punkfolkrocker wrote: Lower cost bare bones PCs [sold without operating system]
probably won't qualify for 11 for some time to come...???

(I'm never sure whether adding ??? to a statement like that is intended to turn it into a question. B3L does it too.)

Anyway, a PC without an existing copy of Win 10 does not qualify for Win 11. Theoretically you should buy a copy - £100 at least for a legal copy. It's usually cheaper to buy a PC with Windows installed than without an OS, or with Linux pre-installed.

If it's like Win 10 you can just install it and use it without activating it. But unlike Win 10, Win 11 requires you to have a MS account - you can't be a local user (or so I've read) - so that might be tricky.

I can't see what benefits Win 11 brings over Win 10. The hardware security features (the 'Secured-Core PC security baseline' in the Register piece) is worth having, but it's mostly in Win 10 already and depends on having up-to-date hardware, including TPM 2. Maybe Android support, when it arrives, if you have a MS tablet.

My wife's laptop works well on Win 10, and won't run Win 11 because it's too old. I'll ignore Win 11 until 2025. (It's a Thinkpad so it will probably still be working fine.)