Windows 11 beta thread

AltTabbins

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Windows 11 just rolled out its official beta release. If you are in it, what are your thoughts on it? I was in the Dev channel but will be reinstalling Windows 10 and going with the beta channel instead. Surprisingly I haven't had any problems beyond a few minor inconveniences. I don't really use Windows primarily for work but still use it for gaming. It's been great so far, to be honest.

Whats your thoughts? Please don't use this thread to bitch about how we should be using Linux, go take that discussion somewhere else.
 
No problems at all here. I've gamed for hours, lots of productivity, content creation. No issues with performance, either. To be honest, aside from the UI changes, I don't see or feel much difference between 10 and 11. I'm torn on whether I'll go back to 10, as I'd prefer to continue forward with 11, but inevitably MS will screw the pooch with a bad update that screws up something important. That is, of course, still a minor nuisance compared to Linux, where even the simplest thing might require typing a 10 page essay in terminal, sacrificing a goat, and promising my soul to Satan.
 
Per Neowin, the build in the Beta channel is the same as the Dev release from last week. Generally speaking, it's okay. Almost baked enough to use as a daily driver, but I still find issues with the start menu either not refreshing, crashing, or generally acting up. It's still forcing the "recommended" section of the start menu upon you, too. Earlier revisions were notoriously buggy/slow when you started tinkering with colors and personalization, but that's no longer the case. I found some icons in Windows Explorer that weren't implemented with the new look, which makes the whole thing look a bit disjointed. On the plus side, game performance is strong and even edges ahead of 10 in a few instances. That's a good sign. DTS:X is now an integrated audio option, too.

I ended up going back to a previous image of Windows 10, but will probably head over to 11 permanently in a few weeks. Ideally whenever the start menu gets some more attention. If you look at the list of fixes for each release, it seems like they're focusing on one section at a time.
 
I just hope the bi-yearly/yearly refresh for 10 has meant when the cutover to 11 happens it will be the least troublesome of all OS upgrades in the past. Going from 8.1 to 10 was pretty good, but there were still some oddball issues. Still nothing like going XP to Vista or Vista to 7.
 
No problems at all here. I've gamed for hours, lots of productivity, content creation. No issues with performance, either. To be honest, aside from the UI changes, I don't see or feel much difference between 10 and 11. I'm torn on whether I'll go back to 10, as I'd prefer to continue forward with 11, but inevitably MS will screw the pooch with a bad update that screws up something important. That is, of course, still a minor nuisance compared to Linux, where even the simplest thing might require typing a 10 page essay in terminal, sacrificing a goat, and promising my soul to Satan.
Interesting because I find things way easyer nowadays in linux than Windows. Everything is so hard to find with constantly changing UI and settings are buried in a cluttered registry.
 
One of the biggest things that I was surprised about was the compatibility. I know its still just Windows 10 at its core, but I haven't even had a driver issue much less have an issue with a piece of software that wouldn't launch. I think the only real inconvenience so far is some programs that were designed with square corners look weird around the X button.
 
I tossed the beta version onto my machine this morning for the hell of it. I'm having all sorts of visual quirks that weren't an issue in the previous release. Almost all are related to modern apps and the start menu, too. Buttons with no visible text unless you hover over them, broken transparency settings, etc. Tried a couple different Nvidia drivers and a variety of color settings that seem to have no effect. Looks like I'll be going back to Win 10 in a few hours.
 
Anyone tried this in a VM? Would it even work?
 
Anyone tried this in a VM? Would it even work?
I did early on in the dev cycle. I was very underwhelmed with it in VM. Even when I through a LOT of resources to it, it was sluggish and didn't perform very well. I had it up to 8 cores, 16gb ram, plenty of virtual disk space, and 4gb virtual VRAM and it was still a slide show most of the time. It was a night and day difference when I went bare metal. Its got hitches here and there but its pretty smooth overall.
 
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No problems at all here. I've gamed for hours, lots of productivity, content creation. No issues with performance, either. To be honest, aside from the UI changes, I don't see or feel much difference between 10 and 11. I'm torn on whether I'll go back to 10, as I'd prefer to continue forward with 11, but inevitably MS will screw the pooch with a bad update that screws up something important. That is, of course, still a minor nuisance compared to Linux, where even the simplest thing might require typing a 10 page essay in terminal, sacrificing a goat, and promising my soul to Satan.

