You paid me, a long-time Linux user, to use Windows 11 exclusively for a month: here’s how it went

You all donated en masse to have me use Windows 11 for a month, and so I did. What was it like for a long-time Linux user to go back and experience Windows as it exists now? Is it really as bad as we've collectively made it out to be? Did my month with Windows 11 consist of nothing but pain and misery, or are there good things to say, too? Or, was it an unexpected pleasant surprise? And ultimately, did I stay with Windows 11, or move back to the Linux world?

7,884 / 10,000

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This year, I'm celebrating the milestone of having posted 20000 stories on OSNews during my 21 years as managing editor of OSNews. This is my full-time job, and since nobody is going to give me any bonuses, stock options, or golden pens, we're running a big fundraiser to keep OSNews going. To add some spice to the whole thing, I added some incentives, with the first being using Windows 11 for a month. We're slowly but steadily approaching the next incentive, too, which is a proper video tour of my office, (unique) computers, and massive devices collection. There's a similar incentive to this Windows 11 one, but for macOS. Yikes.

The rules for the Windows 11 incentive are simple: use stock Windows 11 for a month for my computing tasks (with the exception of gaming - converting my Linux gaming PC to Windows just to play the same games seemed silly). I wasn't allowed to use any debloating tools, but as an EU citizen, I do have the ability to remove a ton of Windows stuff thanks to the success of the Digital Markets Act. I also tried to stick to Microsoft's own applications as much as possible, for that true ecosystem experience", and wasn't allowed to hack my way into a normal local user account. I was all-in.

So what was it like?

Setting it all up

The installation process posed a number of challenges and issues. First and foremost, the Windows 11 installation process is incredibly barebones, and basically assumes no other operating system exists in the world. It has no clue anything other than Windows' filesystems exist, making it dangerously easy to accidentally damage or outright delete any other operating systems you might have installed. My laptop happens to have two M.2 SSDs in, so I could safely dedicate one of them to Windows 11 without interfering with the other SSD with Fedora installed on it, but if you're experimenting with Windows 11 on your Linux machine with just one drive, you might want to reconsider.

I also had to perform the first portion of the installation process - the WinPE section - with just my keyboard, since apparently, my trackpad was not supported and did not work at all. Once the system went through its first of what would be many reboots to come and loaded into the phase of the installation where you're actually already running Windows 11, my trackpad came to life, but without any gestures support - so no scrolling. Not a gamebreaker or anything, but definitely annoying.

A bigger issue was that the Wi-Fi 7 Intel BE200 chip in my laptop was not supported out of the box by Windows 11. This meant that I had to install these drivers during the installation process, which involves going to the Intel website and finding the correct drivers to use. To make this process more obtuse and less intuitive, you can't use the normal driver installer; you have to specifically opt for the Intel(R) PROSet/Wireless Software and Wi-Fi Drivers for IT Administrators, download the ZIP, unpack it on a different computer, put the unpacked drivers on a USB stick, and point the Windows 11 installer to this USB stick.

Mind you, the BE200 chip was launched almost three years ago, and there's no excuse for Windows 11 not supporting this chip out of the box - like Linux does.

The remainder of the installation process involved dodging a lot of tracking and telemetry prompts, reboots, a lot of waiting, setting up the dreaded online account, waiting some more, and then finally ending up at the desktop. I then set out to enjoy my EU privileges by removing whatever applications I didn't need and turning off features I didn't want, as well as making sure all the drivers were up to date. This mostly involved installing the Intel Driver & Support Assistant and the Intel graphics drivers. Curiously, this is where I hit a returning issue: after installing the Intel GPU drivers for the first time, as well as after every subsequent update, the screen would go black and stay that way, forcing a reboot. Windows' graphics stack is supposed to be able to gracefully handle driver updates, but clearly, some bug or problem was preventing the updated Intel driver from being reinitialised.

Once those initial setup tasks were behind me, I experienced two more problems. First, sleep/wake was entirely broken and simply did not work. It turns out Windows 11 really doesn't like S3 sleep, and I had to specifically go into my laptop's Dasharo Coreboot firmware to switch to S0ix get sleep/wake to work on Windows 11. Windows defaults to something it calls Modern Standby", which requires the S0ix state to be enabled. You can also disable Modern Standby which would presumably make sleep/wake work with S3 (?), but this is a whole ordeal and clearly not something Microsoft wants you to do.

Of course, the correct way of handling this would be for Windows 11 to adapt its sleep/wake settings to what the firmware reports, but alas.

