W11 T_T

Windows 11 review/experience.
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The list below got quite long even just after just a few days of use. W11 was new at the time and I don't boot the machine up much for reasons evident below. But when I do I always have to add a few items. A few things might have gotten fixed.

Note: I don't care if the issues listed can be fixed - it's still like selling a nonworking car then getting the users to go to the shady cyberpunk district to get the fixes. It's like selling a dangerous power adapter and then go, hey, you can get an expert to go in there and do some soldering to the bridge rectifier and bulk cap trace widths, fix up the spark gaps so it complies with the most basic of safety regulations, and it will work as well as the competitor's, so aren't they practically the same? "Duurp, well at least you CAAAN get inside and solder-" Hey, what if a power supply just worked and was well featured? After like 40 years of development. Ever thought about that?

Anyways:
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PROS
¤ The programs I needed to work, worked. Old and new. So far so good! Hey, things worked! Great! Ah, I hope nothing goes wrong and makes the whole user experience so miserable I get angry each time I turn the computer on.
¤ This included some 32-bit programs, like BlitzMax. Unclear if Arduino IDE will need FTDI/CH340G drivers (linux does not). Overall Windows supports older software well. Just some trouble with graphics drivers in a few older games.
¤ Decent boot time... for a modern OS. My Amiga still cold boots to WB in a few secs from an ancient HDD though. Haha~ Only Amiga, Makes It Possible!
¤ No severe crashes/hangs yet.
¤ Though Text to Speech is rather wonky and poorly implemented, the actual voices are quite good and small in file size. Opposite situation on (older) Macs - good reading interface but unclear voices.

LIST OF GRIEVANCES (somewhat in order of encounter)
¤ Privacy minefield and annoying account setup bullshit during first boot.
¤ Can't tell if you can scroll to more content in windows as the scrollbars are too thin or even disappearing. Likely due to focus on phone/touch GUIs nowadays. But this is a mouse computer.
¤ Hard to window resize via edges. Made even harder by pixel density of display.
¤ I find myself wasting time looking up how to fix issues / gain basic functionality. This is made difficult by shady clickbait troubleshooting websites which won't answer the question in summary. No doubt the issues here can be remedied by mere weeks of web searches, risky clicks and third party installs.
¤ Clicking in inactive window clicks on thing inside window, rather than just focusing the window, which means you have to search for a safe spot to click.
¤ ...this is REALLY BAD in edge as I've clicked on shit links several times already. There's also a bug where edge keeps scrolling to top of page on focus, and then you click on mystery link there, maybe going to top result which is likely an advertisement when using edge.
¤ Edge is awful and horrible throughout. Can't even set new tab to blank page. Had to make my own blank first boot page. Some options menus just disappear when clicked if a cookie float is up. Why does the new tab page need a cookie? Bloat. Some menus are slow to expand for no reason (favourite menu with 5 bookmarks) and use placeholder bars. Bing doesn't show URLs in image search.
¤ Mouse hover-over annoyances leading to "searching for mouse parking spot" stress. I think hover info should be in dedicated positions like e.g. the bottom bar of old browsers.

¤ Everything (settings and such) is scattered about and hard to find. Help not helpful.
¤ The only consistent thing is that all places look the same, flat and abstract, which just further confuses things when features and behaviours are different.
¤ Programs/settings listed at various places have mystery meat sub actions / menu expansions, like ... or RMB or >
¤ 32-bit programs are blurry due to obscure scaling settings.
¤ In-browser pixel art is blurry due to scaling (bad if screenshotting to clipboard as part of work process).
¤ Bad/coarse control over GUI scaling (what to scale and by how much). 100% or 150% makes sense in some places but not others, but is hard to control.
¤ Inactive window is warm and active/focused is cool? Can hardly tell the difference. Bad for colour blind people.
¤ I have temporarily set a dark theme, but some of the settings windows appear to be really old windows stuff that got sort of just hung on there. Which is fine if they work but the whole GUI is a bit of a hodgepodge. It's like they took old windows, threw a new incredibly clumsy GUI on top, and also abandoned the effort halfway.

