So Microsoft finally made it official yesterday. Panos Panay got up in front of a camera at 11am ET and did the whole "what's next for Windows" thing, and the internet lost its mind over rounded corners and a Start menu that lives in the middle of the screen now instead of the corner. Which, fine, it does look nice. But I have to be honest, watching the stream felt a little like watching a movie trailer for a movie you already saw at a friend's house on a bootleg DVD.
Because I've had this thing installed since roughly June 16th.
Somebody leaked build 21996.1 onto a Chinese forum, it hit a Baidu link, and within about six hours it was everywhere - torrents, direct download mirrors, the works. I am not proud of how fast I had it running in a VM on my desktop. Faster than I've reacted to most actual emergencies in my life, honestly. I wasn't even trying to be first to anything, I just got a Discord message at like 1am saying "yo Windows 11 leaked" and that was that, sleep was over.
First impressions from living with it a week and a half before the "reveal": the centered taskbar is genuinely nice for about two days and then you stop noticing it either way. It's not the transformative thing people are making it out to be. What actually annoyed me, and this didn't get nearly enough attention in yesterday's presentation, is that you can't move the taskbar anymore. Not to the top, not to the side. Centered or left-aligned, that's your entire universe of options now. I've had my taskbar on the top of the screen since Windows 7, this is not a joke, it's just where my eyes go, and apparently Microsoft has decided that's not a supported way to live anymore. Small thing. Bugged me more than it should have.
The stuff that did get shown yesterday and is genuinely worth caring about: Android apps are coming to Windows through a partnership with the Amazon Appstore, which is a weirder pairing than I expected - I figured Google would be involved somehow, not Amazon. There's a new Widgets panel that slides in from the left, which if I'm being honest just feels like News and Interests from Windows 10 wearing a nicer jacket. And Teams is getting pinned right into the taskbar as a chat icon, which tells you everything about where Microsoft's priorities are right now. They want Teams to be the thing your grandmother uses to call you, the way FaceTime works on an iPhone.
The right-click menu redesign is the one I have genuinely mixed feelings about. It's cleaner, it's got icons now instead of just text, cut/copy/paste got turned into little toolbar buttons up top. But half the things I actually use daily got shoved into a "Show more options" submenu, which means every single day for the rest of my life I'm going to be clicking twice to get to something that used to take one click. I get why they did it. I still don't love it.
One thing that's already stirring up chatter in the corners of Twitter I follow: the system requirements mention something about TPM 2.0, and people are starting to ask whether their current PCs are even going to be eligible for the free upgrade. Nobody has a clean answer on this yet as of today. I have a feeling this is going to be a whole thing over the next few weeks once people start running the compatibility checker and finding out their two-year-old laptop doesn't make the cut. I'll believe it's a real requirement and not some conservative default when I see Microsoft actually explain it in plain language, which, based on their track record with stuff like this, could be a while.
Anyway. It's a good-looking OS. I'm not switching my main machine over yet, the VM is enough for now, and there's still months before this actually ships to regular people. But if you were hoping yesterday's event was going to be full of surprises, I can tell you from experience it mostly wasn't. The leak did the reveal for them two weeks early, whether Microsoft wanted it to or not.