Our priorities on operating systems are a mixture of practical and highly-specific. The OS must:
- Receive security updates.
- Have software that can edit its look and functionality.
- Allow us to disable and tinker with its policies and settings.
- Remember windows positions across 2 monitors when the monitors turn off/on or we switch inputs on any monitor.
- Have a functional emoji picker.
Windows 10 Pro ticked some of these boxes, but not all of them. It's about to lose security updates later this year, refused to remember window positions, and had an emoji picker that limited which emojis it would display. We had to use PersistentWindows to restore application windows to the correct monitor, size, and position.
Windows 11 Pro meets most of these criteria to varying degrees. It's a bit trickier to edit its functionality versus Windows 10, but still doable with the right software, but it does remember window positions and sizes correctly... so far at least.
The emoji picker for Windows 11 is not a straightforward improvement over Windows 10. It does show newer emojis that the emoji picker in 10 refused to display, even with an updated emoji font installed, but it's less user friendly. We're going to install a custom emoji font to see whether the picker actively hides country flags.