Windows 11 may not be as popular as Microsoft had hoped

Sorry, what did they think was going to happen when people saw just how blatantly Microsoft said, "You know, the problem with Windows 10 is that we just haven't expressed enough disdain for our eyeballs? The ones we can't really sell to our real customers yet because we wrote Windows 10 as an OS..."

I will not run Windows 11 on any personal computer. I will discourage anyone else from doing so. Reasons, in no particular order:

- Windows 10 has been getting harder and harder to install with a "local account only" over the years. You used to opt out. Now you have to disconnect the physical network connection to pull it off, and then it badgers you until you find the checkbox for the notifications. Windows 11 Home explicitly didn't support offline accounts, and as of some recent updates, Windows 11 Pro doesn't support offline accounts. You have to use a Microsoft Account to log in - which tells me that the value of having a particular computer's used tied to a particular email address with insert handwave privacy policy barriers here in the way is worth a lot of money to Microsoft. I'm not sure what exactly they are and aren't snorfing up for app data and such, but clearly, knowing which exact human is behind the screen is worth a lot, which tells me they're doing something on the big data backend. Or, at least, plan to - if they're not doing it now, it will likely sneak in at some update.

- The integration of advertising into the deepest cores of the UI (Explorer) are clear from the fact that during the beta, a bad blob of advertising JSON delivered to end user computers literally rendered them unusable. The JSON, to display an ad, broke Explorer. Those two should not be remotely at the same privilege level for a variety of reasons, but when "displaying the ads" is at the same level as "me deciding which programs to launch," it tells me something about the priorities of the company releasing the system. It's no longer about running programs, it's about pushing the limits of just how much you can shove in front of a set of monetized eyballs before they revolt. My limit is quite low.

- The "Oh, yes, yes, we need modern hardware to run this... oh, what's that, one of the machines we're selling right now won't run it... right, except for that bit of hardware we whitelisted on an older chip..." thing is rubbish. It's a way to try and juice the PC hardware industry, which is struggling for a variety of reasons, but it's a clear money grab (all those new OEM licenses!) with very real environmental consequences (gobs of ewaste that otherwise would work fine - I've got an i7-970 with a 7970 at a relative's place and it works perfectly fine for their needs, including some light gaming). They're weirdly non-committal about anything "Unsupported" too - "Well, yeah, you can install it... and it works, but, you know, we might not deliver security updates forever..." Not confidence inspiring.

And the reality is that for an awful lot of people, the "computer" is "the thing that runs the web browser." Or "the thing collecting dust in the corner because the phone is the primary device."

I hope this whole Win11 thing blows up in Microsoft's face. It's a user-hostile money grab, because apparently they couldn't get Windows 10 to do quite enough data collection for their desires.

I'll run Win10 in random corners of computers until such point as it's no longer supported, and then I'll just expand my Linux partitions over it. If I can't play certain games, well, so be it. Windows 11 is not for me.

Windows has never been better. WSL2, wsl/g, android (hope it gets better store but you can side load), xbox gamepass, game bar, better security, better app store, powershell, windows terminal and of course all the other apps, games, onedrive locker..

sure quirks along the way but to me it’s been a fine experience..

i don’t tend to customize my iphone or mac either and just use the experience native and it’s been fine..

best times ever on all platforms. love new mac… love new surface pro 8. all great..

> Which is a shame as these same corporates who have fleets of Apple Mac computers normally migrate annually about 6-9 months after each major annual MacOS release.

Those have a much longer support period, though. MacOS 11 works on any Mac from 2013 (or occasionally 2014) on. Windows 11 appears to require at least a Kaby Lake processor; those mostly showed up in mid 2017. Many corporates would still have Skylake or earlier machines knocking around; my work machine is a Skylake MacBook Pro, and that's in a large _software_ company.

This is particularly a problem because Intel has been in a bit of a rut; there's not that much difference between a Skylake chip from 2016 and an Ice Lake one from 2020, particularly on the desktop, so there are a lot of Skylakes still in circulation.

Which is all a bit odd, really; traditionally it has been the opposite. But as Apple's support periods have grown, Microsoft's seem to have shrunk.

You might consider trying something like Ubuntu or Linux Mint.

Steam's Proton compatibility layer has come a long way in the past couple of years. It supports most titles without any special configuration, including resource-hungry 3D games like Elden Ring and modded Fallout 4.

AFAIK there's no official corporate communication to that effect. The whole "windows 10 will be the last windows" thing can ultimately be traced back to something that a evangelist/dev said at a microsoft event. That didn't prevent tech blogs/media from parroting it far and wide though, so that's probably why you might have "remembered" it.