The TPM and general older platform incompatibility problems have been advertised for long; not sure how it'll play out, but I'll avoid it like the plague.
It's out for people on the Windows Insiders program. I happen to be on it and got stranded because they enrolled me for Win11 despite my machine not meeting the specs and now they've decided to no longer provide updates to that cohort an downgrading requires a full wipe.
That said, from what I've been seeing Win11 is mostly just Win10 with some minor incremental changes, some good, some bad. The default centering of the task bar is certainly a thing but you can set it to align left as normal although I miss having the task bar moved to the top. Only thing I find a bit tedious is the new right click menu in the file explorer, which I can understand the reasoning behind but still don't think was the right move.
I think the new widgets thing is a misstep like the charms bar but it's just another icon you can ignore. The built-in MS Teams chat feature is interesting but just adds to the redundancy of having to have separate Microsoft and Microsoft 365 accounts, which is getting silly.
I have to say that I do not understand the bad press around Windows 11. I'm using the dev channel since it's available and while things have been unstable (expected from a dev release), the user experience is clearly an improvement over the mess Windows 10 is. My machine doesn't feel slugish anymore, the Start menu and settings panel are finally usable, the new windows snapping features work quite well, managing external displays isn't a nightmare anymore, etc.
I was even able to update my old Thinkpad x230 after enabling TPM from the bios, it feels usable again.
> the user experience is clearly an improvement over the mess Windows 10 is
To me, it looks like another coat of varnish haphazardly and thoughtlessly painted on top of multiple layers on a crumbling, dry wall. A mishmash of ideas added on top of Windows 10, not an evolution and revolution and refactoring of what Windows is. Ah, and more telemetry and ads.
Yes, that’s not false. But it’s a nice coating, to continue your wall painting analogy. It’s way more coherent than Windows 8 or Windows 10. but it’s still fundamentally the same windows mess.
Scaling is when you change the size of fonts, apps, etc. In Win10 if you chose anything above 100% everything becomes blurry. There's also a problem when you use multiple monitors with different resolutions. You move a window from one screen to the next and it doesn't scale properly. It's a known issue for some years, and I'd wish they solved it in Win11.
Ah yes! scaling of the UI has been fixed for me since Windows 11. I use a laptop with a 4k display, and an external display with a 2k resolution. That was really a mess with windows 10, since windows 11 I’m very happy with the scaling and external display support. Even the Win+P menu to change how the external display is being used is not as buggy as it was with Windows 10.
I only have issue with Telegram’s client, and that’s due to their use of Qt, which doesn’t support native UI scaling without relaunching the app.
But I would guess that may vary depending on your setup.
The preview for it is available so in a way it is already out. The general release is also very soon -- October 5th -- so the latest previews are likely fairly close to the final version.