The second bug came while trying to troubleshoot the first-attempting to set IP address configuration directly using Windows 11's Settings dialog fails miserably, with a cryptic message to 'check one or more settings and try again.' There's nothing actually wrong with the settings-the dialog is just broken. Nevertheless, attempting to ping the same hostname directly fails, as do most attempts to browse with Edge or Chrome. But attempts to ping fail! The confusion only gets worse when we use nslookup to query our DNS server directly-it answers our queries just fine. We can ping 8.8.8.8-Google's anycast DNS provider-without issue, so we know that general connectivity is fine both inside the LAN and outside of it. You can see the DNS resolver issues in the first screenshot above. It took almost no time to find our first and second nasty Windows 11 bugs-the DNS resolver was strangely and inconsistently broken, and the network configuration dialog under Settings was broken as well. During the reboot, we get the usual 'don't turn off your computer' message-but it's in a new font and possibly on a slightly different shade of blue background. Ironically, the first look anyone gets at Windows 11 itself right now is the dreaded BSOU (Blue Screen Of Updates)-after flighting our Windows 10 VM into the Dev channel and one very quick download, it rebooted. Although one of our test VMs is a 'daily driver' we rely on, it's sitting on top of a ZFS dataset-and we took a manual snapshot prior to the upgrade, for easy rollback. We had no real problems updating either a well-used Windows 10 VM or a brand-new one-but we strongly advise against upgrading to Windows 11 on a machine or VM that matters to you, unless you have a guaranteed method of recovery you both trust and are prepared to use. (If you're not already on Windows 10 20H2 or newer, you'll need to get through that upgrade first.) To install Windows 11 Build 22000.51, you must begin with a fully patched and up-to-date Windows 10 installation, then flight it into the Dev channel, then upgrade it to Windows 11 via Windows Update.

The first disappointment we encountered with Windows 11 is a puzzling one-it can't (yet) be cleanly installed as a new operating system.

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