We got new laptops at work yesterday. Latitude 5520 running Win 11 Pro. So after trying Win 11 for a few weeks right after it came out, then switching back to Win 10, I now need to re-learn 11. initial impressions:
Same as when I tried 11 late last year, some things I like better than 10, some things I like less. But the things I liked less as a personal user/tweaker-geek—the same complaints shared on this site—do not bother me as much when I put on my office grunt hat.
As a personal PC user I switched back to 10 because 11 just did not feel finished. That and the default apps/Bing-pushing stuff. Right-click on the taskbar is a good example, though that was not a call to arms for me the way it was for some. (In the past day I taught my fingers to click on Start rather than the taskbar to summon task manager.) I said I would try it again in a year or so.
Getting work done yesterday felt no different on the new laptop I got early afternoon than it did on the old laptop I used in the morning. Some slight tweaking to how I lauch apps from Start was the only change.
That’s the key, I think. Folks at either extreme—either total tech-luddites who can’t or won’t learn anything new and feel threatened by any change, or else enthusiast-geeks who flock to sites like this and obsess about stuff—will not react well to the moving from 10 to 11.
The vast middle ground of people just trying to get stuff done and have a little fun surfing the Web will adjust just fine. I am more of an enthusiast-geek at home, but more of a get-stuff-done normal user at work. At the office, I worry less about right-clicking and task manager and dodging Edge and Bing, and whether to center Start or how to find stuff in Settings with the fewest clicks.
I do spend more time than I should focusing on that stuff at home. Plus I have much more latitude to play around with my own PCs, install Open Shell and tweak stuff, etc.
Though now that I think of it, I do not like the way icons look on the Win 11 taskbar. Notepad and task manager minimized just don’t look like. Let’s see if there is a way to change that without setting off alarm bells with company IT….