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votes
Is it a good time to upgrade to Windows 11?
I don't use Windows 10 all that much, but there's a Windows laptop in the house that I use from time to time.
I generally wait like a year before upgrading, but I heard Windows 11 has better support for running Linux GUI applications with the Windows Linux Subsystem 2. Command-line Emacs is fine but is not exactly the same and there is no clipboard integration. That is the sole reason I'm thinking of upgrading. I don't care about any details or aesthetic changes, since I'll just make everything look and feel more like Windows 7 anyway. I just wanna know if it's stable enough, and if it will get in my way.
Thanks!
Seeing as Emacs runs perfectly fine and natively on Windows, I'm not clear on the premise. Have you tried that?
Otherwise, a year long wait strategy is pretty good. If you are still in doubt, why not give it a try in a virtual machine?
Thanks!
Emacs itself runs perfectly fine, but everything that requires an Unix environment will either work badly or not work at all. I'd rather have the exact same init in my Linux and Windows machine. I kinda have that already and it works well (on the command line).
I may try a virtual machine, but I don't know if my computer is powerful enough to run two Windows at the same time. It barely manages one :P
Anecdotally, I can say that running WSL2 (mind the 2 there, there's a big architectural shift going from WSL1 to 2) on Win10 with a third-party X server (I've used Xming and most recently GWSL) has worked fine for me in the past.
Under the hood, WSL2 is actually just creating and managing a VM for you, so there's still that resource commitment in a chunk of ram and disk space, but the overall experience is quite good.
The new stuff with native graphical support is based on Wayland instead of X, and may or may not have some teething issues, but I'm not using Wayland yet even on my desktop which runs KDE Neon full time. That said, the initial demos for the Win11 graphical WSL work do look really promising, and there's a chance that I end up getting value from Wayland on Windows before I do much with it on Linux.
It’s not my daily driver, but I have a Windows PC hooked up to my TV for gaming. I upgraded it to Windows 11 a few weeks ago and have had no issues with it whatsoever. The upgrade was smooth and it runs fine.
That’s no guarantee for you, of course, but I mention it simply because the only stories about upgrading you can find online tend to be the ones where something went wrong.
I have Win 11 installed and so far love it.