It's not perfect, but I'm very productive and happy using it.
Windows 11 Pro on my Dell Latitude 5540 and it's a rock solid experience.
I on principle always format my disk drive when getting a new PC and reinstall using an ISO downloaded from Microsoft to ensure no OEM software is on them. For my Dell the only thing I install is "Dell Command | Update" (not to be confused with Dell SupportAssist which is crap targeting general consumers). It's for updating drivers and firmware and it does absolutely no nonsense, only prompting me when a driver or firmware update is available.
I use no third-party anti-malware, no "corporate management software", just Windows Defender, but with Dev Drive and exclusions to my working directories so everything is very fast for my development work with Visual Studio.
My work is mostly developing for .NET and Electron which works on Linux and macOS as well. WSL with Visual Studio is super impressive that I can seamlessly debug processes running under WSL from normal Visual Studio. For Electron / NodeJS debugging I can use VS Code which also supports debugging processes running under WSL.
I have done two registry tweaks to Windows 11 to remove a couple of annoyances:
- I've turned off the "simplified" context menu which shows by default in Windows Explorer, otherwise most of what I need is hidden behind an extra click of my mouse.
- I've turned off internet search results from showing on the Start Menu. This is a huge quality of life improvement, I've never ever cared for searching outside of my web browser and it makes the Start Menu super responsive and stops it showing web results above stuff on my local computer which was what I was looking for.
(As a side remark, I was very happy when I only somewhat recently worked out how to get iOS to stop showing web search results when I search my home screen for apps, that was a huge annoyance as I only want to search for apps on my phone by name and often it would show web searches over a locally installed app name.)
People constantly complain here about all the adverts on Windows 11. I honestly don't get any adverts, maybe it's because I'm in South Africa and not the US (marketing sounds like it's beyond obnoxious there). I think it came pre-installed (even when installing with the ISO downloaded from MS) with a few rubbish Windows Store apps (like Candy Crush), but I uninstalled them normally and nothing ever came back. I also use OneDrive already (which integrates really nicely with Windows), maybe if I didn't have it set up, Windows would be bugging me about it.
Install NetLimiter and be amazed with the MB/s of data that is getting uploaded into Microsoft when your PC is at rest, even when you open PowerPoint and are just editing a slide..
Install SystemInformer (the successor of ProcessHacker) and be amazed how Microsoft Telemetry will use 12 to 15% of your CPU even with the machine at rest...
- Multiple Visual Studio instances (with ReSharper)
- Several Electron(-like) based Applications
- Outlook Classic
- Slack
- Teams
- Docker Desktop
As is plain from the screenshot, there is not MB/s of network traffic, furthermore, the CPU is also pretty idle as one would expect from my not doing anything heavy (like compilation) at this moment. This is very typical for my PC most of the time.
Based on my decades of using Windows full time and my screenshot, your comment is absolutely not representative of typical idle resource usage.
I do however acknowledge that there is a recurring scheduled telemetry collection process which when it runs pegs an entire CPU Core for minutes. I do find this annoying when I notice it, but that's maybe every couple of months which isn't enough of an annoyance to me to waste my time worrying about it, or I might have actually already disabled it in Task Scheduler.
Some people on principle dislike telemetry which is a completely understandable viewpoint, but for me personally I'm okay with Microsoft collecting essentially anonymous usage statistics to better understand how people use their software and where best to direct their efforts.
