When I posted that on Facebook yesterday, people who knew me laughed because over the years I have become as tired of Microsoft shenanigans as I have politics, and if you think about it most politicians have offices that use Microsoft products, which is an interesting thing to consider and could be fodder for a post on bias sometime in the future.

I upgraded a perfectly fine Windows 10 machine yesterday to Windows 11 without reading too many reviews on it. It went amazingly well, which is why I generally wait to adopt things. There’s no sense being a beta tester for new stuff, I’ve found, other than to write a lot of things that a lot of people write about anyway. Let an upgrade soak a little before you dip your toes in it is generally my advice.

My initial reaction is that they screwed up the task bar, putting things at the center – which leads me to believe they’re planning to work more with touch displays, where that is a good thing, but on the desktop it’s kinda crappy for those of us who are used to the Start button on the left.

Yet there is a cold logic to it. The mouse pointer lives around the center of the screen most of the time, and it is probably statistically important for decreasing hand movement. It’s not going to contribute to obesity too much through the decrease in calories burned, but it might help with carpal tunnel syndrome.

Do I like it? No, and I immediately found out how to ‘fix it’ in the taskbar settings. It was intuitive to do, which speaks of good design for those of us who have found our way around Microsoft’s operating systems before.

Everything else I normally do on the machine has worked as it did before. LibreOffice is just dandy with it, at least so far, Scrivener and Scrapple are working well, and Firefox has had no complaint. Battlenet was curious about a ‘new machine’ since apparently it checks the Windows registry and other things.

This is a relatively clean machine, not one I do coding on, but since most of what I use is multiplatform, not one of the things I expected I could have issues with did.

There’s been quite a bit said about how good Windows 11 is by people who get paid to say it. To me, so far it’s just an update of Windows 10 with the new stuff hidden. I ran across the snipping tool when I took a screenshot of that Facebook post, and found it immediately pretty handy. Cropping the image down was done within that app, and it saved in a predictable place: /Pictures/Screenshots.

So yes, I found one thing that was kinda cool. But overall, it’s somewhat a vanilla experience and when it comes to operating systems, vanilla is just dandy.

I do think with what I’m seeing, Microsoft is catering for more multiplatform, but there are some things that do seem worth paying attention to – as leaks about Windows 12 are already happening. Neural Processing Units? Dedicated? What?