[milesvp]

It’s been fine? Are you completely immune to attention grabbing features? I absolutely cannot use win11 as it comes on a stock lenovo. Maybe you got your hands on some corporate version with some of the standard settings off? But between the news feed and the advertising in the start menu I find stock installs to he maddening, and I loath needing to boot my win11 partition.

[Aurornis]

I didn’t run any scripts or utilities. When I encountered something I didn’t like I just found the setting to turn it off.

I prefer a clean system, but I’m not the kind of person who gets triggered into rage when the OS pops up a suggestion after fresh install or has something on by default. Spending some time customization the OS and desktop environment is part of the drill any time I do a clean install, whether it’s Windows, Linux, or Mac.

[butlike]

You seem like a reasonable person. Good job.

[y-c-o-m-b]

I finally updated a couple of months ago after putting it off forever and it's been fine for me too. I'm on Pro version and I just used this as the first step after upgrading: https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat

No issues so far, no ads, none of the complaints others are seeing. I'm a power user too: I do gaming, programming, music production, video editing, etc. All of those things are fine.

My only real problem was not being able to have two rows on the taskbar, which I solved with Windhawk's "Multirow taskbar for Windows 11" mod. Done and done.

[pipes]

The average home user probably won't know what power shell and GitHub are.

I can't run the scripts you are talking about on my work pc.

I can sympathise with your point of view but it does feel a bit like "works for me because I know what I'm doing". Also how long before another Windows update that undoes what the scripts do.

I used to be very pro windows simply because of backwards compatibility and hardware support was ridiculously good. I can't recommend Linux to relatives as they'd be utterly confused.

Dave Plummer, ex windows kernel dev does a good job of explaining what the issues are:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oTpA5jt1g60

[y-c-o-m-b]

I was answering with the idea in mind that this is "HackerNews" and most here are not "average" home users, but I see your point.

Does the average home user care about any of these complaints though? In my experience, they don't really, and I'm not even sure how many use desktop operating systems these days considering everything has shifted towards mobile.

I'm not "pro" windows by the way. In fact if you look through my history, you'll see I resisted the change to Windows 10 and have tried migrating to Linux without luck. I would love to move away from Microsoft when given a realistic opportunity to do so. I loathe Microsoft trying to take up real estate within the private boundaries of my life. I just think some of these reported issues are widely exaggerated is all.

[pipes]

Ah ok I see, yeah for the hackernews crowd probably not an issue.

Genuine issue I have is my unbelievably well specced work laptop does not run win 11 nicely. It's not just the adverts.

As for moving away from windows, I've been a Linux user in work before, and a casual user on and off for 20 years but it was a combination of windows 11 pain and buying a steamdeck that finally pushed me to just move at least one of my home computers to Linux. But yeah, not for relatives.