Making Windows 11 Suck Less in 2026 ⭐

I’ve dedicated my adult life to helping others use Windows as efficiently and effectively as possible. But my focus has shifted, decidedly, in recent years thanks to the enshittification of the product and how Microsoft’s escalating bad behaviors in Windows put customers on the defensive. Today, much of my time is spent figuring out how to reverse or at least workaround those behaviors and force Windows 11 to work the way we need it to.

⁉️ How did we get to this point?

Microsoft released Windows 8 in 2012 to nearly universal criticism and disdain. The biggest issue, of course, was the forced usage of a new and half-baked full-screen and “touch-first” user interface that didn’t make sense on the traditional PCs of the day. But Windows 8 was also notable for another negative reason. It was the first version of Windows to include advertising directly in the product, in the form of web-based display ads in MSN News and some other bundled (“in-box”) apps.

At the time, I described this shift, subtle at the time, as “a slippery slope.” What I meant was that Microsoft including ads directly in Windows was just the first step in a broader campaign to improve the software giant’s ability to monetize each Windows user. And that it didn’t put a limited set of ads in Windows 8 to only put fewer ads in the next version. No, this was going to get worse. Much worse.

I’m not much of a prognosticator, but I could not have been more right on this count. Things did get much worse.

When Windows 10 debuted in 2015, it fixed some of Windows 8’s most egregious and obvious problems, most notably by backing off from that touch-first interface and returning to a classic Desktop UI with a Start button, Start menu, and Taskbar. It was also the first truly free upgrade for a major Windows version, giving those still on Windows 7, Windows 8.x, and even some recent Windows Phone versions a way to move forward at no cost.

Well. No overt cost. As it turns out, Windows 10 escalated the bad behaviors that Windows 8 had only hinted at. That free upgrade came with hidden costs in the forms of far more in-box advertising, bundled crapware apps from third parties, forced feedback telemetry that could not be disabled, and a dramatic scaling back of one’s ability to configure a default web browser and other apps. Worse, customers who adopted Windows 10 would be required to let Microsoft keep it up-to-date using a system called Windows as a Service (WaaS). This wasn’t just a buggy and unreliable system, it was a running monthly commitment that would fix bugs and add new features to Windows 10. And customers would need to upgrade to a new Windows 10 product version twice every year, a major, disruptive processthat led to a string of major issues over several years.

Microsoft released Windows 11 in October 2021, another free upgrade that was perhaps most notable at first for its modern look and feel and a promise of fewer updates, with major product versions now appearing only once each year. But this was a lie: Microsoft instead escalated the release of new features, adding several or dozens more every single month. And Windows 11 carried forward the bad behaviors from Windows 10 while making some even worse.

Windows 11 continued the forced telemetry that Microsoft had introduced in Windows 10. It continued to bundle third-party crapware. It closed the vice on local accounts, forcing more and more users to sign in to the OS using their Microsoft accounts (MSAs) over time. It escalated the bad behaviors in its web browser, Microsoft Edge, by forcing it on users even when they had picked another default browser. It changed the hardware requirements arbitrarily in a bid to force customers to upgrade to new PCs. And then it enabled the Folder Backup feature in OneDrive even when users declined multiple offers to do so.

Today, we have a term for this process by which a platform maker, in this case Microsoft, makes a product, in this case Windows, worse for its customers because doing so furthers its strategic aims. That term is enshittification. And Windows 11 has emerged as a key example of how a once customer-driven product can be enshittified to the point where even dedicated users begin researching alternatives and plan their exit.

No one has spent more time on this research than me—even with my focus on Windows for over 30 years, I first started experimenting with Linux using the floppy disk-based Slackware distribution in the mid-1990s—and the result of this work is clear. Yes, there are reasonable personal computing alternatives out there, most notably the Mac. And yes, there are possible alternatives for some in the form of an iPad, Chromebook, or even Linux. But there is nothing like Windows. And it’s possible, despite Microsoft’s best efforts, to make Windows 11 work the way you want. In fact, it’s not all that difficult or time consuming. You just need to know where to look and what to do.

