Windows 11 Home

Windows 11 Home is what the overwhelming majority of new consumer PCs ship with out of the box. It carries Microsoft's strictest hardware gate of any Windows release to date -- a TPM 2.0 chip and UEFI Secure Boot are hard requirements, not just recommendations, which is why a meaningful share of otherwise-capable Windows 10 PCs can't officially upgrade. It lacks a few features reserved for Pro and above (BitLocker device encryption's full control panel, Group Policy management, Remote Desktop as a host, Windows Sandbox), which is the usual reason a Home user later upgrades to Pro rather than reinstalling from scratch. Feature updates arrive roughly once a year (most recently 25H2 in late 2025) rather than the old twice-a-year cadence.