Windows 11 is a Mess…
I’ll keep the introduction short. I’ve been using Windows 11 since September of last year and I’ve got some thoughts on it.
THE EARLY WINDOWS CYCLE
We all know the familiar cycle of Microsoft’s flagship operating system. Bad, good, bad, good, bad, good, bad, and so on.
Windows 95, revolutionary!
Windows 98 was kind of a struggle.
Windows 98 SE fixed a lot of 98’s problems.
Windows Me, despite my experience documented here, was pretty terrible and is in the race for the worst release of all time.
Windows XP, on the other hand is in the race for the greatest release of all time.
Vista, like Millennium Edition, is widely considered to be one of the worst and was such a resource hog that a lot of XP users either reverted back, or just stayed on XP.
Windows 7, while requiring basically the same resources as Vista, fixed many (if not all) of the problems that Vista introduced; it was stable and reliable and many dedicated XP users found it to be a suitable replacement.
Windows 8.x, well… let’s be honest, Windows 8 sucked. It was a big swing and a miss as Microsoft hoped to capture the mobile phone and tablet market with an overhaul that no one asked for or wanted. Never forget the charms…
WINDOWS 10
Windows 10 released in 2015 and wasn’t perfect, but it rectified a lot of the mistakes of Windows 8. Sure, the live tiles were still a thing, and there was no classic theme for people like me. Sure, it was kind of slow on a lot of hardware, but over time Redmond fixed those problems and introduced many welcome features including dark mode, because the world needs more dark mode in it. As of writing this, the current release of Windows 10, 21H2 is stable, responsive, and has a clean design. Sure, I wish that the non-UWP apps matched the theme a bit better (looking at you, bright white inactive title bars contrasting with my beautiful dark mode) but that’s something that I can deal with.
WINDOWS 11
With the announcement of Windows 11 early last year there was a lot of hype within certain internet circles that we might finally see that cycle broken. Win11 looked really pretty with it’s rounded window corners, it’s colorful icons, it’s redesigned taskbar and systray, and the fresh (obviously macOS-inspired) system theme. Following a “leaked” build of Windows 11 about a week before the announcement people started downloading and testing the system out. It seemed to be a little buggy — as you’d expect from a leaked developer build — but it was also perceived to basically be a re-themed Windows 10. This led a lot… well, some of us to speculate that perhaps we would see an end to the Windows Good/Bad Cycle. If Windows 10 was finally in a good place, and Windows 11 wasn’t changing too much beyond the theming, then this might be a nice, quality refresh of a 6-year-old operating system. Yeah… that didn’t quite happen.
A FLAWED RELEASE
There was a lot to criticize about the announcement and release of Windows 11, from the overly emotional parody of an Apple keynote, to the arbitrary hardware restrictions designed — in my humble opinion — to push more hardware sales, but I would argue that there was still a good bit of excitement for the new release.
Windows 11 released on October 5, 2021. Some people loved it, and others hated it. I was somewhere in between, personally. I made the upgrade a little earlier as part of the Windows Insider program and upgraded my primary work PC — a Microsoft Surface Pro 6 — as a fresh install to get a feel of the out of box experience before switching over to the stable release after launch day.
THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY
My initial reactions were mixed. The new UI felt weird. Everything looked nice, but it didn’t feel like Windows. It felt like a theme pack you’d install on your XP laptop in 2006 to make it look more like OS X Tiger or something like that. The buttons were bigger, the icons were bigger, undoubtedly trying to merge the desktop and tablet modes that were present in Win10. It wasn’t bad, it just felt off.
That said, there were changes that I liked. The default command-line environment changed from Cmd Prompt to PowerShell, and they included the versatile Windows Terminal application by default. I loved this, because I’d been running the preview build of Windows Terminal on Win10 for about a year already and was familiar with many of it’s functions. While I hate that Microsoft seems intent on killing off the “legacy” Control Panel (a stupid idea, by the way), Windows 11 definitely gave the settings app a much needed face lift with it’s semi-transparent interface. Of course, they also made some of the features we were used to from the Win10 Settings app more difficult to fine, but I got used to the changes pretty quick. File Explorer also got a makeover, mirroring the changes made to Settings. I wanted to be fair to Windows 11, and I feel like I’ve done that, so now let’s talk about the things they failed at.
For one thing, stability appeared to be an issue for some people. My co-worker who also wanted to test it out upgraded his 10th generation Lenovo X1 Carbon to it, but after about a half-dozen blue screens decided to revert back to Windows 10. Another problem I found was in its responsiveness. During my entire time using 11, I found it to be slow, and graphically buggy. It was just a mess all around, and it wasn’t for lack of resources. It’s not like I was running with the bare minimum here; it was running on a Surface Pro 6 — a machine made by Microsoft, mind you — with 16 GB of DDR4 memory and an NVMe drive. Imagine if Apple sold one of their higher end machines and designed the software for that hardware, and it was still a slow and buggy experience. There’s no way it would make it to market.
Couple those examples with the capricious UX changes like removing the ability to relocate the taskbar, or universally set the default browser to anything other than Edge as its so integrated with the operating system. The rounded edges of the windows also seemed to be a visual change only, as the pixels that you click to resize a window were still where with Win10’s squared off corners had them. At least they had the wherewithal to add in a toggle to be able to move the taskbar icons back to the corner instead of forcing users to accept the new centered design. They also took away the ability to right-click the taskbar to launch the task manager — a fact that I was made aware of by a very annoyed co-worker — instead moving it to the Start/Windows icon’s context menu. And speaking of context menus, perhaps the biggest gripe was that redesign. No longer do you have dedicated cut/copy/paste buttons in the place they’ve been for the last nearly 30 years, instead they have been turned into odd looking and not-labeled icons at the top of the context menu. Sure, keyboard shortcuts are more efficient, but there are a lot of people that rely on the context menu for such things. Also, the options within the context menu were severely reduced, leaving admins who may need to run an application or open a file as a different user to have to go into a sub-context menu in order to get the more traditional options.
There were other annoyances as well, like having forced dedicated icons on the taskbar that seem to be intentionally out of the way to remove such as the chat app (or whatever it was called). It was basically a more integrated view for Teams, but it only worked with personal Microsoft accounts, meaning my corporate Teams account couldn’t be added (a feature I think would have actually been somewhat useful). The same was the case for the widgets pane. To access it without touch, there was an icon next to the Start menu that you would click on. This was not something I needed so I wanted to remove it (like the chat icon) but right clicking wouldn’t allow me to remove it. Instead I had to go into the Taskbar pane in the Settings app and toggle them off from there.
FINAL THOUGHTS
If it’s not already obvious, I’m not impressed with Windows 11. I can respect what they’re trying to do and I respect that they took a big risk, but they also took a big risk on Vista and Windows 8 with their poorly implemented UX design changes. That said, I found Windows 11 problematic enough that I actually backed up my files, blew it away and reinstalled Windows 10. It’s just not ready for production in my opinion.
I’m hopeful that it will follow Windows 10’s lead and get better with incremental changes and fixes, but as of right now I must say that the Good/Bad cycle is alive and well; but if that is the case, we should all be pretty excited for Windows 12 will bring to the table!