Another problem were the laptop's cooling fans seemingly leading lives of their own, spinning up loudly at entirely random times, irrespective of use. It was so bad and loud I assumed the laptop was damaged somehow, and nothing I tried alleviated the issue. However, a day after installation, a massive Windows update came in that somehow fixed the issue, taming the fans back to the normal levels that I had come to expect while running Linux.

Except for one curious problem that seems to tie the fan and sleep/wake problems together: roughly one out of three sleep cycles, Windows would spin up the fans to maximum blast, for long periods of time before actually going to sleep; on some occasions, sleep would never set in at all, forcing a reboot as the screen wouldn't come back on either. This seems to be a widely reported problem on a whole slew of different hardware configurations, so I'm assuming Windows 11 is just trash at putting devices to sleep properly.

Note that this same laptop running Fedora Linux has none of these issues; sleep/wake works perfectly every time regardless of whether Coreboot is set to S3 or S0ix, and the fans behave exactly as you'd expect.

One thing I found almost too hard to believe was that Windows 11 apparently does not natively support the US (int'l with AltGr dead keys)" keyboard layout. Instead, the only option it seems to have for the US (int'l)" keyboard layout family is the one with regular dead keys, which I personally find unusable. For those that don't know, dead keys are when you press e.g. ', but nothing happens until you press a letter which then gets the diacritic added to it: ' followed by e will turn into e.

You might spot the problem here: you often need to use characters like ' and " as actual characters, especially when you type a lot of English, but if they function as dead keys you have to hit them twice to use them as individual characters instead. This is incredibly annoying - way more than it seems on paper - so an alternative exists: US (int'l with AltGr dead keys)". On this keyboard layout, AltGr acts a modifier you need to press to turn certain keys into dead keys. To input e using this layout, you hit AltGr + ' followed by e.

This keyboard layout has been available as an option in every Linux installer and every desktop environment for as long as I can remember, so I never even considered it might not be available in Windows. Luckily, people have created third-party US (int'l with AltGr dead keys)" layouts for Windows, so I ended up downloading this one, which works perfectly.

Input crisis averted.

I also ran into a few smaller issues. Windows' window manager is incredibly limiting and dumb, and won't even allow you to change things like titlebar actions. By default, double-clicking a titlebar will maximise a window, but I'm a BeOS user at heart and double-click titlebars to minimise windows (I never maximise a window). I kept accidentally maximising windows when I was trying to minimise them, which wasn't pleasant. The fact that such basic settings virtually every operating system and desktop environment support are unavailable on Windows is indefensible.

Another pain point is Explorer, Windows' file manager. It takes longer to load than a file manager should, and 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.

A quick non-exhaustive rundown of even more issues: Windows operating system updates are slow, cumbersome, and require way too many reboots. The Start menu desperately needs to be more customisable and adaptable to user needs. The widgets system in the taskbar is useless. The overview/Expose feature drops frames all the time. I was never given an option to change my home folder's name. There are way too many useless default folders in your home directory, and most of them you can't delete (they keep automatically reappearing). Dark mode is still broken, with many dialogs and panels only available in light mode.

I also happened to run into a curious bug in Explorer where the icons in the Quick Access tab were fuzzy. No amount of troubleshooting could fix this. I admit this bothered me way more than it should.

Applications

As part of the incentive, I also wanted to experience proper Windows applications. First and foremost, this means using Microsoft Edge. Like many other browsers today - even Firefox - Edge spams you with useless AI" nonsense you have to meticulously disable, but once you've done that song and dance, Edge is mostly just fine? I even felt like it did a better job of handing online video - less heat, less fan noise - than Firefox did, but I didn't do any benchmarking or anything so I have no data to back it up.

The email situation on Windows is abysmal. You're supposed to use the new" Outlook, which is basically just a web application that also happens to send all your login credentials, emails, and personal information to Microsoft as a requirement before you can use it. While the irony of Gmail users complaining about this isn't lost on me - email is not, never has been, and never will be a private medium - it's still just unethical, unpleasant, and wholly unnecessary. To make matters worse, if you don't have some sort of Office 365 subscription, Outlook even shows you ads. The new Outlook is just a long string of own goals before kickoff.

Nevertheless, I took my assignment seriously, and after choosing to ignore it's just a website, after sending all my data to Microsoft, and after paying the cheapest possible Office 365 subscription offer I could find to get rid of the ads, I found that the new Outlook is, much like Edge, fine. While I'm sure it falls apart quickly for people with more advanced email needs, it handled my basic personal send-and-receive use case just fine.

If you disregard it's a website that sends all your emails and personal information to Microsoft and that you have to pay for it even after paying for Windows itself, then yes, it is mostly fine. A ringing endorsement if there ever was one, isn't it? This whole situation is criminal, and the clearest example of just how much Microsoft utterly despises Windows and its users. A desktop operating system needs to come with a solid, serviceable email client. I consider this non-optional.

