User:Mr. George/Windows 11

A rare instance of minimalist branding going full circle.

Windows 11 is Microsoft's second stab at an operating system since Bill Gates ditched Redmond for greener pastures. Having slunk out of its labs in 2021 (albeit not after a series of leakages), the OS is the latest product of the tech giant's ongoing psychological experiment to see how many times they can redesign the Start menu before the public lashes out. Having already tested the waters of public tolerance with the unholy Start menu purge of Windows 8, Microsoft started to double down and settled on centering the Start menu and implementing an option to reposition it back to its original locus in the taskbar settings so as to stave off a mass exodus of folk to the wilds of Linux.

Billed as the heir to Windows 10, an OS Microsoft once swore on their pyres would be its last much like Hollywood's quondam insistence that Shrek Forever After would end up being the ogre's final swamp romp, Windows 11 lumbered onto the scene clad in pillowy, rounded corners; an only slightly less glossier interface than the glassy-eyed optimism of Vista and 7; and Copilot, Microsoft's hottest new probing sidekick since Cortana flunked in its endeavour to vie against Siri in terms of virtual assistant surveillance superiority at the same point in time that the AI revolution engendered by ChatGPT was taking the globe by storm.

Release

What, does it need to be plugged into the sun now?

Similarly to its predecessor, Windows 11 was bestowed by Microsoft upon the masses as a free upgrade, provided of course that said masses were already in possession of hardware forged no earlier than the late Holocene, complete with arcane relics such as TPM 2.0, UEFI firmware and the blessed Secure Boot incantation. This bold maneuver was widely perceived as a way of gently coaxing, cajoling and eventually forcing users against their own will into discarding their creaky, carbon-dusted Lenovo ThinkPads running Windows 7 in favor of newer, shinier, telemetry-ready vessels of commerce before Steam eventually drops support for any device still clinging to a DVD drive in the big '21, where by then Netflix had already declared optical media a war crime.

The integration of installation assistants into all Windows 10 devices culminated in users who had been beaten into submission by years on end of update notifications clicking "Accept" before fully realizing they had agreed to trade their autonomy for auto-updates, forced reboots and a mandatory Microsoft Store account just so they could access Minesweeper and Solitaire.

See also

• UnNews:Windows 11 JBE hits shelves just in time for Christmas