Windows 11.
If you've looked around this site at all, you've probably noticed
that I don't particularly like Windows 11.
While this is at least partly because it's just Windows 10 with a
new coat of paint, there's a bunch of other reasons too.
Here's a bit of a list.
Microsoft took out all of the customisation.
This seems kinda self-explanitory, but I'll explain anyway.
In Windows 10 and earlier, you could pick the location of your
taskbar, and the size of it (I'm a top-mounted small taskbar
enjoyer). In Windows 11, Microsoft decided that you don't need to
put your taskbar anywhere but the bottom of the screen, and that the
small taskbar option was "legacy" and unneeded.
While I have no doubts that almost nobody ever moved their taskbar
away from the bottom of the screen, I wouldn't consider the small
taskbar option simply a holdover from older versions of Windows. I
personally used the small taskbar option to save on screen
real-estate when using computers with small screens, such as my
laptop, and I'm sure there's plenty of other people who do the same.
The sheer amount of "AI" jammed in
Seeing as "AI" is the new big craze, it shouldn't come as a
surprise that microsoft has placed the digital equivalent of a
metric fuck ton of "AI" within Windows 11.
If Microsoft was just implementing it and saying "Hey! This is
available now!" once I'd probably be fine with it, but in
classic Microsoft fashion, they are trying their best to shove it
down your throat, and force you to use it.
We can start this out with Copilot Recall, which
was going to be enabled by default until Microsoft recieved extreme
backlash over the feature.
Now, Microsoft has decided to replace the search box they placed in
the taskbar all the way back in Windows 10 with
yet another way to access Copilot.
Of course, Microsoft isn't the worst offender of forcing AI into
everything, as Google is definitively worse, but this page isn't
about them.
It just isn't as stable as previous versions
Windows 10 wasn't always particularly stable, but at least it got
better, unlike Windows 11. The only time Windows 11 was stable at
all for me was back during the pre-release Insider builds, where it
was remarkably stable for a new OS.
I've had and seen some of the strangest problems with Windows 11,
but there's one I keep seeing that apparently nobody else sees?
In my experience using and/or dealing with Windows 11, on
occasion I'd run into the current active network connection suddenly
failing (until I rebooted the machine.) I eventually figured out
that this was repeatable, and it would happen when I did something
specific. During my inital experience with what I eventually started
calling "the Windows 11 problem", my network connection would die
whenever I connected to a Discord VC. It's easy to trip up and think
this was a network-sided issue, but after I reinstalled the OS (and
changed nothing about the network), I stopped having the problem.
The next time it popped up was with a friend of mine's server, which
for some reason ran Windows 11. In this case, the network connection
would die whenever any player on any minecraft server on that
machine entered the Nether. We never actually solved this case of
the issue, but it demonstrates what makes it weird, as there is no
connection between the cases outside of the main symptom (sudden
network failure)
I've only seen what is definitively the same issue one more time, on
a different friend's main PC. In this case, if he joined a server on
Minecraft Beta 1.7.3 his network connection would die the same as
the previous two. He eventually ended up reinstalling Windows.
This happened like a year after my inital experience with the issue,
meaning that it wasn't caused by a bad update.
Beyond the major issues I listed just a second ago, I also just... don't like the design language Microsoft has gone with in 11. Fluent is a perfectly good design language, but it really doesn't feel like they changed much from the previous Metro design language, other than Metro's sharp corners and distinct lack of colors.