And that’s where I’m at.

? But wait, what’s this?

Look, every Windows version has introduced changes that users disliked. One of the important distinctions here, however, is that enshittification is not subjective. Many misuse this term to describe aspects of Windows or other tech products they don’t like, and that is, of course, not surprising. But enshittification occurs only when the maker of the product, in this case Microsoft, purposefully makes it worse for users because doing so improves things for itself.

We can be pedantic about this, as we often are. For example, one might argue that ads in Windows 8 were just a minor annoyance and not true enshittification, especially since so few users even noticed those ads. But I will argue instead that ads in Windows 8 were the tip of the spear for enshittification in Windows, its genesis moment, because this was the point at which Microsoft’s needs truly outweighed those of its customers. It knew then, as I suspected, that it would only tread further on this product going forward. This was purposeful and planned.

But no matter. There are bad and unwanted behaviors in Windows today. Some are objectively enshittification, some are just negative or undesirable. All I know is that, labels aside, I’ve been trying to fight the good fight for years and that, in my role as the proverbial canary in the coal mine, I often encounter new issues earlier than most. That’s what happened with the forced OneDrive Folder Backup, for example. I doubted what I was seeing at first, assumed that I had done something wrong. And then it kept happening. For over two and a half years to date. Over and over and over again. On every PC I use, and I use between 30 and 50 PCs each year.

One thing that’s remained consistent during all this, regardless of who was or was not running Windows, regardless of whether Windows was forced to conform to the needs of a Microsoft that was a cloud superpower or, more recently, a wannabe AI superpower, is a complete and utter lack of accountability or explanation for the changes Microsoft made to this product. Like others, I’ve written about these problems again and again, as they’ve appeared and as they’ve gotten worse, and Microsoft just continues on its merry way as if it’s doing nothing wrong. This is troubling, of course. But I also just got used to it. The company says one thing. And then it does terrible things.

And then this happened.

Following its revelation that there are now over one billion Windows 11 users, an almost throwaway comment made during Microsoft’s post-earnings conference call last week, the software giant revealed that it actually had heard all the negative feedback about Windows 11 from its customers and Windows Insiders. That it had almost literally ignored that negative feedback since it first unveiled Windows 11 in June 2021 is, to put it mildly, frustrating. But let’s take this at face value for a moment and consider what it really means.

Let’s also separate fact from fiction, or at least rumor: Despite reports that Microsoft is reconsidering its AI strategy for Windows 11 that I know a lot of you desperately want to believe, there is no chance, none, that we will have less AI in Windows 11 in the future. We will only get more AI. The real question is how that AI will be presented to users and where Microsoft falls on the opt-in/opt-out curve.

In short, let’s approach this news the only way we can approach this news: Hopeful but realistic. We should remember the past and the many abuses that we have endured over the past decade. But we should also accept positive changes, should that occur, for what they are and not just hold an eternal grudge against a company that just does not give a crap you think. We need to be pragmatic here.

?️ What Microsoft really said

We know what Microsoft has done to Windows 11. We know that Microsoft recently promoted Pavan Davuluri, who I like, and that he reorganized Windows, bringing the client and server sides of this business back into the same engineering organization for the first time in many years. But what has Microsoft really said about its efforts to “fix” Windows 11?

Very little.

“The feedback we’re receiving from our community of passionate customers and Windows Insiders has been clear,” Mr. Davuluri said this past week. “We need to improve Windows in ways that are meaningful for people. This year you will see us focus on addressing pain points we hear consistently from customers: Improving system performance, reliability, and the overall experience of Windows. Trust is earned over time and we are committed to building it back with the Windows community.”

So few words. So many thoughts. I will try to be concise.

An interesting and not coincidental identification of the complainers. Davuluri says that the feedback is from a “community of passionate customers and Windows Insiders,” and not from Microsoft’s customer base more broadly. In other words, this is from enthusiasts, the same audience that over-reacted (and wrongly) to Recall. This maps to my comments that the vast majority of people who use Windows 11 don’t hate it (or love it) but are instead ambivalent about it. Windows 11 is a tool they use to get work done. These people have no opinions about the quality of Windows 11, nor do they have any opinions about AI features, not that Davuluri addresses that topic at all.

