A few weeks ago Microsoft stood up and announced Windows 11, after years of insisting that Windows 10 was the last Windows, and the internet has been arguing about it ever since. I watched the reaction more than the keynote, and the reaction is the more interesting thing. Everyone has a take. Most of the takes are about the taskbar.
That's not a criticism of people, it's a fairly reliable law of software. The changes that generate the most heat are the visible ones, and a centred Start menu with rounded corners is about as visible as a change gets. You move something a person looks at forty times an hour and they will have feelings about it. I have mild feelings about it myself, and I'll have forgotten I ever had them within a week of installing it, which is also how this always goes.
The argument that actually matters got much less airtime, which is the hardware requirements. The new TPM and CPU-generation floor means a lot of perfectly capable machines won't be offered the upgrade, at least as the rules stand right now. The messaging around it has been genuinely confusing, the compatibility checker tool was so unclear that Microsoft pulled it, and the result is a lot of people who don't know whether their three-year-old laptop is suddenly on a path to no more updates. That's a real question with real consequences for real e-waste, and it got buried under screenshots of the new corners. There's a security rationale for the TPM requirement and I'm broadly sympathetic to it, but "your hardware is fine, you just can't have the new thing" is a hard sell however you dress it up.
What I keep coming back to is how little of this changes the work. I spend my day in a terminal, an editor, and a browser. Most of that runs inside WSL anyway, which is the genuinely good thing Microsoft has shipped in recent years and which barely got a mention in all the corner discourse. Whether the Start button is in the middle or the corner does not touch a single thing I actually do. The bits that would touch my work, how well WSL behaves, whether the package and update story improves, whether the thing is fast, are exactly the bits you can't judge from a keynote and won't really know until it's been in people's hands for a few months.
So I'm doing what I always do with a new Windows: waiting. Not out of cynicism, just experience. The launch-day version of any operating system is the worst version it will ever be, and the opinions formed in the first fortnight are mostly about whatever moved on screen. I'll install it on a spare machine when it's out properly, see whether my actual tools still work, and form a view then. Until then, I'm happy to let everyone else fight about the taskbar.