There's been a long observed tradition that every other version of Windows is trash. 3.1, 98, XP, 7, 10 were good^, 95, ME, Vista, 8 and now 11 are trash. This one is a bit of a fun one because the bits described here are almost sabotage level bad. You can deactivate that pretty easily so it's not a big deal; there's some other clunky ui interface notably in settings where you can still find 4 or 5 different generations of Windows ui. The two things that I reaaaally dont like is the right click menu that's now hidden behind a "more options" first ui someone figured was a good idea, the poorer performance where the antimalware or other bloatware sometimes decides to grab your CPU for itself, the lack of reliability - notably of the wsl, and most of all the sleep management.

What burns me is that my laptop used to wake up instantaneously in 10 when I opened the screen, even after a couple days of stowage. That was even one of the sales arguments, I think it was called "instant on" or something like that. Now if I wait more than 5 minutes it goes into Deep sleep. If I setup the sleep to longer than that the battery drains. I can't rollback to 10.

Even with 250gb free disk, I wanted to dual boot a Linux distro, can't resize the partition because "reasons", that's the first time I'm stuck on that.

So yeah, waiting for 12.

^hold your horses, even if you don't like the system, everything can still be relative

Windows 8 + OpenShell was great. Since you didn't have to deal with the stupid Metro crap, Windows 8 was pretty much just like Windows 7.

I just tested now and OpenShell (release 4.4.170 at this time) does work for Win 11, albeit needing some tweaks.

The start button image has to be replaced so that the replacement intercepts mouse clicks.

Still far better than the MS start menu fetching internet garbage instead of just launching an app as it's supposed to.

For those who know Classic Shell, Open-Shell is its successor.

Open-Shell: https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu