My i5-6200u SwitchAlpha12 (2016) on Win 11

I am on the Dev Channel for Windows Update (switched to that channel last week) and yesterday afternoon got the Win 11 build for the Dev Channel.

It took awhile to download and install, but once it rebooted … sigh. Ah, oh so nice.

My little 2-in-1 now boots to login and logged in so much faster than before.

It feels so smooth. It looks different, rounded corners

My little 2-in-1 now boots to login and logged in so much faster than before.

It feels so smooth. It looks different, rounded corners on everything. I didn’t know if I would like that, but I actually do. I feel very much over the Material look now.

Everything has more color, um, personality, compared with Win 10. Win 10 was business that never really got down to business.

Win 11 has the opportunity to be business, play, create, enjoy all in one machine.

My problem is that trying out this first part of the Dev Win 11 build, I don’t want to go back to Win 10! I had installed Linux Mint on our very old 2nd gen i5 All-in-One. It’s ancient for a computer, and never even felt nice when upgraded from HP’s lovely Win 7 for touchscreen all in ones, to win 8 then to Win 10. It became boring to use and everyone gravitated away from it. I had Linux Mint previously on an old laptop, thought it OK, nice. This version I installed the other day is 20.1 and I had problems with it and also wiped out partition that I didn’t want to trying to fix the bootup. Nothing worked except for nuking it all. Not having a free usb drive to backup on, that long lasting partition full of stuff vanished into the nether regions of the hard drive.

TestDisk of course is my friend for years. I keep running it and finding it impossible to use to save the little it’s finding, so I hope I can do that today. I have stuff I don’t want to lose but just might have. I might have some of it on another drive but really, much is probably lost. Ugh.

The point to this: that is an old, freaking device. I got rid of Windows, but I am not finding Linux Mint compelling to use now, not sure, maybe I’ll feel better once I not running scan after scan with TestDisk and actually reclaim some good stuff.

The point here is, I was contemplating getting Mint on an external drive to connect to my laptop to use instead of Win 10. I didn’t want to be left behind on Win 10. I have been pretty sick of Win 10 on this device. I see much more potential for loving my laptop with Win 11, and the future would have been choosing a Windows Tablet PC again over a new Android Tablet perhaps … so the end of this would be having Mint only on this machine … which feels left behind too.

My only hope comes from this Dev Build of Win 11. It’s working a treat. That doesn’t mean every build from here to full release will work so sweetly, but it doesn’t mean the end full Win 11 won’t. Microsoft needs to soften things and just say “OK we’ll let y’all upgrade, but don’t call us if it doesn’t work so well.”

All the right things are in my laptop. All of them are enabled properly. Not everyone would have the same thing going on, I’m techy, not everyone else is.

I’m the one that facilitates machines working and integrating with other machines, people, networks, etc. in my home. Any machine that will able to upgrade to Win 11 will be aided by my effort to have them setup properly. All the others will not get Win 11, and will either stay Win 10, Dual-Boot Win 10/Linux or switch to Linux.

I surely just want to have Win 11 working for this laptop and a couple of others in our house. We can’t go around buying new laptops so easily when something would work to update to next Win on our existing machines, and then get others when it can be done.

I am not happy staying with Win 10, I’ve said that ad nauseum in this one post. It’s exactly what is meant: Win 11 has great potential and Win 10 is a backwards stepping into a hole feeling.