With Windows 11, Microsoft hasn’t exactly reinvented its desktop operating system. Instead, the Redmond company has used the now-mature Windows 10 as a solid base and modernized…
The big picture: Microsoft once said that Windows 10 was the last version of Windows, but then the pandemic hit, and the company took the ideas encompassed in the unreleased Windows 10X operating system and laid them on top of the now-mature Windows 10 Core OS. The result is Windows 11, which sports a forward-looking UI and has the strictest system requirements in the history of the Windows operating system. With Windows 11, Microsoft hasn’t exactly reinvented its desktop operating system. Instead, the Redmond company has used the now-mature Windows 10 as a solid base and modernized the user interface, focusing on simplifying things. The new operating system is both familiar and fresh depending on what you’re looking at, and upgrading to it won’t be a terrifying experience like upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 10. In some ways, Windows 11 will feel just like a Windows 10 feature update. It’s free, it looks a lot like its predecessor (save for its rounded corners), but it also comes with welcome refinements that make the interface more pleasant to use and a Windows Store that’s finally as welcoming for developers as it should have been from the start. For a deeper dive into what Windows 11 is all about, we turn to the wave of reviews and first impressions from experts and critics. ZDNet ’s Ed Bott believes Windows 11 is not so much a software refresh as it is a nudge for people to upgrade to newer hardware: This version of Windows marks a major hardware transition, with Microsoft drawing a firm line in the silicon and declaring that the majority of current CPUs will be obsolete when Windows 10 support expires in October 2025. For the first time ever, Microsoft is releasing a Windows upgrade that it doesn’t want most of its existing customers to use. By my back-of the envelope calculations, roughly 60% of the 1.3 billion PCs now running Windows 10 will be blocked from upgrading to Windows 11 (although the owners of those PCs can install Windows 11 manually). That finding tracks with the results of a survey of 30 million enterprise PCs by IT asset management company Lansweeper, which estimated that 55% of those PCs would fall short of Microsoft’s hardware requirements. Rich Woods from XDA Developers likes the changes Microsoft has made to the out-of-box experience, from the prettier and more accessible interface down to the small details like being able to name your machine without going through an arduous process: No, I don’t hate Cortana, but I despised the digital assistant being part of the out-of-box experience. It was jarring, and frankly, it was terrible. Moreover, if anyone complained about it, Microsoft acted like they were some kind of villain that hates people with special needs. Windows 11 works the way it should have worked this whole time… The whole OOBE has been redesigned too, and it’s a lot prettier. It has a white background now, rounded corners on buttons, and it’s just more graphical. You might recall that when Windows 10 first launched, it just had these flat blue screens, and then it was redesigned later on with deeper blues and more windows… One other thing to note is that you can finally name your PC in the OOBE, something that was in the Windows 8 OOBE and was removed in Windows 10… With Windows 10, you had to go into Settings to do it, and then you still had to reboot. The next change that will be immediately visible to new users is the Start Menu. Neowin ’s Usama Jawad notes that Microsoft pursued aesthetics to the point where functionality took a hit, and better integration with Search is an afterthought: The Start menu has received a major overhaul with this release of Windows. Gone are the Live Tiles that were a design staple since Windows 8, and in come pinned apps that will be more familiar to users of smartphone devices… people who leveraged the Start menu in Windows 10 quite a lot will be disappointed that Microsoft has taken away some useful features such the ability to group apps… I can’t help but feel that this is a design oversight on Microsoft’s part, especially considering there’s no workaround… Meanwhile, the Search experience in Windows 11 is a bit of an odd duck. When I initially had a look at it a few months ago, I noted how the search bar in the Start menu is closely coupled with the dedicated Search button. In fact, it was so closely related that if you click the search bar at the top of the Start menu, it closes the Start menu and opens the dedicated Search UI, which is a very jarring experience… While Search seems to offer relevant local results in my use-case, I find it simply ludicrous that Microsoft is shipping Start menu in its current stuttering state when it comes to integration with the Start menu.
