Windows 11 Reviewed (by a Linux guy)

it's time to review windows 11 seriously [Music] now if the name of this channel is any indication windows is normally beyond the scope of this channel but i figured it might be entertaining to give you guys a linux user's perspective of windows 11. now if you're looking for an in-depth review of windows 11 from a windows expert you have come to the wrong video i am a linux user full time and i have been since around 2006. before that i was using windows but somewhere around 2006 i made the switch and linux became my primary platform nowadays popos is my favorite distribution the one i use the most i also like fedora debian ubuntu and some others but even though i switched to linux in 2006 i still used windows from time to time from then on so i feel like i'm kept moderately up to date with what microsoft is up to but i figured that this video might be entertaining to get a linux user's perspective of windows 11 because windows is not my primary platform a lot of you guys out there are using windows as your primary platform and maybe you are considering the switch to linux but you haven't made this switch yet so i figured it might be fun to give you guys a review of windows 11 from a different direction from someone that doesn't use windows full time so that's what today's video is going to be about on my end i had windows 10 installed on my recording pc and i decided to upgrade that to windows 11. in addition my thinkpad x1 extreme first generation normally runs a linux distribution but i decided to temporarily install windows 11 on that as well so that way i can get a perspective of the new os from two different machines now when it comes to my recording pc i uploaded another video about that build some time ago around the same time as i put it together i don't really consider it a windows pc although technically it is because it's literally just used for one single purpose obs i will be switching this particular pc to linux at some point in the future but i haven't gotten around to it yet i'm not in all that much of a hurry to switch it over because i run obs full screen so i rarely see the windows ui all that much anyway but i figured that since it was running windows 10 why not upgrade it now it's no secret that windows is currently the dominating operating system on desktop pcs but today we're going to get a review of windows 11 from a linux user's perspective i think it's going to be fun so let's get into it first of all let's talk about the installation process as i mentioned earlier i installed windows 11 on two machines my recording pc and also my thinkpad x1 extreme first generation on my recording pc i installed it as an upgrade from windows 10 and on my thinkpad i did a clean install so first i'm going to talk about the process of upgrading my recording pc to kick off the process i ran the installation assistant that i downloaded from microsoft and with this tool what it does is it shows you whether or not you are compatible with windows 11 and if you are it gives you a chance to upgrade this isn't the only way that you can upgrade though at some point in the future it's going to be showing up in windows update as an update that you can install but it hasn't been distributed to everyone just yet with the installation assistant you could basically make it upgrade right now even if you are not normally offered the upgrade at first it told me that my pc didn't meet the requirements but all i had to do was enable the tpm module in the bios and that was the only change that i needed to make on my end after i made that change i ran the installation assistant when i launched it it triggered a user account control prompt because it well it needs to run as administrator and that prompt didn't show up in the screen capture but effectively is just asking for my permission to run the tool windows users see this prompt all the time so there's nothing unusual about this at first it seemed like everything was going well it downloaded windows 11 and started to install it but unfortunately it crashed on the third step and i ran it again just in case it was an intermittent problem and it failed again in the exact same place so at this point i figured that the tool just wasn't going to finish for whatever reason so i took a look at the error code which was 0x8007007 and that error message was very clear and straightforward i knew exactly what it meant okay i had no idea so i did the same thing that anyone else would do i went ahead and googled the error message and the solution surprisingly was to right click on the installation assistant executable and then click on run as administrator but wait a minute when i ran it the first time the user account control came up and asked me to verify that i wanted to run as administrator because it's going to make changes to my system and i told it that it had my permission to do so so why would i get different behavior depending on which method i used to tell it to run as administrator this seems like a bug to me anyway after i manually relaunched it as administrator it worked fine even though there was a few failed attempts the first time i tried it the process did finish successfully so i have to give it credit for that i don't remember how long it took but the process didn't seem to take all that much time so i think it was reasonable and after that i was running windows 11 on my recording pc but i wasn't done yet at that point it was time to install windows 11 on my thinkpad this one right here so for the thinkpad i created a bootable usb key with windows 11 on it and then i started my laptop from that usb key and started the installer one of the first things that i've noticed is that the ui of the installer seems virtually unchanged from windows vista 7 and 10. later on it is a bit different but at least at the beginning it looks virtually the same and i don't think that's really a problem if the installer does what it's supposed to do but i do find it a bit odd that they've never updated the ui in the installer to match the actual ui in windows but i suppose that's a very minor complaint there's no functional problem with the installer at least that i found the process wasn't as fast as installing something like ubuntu but it wasn't all that much different either the speed of the installation was very reasonable and the process seemed a bit faster when compared to installing windows 10 but i haven't actually timed the installation of that before so i'm not really sure if it is any faster but it was fine after the main phase of the installer was finished my laptop rebooted a few times and then the next phase of the setup process began and what's interesting here is that they actually did update the ui of the installer for this section it has the windows 11 theme perhaps they figured that the majority of installations are probably going to be oem installs so maybe that's why they didn't update the ui for the first part of the installer but i guess it is what it is anyway the first part of the second phase asked me for my country and then it asked me for my keyboard layout and after that it gave me the option to connect to wi-fi which i decided to skip and the reason why i decided to not connect to wi-fi is because i know from past experience that they're going to try very hard to force me to sign into a microsoft account and i don't have a microsoft account and i don't need one because well microsoft is not my primary platform but there seems to be this war between microsoft and its users where it's trying to shoehorn them into things that they may or may not want and they seem to do this a little forcefully i mean when windows 10 came out they were trying really hard to get people to move to windows 10 even to the point where they made the prompt that comes up when you are upgrading from windows 7 to windows 10 trigger the upgrade process regardless of what you click on the form but then with you know windows 10 they're trying really hard to get you into a microsoft account and they're trying hard to keep you on microsoft edge but i feel like there's a you know a problem here because they really do need to respect the wishes of their users and i just don't have a need for a microsoft account personally so i think they should make it easier to say no now from what i understand if you are using the pro version of windows 11 it's a bit easier to bypass this the home edition not so much so anyway i lied to the installer and told it that i didn't have internet on the next screen i clicked on the button to continue with limited setup which was almost like a backhanded way of telling me that i was making the wrong decision [Music] after that i created my local account i set up my password and then it asked me to choose my privacy settings by default as you would expect all of the telemetry was enabled so i turned everything off since i don't personally have a need for any of this stuff and then the installation process set up a few more things in the background and i was finally able to log in so at this point i have two installations of windows 11 and both were a success i mean the recording pc did fail a few times but i was able to get that going then the process on my laptop actually worked without any problems whatsoever or so i thought at first everything seemed fine i had the default desktop on my screen so it appeared as though i was good to go but the resolution looked a bit strange it wasn't the proper resolution for my panel and everything appeared to be stretched knowing that the unusual resolution probably meant that i was missing some sort of driver i opened up the device manager to check that and to my surprise there was a bunch of missing drivers like over 20 of them and i find this a bit strange because one of the main complaints that windows users use against linux users is that they claim that windows has better hardware support but that's literally never been true i mean just look for yourself there are over 20 drivers that are not installed out of the box with windows 11 and previous versions of windows would at least have three or four drivers that you had to source manually or through windows update now when it comes to a linux distribution generally speaking you have between zero to two drivers to install during any one installation it could be something like the gpu and the wi-fi driver that makes sense because you have to have those things installed and some of those things require proprietary drivers but distributions like ubuntu make it very easy for you to install those drivers but generally speaking on a linux distribution i don't really have to install more than one or two drivers at most and on windows i always have to install more and some of them i'm able to get through windows update other ones you know required a few more clicks so it's nowhere near as easy as it is on a linux distribution and speaking of hardware after all the drivers were installed i noticed that my network printer wasn't set up automatically this means that if i want to set up my printer i'd have to install the driver manually and that's not necessarily a huge problem but with most linux distributions that i've tried lately my brother printer is installed automatically there's literally nothing that i have to do it's just magically there and available and even when i tried a macbook recently the same thing happened there was nothing to install my network printer was automatically set up so with windows needing me to install my printer manually