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Comment by pizza234 | Hacker News Reader

> I'm almost impressed with what people willingly put up with.

I had, in a sense, the opposite experience.

I was discussing in a social circle of mine the reasons why one should avoid as much as possible the upgrade to Windows 11... and I completely failed to persuade anybody.

Non-power users use a very limited subset of O/S functionalities (I'd say that as long as device and applicative support is sufficient, the O/S is essentially transparent to them), so, from their perspective, all those ideological and "weakly concrete" motivations are essentially pointless.

I definitely bothers me ideologically because this is a large scale covert assault (and it will have long term effects), but sadly, to non-power users, it's completely irrelevant.

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Non-power users operate entirely in browser these days. You can switch them over to arch and they wouldn't be able to tell the difference. The problem is switchover of the OS is a complicated, techie thing to do. Try convincing someone to switch to Win 10/12/whatever isn't current one and requires more than ticking "yes I agree to automagical update on next reboot". It's not an aversion to Linux, it's laziness.

What we need is Linux laptops being sold in supermarkets. 99% of people won't even notice they aren't running Windows anymore.

I think you're talking about Chromebooks.

Unfortunately they are also proprietary, spyware-laden devices, that cease to be updated for no good reason after 5 years.

As a power user, upgrading to Windows 11 is great if your hardware meets sysreqs.

Why? Because of all the numerous and significant backend improvements, a relatively less schizophrenic UI, and more.

Certain things that affect power users and common users alike, such as proper Intel 12th+ Gen CPU support and variable refresh rates, are Windows 11 exclusive, not being backported to Windows 10 (let alone 7).

To be clear, I have my fair share of gripes with Windows 11 that I've worked around. But overall it's an easy upgrade over Windows 10.

Thanks! This is the first I've read of any Win11 features that aren't just 'features'. All the articles and marketing stuffs make it seem the same as the last to major versions of macOS:

"Look at all these new features we have! (…that are so minor or quizzically irrelevant that you'll wonder why this is a whole version number upgrade instead of a .1 release).

Oh, and we rearranged a bunch of stuff into weird, often obscure, places with no justification, but we're calling those features, too!".

So, now at least I have some things to look up, even if I intend to skip Win11 for other reasons.

To be fair, Windows 11 internally identifies as NT10.0, the same as Windows 10's internal identification.

So officially, Windows 11 is just Windows 10 with new icing on top, but there are nonetheless significant changes and improvements behind-the-scenes that may or may not merit a marketing version number increase.

Every non-power user I've seen actively really likes 11. It's baffling to me, I don't see how it doesn't get in the way more.

I prefer it. One reason is simply that MS haven't been fixing bugs in Win10 for a long time now, so Win11 is meaningfully less buggy and more consistent.

Everything I've heard makes 11 sound worse, from the new start bar, from things being rewritten but not everything so it's a horrible mix of old and new, features missing for no reason, telemetry, all kinds of horrible things.

10 at least with the way I customized it is entirely stable and I'm not aware of any bugs that affect my workflow at all.

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