There's the obvious telemetry, MS account requirement for home editions, and other MS dark patterns for one.
But, Windows 11 performance is still crap compared to 10, and even 7. The right click menu in explorer is still high latency, and if you have a lot of extensions, you see "loading..." and it can take a good full second for all menu options to show up. Also, you still can't move the task bar, search is as garbage as ever (but honestly that's expected from Windows at this point).
Windows 11 does have some nice features, especially once combined with PowerToys. I still prefer the way Windows manages Windows compared to my mac which I need 3 third party apps at this point to make usable, and WSL2 is neat, windows has native SSH now, etc.
It could be a great OS if Microsoft could get their heads out of their rears and fix the performance issues, and stop with the advertising, telemetry and dark patterns.
- Telemetry doesn’t affect end users in terms of functionality or performance, and every commercial OS has telemetry. People cite telemetry as a reason not to upgrade to 10/11 but even Windows 7 had telemetry. It isn’t even really that much of a privacy issue if you really dig in to what Microsoft collects and you’ve spent ten seconds in the privacy and security settings. People just like to complain.
- Right click menu latency is such a non-issue and that issue is specifically in file explorer and not other applications. I do think they need to make improvements to that experience like having the legacy right click behind the new one but it’s not a big deal day to day.
- Everyone likes to complain that you can’t move the taskbar. Can you move the menu bar on Mac? Can we not just accept that this is a design decision and move on?
- Is search garbage? Seems to work fine for me and seems identical to Mac and Linux quick searching functionality, and if I need something more powerful I just use Everything.
It actually is a pretty great OS, but like every OS it’s not perfect and never will be.
> Can you move the menu bar on Mac? Can we not just accept that this is a design decision and move on?
Yes, you can put the Dock on any side of the screen, plus you can pin it to the beginning or end of the chosen side. Those options have been in there since 10-dot-0 even before there was official UI to control them. TinkerTool was popular for this: https://www.bresink.com/osx/0TinkerToolClassic/details.html
I always move the taskbar to the right on any remotely wide setup that I have - including my 21:9 main. Had it at the top on my sp3. On my current portable (spectre 13.5) it's at the bottom, since I kind of have to use win11 due to the heterogeneous cpu arrangement (how "hard" could it be to port the scheduler to win10... yeah yeah we know), and while it annoys me when I dock it at work, the system (win11 pro, with MS account) absolutely does suck in a lot of other respects.
Right click latency in explorer is annoying.
Opening the settings "app" after first boot takes several seconds because who the hell knows - I personally blame it on moving everything to some thousand layers JS framework since I like being grumpy about that. This is a core part of the OS, FFS. Fairly certain that they have the talent to pull it off properly.
Search has been fine for me.
Language switching almost always breaks during updates - "ghost keyboard layouts" and such. Has been the case for a few years now.
General "we'll shove down whatever we feel like on you" BS.
Just let us pay for "ultimate" (a.k.a. end-user enterprise) and be rid of all the BS.
Getting WSA back (yes, I have the community version) and expanding on connected standby or however they call it now would've been neat, especially on a convertible, but it is what it is, I guess. WSL2 is also quite the improvement. Lots of other small little things like the task manager (not using procexp too often nowadays).
> Just let us pay for "ultimate" (a.k.a. end-user enterprise) and be rid of all the BS.
This would do it for me, and probably many others. People would still complain, but at least it'd be offered.
They can keep the home editions as the adware and copilot editions, just let us buy "Ultimate" without all that (or just leave it as opt-in/toggleable). If the new snapdragon X Elite 2 chips pan out like the early benchmarks show they do (almost on par with the M5 in the new iPad), and if Windows encourages more ARM adoption they could seriously have a legitimate macbook competitor finally.
But that would require MS to divert efforts away from "AI, AI, AI, AI!" so they won't do it.
At the very least, telemetry should be opt-in, but yes I agree it's whatever, there's unfortunately no avoiding it any commercial software today. The dark patterns to lock out usage of local accounts though I take issue with. There's still workarounds for now, but how long will those workarounds exist for non enterprise users?
