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Windows 11 is about to celebrate its fourth anniversary and runs on hundreds of millions of PCs worldwide.
When it debuted in 2021, the new version of Microsoft's flagship operating system was arguably an incremental change to Windows 10, with a fresh look and feel on top of core code that was practically identical to its predecessor. The more important change, it turned out, was a new set of hardware compatibility requirements that made many existing PCs ineligible for upgrades. That decision marked a bold shift in direction for Windows, which has historically prized backward compatibility as a key requirement.
Also: How to upgrade an 'incompatible' Windows 10 PC to Windows 11 - 2 free options
We published the first edition of this FAQ when Windows 11 was brand new, and we all had plenty of questions about this system that most of us had only seen in demos. Today, Windows 11 is much better known, and it soon will be the only supported version of Windows for most PC owners.
With the end-of-support date for Windows 10 only a few months away, even people who haven't paid attention for the past few years need to begin asking some serious questions. We have answers.
What is Windows 11? Screenshot by Ed Bott/ZDNET At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, Windows 11 is the successor to Windows 10. It's built on the same core architecture as Windows 10; indeed, Microsoft could have chosen to deliver the new features in Windows 11 through a series of feature updates to Windows 10 without a name change. Instead, it chose to give the new OS a new major version number, along with a set of new and unusually restrictive hardware requirements. Show more
Windows 11 was initially released to the public in October 2021. In the nearly four years since then, it has steadily added new features and refined existing ones.
Also: Windows 11 should have been an easy upgrade - Microsoft chose to unleash chaos on us instead
The most obvious change is the user experience, which makes major changes to the Start menu and taskbar and extensively reworks the Settings app; Windows 11 also includes a Widgets pane designed to deliver bite-sized chunks of news and reminders, and a greatly improved way to snap windows into position. Subsequent updates include a tabbed File Explorer and the AI-powered Windows Copilot.
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