Microsoft's overall design story in recent years is called Fluent Design System and this document informs us that: 'Windows 11 marks a visual evolution of the operating system. It is hard to shake off the suspicion that pressure from OEM partners to encourage a hardware refresh was a factor in the reasoning, despite some merit in the arguments about security and performance. In an interview with CRN, Weston said that 'if you make things optional, people don't turn them on … what we put into 11 is we are going to secure you by default.'Īnother element in the system requirements, Weston explained, is that hardware features, such as mode-based execution control (MBEC), which improves the performance of HVCI, are specified to prevent performance issues – though users remain puzzled about the exclusion of Intel's 7th generation processors which do support MBEC. It is hard to shake off the suspicion that pressure from OEM partners to encourage a hardware refresh was a factor in the reasoning, despite some merit in the arguments about security and performance In other words, features that were optional in Windows 10 are now on by default – which means that hardware that does not support them blocks installation. Virtualization Based Security (VBS) is now a requirement, as explained by director of OS Security David Weston here. The quick summary is that the Windows 11 has a new security baseline similar to the Secured-Core PC security baseline, including hardware root of trust via TPM (Trusted Platform Module) 2.0, Secure Boot, hypervisor-protected code integrity (HVCI) and hardware-enforced stack protection. It may seem odd that the docs say that 'the security and privacy features in Windows 11 are similar to Windows 10.'

One reason for the new release is to improve security and reliability – though this has also provoked a storm of protest since it depends in part on recent hardware, causing the majority of PCs in use to be incompatible. Microsoft never quite said that Windows 10 was forever, though, and Windows 11 represents the moment when the company decided that a combination of technical advances and design refresh merited a new major version.

Windows11 power automate desktop