Improving Windows in ways that are meaningful for people. This, too, will be misunderstood to some degree. Davuluri mentions specific areas, albeit generally, but I want to stress that he never mentions AI. Meaning, don’t take this sentence to mean that Microsoft is scaling back its AI ambitions in Windows. Clearly, Microsoft believes—and in some cases is correct—that AI features will literally improve Windows in meaningful ways. This has already happened, in particular in Notepad, Paint, and Photos, and in Copilot+ PC features like Click to Do.

A new focus for 2026. After the Liquid Glass debacle of its ’26 OS releases, we started hearing rumors that Apple would focus on quality for the ’27 releases. Davuluri says that Microsoft is doing the same thing with Windows 11, with a focus this year on “improving system performance, reliability, and the overall experience of Windows.” That, too, doesn’t mean a de-escalation of AI features. This is, after all, the company that is allegedly focused on security when it is, in fact, focused on AI. We will continue to see new features, AI or otherwise, every month this year. What we don’t know is how these more fundamental improvements will impact the product. I have one hint about that in the form of a specific example, which we’ll discuss below.

Trust. If you read my From the Editor’s Desk editorials and other writings, you know that trust comes up a lot. And my key takeaway is this. Trust is earned slowly, over time, but it can be destroyed instantly, and it is difficult to impossible to win back trust that you squandered. So Microsoft’s road here will be a rocky one … albeit it only with the enthusiasts Davuluri is addressing here. And that’s an important nuance I have to keep repeating: The vast majority of Microsoft’s customer base simply doesn’t not care about any of the topics that you and I obsess over every day.

Given all this, it seems to me that this is mostly about shutting up the complainers and that we need to see real improvement before this is anything more than words. As noted, I like Davuluri, but he’s also a pawn of sorts in Microsoft’s broader ambitions, just like his predecessors, and that means his hands are tied in some ways. So we’ll see what comes out of this.

In the good news department, there have already been some positive developments that I don’t think get enough press. And a more recent positive change that, while not perfect, I think points to the types of changes we might see this year.

? What Microsoft has really done

I track all the new features coming to Windows 11 each month and it’s fair to describe it as a tsunami of change. This is interesting because most of this change is small, but there’s so much of it that Windows 11 today is a vastly different product than it was over four years ago despite looking nearly identical from a high-level view.

Windows is like an onion, architecturally. That is, there are literal layers to the thing, some of which we might describe as foundational, like the kernel, some of which is user interface, and most of which sits in the middle, allowing the two extremes to interact with each other and with online services. The initial release of Windows 11 was nothing more than “lipstick on a pig,” meaning that it was just Windows 10 with a simpler new top-level user interface. In this way, it mirrored the release of Windows Mobile 6.5, which slapped a then-new touch-friendly lock screen and home screen on top of the old stylus-based UIs that were still everywhere else in that system. Half-assed, to some degree and, as I wrote in my initial review, incomplete.

This is what made the Windows 11 hardware requirements seem so arbitrary at the time. Literally, any PC that could run Windows 10 effectively could also run Windows 11 effectively, as they were the same thing. But Microsoft was requiring certain hardware components, found only in modern PCs (roughly 2017 or newer), that limited who could install the upgrade. There were workarounds, and there still are, but these requirements felt like Microsoft trying to force customers to buy new PCs, which would help it, its partners, and the broader industry.

Windows 11 improved—or at least changed—over time. Over the first few years, it wasn’t clear that the Windows team was even capable of deep architectural work anymore, not that it mattered because the Azure team controlled that part of the system anyway. Most of the work we saw over the first few years was high-level UI work, and the slow reversal of the functional regressions Windows 11 introduced. If you know the history of Windows 11, this almost made sense: The new UI came out of Windows 10X, but Microsoft could never make the more technically difficult part of that project, the container-based isolation of Win32 desktop apps, work properly and so that disappeared.

