Sorry, what did they think was going to happen when people saw just how blatantly Microsoft said, "You know, the problem with Windows 10 is that we just haven't expressed enough disdain for our eyeballs? The ones we can't really sell to our real customers yet because we wrote Windows 10 as an OS..."

I will not run Windows 11 on any personal computer. I will discourage anyone else from doing so. Reasons, in no particular order:

- Windows 10 has been getting harder and harder to install with a "local account only" over the years. You used to opt out. Now you have to disconnect the physical network connection to pull it off, and then it badgers you until you find the checkbox for the notifications. Windows 11 Home explicitly didn't support offline accounts, and as of some recent updates, Windows 11 Pro doesn't support offline accounts. You have to use a Microsoft Account to log in - which tells me that the value of having a particular computer's used tied to a particular email address with insert handwave privacy policy barriers here in the way is worth a lot of money to Microsoft. I'm not sure what exactly they are and aren't snorfing up for app data and such, but clearly, knowing which exact human is behind the screen is worth a lot, which tells me they're doing something on the big data backend. Or, at least, plan to - if they're not doing it now, it will likely sneak in at some update.

- The integration of advertising into the deepest cores of the UI (Explorer) are clear from the fact that during the beta, a bad blob of advertising JSON delivered to end user computers literally rendered them unusable. The JSON, to display an ad, broke Explorer. Those two should not be remotely at the same privilege level for a variety of reasons, but when "displaying the ads" is at the same level as "me deciding which programs to launch," it tells me something about the priorities of the company releasing the system. It's no longer about running programs, it's about pushing the limits of just how much you can shove in front of a set of monetized eyballs before they revolt. My limit is quite low.

- The "Oh, yes, yes, we need modern hardware to run this... oh, what's that, one of the machines we're selling right now won't run it... right, except for that bit of hardware we whitelisted on an older chip..." thing is rubbish. It's a way to try and juice the PC hardware industry, which is struggling for a variety of reasons, but it's a clear money grab (all those new OEM licenses!) with very real environmental consequences (gobs of ewaste that otherwise would work fine - I've got an i7-970 with a 7970 at a relative's place and it works perfectly fine for their needs, including some light gaming). They're weirdly non-committal about anything "Unsupported" too - "Well, yeah, you can install it... and it works, but, you know, we might not deliver security updates forever..." Not confidence inspiring.

And the reality is that for an awful lot of people, the "computer" is "the thing that runs the web browser." Or "the thing collecting dust in the corner because the phone is the primary device."

I hope this whole Win11 thing blows up in Microsoft's face. It's a user-hostile money grab, because apparently they couldn't get Windows 10 to do quite enough data collection for their desires.

I'll run Win10 in random corners of computers until such point as it's no longer supported, and then I'll just expand my Linux partitions over it. If I can't play certain games, well, so be it. Windows 11 is not for me.