Sorry I feel kinda dumb and am still not sure, so I’ll write my situation in more detail. I build my own PC’s, so I have the free Win10 license for mine I got a bajillion years ago when they were giving them away. Soon I’ll be replacing this motherboard and do a fresh install on a different drive. Does this mean I’ll need to buy one, or will it look at my Microsoft account and see I have Win10 and let me do a fresh install of Win11 for free?
BTW, any suggestions for doing the fresh install of Win11 or a preferred method?
My only concern is the transition to Windows 11 as a clean install. I know you can slide your retail Windows 10 over to a new system by indicating it’s a hardware change (Microsoft support explained this much to me). So I know you can do that and then upgrade, then do a “fresh” re-install. I just wonder if you can do it without the in-between steps.
The only two notable features Windows 11 brings to the table are Windows Explorer tabs and (what is more important) handling fullscreen rendering as windowed, so there is supposedly no longer performance loss for playing games in borderless windowed mode.
I actively rolled back to Windows 10 on my most recent PC.
Unless there is an app or something you do that requires Windows 10 and will absolutely not function correctly in Windows 11, I recommend moving to Windows 11 based on my anecdotal experience, at least to see how it works for you. While I run on the beta channel of Windows 11, to varying degrees of annoyance, the release channel seems pretty solid. I have about half of our business systems running Windows 11 and the only major complaint is that Snip & Sketch (Snipping Tool) doesn’t work properly on a dual display if you have the secondary to the left of the primary display (typically a laptop to the left in our case).
Win11 is OK, unless you use uncombined taskbar buttons or move the taskbar to the sides/top, which you still can’t do without a third-party program.
It doesn’t add much of particular value, but other than the taskbar regressions doesn’t break much either and you can turn off the stupid shit like widgets. I do like the way the UI looks.
