People can get "used" to the worst things in life, yet, it does not mean they are happy doing so, with a few exceptions.

I have no intention switching to Win 11 in the next about 5 years, which is one generation of hardware to me. What will happen AFTER those 5 years has passed, i can not say. It totally depends on the development of the new software and the possibilities. Most likely, in order to use newer software, i may have to switch to another OS at this point but most likely it will not be Win 11, i just can not handle the whole mobile-interface. At this point another OS is out anyway and, if we like it or not... we simply will have to deal with it and trying to throw out all the stuff not necessary for having joy.

But until this point... i am happy with the old Win 10 and all games should work on it for the next 5 years at least. I was ordering me 2 new OEM copys of Win 10 Pro (22H2) very recently and those copys will be stored as a backup, in case i may have to build another PC in the next 5 years. There is no new copys (in my country) of WIn 10 available anymore, with the exceptions of some fishy "gray market keys" lurking around on the net. The last 2 copys was very hard to get... so at least i am safe toward some unknown future.

At around 2027-2028... i may have to decide "how to move on", and most likely switching to Win 12 may be unavoidable, else there is simply no support anymore. Upgrading is not a matter because at this point i will build another system with new hardware; so the old system will stay as a retro-machine and as a backup for some very old games who might become issues at a certain point with newer systems.

In the case i truly hate Win 12 i may still be forced to bite this bad apple because at this point most likely there could be a new API released. As for Win 11, there is zero reason using it, because (almost) every single game in the next 5 years will run on it. The only reason for using it is because the shepherds told us so... and in case i am a sheep, which is not the case i feel.

Maybe Win 11 will come preinstalled on a handheld, if i ever plan to buy one (not sure yet) and my next notebook will be delivered with Win 10 Pro as well.

https:/----/www.gigabyte.com/us/Laptop/AERO-15-OLED--Intel-11th-Gen/sp#sp

It even got a true 4k AMOLED on it, everything great here... i hope there will be no issues with the delivery... most likely not. The next version, Aero 16, got a 16:10 which will cause issues with many games not able to handle it. I am happy i still can get me something like this... because unfortunately, the things in the last few years has become worse, in general.

I do not need to "hunt" a new OS, it will be thrown after me... as soon as i get any preinstalled system; simply will have to catch it up else it will hurt.

We got it. Change is bad.

If you want to stick with Win10, then do so, by all means.

Just that bashing is getting a bit old by now, Windows 11 is no more meant for tablets or smartphone as Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 are.

There will be a handheld UI, since those are getting popular. Microsoft is working on it. Now one could conclude by this that they do that because the current UI is not good for handhelds.
And aside from conclusions it's a fact that Windows not being usable easily on handhelds is one of the most common arguments against Windows on handhelds.

To be honest, whenever someone calls people who disagree with him or her "sheep", I usually switch off.

Didn't even read that far. Usually I hear that when it's about politics. My answer to that is that we all are sheep, just with different sheperds.

The illuminated who can see in contradiction to all that blind sheep are like preachers and keep repeating the same nonsense over and over, no matter the facts.

Well congrats... they made a OS neither good for PC nor for a handheld... this is in my mind a real mess. Win 10 is fine so far... not my dream but simply "fine"... so i keep it for as long as possible.

I hope the Chinese may grow stronger and maybe someday they may provide a own Linux https:/----/www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuJg30UqhuI with a scale of users so big that the industry in general may start to become interested into development on PC. At some point we may indeed slowly be able to push a second force toward open source and even gaming on a open source system. Kinda the same way like Apples iOS vs. Android, although Android is not fully open source it seems but way more open than the totally proprietary iOS.

This thread reminds me of the time when MS-DOS was still the way to go and I ranted against Windows 95.

Quite. That awful DirectX thing will never catch on, not when you've got Glide support in MS-DOS!

Damn right it won't. And who needs to waste resources on Icons when you have Norton Commander. Windows is not gonna make it anyway.
And if it really has to be a fancy UI, pick OS/2, which has a integrated emulation of Windows and runs Windows programs more stable than Windows itself. IBM is so gonna smash Microsoft into the ground!