The right click menu though, I wouldn't call it a non-issue it's a pretty big regression. The legacy right-click menu loads instantaneously. The new one doesn't seem to do any caching either because it's consistently laggy even after an initial load. Is it still usable? Sure, but it's definitely annoying. It's not the only performance regression either.
> Can you move the menu bar on Mac? Can we not just accept that this is a design decision and move on?
Because it was an option in every single windows version up until now. And on macOS I can move the dock to any side of the screen I'd like. Hell, it will even dynamically move if I'm using multiple monitors and hover my mouse where it should be.
> It actually is a pretty great OS, but like every OS it’s not perfect and never will be.
I never said it wasn't. It's got plenty of features I like, use and appreciate. I wouldn't complain if I hated Windows, because I wouldn't care if that was the case. I'm one of the few on here that actually likes and uses Windows, so of course it's frustrating to see regressions.
I’ll admit it’s not the best, but “huge dealbreaker” seems dramatic.
1. It’s not even a requirement for business/enteprise customers.
2. It remains trivial for technical users to bypass.
3. Literal billions of iPhone and Android users live with a similar soft restriction. Like, yeah, you can skip making an account on those devices, but they’re damn near useless in practice without them.
people have unfortunately accepted that as part of using a phone, but trying to impose it on desktops is a very large change imo. it's part of the general trend of users not truly owning their devices.
Not really? I imagine most Mac users also have their Apple ID logged in for things like iCloud and the Mac App Store, even if they have a lot of manually installed apps.
It’s not really that crazy.
I totally agree that Microsoft shouldn’t explicitly force an account on you as iOS, Android, and macOS don’t do that, but at the same time it’s just not such a crazy idea.
You can't pin a folder to the start menu and have it list the items in the folder as you could since XP.
The right click menu in explorer is oversimplified garbage that's missing most of the important options without an extra, unnecessary click.
The settings systems still aren't unified, meaning you have to check AT LEAST two places before you find the right settings menu half the time. Sometimes 3.
It takes double the memory it should for something so simple.
Windows explorer in task manager still needs to have the special "restart task" option, specifically because they know it's going to crash a high percentage of the time you use it.
It spies on you with over-intrusive telemetry.
It advertises to you, even though you are (ostensibly) the customer.
It tries to force the Microsoft account.
It tries to force OneDrive.
It tries to force Edge.
Every update resets half my settings that I spent hours configuring.
The updates are often forced on you. I'm not a child. Let ME decide my risk appetite.
It forces their crummy AI into EVERYTHING, and makes you opt out if you don't want all your data hoovered up.
Everything is named poorly and confusingly on purpose. How many damned things are named "Copilot" now? What is Office even called these days?
> 3rd party extensions were causing it to load slowly.
Yep, and I liked it that way. I had piles of right click extensions that I used every day, and if one made it slow I uninstalled it.
Windows is a tool, it shouldn't be any more prescriptive than a hammer. *
> How are you measuring this? How do you specifically know how much memory it should take?
Windows 7 required 1Gb of ram. Windows 11 requires 4Gb (and is unusable with only 4 - windows 7 actually ran with reasonable speed with 1Gb). Windows 11 does NOT offer 4 times the utility or security, it just offers unwanted services.
> It's even more convenient in macOS. It's right on the permanently pinned Finder icon in the Dock!
That made me laugh out loud. Still, if my work crashed and I suggested to the boss that I build a special "restart" button into the menu rather than fixing it I would need to work on my resume urgently.
*EDIT* - Had they made it optional I wouldn't be complaining. Instead you have to use registry hacks to get it back.
I'm not frustrated that things changed, I'm frustrated that it has less functionality than it did before and is more expensive in terms of compute. It does less, but costs more.
> I'm frustrated that it has less functionality than it did before
How can anyone claim that's true? It does a lot _more_ than Windows 7 did. It has Defender as a full built-in suite. It has VBS. It has a completely different scheduler. It supports the App model. It has a mature virtualization framework. It has ReFS (and the ability to disable file system filters!).