that's a downside to me yes it's not that big of a deal i only have to do it once but when microsoft's competition is all doing things like that automatically it really makes me wonder why windows users claim that windows has better hardware support which again has literally never been true anyway enough about hardware let's actually take a look at windows 11 itself it's installed it's ready to go so let's take a look when it comes to appearance windows 11 looks well fine i don't think there's a ton of innovation here my first impression is that it's a standard windows experience with some tweaking of the ui for example the icons on the taskbar start out in the center which may take some getting used to for some people and as far as i know there's no way to move the taskbar to another edge of the screen but maybe an update will enable that functionality but it's not a real deal killer to me i think for a certain portion of the windows user base they're probably used to clicking on the lower left hand corner for the start menu which now is actually off to the side it doesn't really trip me up all that much and to be honest i kind of like it i think it makes sense but again for some people it might take some getting used to the taskbar is missing some settings though for instance you can't actually move the taskbar to a different edge of the screen is stuck there on the bottom hopefully an update is released before too long that restores some of that functionality because some users just aren't really all that happy about that another thing i've noticed about the ui right away is that the taskbar appears to be an immediate rip-off of the panel from kde plasma on linux i mean just look at it it seems to borrow a lot of ideas now that may not be a bad thing at least not at first i think all ui designers and os maintainers can probably be accused of borrowing ideas from one another it happens all the time but what makes me a bit annoyed here is that microsoft has had a track record of suing linux distributions for patent infringement and non-disclosure rules have prevented the targets of these lawsuits from detailing exactly which patents in the ui were violated and here microsoft clearly borrows ui ideas from plasma which is very ironic sure they claim to love linux now but i think if they're going to release a new version of windows the least they could do is make the ui completely original now borrowed ideas aside the ui in windows 11 seems overall fine it's not going to win any design awards in my opinion but it doesn't look terrible i like the fact that the start menu is missing those annoying tiles from previous versions of windows and that's not surprising because i never thought that would actually catch on anyway people generally open the start menu to get quick access to applications and it does that in fact i would say that this is probably my favorite start menu of any version of windows it's not revolutionary by any means but it is simpler and i think that's the proper way to move forward and this simplification is prevalent all over the design and i like the fact that the ui has been simplified i hope that they add back some of the missing features for example on the taskbar but i think the motto here is that less is more and i agree with that my opinion has always been that the job of an operating system is to help you open your files and programs as well as give you an interface through which to configure settings anything beyond that in my opinion is bloat i think that's actually why a lot of linux users often enjoy using window managers over desktop environments but i digress windows 11 is the most curvy version of windows ever and i can't believe i'm using that word to describe an operating system of all things one of the reasons why this new look is very interesting to me is because it looks like a complete 180. in the past when metro was the look and feel of windows everything was boxy square and flat now everything has to be curved i think it looks nice overall it's a modern user interface that's also simple windows are curved around the edges and have drop shadows just like linux environments have had for decades windows 10 introduced virtual desktops which was awesome i thought it was fairly amusing when windows 10 was released with that feature because i've had virtual desktops in linux since i started using that platform way back in 2003 microsoft seems to be late to the party very often but i guess it doesn't matter their implementation of virtual desktops is good enough it's not as featureful as the concept is in most linux desktops but i'll take it the only oddity that i see here is that there's no effect when you use the keyboard shortcuts to switch between workspaces when you switch between one workspace to another or virtual desktop whatever microsoft tries to call it the apps kind of just disappear and the apps from the other desktop appear i would have liked to see some sort of transition here to make it obvious to the user how this paradigm is set up but that's my only real complaint about it and it's not that much of a problem another new feature in windows 11 is window grouping and this refers to the ability to have application windows tiled into quadrants of the screen now this concept isn't entirely new they've had similar abilities in the past but it's fully fleshed out here and it works very well when you hover over the maximize button you can choose which quadrant of the screen to maximize it to once you do this the app will generally stay in that quadrant and resizing the window will also resize adjacent windows as well the ability to do this isn't actually new but how the feature is accessed certainly is and being able to choose how you maximize a window when you hover over