Decided to give it a go this morning.
I was… disappointed? I expected either something really cool, or something really catastrophic.
Neither happened. Outside of a few visual differences, so far it seems exactly like Windows 10 and my day went on as normal.
Seems to run perfectly fine. Didn’t have any driver conflicts, games ran fine. It may have felt a bit snappier? Hard to say.
Nothing really to report. It’s…fine? I guess that’s good. It wasn’t broken.
Haven’t yet, but have been considering it on my gaming tower. Potentially have a cross-state move coming up so it’ll probably have to wait until that’s all over at minimum.
Off the top of my head there’s not any headliner features I’m looking for from it (though Direct Storage has massive potential), but the UI changes from what I’ve seen so far, for the most part, are very welcome. The centered taskbar is questionable, but I really like the rest — rounded corners, icons with subtle shading and depth, and generally less flatness. It almost feels like a more refined version of Win7’s Aero, which I’ve always strongly preferred to the Metro/Modern aesthetic that got its start in Windows 8.
It looks like they might finally be getting around to the promise of giving all the old Win9x era control panels a design pass, too, which is also quite welcome. Some of those things are so anachronistic it’s comical (looking for A:/ floppy drives by default), and in several cases they have oddness like a single-tabbed tab bar due to obsoleted tabs getting deleted over the years.
And it might sound silly, but as a software dev the revamped UI theme and added controls in WinUI make me want to tinker with native Windows software development, which is a first… prior to Win11 the only platforms I had any interest in developing software for was iOS/macOS and maybe Linux.
You can move taskbar back to left orientation. It looks like W10 for the most part if you want to.
Only complaint so far is that the volume and wifi are now one widget int he taskbar. In W10, i can click the volume and then use the scroll wheel to adjust volume. In W11, you can still do that, but since they’re together with wifi, you have to move the mouse to the volume bar then scroll.
This seems to be a trend of sorts. The latest macOS release did something like this too, moving most controls like that into a single pane, as seen in the screenshot. It at least allows you to drag any of the sections out into separate tray items, though (as seen by the separate volume and “now playing” icons in the tray beside the Control Center). Hopefully Windows gains something like that, so individual items can be broken out and made top-level.
Well 14 crashed on me.
Can’t be sure if it was W11, but it hasn’t ever crashed on me before.
I rolled it back because you only have a 10 day period to do so.
Running it right now. WoW runs just fine on it
Well it updated me back to 11 on restart lol. Guess I didn’t unenroll properly from Insider.
Suppose I’ll just leave it there.
I think I know what happened, I was using an undervolt on my 3080 so that may have been it. Removed the undervolt and it seems fine now.