Is Windows 11 good to use yet?

I’ve been holding off on updating to Windows 11 for a while, but just took the plunge on my work laptop and it doesn’t seem too terrible

My desktop is due for a reinstall, lots of little weird issues since I first installed Windows 10 over 3 years ago

Windows 11 decent enough for gaming etc? No weird issues or performance problems?

It’s fine if you don’t mind being the unwilling recipient of Microsoft adspam and the OS phoning home every 30 seconds, and it trying to be all things to all Mac users.

I’d recommend a Linux distro to solve the above issues but you might have a less than satisfactory gaming experience on Linux, even though it’s apparently getting better; I don’t game.

One weird thing about Windows 11: it gives you a five character user name: the abbreviation of whatever you gave it (fresh install of Windows 11, not upgrading from an earlier version. I presume upgrades keep whatever your account name already is).

For Home a Microsoft account is required. For Pro (the version I have) it isn’t yet although I’ve heard it will be (I used my already existing Microsoft account with Pro).

One slightly disturbing thing, at least to me, is that Microsoft now knows about your machines, their names, etc. I don’t know if this is a good or bad thing, but AFAIK it’s a departure from the past (I never installed Windows 10 so don’t know).

One definitely good thing about Windows 11 and probably Windows generally is that all your old crappy programs continue to work, and work well with very good performance I’ve found (this is on an i9-12900 system which is a bit of a screamer compared to my older PC builds).

I think it’s a good idea to put a foot in another camp if you can. The future of Windows looks to be more control by Microsoft and less choice for the user.

Meanwhile, Windows 11 is objectively a good product, but personally I worry about the future, hence Linux (and who knows what will happen with that should Linus cease to be around, for example. Not worth thinking about).

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I hated WIndows 11 so much that I’m daily driving Windows 8.1 now out of spite. It’s probably fine as long as you don’t want a start menu, or consistent UI, or folder image previews, or a usable search bar, or a lot of other stuff that’s either broken or was removed altogether and never reintroduced.

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No issues here, running 22H2. Everything still more or less works as expected for gaming. Not come across any show stopping bugs. The only thing I did was turn off web search in Windows Search, which makes this functionality less frustrating. You can’t do this through the control panel or anywhere, has to be a registry tweak. Can be turned off by running:

REG ADD HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search /v BingSearchEnabled /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
REG ADD HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search /v CortanaConsent /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
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I don’t think it’s good to go yet, especially for a machine you can tinker with every day. Work machines, in my opinion, don’t count because they’re already very much locked down and you don’t do much with them beside work. Still my workplace asked everyone kindly to NOT update to Windows 11 after it started rolling out. The tech department must’ve been submerged with requests to fix stuff.

I don’t think Windows 11 has any issues with games or performance. It’s mostly usability stuff. It just carries on the terrible legacy of Windows 10, but made things even worse. It’s annoying to use every day. So much so that, when I gave it a try, I installed Power Toys to try and make it more usable once again.
But I love that multiple desktops now have different wallpapers, makes them so much easier to nagivate!

If you want to experience some of the features of Windows 11 and more get Power Toys, this is my advice.

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Windows 8.1 will be EOL very soon, if it isn’t already. But it’s a good choice for running old programs who broke during Windows 10 Updates. (for example old fullscrren SDL programs / games which have mouse issues in Win 10). Also hardware requiring Windows 7 drivers is most likely to work. It’s easy to get vfio set up because it’s fully UEFI compatible. Newer hardware will also work, even if it doesn’t explicitly supports Win 8, if there is a Windows 7 driver - For example the AMD Radeon RX 6600

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Works as expected

You need to do this registry hack

Yep, that is pretty much what I’d expect.

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Pi-hole in a Linux VM, or a docker container. Apparently the latter is significantly faster, but I’ve never tried docker. My VM is fine, and doesn’t take more than 50 seconds to boot.

8.1
Ends in 1 week and 2 days
(10 Jan 2023)

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In my opinion the look and feel of windows 11 is really great. I like that the start menu and buttons are now centered - looks and feels a little bit like mac os.

The performance is also great as far as I can tell and I am running Windows 11 since half a year on my gaming and video editing laptap as well as a virtual machine for gaming with GPU passthrough (unraid with software TPM).

The downside is that it asks every once in a while to activate their adspam features but to be honest besides Windows there isn’t really an alternative OS that you can use for gaming and content creation because unfortenatly not everythink runs good with proton and similar setups.

This might be the only time I’ve ever seen anyone say Windows 8 is a good choice :stuck_out_tongue:

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Certain OSes are a hammer - nail thing for me. If I can run my old ass games in a vfio VM without wrangling with incomplete Windows 7 UEFI implementation and hacky workarounds for hours, I am a happy man.

I’ve been using it since it launched, had to endure some driver issues at the start since my system is AMD, but overall i hadn’t have any issues with it over the past year or so.
I have a friend that refuses to use it any cost, and i really can’t understand why, there’s nothing on the system that would interfere with his daily tasks, seeing as he does quite literally the same things as i do.
I’m also using W11 on my work computer since mid 22, can’t complain about it there either.

Works surprisingly well on the surface go 2 which I use for couch surfing… but they mutilated the task bar, especially all the icon business on the lower right side.