd139]

Or you can pay a third more and get decent battery life, an enclosure that isn't made of what feels like recycled coke bottles, no vignetting on the screen, won't make you infertile if you stick it on your lap for 30 minutes and will actually log in when you open the lid not 5 minutes after you've argued with windows hello after daring to actually shave...

Oh and an actual warranty (try getting Lenovo to service anything that you haven't paid for an extended NBD warranty on)

I've owned a lot of Lenovo kit and I won't go there again.

[james_s]

Have MS made any of their basic programs any better ? For instance the basic photo viewer is crap, as is the basic paint.

I suppose it's not up to MS to do anything, but they used to make that stuff pretty good years ago.

And even the calculator in win10, I'm sure it's worse, I don't use it tho anymore, I just use my real TI calc.

The standard Windows mail program is designed to force users away from email to ... anything else. It's really terrible. But that said, Mozilla Thunderbird is worthless shit, too.

The Mac Mail program still works well.

I'm using Thunderbird 2.something and for the most part I find it to be pretty nice, although it's getting rather old at this point. I tried to like Thunderbird 3 for a while but there was something about it I just couldn't stand, it's been so long now I don't remember what it was. There seems to be a shockingly small selection of proper email clients these days which is surprising because web mail is terrible. I use Gmail and every few years they redesign the UI to add features nobody ever asked for and make it worse.

[tooki]

Seems grand. If the aspect ratio of the area without the notch is normal, I can't see why people are getting themselves so twisted about it.

That is exactly how it works. Full-screen mode avoids the notch. So yes, it’s people getting their panties in a twist for the sake of enjoying their own outrage.

menu bar

I'd rather not.

From a usability perspective, the menu bar is a spectacularly good design which has withstood 40 years of service (Apple introduced it in the Lisa, a few years before the Mac). It makes it clear which app has focus, and its position at the edge of the screen makes it far faster (and less fiddly) to target than an inset menu bar — the same benefit enjoyed by the Mac’s Dock and the Windows task bar (see Fitts' law).

[Marco]

But most software is either so simple it doesn't need a menu, or so complex it needs a complete and much larger GUI, where the horizontal interruption would break clicking continuity. So what remains which you can put in the relatively awkward space is a small menu just to fill the space and I'd rather not, I can live with it ... but I could better live without it and more screen space. On a phone it doesn't matter, it's tall.

You're always going to be working around it, not with it.

[bd139]

Well don’t buy one then  . More spares on the shelves for me 

As for menus, use the keyboard. You can’t really complain about clicking continuity when you’ve got to drag a mouse to the top of the screen already. That’s like going to a steak house and complaining because they served you steak.

[nightfire]

As a sysadmin I had to look out for the diferences of Win 10/11  for the company due to long term decisions.

Basically it boiled down to something like this: When Win 11 is finally stable (=wait for 1 year after launch minimum), we have to evaluate all our (sometimes written inhouse) programs if they would run on Win 11, and then determine a timeframe for switching the whole company. In the meantime, all hardware bought has to be evaluated to be Win11 compatible.
My colleague volunteered to be the first guinea pig for testing Win11 in production, so far it works on his Probook 650 Gen8 without issues- at least none we really could see.

On old computers, like Haswell generation that do not have the necessary TPM module, Win11 is not officially supported, but can be installed. IN a test, a fresh install of Win11 on a Asus Mainboard with a i7-4790K was successful.
But, as Win11 is more resource-consuming as Win 10, Win10 finally is down to yearly big changes and finally stable, I do not see any big benefits of upgrading to Win 11.

[Marco]

Well don’t buy one then

Soon I won't have a choice, Apple already has the high margin market dominance to buy over a year of process node advantage. A monopoly with trillion dollar barrier to entry seems inavertable to me.

As for menus, use the keyboard.

The menu will be there regardless. I don't need a huge webcam with large lenses, I mostly don't need the menu, but I could always use extra screenspace. I can live with the notch, but it's always suboptimal.

[tooki]

But most software is either so simple it doesn't need a menu, or so complex it needs a complete and much larger GUI, where the horizontal interruption would break clicking continuity. So what remains which you can put in the relatively awkward space is a small menu just to fill the space and I'd rather not, I can live with it ... but I could better live without it and more screen space. On a phone it doesn't matter, it's tall.

You're always going to be working around it, not with it.

Oh, I see you’re talking about rejecting a notch in the menu bar, not about rejecting the menu bar itself, correct?

Well you don’t have to release the mouse click to move across the menu bar. Because it’s at the edge of the screen, you just slide the mouse along the top edge, where its vertical movement is constrained by the edge, allowing you to use much less precise hand motions to move the mouse quite precisely and quickly to the desired spot. The menus just scoot around the notch.

And again, the display size and aspect ratio excluding the notch is normal, so what they did was to offload the menu bar onto the area around the camera, creating the notch. The alternative is to have no screen there at all, so the notch is actually giving you more screen space, not less.

[Fred27]

I like Windows 11 and have had no problems with it. I wouldn't say it's worth spending money upgrading hardware just to move to it though. Next time you want to upgrade hardware anyway then it's probably worth switching.

[Marco]

And again, the display size and aspect ratio excluding the notch is normal, so what they did was to offload the menu bar onto the area around the camera, creating the notch. The alternative is to have no screen there at all, so the notch is actually giving you more screen space, not less.

Laptop lids need a little bezel, it's not like the new Macbook Pro has mobile phone sized bezels, a small webcam fits in there comfortably. I'm sure if you want to show your zoom partners every pore on your face the Apple cam is vastly superior ... but I don't really care. It solves nothing of value for me. Face Id at least would be somewhat useful, maybe some engineering schedules didn't line up and they just couldn't get it to fit in time and this was the result.

I wonder if it's the IR projection which stands in the way of further miniaturization for Face ID, I don't see why a ToF camera would need to be any larger than a webcam. Of course Microsoft snapped up most of the ToF camera patents a little before Apple realized they needed it.

[JohanH]

Still running Windows 10 on mandatory (company owned) laptop. Don't have a specific opinion on Windows 11, I run it in a virtual machine to test software. I don't really see what the fuss is about, the software we develop works just fine. I recently installed the first Linux desktop on another company laptop that will be used for special tasks that Windows can't handle. Yes, there are situations I can't work without Linux now. On company servers we've used Linux for 15+ years. I've been running Linux on my own private PCs as long as that (I ditched Windows when Vista came out). Lenovo laptops support Linux nowadays, you even get firmware updates via fwupd.