windows 11, now slightly less terrible than it used to be

I said recently that Windows 10 will be dead in October. Although my primary computer runs Linux, I do keep a separate Windows laptop for "runs only on Windows" specific stuff. It runs Windows 10. Or rather, it used to. Now it runs Windows 11. It's a bone stock install with the latest version. Thankfully, Win11 doesn't suck as much as it did a year ago.

When I say the installation is bone stock, I'm not kidding. What I always do with Windows is run a few third party programs to disable all the crap I don't want. Not this time. Instead, I just ran Win11 as intended...

...almost.

The only thing I did differently is install the OS without a Microsoft account (meaning local account only). Since that was doable, that's what I went with. Aside from that, everything else is the standard Win11 installation.

I'm running Win11 on a laptop over a decade old with a Core i5, 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. I thought briefly that maybe I should buy a 512GB SSD since those are cheap now, but nah, I had the 256GB as a spare and just used that. For what I use the laptop for, that works. I could upgrade the RAM to 16GB, but Win11 runs fine with 8GB.

I hate that the right-click context menu has been changed. There's a registry mod that brings back the old menu, but I haven't done it yet.

I cannot find how to make the non-movable taskbar smaller. That's annoying.

There does not appear to be any show-all option for taskbar icons, as in for the smaller ones on the right. Any time anything new is installed that has one of those icons, I have to manually enable that so I always see it. It also annoyed me that the "Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media" icon was hidden by default in a submenu. Stupid.

When changing certain settings for certain things, I found a mishmash of earlier crap and some positively ancient crap all over the place - in stock Win11. It's a mess. The Device Manager looks straight out of Windows 2000, as does sound event control. Control Panel is still there that looks straight out of Windows 7, while at the same time Settings exists, which is a Win11 thing.

File Explorer is better. I like that. Many improvements there.

Command Prompt and Terminal are much better because of tabs and a nicer font.

Notepad is better as well, but still nowhere near as good as Notepad++ (arguably one of the best text editors ever to exist).

Boot-up time is quicker than Win10, but shutdown time is about the same as 10.

Win11 has TAR support with ZST compression. That's a very nerdy thing, but I like it because ZST archives are nice to work with. When I type tar --zstd -cvf archive.tar.zst folder-to-archive, it works the same as in Linux. Good. Opening a ZST can be done using stock Win11 File Explorer as well. Also good.

Terminal in Win11 does allow me to do things somewhat "the Linux way", which I appreciate.

I like that I can run the older style programs in Win11 that I prefer, such as IrfanView (image viewer/editor), LibreOffice, 7-Zip, Notepad++, and so on.

Add/Remove for uninstalling crap seems to work okay, although I had to uninstall Microsoft Teams twice just to get it out of there. Win11 was really insistent on keeping Teams for some reason.

Most importantly is the fact I was able to get along with Win11. When I tried it before, I hated it. But now it's slightly less terrible. I was able to get the OS installed, get everything working, Windows-Updated the bejeezus out of it, and I can run my Windows-specific stuff on it that I need to.

I believe there are 3 big reasons why it went better this time. Some time has passed and many bugs with the OS have been fixed, I used a local account instead of a Microsoft account on installation, and I installed it clean.

The clean install is a big deal, because I'm absolutely certain that had I installed this over an old Win10 installation, that would have not gone well. Better to just use a blank SSD and install it clean, which is exactly what I did. It worked.

Published 2025 Jan 30