Windows 11
A few weeks ago, a special moment happened. I wanted to prepare my son’s first “computer”. He obviously didn’t grow up watching me type on a mechanical typewriter. Yet all he knew so far from his first experience was an iPad. A machine that, to this day, I believe is more suitable for consumption than production (although that conclusion already drove Steve Jobs crazy with the first iteration of the iPad over a decade ago) .
I want him to be able to dig deeper. Explore. Trying things, misconfiguring, crashing, fixing and reinstalling. To get an idea of how things work below the surface and how they don’t. To learn to type quickly and efficiently. To create things. Maybe even, one day, learn to code if that interests him. It’s not possible in the same way on an iPad, although there are awesome apps for this and that. But there are hardly any opportunities to go out of the ordinary.
So I pulled a Dell laptop from a drawer under my desk and installed Windows 11. So far I’ve only used it a few times to debug some old software I wrote there. a long time ago and which needed some corrections. In other words, I didn’t pay attention: I didn’t pay attention.
This changed immediately following setting up my son’s user account. I already knew from Windows 10 that some diagnostic settings might no longer be disabled permanently. But what I found here left me speechless.
First, we learned that a mass shooting had just taken place. In the middle of the search menu. The menu that was supposed to be one of the child’s first points of contact with the computer. It’s not good. But following a while I found a way to disable this feature.
Next: the Start menu. Links to WhatsApp, TikTok, Xbox, Instagram and others. What the fuck is this? This kid is 10 years old, and TikTok is one of the things I’m actively trying to keep out of his world for as long as possible. Why is this software pre-installed on a clean Windows installation? It’s not good. So I spent time uninstalling all these apps. I realized that they hadn’t disappeared from the system, only from the start menu of his account. After creating a separate administrator account, everything appeared there too. Again: what the fuck?
Next: Casual games. Minesweeper, Solitaire… who didn’t waste their time with these games in the 1990s? Today, they’re cluttered with in-app purchase offers. Just like other parts of the system that attempt to sell Microsoft 365 subscriptions. What is…
So there’s not much you can do with Windows in its initial release, other than buying subscriptions and connecting to pre-installed social media apps. There is one thing I knew right away: This is not an environment in which I want my child to take their first steps “on a real computer”. Not in a hundred years. Never.
Some people have recommended tools to me that can be used to disable most of these things. But honestly, how can you trust a system (or its manufacturer) if you can’t even know if these settings, which you have deliberately chosen, persist? What if I delete app x for some reason and it suddenly reappears following the next Windows update? Or the news section in the search menu? There is no question. I don’t see the point of it anymore, at least not for me.
That’s when Windows died for me.
