Can you still use older drivers, Windows 8-8.1 installed in compatibility mode as I have done with Windows 10?

10 was not an upgrade I needed, I was happy with 7 and only upgraded a few months back out of necessity! I’m more up for moving to 11, as the things that seem worse don’t bother me and it looks to be a more cohesive package than 10.

Haven’t had any issues with drivers in W11 and I run all manner of esoteric ham radio and astrophotography software with weird drivers…

Good to know.

Pretty sure Microsoft changed the driver architecture, think it was from XP to Vista, but can’t remember for certain. For example in XP you had to stop the print spooler service to delete pending print jobs, the same way removing programs was handled when a background service was running. That was changed in subsequent versions and meant any previous drivers didn’t work/had to be updated by the vendor to work within the newer OS.

I’ve not had much luck with some of my thinkpad drivers – W11 works fine BUT fingerprint readers cameras etc not so.

so worth checking with individual manufacturers eg
my ones not supported

You can use older (not supported) drivers in compatibility mode as long as the OS driver architecture allows for it.

Personally, I would wait for a major upgrade to Win11 before upgrading from 10. Win11 seems to be only half finished. I don’t think it has any major functionality benefits over Win10 and there are some annoying things missing. One is that you can no longer move the start menu and taskbar to the sides of the screen which is a mild annoyance if you’re used to having them on the left side of the screen. Another is that internet connection sharing is either broken or needs to be enabled differently than in Win10. That was a deal-breaker for me, I rolled back my work desktop to Win10 rather than spend all day trying to figure out how to get ICS working again.

so worth checking with individual manufacturers eg

All well and good. But, for example, Intel customer service tell you to buy their latest LAN card, when the unsupported drivers work, despite their shady attempts to make it difficult!

I couldn’t give a **** about their corporate disputes!