I'm a Mac guy but always liked Windows 10. Bummer to hear 11 is so bad.
It's not bad... it's just a lot of people refusing change. Sure, there are legitimate complaints such as the ads or the fucking garbage search or the non-ability to move the taskbar itself (not the icons on it!) to the left or right side or even top of the screen.
Personally. Zero issues. No ads. Most garbage removed. I even keep my icons on the taskbar centered.
I think the Start menu is super fine - I even like it. The only two things I'd change are:
- When clicking the search, to be able to go back to the start menu without going back and clicking the icon
- Be able to remove "Suggested" entirely.
As for the other complaints, the new left click menu would be cool if you could have the whole menu without clicking "More" and, also, allowing third-party apps to easily add to it. Seeing as most software go and only add itself to the old left-click menu still, it shows me that it's non-trivial to go and add it to the new left-click menu or even use it in their software.
I also remove all bloatware I don't want from the install itself using NTLite (if you make your own, please, test it in a VM!) and I also use that to automatically disable ads, telemetry, auto-dark theme, etc. You can go so much farther by integrating software and drivers to the ISO as well.
But I digress...
I never understood the "high requirement" complaints when, most likely, a lot of these people have a PC that's less than 5 years old - it's just that default BIOS settings are all wrong which makes Win11 non-compatibility trigger. I know you shouldn't have to do that but that one is on hardware manufacturers to not have these enabled by default (TPM and Secure Boot). Also, please, don't use that "Health" software, that's just junk and bugged to all Hell.