The telemetry, ads and forced online accounts are the only major changes since Windows 7 that I can think of. What useful features has Microsoft added since then to make you consider it at its peak currently? I haven't been using it as heavily and I'm genuinely interested if there's something great I've missed.
It's lots and lots. Just around things like DPI scaling and multi monitor there is quite a bit. You might not notice because maybe when you ran Win7 you had one non HDR standard def. Then maybe you had two. But today you might have multiple monitors with different scaling, some being HDR and so on. And that mostly just works in the later versions of Win10/11 where as the features just weren't there in Win7. When you dragged a window between a screen with 100% scaling to one with 200% scaling in Win7, it became tiny. Or it became blurry. Now the OS sends the app the info that needs in order to resize and stay crisp as it switches screens.
Windows Defender while not being great, at least means you don't need to start off by installing a third party Antivirus. DirectX 12 also comes to mind.
Obviously none, but that’s the point — you cannot have one without the other in the rest of the world. The EU believes this to be wrong to the point of being illegal. Which is why EU versions of windows — the N SKUs — ship without it.
There’s a separate OOBE where default browser, default media player, and so on must be selected (which was on US SKUs in 10 but removed in 11; it stays in N). One of the screens is asking about telemetry status, and the lowest option is “None”. There is no default selection.
It’s strange that Telemetry would be treated differently in those versions. If its’s truly anonymous then there would be no real reason for the difference, and if it’s not well then all versions needs the notice in the EU.
The GDPR has the concept of “intended to be sold to people in the European Union”. As in, if you have a product that is sold in the EU, that product must be GDPR compliant, but if you happen to have a very similar product which is not sold in the EU, not available for download if the website detects you are in the EU, not able to be purchased if your CC is from an EU country, and the only way to get it would be to self-import, that product does not have to be GDPR compliant. The N version of Windows, and only the N version, is sold in the EU. (There are N SKUs for every additonal SKU elsewhere, it’d a matrix)
But that's about it. For regular users, Windows 7 has been the best, and after noticing how my parents struggled with the updates, nothing can convince me to think otherwise.
Terminal app is another good thing, the clipboard manager that's built-in, snipping tool being built-in, Notepad having tabs, there's all sorts of other enhancements I can't recall. Not to mention Visual Studio is arguably one of the best IDE's I've ever used.
All the really nice bits of Windows 11 are lost to time because you don't notice them, but they all add up. The fact we're mainly worried about telemetry over anything else says it all.
Terminal is cool, but it's just an app that's not even shipping with Windows. The best terminal app for macOS, iTerm2, isn't built by Apple. It says something about the Windows ecosystem that it took Microsoft to come up with Windows Terminal.
Visual Studio is a good IDE, but at least back in the day it needed ReSharper to have the smarts that Jetbrains IDEs usually have. And the fact that it only works on Windows is a dealbreaker for me, as many people want to develop on the same operating system that they target for deployment.
I can certainly buy into small improvements, such as Notepad having tabs. And I'm not the one that mentioned telemetry. But now that you've mentioned it, I'll say ... such marginal improvements aren't worth the creepy spyware, or the ads, or the useless breakage in UX.
I have to disagree with the settings app. When i needed to change, fix, or update something in my parents old computer i always knew exactly where to go there was one central hub that contained every useful permission and setting that i could need to change or update to fix a buggy mouse or alter audio settings/devices etc.
Nowadays it's impossible to know exactly where some specific setting is anymore, and the settings app has been so dumbed down that most settings don't even exist anymore. Just the other day i tried to fix my dads touchpad and went on a wild goose chase through every possible setting location, of which there were too many, and kept coming back to the "settings app" in which the touchpad "settings" had only a single checkbox, fully unrelated to anything actually useful at all. The tab was there but there was no fucking settings in it. Nothing useful at all. In the end i tried driver updates, i tried rollbacks, i tried every setting app, i tried everything and the touchpad still doesnt work. You can click, you can't move, you can't scroll. The man didn't install anything, windows released an update and the single most important tool for interacting with the computer, one that is built into the hardware, was broken with no recourse to fix it, I'm simply not allowed access to the settings i require to maintain my own control over a functioning device.
