My Upgrade Experience
Both my main desktop and laptop run Windows 10 – dual booting with Kubuntu. I’d be massively annoyed if the upgrade to 11 breaks all that. My plan was to do my laptop first and see how that goes. If things go wrong, I’ll be less annoyed than if the same happened to my desktop installation. I spent some time with it on my laptop before I upgraded the desktop. I’m not a fan of the start menu in Windows 11, so I’ll be sticking Start11 on both devices (my desktop already uses it, and it’s so much less intrusive)
Laptop Upgrade
I opened Windows Update and clicked on the button I’d been putting off for months (though at least those annoying ‘Upgrade to W11’ screens that pop up on boot now and then will be gone forever. My desktop is thankfully immune to these). It took just over an hour to download and install the upgrade. For reference, the other night, I upgraded a Raspberry Pi 4 from Ubuntu 20.04, to 22.04, to 24.04 in less than that time. After it had done that, the system prompted me to restart, which I did so. My OS boot screen selection screen was still there. Good good; it hadn’t messed with the bootloader. I selected to boot in to Windows. There I was greeted by a black screen and a huge mouse pointer…. and that was it. No message. No little whirly animation. No progress percentage. Just a black screen. Great feedback there, MS. I decided to leave it in case it was actually doing something, and also hoping it hadn’t gone and broken everything. Sure enough, after close to 15 minute of blackness, it rebooted again. This time I did get a progress percentage and a message about it working on updates, and after a minute or so I was greeted by a login screen. I logged in and my desktop looked close to how it did before; all my icons where there, and it looked like everything that was originally in the taskbar was still there. My desktop wallpaper was also untouched. I do also like the new default font. It make things just look that little bit more professional. It almost feels a little MacOS, with that ‘I can’t explain why it looks better, but it does’ feel.
Oh, but the start menu. Now I have no problem with the taskbar being in the centre. After all, in my previous job I used a Mac, which does the same, and one of my Linux installations has the taskbar centred as well. You can get used to that. However, when you click the start button itself, it would make sense for the menu to appear above your mouse, like most menus. Oh no… not Microsoft. The start menu is centred to the screen as it’s default setting. So you may click on a button, that is more towards the left of the screen, with the menu opening away from you. Who thought that one up?
With the taskbar being centred by default, this also means the placement of the start button will change, as more icons are added. That’s not great for muscle memory. Although I usually just hit the Windows key on the keyboard anyway. Fortunately, Microsoft have learned from at least some of their past mistakes, and they do allow you to move the taskbar to the left, and with that, the menu opens directly above the mouse. It’s a start (no pun intended) at least. There is a search box on the taskbar as well. That is another thing I instantly got rid of.
And, of course, they’ve changed behaviour once again. Now there are default pinned applications that I don’t use. Also typing an applications name often brings up a Bing search result, rather than, you know, the application installed on my machine. Ugh. What pops up, when you type is also inconsistent
Another instantly obvious change, and in my view another improvement, are the menus when you right click. In previous Windows versions these can get horribly large, and sometimes go beyond your visible screen, even on high resolutions displays. So it’s nice that this is organised a bit better.
File Explorer has also been tweaked, in positive ways, looking somewhat cleaner. There are also icons for file options (such as copy, paste, delete, and new). I’m not all that sure about the usefulness of those, when it’s a lot quicker to right click the mouse. But I guess there may be those that will find the visual cues helpful. MS have also added tabs to Explorer, so you can now have multiple folders open in one place.
Windows has also not lost my mapped network drives, and the hosts file (which I use to map internal network devices to urls) is untouched. I’m glad I don’t I don’t have to go about reconfiguring everything all over again. It seems all my devices work as before. Overall, bar the black screen of nothingness, and the default start menu, the initial impressions are overall good, and it’s mostly business as usual. I also like the UI tweaks, with a nice icon set. Windows 11 feels more polished than 10, for sure.