Should You Test Windows 11 Yet? (Premium)

I was running Windows 11 on all of my daily-use PCs before Microsoft even released the first official preview, and I’ve continued to expand its use since. But of course, I’m going to do this. Windows isn’t just a career for me, it’s an obsession of sorts. The question here is whether you should be testing Windows 11 right now.

There are two ways to answer that, and the first is as obvious as it is snarky: If you have to ask, no, you shouldn’t be testing Windows 11 yet. You should wait until a more polished and feature-complete build appears, perhaps in the Windows Insider Program’s Beta channel. That release will allegedly occur later this month, so you shouldn’t have too long of a wait.

But the second, more nuanced, answer goes like this: It depends. And on a variety of factors.

The first is your ability to cope with instability. Looking back over my weeks of experience with Windows 11, I can identify exactly one major instability issue, and it’s been a killer for me: File Explorer hangs repeatedly, forcing me to bring up Task Manager and restart the explorer.exe process.

Doing so solves the problem, instantly. But it also closes all of my File Explorer windows. And that’s when this problem flares up the most, when I have multiple File Explorer windows open. This past week, for example, I’ve been finalizing the Windows 10 Field Guide so that I can move on to the Windows 11 Field Guide, and this requires me to have multiple File Explorer windows open: One for the manuscript folder, one for the current chapter’s images folder, and one for the NAS-based public folder to which screenshots from a second PC are deposited. There’s something about this combination of folders being open that triggers a File Explorer hang every 20-30 minutes. It was an infuriating weekend. (But I did finish the last major Windows 10 Field Guide content update, so there’s that.)

The second factor is your ability to cope with inconsistency, and in this case, I’m referring to the experience across different PCs. Here, too, I’ll point to the File Explorer example, because this problem has cropped up on every portable PC with which I’ve used Windows 11, including an ARM-based HP Elite Folio and an Intel Evo-based HP EliteBook 14. But I have never once experienced this problem on my current desktop PC, an HP Z2 SFF workstation. And I have no idea why.

The third factor is the most subjective of issues, whether you find the Windows 11 user interface to be attractive. This seems to be a contentious issue in the Windows enthusiast community, with some outright in love with the new UI and others anxious for the inevitable third-party utilities that will put everything back where it was in Windows 10. Those utilities are already appearing, as are the Registry-based settings that enable them to work. But I would simply ask that the Windows 11 deniers to give it a chance, and that you shouldn’t let your initial reaction to the look and feel deter you from doing so. The future is happening either way.

Fourth and finally, is familiarity, a sort of “Who Moved My Cheese ?”-type problem where Microsoft, for reasons that some incorrectly find arbitrary, has dramatically changed both the look and feel and the functionality of key Windows interface elements like the taskbar, the Start menu, and File Explorer. These changes were made purposefully and are based on several years of experimentation and feedback, and while you might not like some of them from a usability perspective—again, “looks” are a different issue—a lot of that just comes down to familiarity. You’re used to Windows 10, so some of these changes are … well, a bit concerning.

That cleaning up and simplifying the Windows user experience was a primary goal of this change is obvious. It’s also understandable: Windows is a nightmare of conflicting, multiple ways to accomplish the same tasks today. But as any power user will find out the moment that they start using Windows 11, many common tasks are no longer surfaced directly and will require extra steps to reach.

Consider a simple example.

In Windows 10, the Settings app provides a home screen in which there are icons for its major content sections, things like System, Bluetooth & Devices, Personalization, Accounts, and the like. When you navigate into one of those sections, the UI changes so that you see a list of sub-sections on the left in a navigation pane and then the contents of the currently-selected section on the right. What disappears, of course, is that top-level navigation with all the major content sections listed. To see that again, you need to navigate back out of the current sub-section.

In Windows 11, Microsoft “solves” that problem by providing a single UI across all of the Settings app in which the major content sections are always listed in a left-mounted navigation pane. The sub-sections available in the currently-selected section appear in a list on the right. And you can navigate further into this hierarchical interface by selecting one. What disappears then is the section view; the many content sections are still always visible on the left.

Is this “better”? I’m not honestly sure. But because of my deep-rooted memory of how the Windows 10 Settings app works, I still find myself pausing to look to find particular sub-sections in the new lists because everything is in a different place now. Will I get used to that? Yeah, probably. But being unfamiliar with a tool that I’d been using successfully for years is weird. Previous Settings app updates were evolutionary and didn’t impact the core navigation of the app like this does.

Here’s another example. When you right-click the taskbar in Windows 10, you see a lengthy list of options in a context menu, many of which have sub-menus with multiple choices. With Windows 11, you see exactly one entry, Taskbar settings. This brings you to a specific sub-page in the Settings app (Settings > Personalization > Taskbar) that contains some, but not all, of the options we used to get in the Windows 10 context menu.

There are two issues here, and both were triggered by Microsoft’s need to simplify Windows. First, some tasks we used to access directly off that right-click are now multiple steps away. Toggling the availability of the Task View button, for example. Second, some tasks are simply gone. To launch Task Manager now, you will need another approach (right-click the Start button or use Start search), but those taskbar-based toolbars you might have enjoyed previously are no longer even supported in the new system.

I think most would agree that these changes were done for the broader good and that if one were designing such a UI, most would further agree that power users should be the ones getting displaced since they are, after all, power users and can adapt. Normal users should be the focus.

And I do agree with that, I guess, but I also feel that Windows should be sophisticated enough to adapt to both kinds of users. And that the system could offer two obvious features: An advanced interface for power users and a way to literally customize everything in the system so that we could, for example, put that Task Manager option back on the taskbar context menu where it belongs.

I know. I’m a dreamer.

Still want to wait? That’s understandable. Today, the Windows 11 preview offers most of what Microsoft is promising, but some features, like Android app compatibility via the Amazon AppStore and Chat with Teams are coming in future builds. We can also expect Microsoft to make small concessions to the UI based on feedback, and that’s where the next part of this discussion comes into play: If you are bothered by anything I’ve described above or by whatever other issues you’ve discovered on your own, it’s your responsibility to add your voice to the feedback that Microsoft is receiving through the Windows Insider Program.

And you can’t do that unless you test Windows 11. Complaining here or on other non-Microsoft sites is like complaining about a personal problem to someone you just met in a bar. It may feel good to unload, and you may even get some good advice, but you need to deal with the source of your problems if you want it resolved.

If you’re reading this website, you’re probably ready. But if you have some or all of the concerns I mentioned above, you can still probably test this new platform now or in the near future, assuming you have an extra PC sitting around gathering dust. Major new Windows versions happen more than once a decade, even these days, but it’s still a rare event, and the last time we experienced such a thing was almost 7 years ago. Don’t miss out on this opportunity.