The one thing you’ve called out that I can’t refute is that the option to customise it to the win2k look has been taken away, but I imagine it gets harder to maintain the further they move from those metaphors (e.g. you already needed to use WindowBlinds on 10).
I really like the new UI. The window snapping is far better than it’s been previously. It takes quite a bit from macOS, but I think they’ve left the worst parts of macOS out like the horrific monstrosity of a settings screen and the janky mess of a permissions system.
Certainly.
The problem I have though is that one of the reasons I use Windows is because it's not Mac.
Really, the only reason I'm still on Windows is because I'm a gamer and many multiplayer games don't work in Linux because the anti-cheat software isn't compatible. But the changes in Win11 make me stick with Win10, which is a shame because the current gen of Intel CPUs use two types of cores, and the Thread Director technology isn't going to be ported to Win10, so I'm either stuck with my i9-9900K or I switch to AMD.
On W11 you have TPM/ROT, centralised app signing (that you can enable/disable as you prefer), DirectX 12 (I realise this wouldn't matter if everything was on Vulkan, but it's not).
Proton is great, and Linux has only gotten more user-friendly over time, but there's still some touch points that are either stubbornly still not addressed or just won't be addressed because they're antithetical to FOSS (again, TPM and central signing authorities).
Side note: A central signing authority would be really helpful in the Linux world, maybe run/funded by a consortium of Linux-using orgs (Microsoft/Amazon/Google/Red Hat). I'm surprised this hasn't been attempted already as it would be protective of those organisations massive cloud investments, too.
Seth Arnold wrote about this about ten years ago, touching on the problems back in 2.4.3 that prevented this from gaining traction: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732927/signed-executabl....
It should be noted some of those weaknesses still apply to W11 and macOS even now. I would think WASM (coupled with a minimal runtime like Wasmer) might provide a means to deal with this issue by signing the packaged sandbox and everything in it rather than worry about the internals of the language and what it loads (in that it can't load/touch anything outside the sandbox boundary anyway).
UPDATE: Hadn't realised this has now been started (https://www.sigstore.dev/).
Oh fuck no it hasn't. The UI is actually what's stopping me from upgrading to Win11.
Win11 is trying to be macOS with its UI, and that's a bug, not a feature, because I fucking hate everything about macOS's UI.
I hate multiple windows from a program coalescing into a single icon on the task bar. I hate the task bar not including text from windows. I hate that I can't have a task bar on multiple monitors. And I just generally hate how flat everything looks. What I hate most of all, is that Microsoft has decided to go the Apple way and disallow you from choosing what you want it to look like. There are no options to make it look like it used to.
IMO, Windows UI peaked with Win2K. When I used Win7, I used the classic theme. I use Win10 now, and use WindowBlinds to skin it to look like Win2K.