Moving beyond Microsoft's own applications, the application ecosystem on Windows is in a dire state. Anything developed over the last decade or so using the long list of modern frameworks and APIs Microsoft championed and subsequently abandoned is an exercise in frustration; most applications in this category are unfinished, buggy, slow and/or abandoned. Applications with more pedigree from the classic Win32 days feel outdated and out of place, but at least they tend to get the job done. The end result is an incredibly inconsistent, messy, and jarring user experience where every application clearly feels of its time, dependent on which set of frameworks and UI design philosophies Microsoft was pushing at that particular moment in time.

No two titlebars are of the same height. There are countless entirely different designs for titlebar buttons. The modern desktop context menu has its own classic Win32 context menu. Win32 applications look and behave differently than WinUI 3 applications which look and behave differently than Fluent applications which look and behave differently than Metro applications which look and behave differently than - and so on. No two applications have their important UI elements in the same place, and no two applications seem to be using the same design language. Hell, Win32 UIs use completely different-looking font rendering than modern" UIs. The word mess" doesn't even begin to describe it.

As someone who is used to KDE and GNOME, whose developers still take consistency in both look and behaviour quite seriously, this is the single biggest reason why using Windows 11 was such a frustrating experience for me. It's like reading a book where every few words, the language and script randomly change. I know UI consistency has been a dirty word ever since the web and then iOS rose to prominence - I lamented the death of consistency in UI design back 2012, which is fourteen years ago! - but the situation on Windows today is particularly dire.

Managing applications is also not as nice and effortless as it is on Linux. Most of the time, you have to manually browse around and download applications (and hope they're not malware), which use one of an endless variety of different installation wizards, and then update these manually using countless different update services running in the background. There's also a Windows Store, but its selection is limited. On top of all that, Windows also has its own very limited and basic package manager now, but it doesn't come with an easy-to-use graphical user interface; you have to find and download one yourself, and it seems UniGetUI is one the more popular ones. It's a mess of an application - with its own entirely unique titlebar and buttons, as is Windows tradition - but at least it works.

Keeping track of all the individual updaters, the Windows Store, WinGet, and so on is a massive chore, and a huge regression compared to what's been the norm in the Linux world for a very long time. Desktop Linux solved keeping applications updated decades ago. Microsoft seems to be making it worse every time they add another different application delivery and management framework.

Windows applications are also absolutely obsessed with the system tray. It seems like every single thing you install wants to bury itself in the system tray, even when they're not actually running. Before you know it, you'll have a long string of random icons in there competing for your attention, and each seems to operate and behave a little differently than the other. Some open their main window when you click on them once, some when you click on them twice, some open a menu, some only respond by opening a menu when you left-click on them instead.

Of course, the menus that pop up all have different designs, as is tradition.

It's not all bad, I guess?

There were positive aspects to Windows 11, too. It's taken them a very long time, but with most of the various settings and configuration panels now moved from the old Control Panel to the Settings application, I think the latter has come into its own quite nicely. If you ignore the various ads for Microsoft's services - a common tactic in commercial operating systems like macOS, Windows, and iOS these days - I find it quite easy to use. There's always going to be some arbitrariness to the organisation and hierarchy of the various settings and panels, but overall, I found things relatively easy to find, and performance didn't seem to be an issue.

Windows 11 also has a combined emoji/symbol picker now (Super + .), negating the need to dive into the Character Map, a horrid application which basically hasn't been meaningfully updated since Windows 3.x. There's an actual clipboard manager in Windows too now (Super + v), and it works great as well. These are two relatively recent additions that make some of the menial tasks related to text input quite a bit more pleasant.

I really don't have much more to add to this measly positive vibes only" section. Like Linux, Windows 11 found and set up our crappy HP Wi-Fi printer/scanner combo thing without any issues, I guess?

Did I stay with Windows 11?

No. Of course not.

I gave it an honest-to-god try. I put in the time, work, and even some money. I was strict, didn't allow myself to do any non-gaming tasks on Linux, and truly used Windows 11 exclusively for a month. 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.

Whether I use a KDE or GNOME desktop, things look, feel, and behave consistently. There are no ads for services I don't want, no online accounts forced down my throat, no dark patterns to trick me into subscriptions I don't want. Managing and updating applications and the operating system are so effortless you barely even notice it's happening, and whether I'm using an older machine or something brand new, performance is going to be good, and consistent. Desktop Linux is also going to respect my privacy, and I don't have to worry about data harvesting.

Windows 11 just cannot compete with any of that, and my month with Windows 11 proved that to me beyond a shadow of a doubt.