To that last part, you are straight up wrong and I assume you think that and were not simply being sarcastic. (Only slightly exaggerated.) I see no reason to bother with Windows 11, at least at the moment, because I cannot dual boot with it and the latest Linux Xanmod kernel, 5.13.6, with Secure boot enabled and therefore, I will just stick with the Windows 10 install I have for gaming only. I use Windows 10 at work all day, being in IT, and could not care less there but for my personal machines, I will stick with Ubuntu 20.04.2 as my Daily Driver.

Otherwise, I will play Red Dead Redemption 2 in my Windows 10 install and be fine with that. Personally, I wish I could do the VFIO with the GPU passthrough but so far, I have not had a lot of personal success doing so. And by the way, MS screwing up something important with a bad update is no minor inconvenience and in fact, that have made a habit of doing so, in comparison to the past. The most disappointing aspect about not being able to dual boot with it is because the Win11 interface is far more appealing and intuitive than anything Windows 10 has put out from the start.
 
To that last part, you are straight up wrong and I assume you think that and were not simply being sarcastic. (Only slightly exaggerated.) I see no reason to bother with Windows 11, at least at the moment, because I cannot dual boot with it and the latest Linux Xanmod kernel, 5.13.6, with Secure boot enabled and therefore, I will just stick with the Windows 10 install I have for gaming only. I use Windows 10 at work all day, being in IT, and could not care less there but for my personal machines, I will stick with Ubuntu 20.04.2 as my Daily Driver.

Otherwise, I will play Red Dead Redemption 2 in my Windows 10 install and be fine with that. Personally, I wish I could do the VFIO with the GPU passthrough but so far, I have not had a lot of personal success doing so. And by the way, MS screwing up something important with a bad update is no minor inconvenience and in fact, that have made a habit of doing so, in comparison to the past. The most disappointing aspect about not being able to dual boot with it is because the Win11 interface is far more appealing and intuitive than anything Windows 10 has put out from the start.
Only slightly sarcastic. Wrong? No. Admittedly, my usage is not typical but never does it go without a hitch. I always make it work, but these days I don't often have time to troubleshoot issues. My opinion hasn't waivered where Linux is concerned - it falls short as a general purpose desktop OS. You'd think I hate Linux, but quite the opposite. Typically if I need an OS for a specific purpose, Linux can't be beaten.

I should also note that I've used some flavor of Linux since the late 90s. However, my comment was mostly bait.
 
No issues so far on my 15-year-old Q6600 test rig that meets almost none of the Win11 requirements. Even though I had to swap a DLL file to bypass the hardware check and get the first dev build to install, every update since then has installed normally via Windows Update.
 
No issues so far on my 15-year-old Q6600 test rig that meets almost none of the Win11 requirements. Even though I had to swap a DLL file to bypass the hardware check and get the first dev build to install, every update since then has installed normally via Windows Update.
So yet another artificial limitation from MS to bring a negative impact on consumers. A conspiracy to boost hardware sales.
 
I have 11 running on mine,my wife's and my daughters PC's without issue . . I like the Apple'esque design cues in the UI .. everything just works .. only caveat would be the forced AMD GPU driver it installs .. a simple gpedit.msc change for graphic drivers and it doesn't auto load anymore ..
I run all AMD stuff
 
I have 11 running on mine,my wife's and my daughters PC's without issue . . I like the Apple'esque design cues in the UI .. everything just works .. only caveat would be the forced AMD GPU driver it installs .. a simple gpedit.msc change for graphic drivers and it doesn't auto load anymore ..
I run all AMD stuff
i let it install this week and it seems to be just the ms certified version of amds, it has the full control panel and added wddm 3.0 support. its working just fine.
 
Installed it lastnight, had a few blue/green screens due to "irq not less or equal than" figure its either a driver or unstable OC issue. Downclocked it 100mhz and installed new nic driver. Seems ok since then.

Not sure how I feel about the rounded corners.
 
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Another version hit both the Dev and Beta channels today. After my disastrous second attempt at installing it last week, I'll probably hold off for a bit.
 
I take it a separate boot drive is the way to go if you want to try this out instead of a VM?
 
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