I'm really happy about the new functionality for window management in Windows 11, particularly the grouped applications that you can maximize or minimize together. I also like that they're emphasizing different workspaces for different tasks, as this is much how I work with MacOS' spaces. Similarly I'd think that people used to automatic tiling window managers in linux would be familiar and appreciate the advantages of this workflow. The added tiling features that go beyond what is already a pretty competent window manager is welcome. I'm assuming they are drawing a lot of that from their powertoys fancy zones [1] application. Hopefully the added docking features and how they treat windows really is as good as they are demoing.
I hope that there is some way to navigate to the individual workspaces by a keybind built into Windows, though. As it is in Windows 10, you can't (as far as I know) bind an arbitrary hotkey to focus a specific workspace, you have to navigate them directionally which makes it much harder for me to use for what I use them for.
I also got the impression that changing themes like from light to dark mode is going to be a much better experience (one that's intended to happen often) with smooth animations between them. Windows 10 currently does allow you to change from light to dark mode but there's no way to automatically switch them by sunrise/sunset like it exists in MacOS. Mojave also featured bad animations when it added dark mode to MacOS but today does it much more gracefully.
I'm extremely skeptical of any sort of improvement on their search/launcher, which is hilariously bad when compared against spotlight's index (which powers spotlight and many third party applications like alfred and launchbar) or even kde's krunner or applications like rofi. If there is a meaningful change here it'd be the most exciting for me, though.
Overall I don't know that it needs a numbered update or not, but one advantage of having big numbered releases is that it gives you an opportunity to highlight a lot of new features at once, rather than only hearing about them through enthusiast blogs who are carefully watching the rolling releases of Windows 10. Hopefully the features work as well as advertised.
I hope that there is some way to navigate to the individual workspaces by a keybind built into Windows, though. As it is in Windows 10, you can't (as far as I know) bind an arbitrary hotkey to focus a specific workspace, you have to navigate them directionally which makes it much harder for me to use for what I use them for.
I also got the impression that changing themes like from light to dark mode is going to be a much better experience (one that's intended to happen often) with smooth animations between them. Windows 10 currently does allow you to change from light to dark mode but there's no way to automatically switch them by sunrise/sunset like it exists in MacOS. Mojave also featured bad animations when it added dark mode to MacOS but today does it much more gracefully.
I'm extremely skeptical of any sort of improvement on their search/launcher, which is hilariously bad when compared against spotlight's index (which powers spotlight and many third party applications like alfred and launchbar) or even kde's krunner or applications like rofi. If there is a meaningful change here it'd be the most exciting for me, though.
Overall I don't know that it needs a numbered update or not, but one advantage of having big numbered releases is that it gives you an opportunity to highlight a lot of new features at once, rather than only hearing about them through enthusiast blogs who are carefully watching the rolling releases of Windows 10. Hopefully the features work as well as advertised.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzone...