Are you ready for Win 11?

[ComradeYellow]

Yes working quite well actually.  I got it today and it actually is better than 10 but that's not unexpected because if you look at Windows track record, it's always the odd number that's the best version

Win 95: good

Win 98: Bad

WinXP: Good

WinME: Bad

Win7: Good

and so on and so forth.

No added security risks to your device as far as I can tell, all VPN's and security extensions work just as well as before, if not better.  Someone with more knowledge on such matters might be able to give a more accurate analysis on that though.

[Bartimaeus]

Windows 95 (1995): Good
Windows 98 (1998): Bad?
Windows Me (2000): Bad
Windows XP (2001): Good
Windows Vista (2007): Bad
Windows 7 (2009): Good
Windows 8 (2012): Bad
Windows 10 (2015): Bad?
Windows 11 (2021): Good?

[majestic]

Hm, there is a definite pattern of better skipping every other major Windows generation, but I don't think setting Windows 95 to "good" is right.

Windows 95 (1995): Never had any problems with it, but a LOT of people did, but I did not like it and barely ever started it
Windows 98 (1998): Pretty good overall, especially Win 98 SE
Windows Me (2000): Terribad
Windows XP (2001): Good
Windows Vista (2007): Bad
Windows 7 (2009): Good
Windows 8 (2012): Bad
Windows 10 (2015): Good (compared to 8 and 8.1, at least, not as good as 7)
Windows 11 (2021): Should be bad, with the pattern.

[Bartimaeus]

1 minute ago, majestic said:

Hm, there is a definite pattern of better skipping every other major Windows generation, but I don't think setting Windows 95 to "good" is right.

Windows 95 (1995): Never had any problems with it, but a LOT of people did, but I did not like it and barely ever started it
Windows 98 (1998): Pretty good overall, especially Win 98 SE
Windows Me (2000): Terribad
Windows XP (2001): Good
Windows Vista (2007): Bad
Windows 7 (2009): Good
Windows 8 (2012): Bad
Windows 10 (2015): Good (compared to 8 and 8.1, at least, not as good as 7)
Windows 11 (2021): Should be bad, with the pattern.

95 and 98 were a little before my time, so I don't really have much of a comment on them - I included them more to point out that the order listed was incorrect, as he put it 95, 98, XP, then Me, when Me actually came out before XP, so according to him, that would already break the pattern. Then he skipped over 8 entirely to get to 10 being bad and 11 being good, which makes zero sense. I know it's a meme that Microsoft screws up "every other" Windows release, but it's probably more accurate to say they've had a tendency to screw up the next Windows release following Windows releases that were major successes, though not always for the exact same reasons (...albeit those reasons have usually ultimately boiled down to "it's a bad user experience"). Windows 11 will probably be fine, since it basically seems like Windows 10.1 (in the sense of Windows 8 vs. 8.1). I'll more strongly consider it once I get my hands on the LTSC version in probably 2022 or 2023 when it comes out, and not a moment before.

[majestic]

It is a bit of a paradigm in software engineering to skip every other generation, because whenever you add something or change something from a stable version, there's a chance it goes wrong. That's why Windows Vista is remembered as a terrible version. The UAC was overboard, the performance was bad, drivers didn't work properly - and the last part isn't even entirely Microsoft's fault. The actual changes from Vista to 7 weren't even that large, when you look a the version numbers it becomes clear. Windows Vista was Windows 6.0, and Windows 7 was 6.1 - Microsoft just gave it a new name because the Vista brand was burned.

30 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

95 and 98 were a little before my time, so I don't really have much of a comment on them - I included them more to point out that the order listed was incorrect, as he put it 95, 98, XP, then Me, when Me actually came out before XP, so according to him, that would already break the pattern. Then he skipped over 8 entirely to get to 10 being bad and 11 being good, which makes zero sense.

Yeah, well, I agree with you here. Setting 10 to bad immediately breaks the pattern, because that would mean 8 was good. So, dear god, nope.

Windows 10 arguably got a good deal of bad press (still gets that, actually) because updates seem to fail for people, but I never had any issues with it. Then again, I also never had any real issues with Windows 8 and 8.1 when I had to deal with it (my parents had it). I skipped it of course because I'm not going to deal with a completely different start menu unless I really have to, thanks.

Granted, I never really had any major problems with my Windows installations, but I am also super picky about my hardware.

[Malcador]

Don't forget Win 2000, which was good.  Well compared to 98, at least.

Edited November 2, 2021 by Malcador

[majestic]

34 minutes ago, Malcador said:

Don't forget Win 2000, which was good.  Well compared to 98, at least.

Depends on what you wanted to do. Playing games at the time, no. Everything else: Yes, probably.

[Zoraptor]

In terms of ancestry NT and win2k should be in the list instead of 95/98/ME since the modern OS descend from the professional versions rather than the consumer ones.

OTOH, funny pattern is funny, and I'm not exactly endeared to the changes in win11, so...

[ComradeYellow]

Extremely specific and overly critical post.

[Sarex]

I'll give win 11 a spin on my work PC as soon as it's available through windows updates. How bad could it be.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

11 minutes ago, Sarex said:

How bad could it be.

Now that you've jinxed it, very bad.

[majestic]

1 hour ago, Zoraptor said:

In terms of ancestry NT and win2k should be in the list instead of 95/98/ME since the modern OS descend from the professional versions rather than the consumer ones.

OTOH, funny pattern is funny, and I'm not exactly endeared to the changes in win11, so...

Well if we're being that specific, 95/98/ME are out for not being operating systems but fancy GUIs on a DOS platform.

Don't really have anything negative to say about NT4 and 2000 though, never used NT 3.1 or 3.5. *shrug*

[Zoraptor]

The only real negative was indeed games compatibility, and that improved a lot for NT4.0 -> win2k.

(I ended up only ever using 'good' MS OS. NT4 -> 2k -> XP (SP3?)-> 7 -> 10. I even picked the 'right' versions, so not the troublesome 64 bit XP Pro version, 7 Ultimate and 10 Pro meant no broken updates which were the bane of poor consumer grade plebs. Helped a lot being able to scum corporate codes off various employers and educational institutions though. Never used 95/ ME/ Vista/ 8 at all. Only used 98SE on one laptop)

[Malcador]

1 hour ago, Sarex said:

I'll give win 11 a spin on my work PC as soon as it's available through windows updates. How bad could it be.

Depends on your opinion of your IT people.

[majestic]

49 minutes ago, Zoraptor said:

(I ended up only ever using 'good' MS OS. NT4 -> 2k -> XP (SP3?)-> 7 -> 10. I even picked the 'right' versions, so not the troublesome 64 bit XP Pro version, 7 Ultimate and 10 Pro meant no broken updates which were the bane of poor consumer grade plebs. Helped a lot being able to scum corporate codes off various employers and educational institutions though. Never used 95/ ME/ Vista/ 8 at all. Only used 98SE on one laptop)

In terms of having an installation at home I had every consumer operating system and consumer Windows since, uhm, DOS 5.0, which came out in 1991. I removed Windows ME really quickly after trying it for a short time. Windows 95 I had installed, but barely ever used it, the amount of games that required it were pretty small at first, and then came the much better running Windows 98. That had nothing at all to do with the major hardware upgrade in between and everything with Windows 98 having much better performance.

Even the things I needed for school ran purely on DOS, like various Borland C compiler versions and a DOS based COBOL compiler (yeah, don't ask), so why bother starting it. That was before DirectX was a thing, even.

Post-consumer Windows I switched to XP when it came out, then went to 7 and later 10. At school, then later work and through giving out support I pretty much came in contact with everything else in terms of Windows except pre-4.0 NT. A few things outside of MS too, like System 7 (well that was awful), and Linux (early 2.0 kernel versions back in '96).

There was a time when the biggest quality of live improvement for me was the increased floppy disk copy speed from having a VGA graphics card, because someone came up with the brilliant idea of using the super fast (comparatively, at the time) graphics memory as a buffer to store the entire floppy disk content, circumventing allocation size problems and having to swap source and target discs multiple times. I feel old talking about this, but I'm not that old. I just started really, really early. Heh.

