#(yes I already shut stuff down on each computer/phone and I’ve been on the Firefox train for many years but it’s the principle of the thing

[handbellanon]

Excuse me- they build ads INTO THE NATIVE OS?!?!

I use Win 10 for work and it's fine I guess. With them ending support for it in 2025, is it worth upgrading to 11 now? They seem to be trying to be more Mac-like and I don't use Macs for a reason.

Hmmmmmm. Okay so every computer I get with a Windows OS has a pro OS, so I don't have to deal with some of the intrusive and annoying features that home OS users do (ads built into the OS being the main one) and even still I go in and kill things like location tracking and cortana as soon as I install a new OS.

All that being said, 11 is a little nosier and a little more intrusive than 10 and has some aesthetic differences but both 11 and 10 are remarkably similar to 7. On a functional level it is very dissimilar to OSX, though on a visual level there are some things that are a bit more mac-like (the centered start bar is easily changed and i think that's the primary thing people were talking about)

One of the main visual differences that I've seen users complain about is that menus now show pictograms instead of words for things like copy/paste, etc. in the file explorer:

And I do in fact hate this and as far as I know there's no fix for it.

But if you're someone who goes through your computer and shuts down intrusive stuff and removes unnecessary programs anyway, there's not a ton of difference between windows 10 and 11.

Here's basically what you want to do to make 11 more private; it's not at all dissimilar to what you want to do to make 10 more private.

So, all of that being said: if you can set up the privacy protections that you want in Windows 11 (and I think you can) and the visual differences in the OS won't make it totally unusable for you (that has been a stumbling block for some people but at least keyboard commands still work) then I think there's no reason to delay updating to Windows 11.

(sometimes people will scream about stability issues and crashes but that all got ironed out within a couple of months of wide release; the same thing happened with Windows 10 - pushing an OS out to hundreds of millions of users reveals more problems than seeing what happens when it's used by hundreds of thousands of early adopters but even given some hiccups in the early days there have been no particularly notable issues with stability and functionality; the people who yell that Windows 11 is going to crash your computer and eat all your data and set your house on fire *may* pop up on this post and they are exactly as incorrect about it now as they were about Windows 10 crashing your computer and eating all your data and setting your house on fire in 2016.)