...On and on and on. Windows 11 isn't a 7 with a bit of new GUI paint.
I mean, why stop at your Windows 7 v. 11 complaint? Windows 3.11 only required kilobytes of RAM and ran great; NT was the hefty one with a 12MB minimum! But each one ran Notepad, had Word, NT4 had a couple browsers, etc.
Generally commercial OSes don't take away major bits of impactful functionality that are going to magically minimize their footprint.
All fair points, and I AM being hypercritical here just due to the context of my comment. If I were to be as critical of any other OS I'm sure I could write an equally long list, and at the end of the day I only bothered to write the comment because I LIKE Windows and wish it wasn't getting worse over time.
Still, I would argue that almost all of the new features you mention are architectural things that advantage the enterprises, not the individual user. Some are even locked to pro/enterprise users behind licensing. Even for those lucky enough to work within those enterprises, it's not the end user who is advantaged. From their perspective Windows does nothing new, it's just slower and provides a worse user experience.
Further, several of those "features" exist only because Windows is still crippled by preserving backwards compatibility, and therefore is saddled with a legacy security model they're forced to continue trying to bolt solutions onto. The cybersecurity situation becoming so bad that the OS needs to ship with an EDR isn't a benefit to anyone.
It's like trying to turn a canvas tent into a bank vault. You can never do a great job of it and throwing in the padlock for free because congress would shut you down if you didn't do SOMETHING isn't a "feature". Worse, the padlock doesn't actually stop intruders, it just inconveniences legitimate users.
Sluggish UI, broken sleep, telemetry, advertisements in the start menu and lock screen, forced reboots and general "computer doesn't obey you" design philosophy.
Also just lack of attention to detail. e.g. if you start to search in the start menu and then delete what you typed, you don't get the base menu back; you get "suggestions". So e.g. if you search for "power" or "shutdown" to power off, don't see it as a result, and delete your search, the power button won't be there anymore. You have to close the start menu and open it again to find it. Completely ridiculous design (KDE by contrast has the button and finds the action as a search result with both of those search terms).
Microsoft increases their hostility to the end user with Windows.
They added so much bloat that has become core of the OS. Even XBox game bar is a forced installed feature with their embedded / IoT, same with forcing a Microsoft user account.
Windows 7 embedded allowed for full customization and the end user didn't have to install features a product was never going to use.
Microsoft back end processes have become more aggressive. Their analytics added to Windows 10 cause the computer to eat up a core after startup. This time frame is often when most communication about client issues that have to be resolved ASAP. Instead of the resources going to the user and their clients they go to Microsoft.
Microsoft even hides the resource usage from their background process, such as anti malware and analytics, from the user usage reports. They are purposely trying to hide and mask their deficiencies.
All to push product and features that are not actually used by the majority. Forcing a market instead of allowing it to grow from quality.
Microsoft does not have any completion in the Enterprise OS and management market and they exploit it. CTO and IT managers do not get fired for choosing Microsoft as their users prison. Small companies are the ones that can escape.
You can't drag a file onto a taskbar icon to have it open up in the selected program, or copied to the selected folder. That's the huge blunder that prevents me from even looking in Win11's direction. I'm sure there's many more things wrong with it, but I don't care if it doesn't even do something as basic and longstanding as that.
For me the problem is that the start menu want you to use the search bar, but the search bar breaks all the time. This isn't just on one machine either. I have seen this on at least three different Win11 installs and it drives me crazy. Type anything into the search bar on the start menu and nothing appears in the box, just a big empty black box.
I always have to go and dig through the menu (which Microsoft made more difficult to use to encourage use of the search bar) to launch any application.
There is a service you can restart to get it working again, or you can reboot the machine. But it typically stays working for less than an hour.
Compatibility and tightly coupled legacy components tech debt catching up, ads to get revenue from free users, half baked new UIs made out of slow web tech and more.
No serious effort went into consumer desktop Windows in the past 10 years, most of the upgrades are for Windows Server, Azure and Xbox OS. Windows 8 was their last real attempt and they gave up immediately.
What's wrong with Win 11 exactly?