Remind me - wasn't Windows 10 supposed to be the last version ever and from then on it would be updates all the way?

Yes, but one of those updates is an update to Windows 11.

One could argue that Windows 11 isn't an update at all, since it is a regression on so many areas.

So, why would you downgrade to Windows 11 from 10 (or 7/8.1 for that matter).

To be fair, if you look at the kernel updates, Windows hasn't truly been "updated" since Windows 7.

Its basically lipstick on a pig and that is all they can do since the kernel team has pretty much all retired or left!

There have actually been quite a few very important updates made in Windows over the years, but since they're all related to things most people don't find very interesting, they don't get mentioned a lot.

The much hated Vista was an absolutely necessary overhaul to major chunks of the OS. It vastly improved security compared to XP, driver model was overhauled and hardened considerably, it was the first version that could distinguish between multi-core and multi-CPU (a subtle but important distinction), they rewrote the entire GUI using DirectX so it could take advantage of hardware acceleration, etc. People seem to forget how for literally YEARS with XP there would be some new remote exploit that needed to be patched basically every week. Or how everyone hated XP until about SP2 when it finally started to stabilize a little.

Windows 7 was basically lipstick on a pig, being a mostly warmed over version of Vista. Though it did make some refinements to things like the process scheduler and driver security.

Windows 8 was another massive update that really kind of completed a lot of the work started with Vista. The process scheduler was refined further to deal with ever growing core counts, security was improved significantly, more improvements to driver security. Microsoft also cut the size of Windows down by several GB during the 8.x years. It introduced the system-wide search that actually worked...

Windows 10 was (initially) another lipstick on a pig release, just being a warmed over Win 8 with a new start button. Over the years there were a number of security enhancements, enhancements to the process scheduler, more driver hardening, etc.

Win 11 is another lipstick on a pig release, but it does do some things like turn on by default a lot of optional security features in 10, and is the only version of Windows that can make proper use of Intel's mixed P and E core chips in their 12th Gen Core series and later. But they have been making a lot of kernel level changes like hardware address randomization and Win11 Pro has core isolation functions that utilize CPU virtualization functions to protect against DMA attacks from USB/Thunderbolt devices being connected to a system.

If you look past the visual changes of the GUI, you'll see that Microsoft has been making a lot of significant and positive changes to Windows.

Funny you should mention Vista. I had occasion to use two different PCs yesterday - the first was my wife's old, old Core 2 Duo-based system that I built for her back in '09 or so, booting it up for the first time in maybe a decade. I have to say - and believe me, I've indulged my fair share of Vista jokes over the years - Vista 32-bit on it is surprisingly usable and familiar. At a casual glance it's just Windows 7 with a different Start button and Control Panel layout (although obviously there's a few more changes under the skin).

The other PC I booted up is an 8th-gen NUC running Windows 11 that I keep around for interop testing purposes. Again - putting my prejudices to one side for a moment - it's surprisingly slick and polished when compared to my Windows 10 daily driver. Admittedly, I have turned off & disabled as many of the annoyances as I can, but I can see its appeal from the point of view of a non-technical end-user (don't shoot me!).

Fundamentally, is there any added value between the two extremes of OS? Hmm. Pass.

I miss Vista, at least in terms of visuals. I consider it the high water mark for Windows. After that they started adopting this more flat and emotionless style. At least with Windows 8 they had the excuse that they were trying to make the OS usable on low end systems with shitty iGPs, but these days even a pretty low end cell phone has more than enough GPU power to be able to handle the full Vista level bling.

It was indeed a flawed OS in many ways, but it didn't, and still doesn't, deserve the flack it got, and still gets. Same with Win 8. The GUI decision was indeed an odd one, and with the benefit of hindsight there are many seemingly obvious better solutions, but taken as a whole it was a good OS. Strangely, MS didn't seem to learn their lesson and repeated the same mistake with Win 11 only a few short years later. Switching to the 10X UI is all fine and well, but it was only maybe 70-80% complete when they decided to adopt it as part of the version sent out to consumers. That part just boggles the mind.

Vista got a lot right in hindsight, the major issue for most users that I recall was how incredibly intrusive the first generation of UAC was. It is of course a good thing to warn users that they're about to do something.

Internal versioning (used a lot in SCCM queries) shows that Vista is version 6.0, 7 is 6.1, 8 is 6.2 and 8.1 is 6.3 so not much changed across all those generations of OS.

I think it is still just as obtrusive now, the only difference is that application developers have learned not to ask for admin privleges unless they really need it.

It's still sad how much UI regression you have to accept to be able to access the security and performance improvements.

Even with windows 10, the amount of 3rd party software you need to make the UI even close to as pleasant as win7 was by default, eats away a lot of the performance improvements.

And whether security got better in total is also very questionable, when windows itself sends telemetry, force installs unwanted feature updates and software, has ads in the OS start menu, and generally behaves like malware...

Makes me glad tht all of my gear is on wired ethernet. Never did trust this new fangled wireless stuff.

Wire you so negative about it?

It will be some time before Wifi 7 hardware goes mainstream, and there is little point in updating to it in the home. Its features are intended for corporate / large scale deployments. The kind of environments where someone else controls your Windows version.

However people want to interpret some Microsoft marketing comments, the fact remains that Win10 is in its twilight years. So, if you're a business like Intel, it wouldn't make a lot of sense to spend time and resources testing stuff on an OS that's going EOL in 2-3 years. Odds are those drivers and whatnot will still work with Windows 10, no problem, but Intel can always tell anyone calling up for support with that config that it's not supported and to get back to them when they're running Win 11 and can replicate the issue.

Exactly. Also, chances are the Windows 11 drivers will just work as well on Windows 10 anyways.

I'm using a Core i5 from back when the cpus just had a 3 digit part number it definitely won't support switching from Windows 10 to 11. Crazy that a computer from 14 years ago is still perfectly usable today.

> Crazy that a computer from 14 years ago is still perfectly usable today

That sentiment makes me sad

Hold my beer while I power on my ZX Spectrum, I'm in a mood for Elite.

No that isn't the point.

An Ivy Bridge i7 3770 runs about 1/10th of the speed of a modern flagship, but that means for things like spreadsheets, word processing, web browsing, etc; that things that take 10ms on the modern flagship take 100ms on the Ivy Bridge, and you are unlikely to particularly notice the difference.

Gaming, video editing, 3d modelling, stuff like that, you will for sure notice the difference in speed, but if you are not doing those things, you really don't need the extra performance.

Going back 1 decade before the Ivy Bridge (Pentium 4 or thereabouts), your 100ms tasks took 1 second, and then you will notice a difference, and it will slow you down.