It has been half a year since Microsoft promised to improve the Windows 11 user experience. It's time for a mid-term assessment, but the user feedback may not satisfy Microsoft's executives, as most people don't believe there have been any improvements, and some even think it has gotten worse.
In a user survey published on the TPU website, 33,000 netizens participated in the vote this time, a 37% increase from July's participants, making the results more representative overall.
The survey options were primarily four categories— Significant Improvement, Slight Improvement, No Change, and Actually Worse received 6.3%, 12.6%, 43.4%, and 38.1% of the votes, respectively.
This means that only about 19% of gamers gave positive evaluations to Microsoft's improvements, with only 6.3% considering them truly good.
44% of gamers felt no change. If we count this group as negative feedback, adding the 38.1% who felt things got worse means over 80% of people noticed Microsoft's changes, The proportion of truly negative reviews is still quite high.
No matter how you interpret these figures, they only prove that most people don't feel any significant improvement in the Windows 11 experience Microsoft claims to have made. This isn't because gamers are too demanding, but rather Looking back at the improvements to Windows 11 over the past six months, most have indeed been minor tweaks. While some details have been polished, there haven't been many significant changes that users truly need and can clearly perceive.
Over the past six months, Microsoft's improvements to Windows 11 have mainly focused on UI adjustments. The Start menu, taskbar, and right-click context menu have seen significant changes, offering more customization options. The UI has fully transitioned to the WinUI 3 framework, becoming more modern and reducing the fragmentation caused by legacy frameworks.
Microsoft also listened to user feedback, reducing ads and marketing push notifications, and minimizing unnecessary AI entry points. However, Microsoft recently seems intent on bringing ads back, after all, ad revenue is money, and they can't truly give up that portion.
For the majority of users, the improvements they care about most are low-level optimizations for lower-end configurations, such as the 8GB RAM optimization Microsoft has mentioned multiple times, and currently, there seems to be no obvious progress in this area. There is still quite a bit of unnecessary content loading at startup.
Previously promised improvements, such as optimizing game performance and implementing low-level optimizations comparable to SteamOS, have not shown substantial changes. The main performance-related feature is the Low Latency Profile (LLP), which can boost CPU frequency to its turbo peak within seconds to improve the performance of components like the Start menu. However, its application scope is somewhat narrow, and it remains quite controversial.