This part confused me:

> lacks basic features like dealing with compressed files – I don’t count a decades-old cumbersome wizard-style interface with countless steps to go through just to unpack a compressed file to be even remotely acceptable in 2026. Dolphin and Nautilus handle compressed files entirely transparently and much faster than Explorer does, and once you’re used to that, going back to ’90s style compressed file management almost feels insulting.

I can open a zip in a normal file explorer window just fine. Maybe this is something stripped from European versions for anti-monopoly reasons?

Anyway here's what I've done with my Win11 install to make it tolerable:

- Disable onedrive

- Make a secondary local admin account and use that exclusively instead of the the main Microsoft account one (since the library paths in the main account all have onedrive in them even if it's disabled)

- Disable web search in the start menu with group policies

- Remove task view, widgets, the search bar, etc. from the task bar

- Put the start menu in list view and remove every pinned item

- Left-align the taskbar

- Show file extensions in explorer

I'm sure there's a lot more I had to do, but I don't remember off the top of my head.

As a long-time Windows user, from 3.11 onwards, sometime Macbook owner and a Linux tinkerer on spare devices, Windows 11 is a step backwards in UI with all it's inconsistencies and forceful but poor implementation of new features. Linux, the distros I've tinkered with, seems to be more polished and consistent across the board.

Only reason I still use Windows is AAA games and MS SQL Server, which I prefer using SSMS to control.

Different GUI toolkits look & feel is more or less unavoidable if you want backwards compatibility for 3rd party apps (and on Linux, one could read "3rd party" as "anything built on a different UI toolkit than the default desktop environment"). But Thom's conclusion:

"Whenever I experienced a short stretch of time where I felt “perhaps this isn’t so bad?”, one (or multiple) of the problems and issues described above would snap me out of it. For someone used to desktop Linux, where respect for the user, consistency, customisability, and performance are still held in high regard, Windows 11 feels like an endless string of punches in the face."

That's just pathetic for a multi-$B company with >200k employees. At least an OS's built-in apps should be functional, performant, easy to use, and get out of the way of users getting work done.

But that's not even the worst. The worst is that MS clearly doesn't care. MS only seems to care about slurping user's data, pushing unwanted crap (ads, AI features nobody asked for etc), and making sure Windows comes pre-installed on as many computing devices as possible. End users be damned.

If MS would care, then 30y+ of refinement, MS's resources, and Moore's law could have turned Windows into the smoothest, fastest, easiest to use OS on the planet. But alas.. here we are in a different timeline.

1 month is too short for a realistic assessment.

A lot of differences only manifest themselves over time.

For example, what happens during an OS upgrade and how do the systems compare.