Updates to tools for bug fixes added features but don't change any behavior may be one thing; In linux i'd often see updating dostools 2.11.22->2.15.04 or some menial upgrades, though i rarely take them, they take too long to download, apply, and do little for the final result.

And with microsoft's push for 'mandatory updates', like they did when they pushed new drivers out when someone found a way to access the DVD drive so they could do ripping on Windows 8, well, you can see where their priorities lay...

New DirectX can be introduced sometime after the launch of W11. I'm always searching for solutions when I encounter problems with older games. Yesterday I had to use Direct3D 8 to Direct3D 9 wrapper to make Soul Reaver 2 working properly on W10. So there are still some compatibility problems which probably won't be fixed. And I have no complains about this. I'm fully aware that Microsoft priorities lay somewhere else.

As for 32-bit to 64-bit, I fully agree. The architecture is different and thus the issues still exist.

Depends on the change list when it comes out. So far only visual change , who cares about that?

At this moment I'm certain that I'll update my system to the new version sooner or later, even considering the fact we don't know much about W11. The only question is when. If there are almost no compatibility issues I'll do it earlier (but still probably not right after the release date).

Can't wait for Debian 11.

As far as I know, this is framerate related and not really system related. The problem is that for some reason frame-locking doesn't work - but I am not really sure who is to blame - Windows 10 or Nvidia (I know everything worked fine on Windows 7 and AMD).

My studio laptop is still running Windows 10 v1607. It's frozen in time (and offline) and will remain that way.
My general purpose desktop: I don't know, I don't make decisions about future actions based on a few screenshots.

Considering that Windows 10 is the most unstable POS since ME/2K era, probably. Not that we know ANYTHING about it yet. I miss XP/7 (and even 8!) when I could go years -- greater portions of decades and considerable hardware changes -- between reinstalls with no major issues. Win10, it's hard to go even 18 months, usually not even a full year, without some major issue borking something. They really made a serious bad decision when they want the "in place dirty upgrade reinstall every 6 months" route rather than the "updates and service packs" route.

I only went to 10 from 8 for hardware driver support. My laptops all still run 8. And I'd still prefer 7, but, you know. (8's UI is shit, but can be hacked.)

I'd be on Linux if I could. (Game developers, get off your asses! Though I'd still need Windows for work, I could compartmentalize and dual boot for that. Dual booting for games is a PITA and not worth it.)

(Why don't my laptops use Linux? One connects to the TV for DRMed show streaming purposes that didn't work well with it, and the other has a cellular Internet card that I pop my SIM into rather than "hotspotting" and I couldn't get it to work in Linux. The third is a MS Surface Go that I use as a PDF e-reader [for things that don't work/read well on my ancient B&W e-ink device], and MS has that hardware locked up tight. The others are technically Windows, but are now just mothballed in a closet and not used.)

Yeah - Although at least those wrappers exist. To be honest, I'm always ready to roll out a wrapper for everything running on earlier versions than 9.0c as there are some issues in Win10 with early DX (not sure if it's Windows or graphics card related). Either way, thanks to the work of people like dege, we can get pretty much anything going. I think I put in the other Win 11 thread the three fixes to get almost anything working on modern Windows:

- Remove the disc based DRM
- Use a compatibility layer (e.g. XP SP3)
- Use a Glide/DirectX wrapper like dgvoodoo2

No. It's just a new pile of shit I will have to deal with after years spent tweaking and "sanitizing" Winshit 10.

I've used Windows 10 1703 for three years before switching to Windows 10 20H2 (on a completely new PC), I can live without that macos-cloned crap for years as well.

Depends on:

1. What kind of benefits for me, as a user, it is supposed to offer over current Windows 10. And I mean real benefits, not meh changes like "icons are now rounded and look different" or "taskbar icons are now centered by default", such changes don't really matter anything to me.

If Windows 11 brought e.g. a new release of NTFS (let's call it NTFS2) with advanced filesystem features like checksumming, maybe software RAID etc., somewhat like how btrfs or OpenZFS are, then I would probably upgrade to Windows 11 on the release day. But it won't, it will mainly have rounded icons and shit.

2. What kind of potential drawbacks it will have over Windows 10.

3. How simple it is to upgrade, or whether a clean install is a better idea anyway.

I will probably wait quite a bit nearer to when the support for Windows 10 ends (2025) because I am not expecting Windows 11 to bring any must-have or even very cool new features over Windows 10. Of course when I buy a new PC (gaming laptop), it will probably come preinstalled with Windows 11, at which point I will start using it of course, on that particular machine. I am not going to replace it with Windows 10, unless there is a compelling reason to do so.

Windows has had software RAID for a long time. What's special about btrfs or OpenZFS implementations?

You are right, I was unclear. Maybe I was more thinking in the context of the checksumming and for the filesystem to be able to (semi-)autoheal itself, e.g. if some file gets corrupted. Not merely the ability to join several hard drives into one volume, which in itself is quite nice as well, of course.

As an avid Linux user, it would be a downgrade.
I might setup a VM with it for s̶h̶i̶t̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶g̶i̶g̶g̶l̶e̶s̶ schadenfreude.