¤ There's a mystery window redirect thing, going from start menu search field to another search window. It's like the start menu search bar is just a button.
¤ Can't drag stuff like on mac, e.g. onto dock.
¤ Can't left click drag selected text around in notepad (maybe got fixed?).
¤ One Drive? Wouldn't that be two drives? Took some time to find where to turn this off. Next up is Office 365 -  I didn't activate but it is somehow occasionally eating resources, preemptively updating awaiting the OK perhaps?
¤ Sometimes programs start on their own. Mostly some bundled ASUS thing.
¤ Random annoying notifications that the OS decided to do a thing or wants to do a thing. Stop bugging me!
¤ Random process appears, eating drive or CPU (i.e. classic Windows behaviour since the dawn of windows).
¤ Antimalware thing in constantly nibbling at CPU. But sometimes desktop window manager takes the top spot, it's 10% even with the computer freshly booted and idle. A computer (fresh install) shouldn't be at 14%-20% CPU when idle. Perhaps it's not a retain mode GUI but really badly made immediate mode one?
¤ These random processes eating CPU are causing uneven performance and slowdowns in other applications which otherwise run fine. What's this DISM thing?
¤ Antimalware thing is normally 2-6% but matches Minecraft Launcher in CPU use, like 45% & 45%.
¤ Mouse cursor sometimes turns into busy/loading anim even when nothing much is going on and it's rather annoying. Amiga viruses made me incredibly paranoid about unsolicited computer activity...

¤ File search is incredibly slow. Writing a decent file system with index support doesn't seem like it would be a difficult task but somebody decided... not to do it. I suspect that the indexing solution which can be enabled now is a horribly designed afterthought which will constantly trash the CPU & drive.
¤ I was doing nothing in Bing but looking at a search results page and then it suddenly refreshes as server-side unavailable page. Wut?
¤ Unreadable white text on light background on pin code screen. Sloppy.
¤ I can't use AltGr to type special chars like bullets and Greek? What is the key for then? Works only on number keys. Another thing to fix-search.
¤ PSD preview not built-in.
¤ In MS paint the colour swatches are round dots - bad for comparing adjacent colours. Too much whitespace in GUI. Poorly featured still.
¤ No spellcheck in Notepad (got fixed, but I'm having trouble setting it to my preferred language.). Doesn't remember edge wrap setting. TextEdit on Mac is massively better anyways.
¤ Dumb desktop/dock icons all look the same and are abstracted to the point of uselessness (changed with an update though).
¤ Subtle but amateurish window or desktop icon rewdraw/flicker on certain actions.
¤ Minecraft Launcher (now a MS program) didn't get an icon so if I put it in the dock there's a blank space. Is it there or not?
¤ This is a GHz computer but sometimes the GUI lags (icon pop-in, placeholder bars). It's weird how placeholder bars have to be a thing in general nowadays.
¤ Can't open just volume slider (in corner). Instead a whole big panel with other stuff has to load and render. Can take seconds. This is a GHz computer.
¤ I see Windows is still nagging about nonsense stuff when inserting USB memory stick. An issue notification (there is no issue), then a what-to-do dialog. Listen, just place it on the desktop. But no, I have to access it from the explorer sidebar.
¤ No dedicated PDF viewer - opens in edge. As does SVG.
¤ JPG/image viewer (seems nameless) has mystery meat buttons and places floating bullshit over the image, like downloading a video editor, heart buttons, tooltip text junk. It is capable of showing pixel art unscaled (crisp) though.
¤ Installing Japanese was messy compared to e.g. MacOS. tesuto ... No it got stuck on partial download. And now the desktop icons are constantly redrawing for some reason. I better reboot. Oh no, hit by a windows update. Got back in after 5 mins. Now the search thing in the dock has changed to a text field, but it's just a button not an actual field.
¤ After shutting down computer it won't reload unsaved docs and open folders like on MacOS. Stuff just disappears.
¤ It's begging me to log into some email but isn't telling me why.
¤ Notifications pop in then disappear too quickly, preview of notification don't show the full message, then they disappear when clicked on, something else opens. No log of recent notifications?
¤ Tesuto テスト Well, Japanese input sucks, I can't switch to Katakana only, but have to access it via typing menu after typing in hiragana.

