I’m not quite sure why there is so much hate for Windows 11. It’s a slightly improved version of Windows 10.
From personal experience, 11 can’t do vertical taskbars and the hack that restores 10’s taskbar isn’t entirely bug-free and can be shut down on a whim by MS with an update removing the functionality.
From what I’ve read, 11 is a privacy nightmare with Recall and the ever-worsening insistence on having a fucking MS account to log in to your PC locally. Sorry I meant your self-serve surveilance and ad-targeting appliance.
Having to fight the anti-features and dumbing down of a piece of hardware you supposedly own to keep it usable and useful to you, not the mothership, with hacks of varying reliability… What part of that sounds like something you would want to spend any of your money or time on?
My main stuff is the forced-AI. I’ve watched the Start menu, the core of the computer, get slower and slower and just stop working because of infinite efforts to over-complicate it. Then there was that guy who tries to put out a simplified version of Windows, who found that removing the new Recall feature caused Explorer to crash - indicating the core of the operating system UI is now baked around that existing.