We’ve all been there before. You unbox your shiny new PC, everything preinstalled, and you’re so excited you’re practically molting in your chair in anticipation for it to boot up. You’re so engrossed that you forget there’s a 10-ton gorilla lying in wait just around the corner. It’s Windows 11, a mammoth operating system that does everything you want and everything you don’t in equal measure.
I broke out a brand new iBuyPower budget-minded Scale PC to start a review (don’t worry, that’ll be coming soon). As I plug in a DisplayPort cable to my monitor, the constant flickering reminds me that, oh yeah, I’m using Windows, and sometimes things don’t work without some troubleshooting. Of course, the PC is inscribed with garbage dump’s worth of bloatware, and I had no option of performing a clean install. And all that’s before I have to do is click off options for pop-up notifications, dig through settings menus to set my default browser, uninstall unneeded apps, and so on.
Instead of trying to go its own way as the more open OS compared to Apple products, Microsoft has desperately tried to create its own walled garden so it can take bites of Mac’s lunch. Despite its efforts, the company finds itself gnawing at the table, much to the detriment of those who actually just want to eat. We have popups and actual ads for Windows services showing up constantly. Microsoft wants its proprietary account system to be the arterial passage for your entire PC, but it just makes the experience worse. Hell, half the time, the Microsoft account doesn’t even work as intended on startup.
The Redmond, Washington company’s latest update this month introduces a few positive changes to Windows 11, though none are obvious to start. The Moment 5 update finally lets users uninstall system apps, which include the likes of Microsoft Edge and applications like Paint or Photos.
Microsoft made this change to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, so don’t think this was done out of the goodness of Microsoft’s heart. Still, it’s a step in the right direction, and there are a couple of new additions, like better snap layouts, that make me hopeful the current or future iteration of Windows would be more fair to users. However, as of now, the worst aspects of Windows 11 are due to Microsoft funneling users to its own services.
Windows 11 is by far the easiest OS to use that Microsoft has ever created, and yet I find myself more angry at it than I was with the much-derided Windows 8 or even Windows Vista. It’s all due to how much Microsoft tries to force you to use its own products and services. It absolutely bombards users with relentless popups about OneDrive, Microsoft 365, and most recently its new obsession, Copilot. Windows now wants every laptop and keyboard to have a Copilot key to quick access AI, and we’re still waiting to see if that will be a worthwhile addition to Windows or if it will make a bloated OS even more unwieldy.
There are some things Windows 11 is good at. It runs on a whole lot of hardware (though it still requires you to have a modern CPU from the last three years), and it supports gaming far more intrinsically than pretty much any other operating system. But it could be so much better if Microsoft only stopped treating its users like a captive audience or, worse, a piggy bank.