¤ For some reason "Terminal" in the right click menu is now in Katakana.
¤ Right clicking a file brings up a dumbed down menu, which can be expanded into the old right click menu (with e.g. create desktop shortcut), but that one appears with a different smaller font, and as a separate thing.
¤ Right clicking stuff in the task bar tends to trigger a hover-over menu which flickers off before the menu comes up. Visually annoying.
¤ Windows updated and I was left to navigating a "first boot" dark pattern minefield again. Install one drive, subscribe to office 365 for free (ps. not free)?
¤ Took a screenshot, wanted to upload to one drive, which I had disabled.
¤ There's really no quick general file inspection/preview tool like on the Mac?

¤ I transferred a single file to an USB stick. It already existed, so I "Skipped that file" it rather than overwrite. Still got a transfer progress bar (no overwrite tho seemingly).
¤ Explorer window got stuck in a blank state saying "Working on it...". Had to close and reopen.
¤ When right clicking on a USB - Holy shit - Format drive is right next to Eject drive! Not good with a fiddly trackpad.
¤ If I scroll down using a scrollbar, holding down left button on the trackpad while dragging down, then the mouse will continue to slide away in a weird way on its own.
¤ I was trying to close the image preview program but moved the mouse in a curve to the right, triggering the "next" hover-over at the edge, so when I clicked the X this triggered next instead. Wonky.
¤ Rebooted after update... buncha butterfly crap in search bar. Missing icons in taskbar for Outlook and Wikipedia.
¤ When I start the OS I don't go directly to pincode screen but since I might start typing it right away this causes issues.
¤ I had turned off the camera and mic. When I rebooted the computer I got a notice that those had been blocked by me. Why was it even trying to access them?
¤ When I rebooted I got the "OS setup" nag screen again, worded as if I "MUST" do backups and whatnot. Uh, no? It's just selling me office, gamepass, onedrive with harder to spot decline non-buttons.
¤ "Download and install all updates" button is light blue text on light blue backing. The button has an unclickable down arrow. The side scrollbar is blinking every few seconds.
¤ Getting a lot of notification sound spam. But where from?
¤ No way to just alter the palette like on older OSes? Well, you can sort of edit the high contrast themes it seems. The light and dark themes are both awful on the eyes.

¤ Narrator's home window doesn't bring up up the relevant settings for the Narrator, just the general setting window so you have to go there manually.
¤ Narrator settings won't install voices even after reboot. Sometimes the settings window crashes/closes after picking a voice to add.
¤ Installed voices are listed as 0 MB in size (not the listed size in download window).
¤ I selected a installed voice then double-finger scrolled and the selection box kinda started floating around not following the scroll. This is narrator related! It likely just does an overlay rect which is not fully integrated with the software it's monitoring, so scrolling is broken. So, Narrator is not part of the GUI overhaul but a slapped on afterthought.
¤ Removing voices doesn't work reliably.
¤ Natural voices not available under speech settings (just Narrator).
¤ There's seemingly a bug with contrast themes not applying all parameters correctly if one makes enough of them.
¤ Notepad's floating search box covers highlighted search results. Floating GUIs are garbage design.
¤ Sometimes in notepad characters are lost when typing, and the text cursor randomly jumps and I find myself suddenly typing text elsewhere in the doc. Not sure why but it could be a ""slow"" CPU issue, however my Amiga 500 sure as hell didn't have these problems and it was a 7mhz machine, so it's still bad design. Why is there no proper text editor like on other systems - oh, right, M$ wants to sell office 365 subs! "Well, you can download-", yeah, sure let's have grandma go to Huckter Joe's Totally Not Trojans inc. JUST TO EDIT TEXT! IN FUCKING 2025!

Overall rating: 2 stars and 3 insistent turds.