So Microsoft finally put a number on the calendar. Windows 11 ships October 5th. I'd been half-expecting them to just quietly slide it out sometime in the fall the way Windows 10 updates usually show up, but no, they made it official this week with an actual date and everything. Six weeks out, give or take.
I've had the Insider build running on my spare desktop since late June, the one I keep around specifically for breaking things without consequence, and I have to say the rounded corners and the centered Start menu took about two days to stop looking weird and about two hours to start looking normal on my main machine's mental model too. It's a good-looking OS. I'll give them that much without any hedging.
What I will not give them without complaint is the TPM 2.0 situation, which by the end of August is still a mess nobody's fully explained. My spare desktop is a Ryzen 5 1600 box from a few years back, and the official line is it doesn't qualify. I got it running anyway with a registry edit that skips the check (there are about four different ways to do this floating around Reddit at this point, none of them officially sanctioned, all of them working fine for me). The PC Health Check app that's supposed to tell you whether your machine is compatible was pulled back in June because it kept giving people useless "this PC doesn't meet requirements" messages with zero explanation of which requirement. As of today it's still not back in a form anyone trusts. If you're going to gate an entire OS release behind a security chip, at minimum tell people which chip and why, instead of a vague red X.
I get the security argument, I really do, firmware-level protection against certain classes of malware is a legitimate thing to want more of. But there are tens of millions of perfectly capable five- and six-year-old machines that are getting told no for what amounts to a checkbox, and Microsoft hasn't been especially clear about whether that's a hard line or a soft one they'll walk back once the complaints get loud enough. My money's on soft. We'll see.
Anyway. Six weeks. I'm planning on running the Insider build on the spare machine right up until release and then doing a real install on my actual daily driver sometime that first weekend, assuming nothing catches fire between now and then. Given my last two Windows upgrade attempts, "assuming nothing catches fire" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Small unrelated thing before I close this out: my buddy down in Baton Rouge has been without power since Sunday because of Ida, and it's a genuinely strange feeling watching someone's location on Find My Friends just sit frozen in one spot for four days because their phone died and there's no telling when the grid's coming back. Puts the whole "will my old CPU support the new taskbar" complaint into a bit of perspective, honestly. I hope his place still has a roof when this is over. Software problems are still problems, but they're the kind you can fix with a registry edit at 11pm in your pajamas, which is more than a lot of people down there can say about their week right now.
If you're on the fence about jumping onto the Insider channel before October, my honest take after two months on it: do it if you've got a machine you don't mind occasionally rebooting into a broken taskbar (happened to me exactly once, a restart fixed it), skip it if you need your PC to just work every single day. It's polished for a beta but it's still a beta. The snap layouts feature alone might be worth the mild instability though, I've gone from never using window snapping to using it constantly, which surprised me more than it probably should have.
October 5th. Mark it down, dig up your TPM version if you care, and if you don't have TPM 2.0 there's always the registry route, not that I'm officially telling you to do that.