I think some people here need to tone back the sneering patronization a bit. The new W11 context menu's are objectively worse from a UX perspective. Eg, content creators who set up right-click menu so opening say an mp4 file by default will "Play" (in VLC) plus have right-click alternatives for Edit Video (in a video editor) or Edit Audio Track (in say Audacity), or maybe you Open (by default) a html file in a browser, but have Edit in a text editor and Validate in a HTML syntax validator. All these entries were instantly visible after a right-click from W95 to W10 now takes twice as many clicks in W11 due to being hidden behind 'Show More Options' sub-menu because to use W11 'properly' you're 'supposed' to use only one application per file format. Now multiply that extra click by hundreds of times each day if you're working on lots of small files, constant over-pushing of Microsoft Edge to the extent of 'accidentally on purpose' resetting pdf file associations to Edge after certain updates, etc, and this stuff is absolutely pissing a lot of people off in the real world.

Likewise there was so much widespread backlash as to how bad W11's forced Grouping of Taskbar entries was for usability, so many requests asking it to be restored on TechNet, etc, that Microsoft has actually been forced to put it back.

If you hold down the Shift key while clicking it will instantly show the old menu.
Until about a week ago the keyboard would also always open the old menu, now you also need to prss Shift to do so.

There are quite some applications that crate entries in the new menu (for example Bitdefender, WinRAR and Notepad++), btw, it's now up to the software developers to access the according API commands (edit: called IExplorerCommand). Here's a short guide.

Edit2: Btw, it's possible to create a registry entry to only display the old menu. "No one should have to hack his computer?" It's mostly people who call themselves experienced users who don't just complain, but rant about the new stuff. The "normal" user doesn't. Every experienced user has used regedit many times before.

I too prefer the old menu as I prefer the Windows 10 start menu, I am a old keyboard junkie. Currently I deactivated the new menu since it does not get keyboard focus when being opened and removes inactive items only AFTER being opened causing it to flicker. They still have to do some work on it, but it's already better than it has been when Windows 11 was released. It also took a while until they got the Windows 10 context menus right. There was a time when they had three different colors, depending on the location/source and what commands were used to create them. Also fonts were not constant and sometimes would not scale according to the Windows settings. My suspicion is that was the reason why they decided to replace the whole thing.

Aah - I hadn't realised that.

Actually, this now moves me into "strong preference" for Windows 11 menus vs the previous ones. For a lot of people, the standard right click menu is sufficient (including nearly all business users) - for the rest of us, holding down shift or a simple registry edit is easy. I even prefer holding down shift as I've always got my left hand on the home keys when using the computer (I was taught to touch-type at school)

HERESY! Why use third party software when MS-DOS already has DOS Shell with it - software that was so good that it was removed from DOS 6.0 and only available through the supplemental disk - so was only for particularly elite users.

"strong preferences"? Not the context menu? Or is that something like context menu with all options unfolded?
I need to activate it again to test that.

Right click menu. My work upgraded to Windows 11 recently. What we've seen is that the less technically able people really like the new right-click menu - there's less on there and they find the cut/copy/paste icons easier than text (no idea why, but hey)

As the detailed menu comes up with a shift-click, I'm also happy.

Ah, I completely misread :D
Note2self: Coffee first, reading later.

And the performance hit.

I remember back about that time, you had games that were both Windows95 and MS-Dos ports. Games that run in Dos just ran better, even with the limited ram. I recall my dad had some Apache Helicopter game (Probably?) which if you ran in Dos and then Windows, you could detect something like 5-10 fps difference in sheer speed. Maybe it was better optimized in Dos, i don't know, i just recall it was better to play there.

edit: Though to remember a high end computer was 300Mhz

Similar stories probably with MechWarrior

Other things comparing windows vs dos, was disk compression at the time. Stacker and DriveSpace/DoubleSpace were becoming a thing, and transparent compression wasn't supported by FAT16 filesystem, so drivers to add transparent compression were coming out but windows would break it in various ways, especially if there was a unscheduled reset.