[ComradeYellow]

My two biggest things are security and gaming.  Security I don't have the nitpicky details but I do like how my software is efficiently tabbed right where I like it and even has checkmarks letting me know that it's active.  Gaming is certainly better because it now has built in software to reduce hardware usage freeing up resources to improve gameplay.  Noticed a small but apparent increase in fps and functionality in that regard and it does not mess with security software to improve gaming performance,  which is all I care about really.  

It was a free download so no shills attached to these 1st impressions.

Edited November 2, 2021 by ComradeYellow

[Bartimaeus]

7 hours ago, Malcador said:

Don't forget Win 2000, which was good.  Well compared to 98, at least.

I wasn't including 2000 or the other NT versions because they weren't really intended to be home desktop products, though 2000 (the first OS I had on my own PC) was ultimately used a bit for that purpose in the end regardless.

4 hours ago, Zoraptor said:

The only real negative was indeed games compatibility, and that improved a lot for NT4.0 -> win2k.

(I ended up only ever using 'good' MS OS. NT4 -> 2k -> XP (SP3?)-> 7 -> 10. I even picked the 'right' versions, so not the troublesome 64 bit XP Pro version, 7 Ultimate and 10 Pro meant no broken updates which were the bane of poor consumer grade plebs. Helped a lot being able to scum corporate codes off various employers and educational institutions though. Never used 95/ ME/ Vista/ 8 at all. Only used 98SE on one laptop)

2000, XP, 7, and 10 for me, and 10 (LTSC) only just barely (finally switched this past year after a trial run of Windows 10 LTSC on my laptop and then my new Zen 2 PC more or less requiring it). It's been...fine so far, although I've had some pretty annoying issues that I've had to solve, but nowhere near as annoying as the consumer version of Windows 10 which I viewed as a no-go.

[Gfted1]

I installed Win11 on my work laptop. It took several hours but it went smoothly, and I might be jedi mindtricking myself, but it seems to boot and perform slightly faster. It also updated me from Office 2019 --> Office 365 but this happens often with updates so I expect it will get rolled back.

[Keyrock]

My experiences end with XP, so I have no comment on Vista or later. I didn't hate 98, ME was GARBAGE, though. 

[Sarex]

Well here we go... My first impression is that it's a wannabe Mac OS. Control Panel is still here at least. Didn't really spend that much time using it, but I'll see how I feel about it during next week.

[Gorth]

On 11/3/2021 at 4:32 AM, majestic said:

It is a bit of a paradigm in software engineering to skip every other generation, because whenever you add something or change something from a stable version, there's a chance it goes wrong. That's why Windows Vista is remembered as a terrible version worst version ever.The UAC was overboard, the performance was bad, drivers didn't work properly - and the last part isn't even entirely Microsoft's fault.

There, fixed your grammar. Yes, it was even worse than Windows ME which held that title proudly for many years.

My hardware doesn't support Windows 11, so it's a moot point for me. Not going to upgrade my hardware the next 3-4 years. To satisfy my curiosity, I downloaded the developer edition from Microsoft and run it on a Hyper-V machine. Apart from being hopeless to navigate or find anything (which could probably be overcome with patience and a lot of trial and error), I see no point so far, why I would want to run it on actual hardware

[Helz]

On 11/20/2021 at 3:23 AM, Gorth said:

There, fixed your grammar. Yes, it was even worse than Windows ME which held that title proudly for many years.

I worked at a computer store that opened at midnight to celebrate the release of Windows: Millennium Edition To no one's surprise, nobody showed.

At launch Vista was unstable, and on the average system it chugged because the minimum system requirements weren't high enough for the default settings. Turning off Aero eye-candy made it responsive on most systems. It took a year or two, but Vista eventually reached a good place. Which is more than can be said for ME.

[Sarex]

So instead of snapping program windows to the side of the screen, now you can hover over the maximize button and select what layout you want the window to end up in. Pretty cool. Start button in the middle will take some getting used to. The only issue I found so far is that the taskbar icons for opened programs are bugged and do not display their icons on my second screen.

edit: forgot to add that it's on the second screen.

Edited November 22, 2021 by Sarex

[ShadySands]

You can move the start button, it's probably the very first thing I did.

[Sarex]

I'll see if it makes sense for it to be in the middle, although I do not know how the space on the left part of the taskbar is being used.

They already fixed the taskbar icon bug.