What’s new in the Windows 10 May 2020 Update | Hacker News Reader

What’s new in the Windows 10 May 2020 Update

blogs.windows.com

23 pointsaspenmayer30 comments

> Stay on top of your numbers. Keep the calculator close by—now you can choose to keep the Calculator app on top of everything.

This would be brilliant... if the Windows 10 Calculator app wasn't the size of a small country.

An "always on top" option for... a single app.

Chris Rosa wrote Push Pin almost 25 years ago to keep any window on top of other windows. He even included the source code, which should give Microsoft a head start ;-)

https://web.archive.org/web/20011031015225/http://rosafamily...

Here it is in action under Windows XP:

https://imgur.com/a/KDHEtPO

>An "always on top" option for... a single app.

pretty much the single feature I miss the most when I switch between linux and windows machines. It's so ridiculously usful to have available across the entire desktop.

This is why I've got a 'toggle always on top' action mapped to Ctrl+Win+A with Autohotkey. Not sure why Microsoft chose to hide that particular functionality when it's natively supported by windows.

It shrinks quite a bit when in on-top mode, I found.

On my HP laptop with factory installed Windows 10 with the latest updates, opening or closing the CD/DVD device consistently causes the screen background to change from the Autumn scene to black. Hitting the keys Start-Tab shows small version of whatever screens (sessions, whatever they are called -- can have multiple such screens), each with its proper background and a left click on one of those will give a correct screen. In addition the background of the screen from Start-Tab has Autumn, and a left click on part of that background give a correct screen.

When this error first occurred, just after a Windows 10 update, in Firefox a Web page caused Windows to display a pop-window about a security problem. The Autumn background went to black, and the desktop icons were scattered across the desktop. I ran a "quick scan" and a "full scan", and they found no problems. I put the icons back where they belong, and they have stayed there.

Looks like the most recent Windows 10 Home Edition update has a bug that causes the screen background to go to black.

Starting Firefox puts up a pop up window asking if I want to permit Firefox to "change" my system or some such. As this popup is displayed, all other windows have been minimized, and the screen background is black. If I left click on the push button "No", then Firefox runs and the background and all my windows are restored.

Black desktop usually is a sign of a Windows licensing/activation issue.

I'd guess when your DVD drive opens, the driver somehow reloads, and windows sees a different serial number, so the windows license is no longer valid. It then auto-re-licenses itself a few minutes later, provided it has an internet connection and the desktop background returns.

That’s interesting. I would have guessed something like an unsigned driver or malware. I don’t think just one device change would be enough to cause a reactivation, but maybe repeated ones. I’ve changed CPU, GPU, optical drives, RAM on a system with no reactivation. Motherboard seems more likely to trigger it, but that doesn’t seem likely in this case. More info would help, but in the meantime OP should scan for malware with RogueKiller or at least ADW Cleaner/Malwarebytes/ESET or another decent alternative. Not affiliated, just use the product as a free user.

https://www.adlice.com/roguekiller/

If you don’t have the new update, get it after making a backup. Then run these commands in an elevated command prompt to attempt repairs to your Windows 10. Make sure you restart and have all programs closed when you do this.

dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth

sfc /scannow

Run the first one, then run the second one until it says no problems or violations found or something to that effect. Then reboot as soon as you can.

> Go passwordless. Did you know—for improved security and a simple sign-in experience, you can sign in with your face, fingerprint or PIN

How on earth would a 4-6 digit PIN be more secure than my 20+ character password ? In the end, an PIN is just another password. They may employ a million iterations to their KDF, but 6 digits is still a lot easier to bruteforce than 20 characters.

As for the rest, fingerprint and face, they're not secure. Convenient yes, secure no.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/identity-p...

Oh, so a (Windows 10) PIN is more or less like a password, allowing PIN (Password) policies to make complex PINs including letters and punctuation...

Explain to me again how this is better than just a password ?

PIN is probably not the best term they could've chosen since the term implies it should be a number.

However in this case, the Windows 10 "PIN" can actually be a longer password.

Like a personal identification npassword?

Seriously, though, PIN implies a number for a reason (even if people don't think about it or say things like "PIN number"). They should expect confusion if they refer to a password as a PIN.

>However in this case, the Windows 10 "PIN" can actually be a longer password.

So why is it better to have a longer PIN instead of a longer password ?

If a PIN is just another password with the same length/complexity requirements as a regular password, why should i bother ?

> How on earth would a 4-6 digit PIN be more secure than my 20+ character password ?

Because a 4 - 6 digit PIN you can remember, while a 20+ character password you write down and in many cases store insecurely. Some even store it on a post-it note next to the keyboard.

Still doesn't change the fact that a 4-6 digit pin is a lot less secure.

As for remembering 20+ character passwords, "Correct Horse Battery Staple" (https://xkcd.com/936/) is a fine method for passwords. It doesn't have to be serial port line noise.

Because that PIN can only be used on that device, whereas your password can be used from anywhere. Think of it like 2FA where one of the factors is physical possession of the device.

I can't wait to find out what's going to break this time.

The last big update replaced my user profile with the temp one, that it apparently makes normally during the process, but also is supposed to swap it back before the update process finishes. Took me a couple days of googling and chanting to figure out how the hell to fix it, and it still left marks, like the start menu has "computer (1)" and "Control Panel (1)", because the temp-profile-owned ones are still out there occupying the "computer" and "Control Panel" names.

I see that problem at work every few weeks. It’s simple enough to fix if you know how, if you have the easy path.[1]

There are some corruptions I’ve seen on failed Windows Updates where the user profile was entirely gone and had to be recovered from hard disk with data recovery software. It’s fairly rare. For what I do, I don’t usually have the justification to find out why this happens when it does.

The system is hardware and software. Some software problems have an underlying hardware problem causing them. Relatedly, drive failure is very common in the field, especially on laptops. SSD failure is also a thing, but nearly an order of magnitude less frequent in my own workload. Neither here nor there, just trying to say there’s a lot of ways a computer can break. In my opinion it’s great they work as well as they do considering what I’ve seen them put through.

[1] https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/145678-fix-user-profile-...

Name your virtual desktops? I'm underwhelmed. How many years will it take the get the ability to have different desktop backgrounds, which is what users really want?

You can always install CDE :)

Happy to use WSL2 in stable!

Any news wrt WSL?

Nothing that I know of, but this recent news[1] about DirectX support coming to WSL is from Build 2020, 8 days ago. I’ll look more into the release history KB is out.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23241040

Oh and here’s this:

‘Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) enhancements

The Windows Subsystem for Linux lets developers run a GNU/Linux environment. Here's some enhancements we've made in Windows 10, version 2004.

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2). This new version of the architecture powers the WSL to run on ELF64 Linux binaries on Windows and adds support for ARM64 devices.

Connect to WSL apps from localhost: Connect to your WSL Linux networking applications from the local host. For example, start a NodeJS service in a WSL 2 Linux distro, and connect to it from Microsoft Edge.

Global configuration options. We've added global configuration options that you can set on the local host which will apply to each of your WSL distros.’[2]

[2] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/w...

This is the first release of Windows 10 that includes WSLv2 (the full linux kernel) [1].

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-wsl-2/

Is the Chromium-based Edge part of this update?

That's unrelated and can be downloaded at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge for Windows 7 and up.

Do you know when Vertical Tabs are coming? I really hope it gets upstreamed to chromium because I have yet to find a great extension solution that works well on Windows 10 and macOS.

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