But then something happened, as we say.

In mid-2024, we were treated to the CrowdStrike Outage. The backlash was immediate, and I think it says a lot about the world’s general impression of this company that Microsoft was immediately blamed for the problem even though it was human error on CrowdStrike’s part. Microsoft quickly tried to downplay the scope of the outage and then it took the awful step of actually blaming antitrust regulation. But in the end, cooler heads prevailed, and Microsoft set out to work with the security industry in the hopes of locking down the Windows kernel in ways that everyone could agree on. But no one could agree on anything, and that distrust of Microsoft reared its ugly head, again, with security firm executives alleging that Microsoft only wanted to keep them out of the kernel, a move that would advantage Microsoft’s security products.

There is good reason to not trust Microsoft. In January 2024, the software giant vaguely revealed that state-sponsored hackers had infiltrated its corporate networks for at least two months before they were detected. In time, it provided more detail about this hack, later admitting that they had gotten access to source code. But it never fully divulged what happened, leading some to claim that Microsoft was, at best, engaging in “security by obscurity.” And at worst, simply lying.

Microsoft then said that it was making security its top priority. Which rang false given the massive AI push it was then (as now) undergoing.

“If you’re faced with the tradeoff between security and another priority, your answer is clear: Do security,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told employees. “This is key to advancing both our platform quality and capability such that we can protect the digital estates of our customers and build a safer world for all.”

The irony is that Microsoft had announced its Secure Future Initiative (SFI) before it was hacked and before the CrowdStrike incident. (And after its early 2023 AI push with what became known, in time, as Copilot.) That’s right. Microsoft pledged to advance its work on cybersecurity protection right before two of the worst security incidents it’s ever suffered.

So it went back to the drawing board. And at Ignite 2024 that November, it announced the Windows Resiliency Initiative to ensure that Windows 11 would be “the most reliable and resilient open platform” for Microsoft’s customers. This wasn’t a vague promise. Microsoft previewed specific new security features in Windows, including Quick Machine Recovery and Administrator protection, and discussed its efforts to rewrite key parts of the Windows kernel in Rust.

And that, to me, is quite interesting. Windows 11, to that point, was mostly about high-level features and UI. But in 2024, thanks to the Microsoft hack, the CrowdStrike incident, and the resulting Windows Resiliency Initiative, we finally had some of Microsoft’s smartest people looking lower in the stack and making improvements again. It had been a while.

This is when another important (and still largely undocumented) change occurred, too. That change was called Windows 11 version 24H2.

As noted above, Microsoft switched to an annual schedule for feature updates, or major version upgrades, with the arrival of Windows 11 in 2021. But there are feature updates and then there are feature updates. That is, some are more major than others. Those that are not major are delivered as an enablement package (or eKB), which dramatically reduces the time and complexity of the upgrade. But 24H2 would not be an eKB, it would be a major version upgrade, what Microsoft at the time called “a full operating system swap.”

Microsoft positioned this need as a bit of pain that would make life easier in the future by reducing the downside size and install complexity of future updates. That was part of it, but the broader effort here was to harden the foundation of Windows, and it was at this point when the artificial hardware requirements of 2021 finally became real. A lot of the new security work in Windows 24H2 and beyond does require some of the hardware components Microsoft had previously required.

There is so much good work here, it’s difficult to remember it all. In addition to the Rust work in the kernel, Quick Machine Recovery, and the other advances noted above, there’s Copilot+ PC and its heightened security infrastructure, Windows Hello Enhanced Sign-In Security (ESS), Smart App Control, post-quantum security algorithms, Windows App Control, all the passwordless authentication efforts, and a lot more.

This presents a curious conundrum. On the one hand, we have the superficial improvements Microsoft has always made to Windows 11 and, more recently, the AI efforts that certain users seem to loathe. And on the other, we have this deep architectural work, largely security based. One erodes trust and the other amplifies it. The two sides fight it out like a humidifier and dehumidifier running in the same room. And we as customers and users don’t know what to think.

