I hate where Microsoft is going, but there is no obvious alternative. I am not go to be paying hundreds of dollars markup for RAM/SSDs and limiting myself to a single GPU vendor by switching to Apple. I am very hesitant to deal with desktop linux bullshit, but Windows 11 may just be the thing to push me over the edge. I know there are great people at Microsoft who know what “the right thing” is for the people who actually care about the platform, but it seems that nowadays they do not have the required ownership.
Apple's (much more) slowly going down to the same "profit over users" road. A year or so ago I started slowly migrating from Apple-only apps to cross-platform apps. Fortunately my main hobbies are YouTube and software side projects so this was pretty easy.
Anyway, when I finally felt my Mac was getting a bit long in the tooth, I loaded Linux (Debian + XFCE in my case, but they say Linux Mint is quite Windows-ish) on my spare gaming desktop (I don't really game much anymore so it was unused), installed the apps, added some Mac-like keyboard shortcuts, and it's worked fine!
Maybe you too can slowly find cross platform alternatives to your apps, so the jump will be easy when your boiling pot gets too hot.
Having skipped over Vista and Windows 8, my hope is that 11 is another one of those versions where they throw crap at the wall that will not stick to the next version. On the other hand, Windows 10 still has things I considered unacceptable, which I ended up accepting begrudgingly. Perhaps that is the whole strategy.
That's the very point of this discussion: not everybody cares abut the platform. As long browsing and office work, half (or more) of the population would never know a Windows from a Mac. And they shouldn't either.
PS video and music, let aside games, are already for power users.
It does not take a power user to notice that the system has become more sluggish and more annoying, the average user just is not that vocal about it.
However, these people also do not care about stuff like Copilot, so the question becomes: Who is Windows being developed for? Microsoft could save a bunch of money literally adding no new features and that would make both the power user and the average user happy.
I’m puzzled. On the one hand you don’t want the complexity of a Linux desktop, but you want the hassle that comes with changing GPUs. Over the life of a typical machine is it really worth upgrading the GPU separately?
Upgrading a GPU is not much of a hassle on an ordinary desktop, you open the case and plug it in, at worst you also need to upgrade the PSU. And you do that maybe once during the lifetime of the machine.
The real problem with the Apple approach though is that the very highest end SoC gives only the performance of a much cheaper midrange discrete chip and does not support all the software. Unified memory is nice, but that does not make up for it.
For me the answer is yes. It has been more important than upgrading the processor or anything else. But this depends upon your use case.
If you're a tinkerer or even just some kind of traditional PC gamer Mac just isn't a fun platform because there isn't much you can do with it besides buying a newer one. For a long time Windows was a good choice for this kind of user but less so now.
>I am very hesitant to deal with desktop linux bullshit, but Windows 11 may just be the thing to push me over the edge.
I switched to Linux a year ago and never looked back. It's done everything I've asked of it with minimal fuss: gaming, dev, local LLMs (accelerated on my AMD GPU), Microsoft Office (in a VM), web browsing and comms, etc. The only hiccups I've encountered are in Steam VR, which only has official support for Windows.