the maximize button is dare i say it very smart it seems like a simple idea but it's just so effective it's such a good idea in fact that i find it a bit surprising i mean microsoft doesn't really innovate anything nearly as much as they used to so seeing something smart like this is a bit of a jaw dropper again it's a very simple idea but it's very effective however as cool as this is i wish that windows 11 supported full tiling like some linux desktop environments and window managers have been doing for years the tiling that we do have here is definitely welcome but it's almost like getting half of the feature rather than the entire concept like tiling desktop environments and linux when you resize a window the adjacent window resizes as well but when you close a window the other windows don't resize to use up the remaining space tiling in linux desktop environments is a bit more automated which is why i think a lot of linux users enjoy that feature when you have tiling mode enabled on a distribution such as pop os the first app takes up the entire screen if you open another one it'll divide the screen automatically and if you close an app the remaining apps will resize themselves such that you'll never waste any screen real estate anyway window grouping in windows 11 is a very welcome feature but it just isn't implemented as well as it is in linux but i do really enjoy the fact that you can hover over the maximize button to choose how to maximize the screen again that's just brilliant so at this point let's talk about windows terminal windows terminal is not a new concept but i like how it implements different shells when you first launch the windows terminal you'll get a powershell session by default you can change your interpreter by choosing it in the drop-down at the top of the window for example i could switch it back to dos and let's be honest dos is so much more awesome than powershell i think it's an awesome feature to be able to switch your interpreter like that without having to open up a different app but what's even better is that you can easily get a linux shell by installing one from the microsoft app store for example i can grab ubuntu and what i like about this is that it's easier to do this now than it was before you just go into the microsoft store search for a linux distribution install it it's that simple but in order for it to run though you'll need windows subsystem for linux installed and it's not installed by default but then again even that's easier to install now than it used to be to install wsl you just run windows terminal as administrator and then you run the command wsl-install after you reboot you'll be able to use ubuntu you can get an ubuntu prompt in windows terminal or you could click on the standalone app and you have a linux shell awesome i find it a bit amusing though that a lot of windows users will criticize linux users and say that we need to run everything in the command line which isn't true everything you could do on a linux desktop you could do without the command line at all and then here microsoft is telling us to use the command line to install linux now that's ironic now speaking of linux you can actually run linux apps in windows 11 which is actually really cool and this is probably the biggest surprise when it comes to windows 11. now technically windows 10 allows you to do the same but we can run graphical linux apps now which is a welcome addition in order to run graphical apps you first have to launch your installed linux distro at least once and when you first launch it it's going to ask you to set up a username and a password and after you do that you can install and run linux apps as a proof of concept in ubuntu i can run sudo apt update and then after that's done i can run sudo apt install g edit and g edit itself is a text editor for the gnome desktop and probably not the best example but it does work and your mileage may vary for example i can't launch the gnome control center but then again running that probably would be useless in windows anyway overall windows 11 is fine it's not for me i am a linux user and there's nothing here that's going to steal me away from linux even though it can run linux apps i choose to run all of my apps natively that's just the way i prefer it and even though they've made a lot of improvements to the workflow it's actually better than previous versions i still don't think that it's quite on par with a linux desktop in my opinion but it is cool that you can have a linux shell in windows here in windows 11 just like you could in 10 but it's a bit better now i think that's going to be a great fit for anyone that's working in an environment where they don't allow anything but the windows desktop now you can actually have an official linux terminal you can run your gui apps and things like that so i think for those individuals it's going to be a good fit for me not so much not my thing but i figured it would be fun to go ahead and review windows 11 and that's what i did let me know what you think in the comments down below and i'll see you again very soon thanks for watching [Music] my [Music] you

Channel: LearnLinuxTV

Views: 73,257

Keywords: Linux, Review, Howto, Guide, Distribution, Distro, Learn Linux, gnu/linux, LearnLinuxTV, Windows, Windows 11, Windows 11 Review, Linux user, microsoft windows 11, windows 11 review, windows 11, windows 11 upgrade, win 11, how to install windows 11, tech news, windows 11 issues, windows 10 pro, windows 11 upgrade from windows 10, windows 11 update error, windows 11 update process, linux guy, ubuntu user, ubuntu, linux vs windows, ubuntu vs windows, pop!_os, pop!_os vs windows

Id: vOL90Hik4ws

Length: 22min 2sec (1322 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 02 2021