That is the new settings app to me. Maybe if you stay within the ever shrinking bounds of control that Microsoft so graciously barely allows us to utilize, maybe then the buttons are rounder and the categories are better laid out. But if you need to fix anything that exists even slightly outside that toddler playground Microsoft is only ever making that more and more difficult under the guise of UI "improvements".
Dark theme isn't the windows color theming that always existed. It's the actual system setting that instructs apps to use dark mode. It's in UXTheme.dll (an OS lib) and the function app devs use to query it is ShouldSystemUseDarkMode(). This was introduced in Windows 10 1903.
Drawing the line between the OS and "not the OS" is really difficult. Direct X is included with the OS and DX12 is not compatible with Windows 7 so basically DirectX 12 is something you did not have in Win7 and do Have in Win10.
> It's the actual system setting that instructs apps to use dark mode.
Dark mode being use as a short hand - pretty much all "standard" controls used to have colors and font size defined. So if an application wants to draw text - it'd use the text area background and color, likewise for buttons. Being replaced with a single boolean configuration option is just a lazy downgrade. Also I don't quite see it as an OS function - in the end it just reads the registry.
Vulcan was supported on Win7 (along w/ the raytracing) and oddly enough Win7 had a port of DX12 by Microsoft [0]. It was quite an arbitrary decision to prevent Win7 & 8 to run DX12. I suppose one of the issues is that GPU drivers (esp. AMD) do not support Win7 (or 8)
The fact remains there was no system setting for dark mode before Win 10 that apps could use to ask “does this user prefer dark mode”. Now it exists in windows as well as iOS, MacOs etc so its a pretty established standard by now to have that as a Boolean system wide (and that system apps follow it while third party apps can query it of course).
Even if dx12 is an arbitrary restriction to only work in w10 that’s beside the point. It’s a feature of win10 no matter how arbitrary.
there was no system setting for dark mode before Win 10 that apps could use to ask “does this user prefer dark mode”
There was no need for apps to ask that. Previously, apps would just say "draw this dialog box in the user's preferred color scheme" and it would work fine. The only reason this dark mode hint is necessary is because too many apps started ignoring the Windows system color scheme and doing their own thing.
Exactly. Apps ignore anything but a “use dark mode yes or no” option, so the improvement was to
add it. Tiny from windows perspective, huge for users (since the apps now actually respect it).
The difference to windows users is that you change a switch and apps actually change whereas before you couldn’t do that.
It wasn’t Microsoft’s fault before and it isn’t they who updated the apps now so they don’t get credit for that. But the fact remains you basically couldn’t use dark mode before and now you can.
> Dark theme isn't the windows color theming that always existed.
Yes, and no. The colour theming that has existed since at leats Windows v2 could be used to implement dark more quite easily if only your apps listened to the relevant settings (some did, many did at least partially due to the framework they were written in doing so, some didn't at all – partially is the worse option as it caused contrast problems between compliant and non-compliant parts).
> It's the actual system setting that instructs apps to use dark mode.
The old theming was through system settings too. There were GDI API calls to read the values so you could make your app mirror the user's choices. Not as convenient as a single “dark mode” switch but no different other than that affordance. Many toolkits did this for you.
Yes but no apps (more or less) respected those settings. Yet in OSes with a single dark switch, it was seen as impolite for apps to not respect it. So basically Microsoft copied that. That’s the feature. That there is a switch that apps actually tend to respect. Nothing else. Might sound small or even like a regression from before, but it’s not imo.
Notepad has tabs and is insanely fast, Screenshot utilities are built-in, there's a clipboard manager, there's a "Terminal" app that lets you use PowerShell or even CMD and supports tabs. I didn't even need to go out of my way to install a special terminal or WSL just to SSH into another box. There's loads of things in Windows 11 that are useful, but Microsoft spits on the face of all of it by letting Marketing have any say in what goes where. Windows Marketing should happen outside of the software, not inside of it, period.
Much like Apple and Linux, windows even though it always had an API for it, supports Virtual Desktops finally.
