Windows 11 may not be as popular as Microsoft had hoped
Sorry, what did they <i>think</i> was going to happen when people saw just how blatantly Microsoft said, &quot;You know, the problem with Windows 10 is that we just haven&#x27;t expressed enough disdain for our eyeballs?  The ones we can&#x27;t really sell to our <i>real customers</i> yet because we wrote Windows 10 as an OS...&quot;<p>I will not run Windows 11 on any personal computer.  I will discourage anyone else from doing so.  Reasons, in no particular order:<p>- Windows 10 has been getting harder and harder to install with a &quot;local account only&quot; over the years.  You used to opt out.  Now you have to disconnect the physical network connection to pull it off, <i>and then it badgers you</i> until you find the checkbox for the notifications.  Windows 11 Home explicitly didn&#x27;t support offline accounts, and as of some recent updates, Windows 11 <i>Pro</i> doesn&#x27;t support offline accounts.  You <i>have</i> to use a Microsoft Account to log in - which tells me that the value of having a particular computer&#x27;s used tied to a particular email address with <i>insert handwave privacy policy barriers here</i> in the way is worth a lot of money to Microsoft.  I&#x27;m not sure what exactly they are and aren&#x27;t snorfing up for app data and such, but clearly, knowing which exact human is behind the screen is worth a lot, which tells me they&#x27;re doing something on the big data backend.  Or, at least, plan to - if they&#x27;re not doing it now, it will likely sneak in at some update.<p>- The integration of advertising into the deepest cores of the UI (Explorer) are clear from the fact that during the beta, a bad blob of advertising JSON delivered to end user computers <i>literally rendered them unusable.</i>  The JSON, to display an ad, broke Explorer.  Those two should not be remotely at the same privilege level for a variety of reasons, but when &quot;displaying the ads&quot; is at the same level as &quot;me deciding which programs to launch,&quot; it tells me something about the priorities of the company releasing the system.  It&#x27;s no longer about running programs, it&#x27;s about pushing the limits of just how much you can shove in front of a set of monetized eyballs before they revolt.  My limit is quite low.<p>- The &quot;Oh, yes, yes, we need modern hardware to run this... oh, what&#x27;s that, one of the machines we&#x27;re selling right now won&#x27;t run it... right, except for <i>that bit of hardware</i> we whitelisted on an older chip...&quot; thing is rubbish.  It&#x27;s a way to try and juice the PC hardware industry, which is struggling for a variety of reasons, but it&#x27;s a clear money grab (all those new OEM licenses!) with very real environmental consequences (gobs of ewaste that otherwise would work fine - I&#x27;ve got an i7-970 with a 7970 at a relative&#x27;s place and it works perfectly fine for their needs, including some light gaming).  They&#x27;re weirdly non-committal about anything &quot;Unsupported&quot; too - &quot;Well, yeah, you can install it... and it works, but, you know, we <i>might not</i> deliver security updates forever...&quot;  Not confidence inspiring.<p>And the reality is that for an awful lot of people, the &quot;computer&quot; is &quot;the thing that runs the web browser.&quot;  Or &quot;the thing collecting dust in the corner because the phone is the primary device.&quot;<p>I hope this whole Win11 thing blows up in Microsoft&#x27;s face.  It&#x27;s a user-hostile money grab, because apparently they couldn&#x27;t get Windows 10 to do quite enough data collection for their desires.<p>I&#x27;ll run Win10 in random corners of computers until such point as it&#x27;s no longer supported, and then I&#x27;ll just expand my Linux partitions over it.  If I can&#x27;t play certain games, well, so be it.  Windows 11 is not for me.