With all this as background, it’s possible to look at Davuluri’s recent remarks about improving the fundamentals in Windows 11 a bit cynically. After all, this work has been occurring in the background for the past year and a half or more, alongside the enshittification and other slop we experience routinely. But Davuluri reorged Windows 11 less than six months ago. And so the real world impact of this work he promises is difficult to see right now.

Difficult, yes. But not impossible.

? One small step for product quality, one giant leap of the imagination

I review about 25 PCs every year, but I use between 30 and 50 PCs every year, and I am always bringing up new PCs and resetting existing PCs, and so I see a lot of change over time. In December, I started noticing something new tied to my OneDrive Folder Backup problem, a key component of Windows 11 enshittification. And as is always the case with this sort of thing, I at first doubted myself, suspecting that maybe I had done something differently. But in time, as I saw these new behaviors on more and more PCs, it became clear that change was afoot. Positive change.

Two things have changed. I wrote about the first in Hell Freezes Over, If Only Slightly ⭐: Yes, Microsoft is still auto-enabling OneDrive Folder Backup whether you want it or not, but when you revert that change, you are given a useful new option about where you want all the files to be stored. The second change has proven more elusive, and where I see the first change on every new or reset PC now, the second change only appears sometimes.

When you bring up a new PC or reset an existing PC and step through the Out of Box Experience (OOBE), you eventually land on the Windows 11 Desktop, where your real work begins. When the OneDrive icon finally appears in the system tray area of the Taskbar, you can open its settings interface and display the Backup folders on this PC window, which lets you configure Folder Backup. And here, sometimes, but not always, I see this new UI.

It’s subtle, but there’s a new yellow infobar there that reads, “Getting things ready for backup.” And there is a “Cancel” link, a glorious option that Microsoft has denied us for the past two years, that might just work. When you click that, you see the following.

And here, if you choose “Cancel backup,” OneDrive will—be still my heart—cancel Folder Backup. It literally disables this feature before it has a chance to move your files all over the place.

Can I get a Halleluiah?

The problem, for now at least, is two-fold. First, as noted, this UI doesn’t always appear. I’ve been resetting PCs like a madman for the past two weeks, and I’ve only seen it twice in over 10 attempts. Second, and less obviously, who would even know to look for this UI? It disappears after OneDrive silently enables Folder Backup, of course, so you have to look as soon as that OneDrive icon first appears. If you miss it, you miss it, and things go back to how they were before (with the addition of that first change noted above).

These two changes are not perfect for all kinds of reasons. But they collectively represent something that I feel is important: Microsoft stepping back from the cliff of enshittification and finally, belatedly, doing the right thing for customers. OneDrive Folder Backup is, obviously, the right thing for many customers. But not forcing it on those who don’t want it is too. Give users a choice, even a well-hidden choice like this one, is vastly preferable to forcing them down some path they may or may not want.

? It’s going to be an interesting year

This, I think, is the type of change we can expect in Windows 11 this year. Yes, these changes will occur next to the ever-escalating introduction of new AI features. And the caveat there is that familiar opt-in/opt-out issue. As long as Microsoft lets us disable or otherwise configure those features we don’t want or like, I feel like we’re in a good place. But AI is divisive, and it will be interesting to see where Microsoft lands on this stuff. It has a strategic need to get users to adopt AI. Auto-enabling it is the best way to do that (for them). But letting us opt-in is the best choice for us, the customers. What will it do?

We can only speculate. But history tells us that there will be good news and bad news, steps forward and steps backward.

What I do know is that my focus won’t change. I have open questions about how I document all this in the book and on the site, and I have some ideas about what that will look like. Indeed, when I started writing this, I planned on showing you some examples of that work, but this article has gotten too long and there’s too much left to say. So I’ll figure out how to do that soon. For now, let’s try to focus on the real problems we face and how to solve them and ignore all the noise. This is next to impossible, I know. But just claiming that Windows 11 sucks is cheap. Fixing the problems is where the real value lies. I hope to see Microsoft contributing in a positive way for once. But that’s where I’m at. Always.